Enjoy the video game? Then join the Army.
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The combat-style game 'America's Army' has proven to be a potent tool in recruiting.
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The Army is retooling for future wars. Help the generals decide which country to invade next. From Danger Room.
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A quick trip through virtual reality is helping some smokers finally quit the evil weed. In Game|Life.
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Rock Band and Guitar Hero are the video game industry's new rock stars.
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Students at a college in Chile use a bespoke video game to learn about about team-building.
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Tycho:  I purchased twenty fluid ounces of Halo 3 "Limited Edition Mountain Dew Game Fuel" in the hopes that it would taste so horrible that we'd get a strip out of it. Â Before I read the ingredients in preparation for this post, I often found myself desirous of this strange liquid - a liquid the precise color of tubercular sputum.  I would trip over to Seven Eleven to obtain it, tipping a small portion onto the concrete for the Spartans we lost at Reach.  Once I discovered that the soda contained a compound called "Brominated Vegetable Oil," my ardor was diminished for some reason.  The flavor of the beverage is not unpleasant, especially if you like bromide.  The almost oppressive campaign that surrounds the product is, perhaps, more bitter.   It's one slice (or, perhaps, sip) of a ten hojillion dollar marketing campaign designed to project one of gaming's biggest brands to people who already know about it.  There is no way to escape the Goddamn thing.  Over ninety percent of the surveyed crustaceans were "aware of the launch" and held a "strong desire to purchase," even though their massive claws and aquatic habitat make using the product impossible.  Lemurs are less bullish, but then lemurs are a notoriously tough demo.    It took a third night of playing the Call of Duty 4 Beta for everything to sink in, but it's pretty much official: they know what the fuck they're doing.  A shooter can't merely be great to come out this holiday, and even amazing might be insufficient.  To go against the previously described fucking unstoppable media phalanx - to say nothing of Halo 3 itself, whose multiplayer offering is so broad on every axis that it must be called round - you need to drop something that be off the cheazy.       There are shooters that play with progression to varying degrees.  Battlefield 2142 does, but the infantry experience is one part of a whole.  Rainbow Six: Vegas does, but its reward scheme is largely cosmetic in nature, and takes place outside of the game proper - between rounds, in austere menus.  CoD4's leveling has the sharp inhalation of a WoW ding.  It takes place right there at the moment you earn the XP from a kill, with an onscreen celebration of the fact.  The reward structure earns you new playmodes, new weapons,  new slottable abilities, the right to build custom classes, the right to wear a clan tag.  You don't need to wait long to earn them, the schedule is not cruel, but you need to put in your dues.  It's not an onerous process:  in order to level up, you must simply play Call of Duty 4.  Trust me when I say this is something you will want to do.    I feel as though my knowledge of the game should be richer, so let me crack a few more levels and get back to you.  Hopefully a beta code will have dripped out to you by then, and you will know what I mean with visceral certainty.    Oh, and also: Â if you want to tumble down some fissure in the earth and wake up in the Japanese Madness Caverns, take a look at this video for Puzzle de Harvest Moon.  I watched it hours ago, and I am still haunted.
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Some video-game veterans plan to announce the formation of a new publisher that they hope will act as the equivalent of an independent film company for small game developers.
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Tycho:  There was so much news, we had to poke it with a schtick.  I'm allowed one or two puns like that a year.  At least, I hope.    The value of each leisure minute has increased exponentially since the holiday deluge began, that's not precisely news, but the games that are losing out over here are of such a high caliber that it's a little scary.  I downloaded the demo for PGR4 and loved it, in fact I still play it - I'm playing it right now, and you would be horrified if you knew how.  This said, I have no idea where I would fit this game into my life.  This is patently ridiculous - a game of this obvious polish and pedigree would command that tray for weeks at any other time of the year.  We're both in love with Zelda, but can so rarely consummate this love as bright baubles are constantly rolling in.  Gabriel doesn't even make time for nightly Halo - his evening is entirely routed to The Lion War.  When Call of Duty 4 hits on the fifth of November, I have plans to betray our collective in a similar fashion.    The time I did have yesterday wasn't even invested in the long-form retail games that I see as the core of my responsibility to you.  Every moment not devoted to Halo was soaked up by Every Extend Extra Extreme, an XBLA game I had already played on the Playstation Portable and the PC, only to find that its true calling was on the console.  Another game with a strong audio focus from the creators of Lumines and Meteos, the entire objective is to blow yourself up in such a way as to create the most casualties - I can't wait until Jack gets ahold of this one.  It has other modes, but that's the basic idea, and of course it's all very abstract.  Like other games from Q Entertainment, how much you derive from it is often a function of how open you are to its audiovisual synergies.  It's fun, but that fun is not a result of complex systems.      I also picked up Everyday Shooter for the PS3, in further dereliction of my duties, having a series of profound experiences with it that might be too strange to describe.  The game's author expresses a debt of gratitude toward Q's Mizuguchi and others, but he's accomplished something wholly his own here.  Superficially it's one of these dual analog, robotronian shooters every platform is weighed down with now.  Don't be fooled by that trope, and certainly don't think you can come to any conclusions based on screenshots.  Where Lumines or Every Extend Extra draws from electronica, a great match for their style of presentation, Everyday Shooter disarms the player with a suite of earnest, analog songs played on guitar.  At times, during the course of ordinary play, I felt as though I were interrupting him.     In gameplay terms, each level apparently plays around with the idea of chains and combinations, and I say "apparently" because I've only played two levels in - every time I die, I get sucked in by his menu.  It's just a bunch of text, but moving down or right produces a single note, and pressing left or up produces a two note chain.  Pressing a face button produces a string of four notes, and with these rude tools one can actually augment the title music quite well.  I didn't realize I was doing it at first.  When Gabriel came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, I felt as though I had been woken from a dream.
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By David Williams, The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn.  Feb. 14--Imagine an adventure sprung from the pages of a comic book.  Imagine a real-life version of a video game.
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Who needs another video game? Teach kids how to watch their money grow.
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In recent years bellwethers like Electronic Arts have come to treat the process of game making as a virtual factory. But now Electronic Arts is finally coming to its senses.
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An online role-playing game is to be built by a community of ordinary gamers.
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Violence is anathema to modern German sensibilities. That pacifism applied to video games could mean legal repercussions. By Bruce Gain.
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The video game industry has become a force to be reckoned with in the entertainment business. Now it wants a share of the advertising pie.
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In response to the Feb. 9 letter from Gabrielle E. Vantol, in which she asks "Can somebody please tell me how we can support our soldiers and their families?" Here is one option. I will warn you though, that this option can become an addictive habit.
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A new breed of military simulator that's part video game, part Hollywood sound stage creates the illusion of urban warfare. The Army claims it saves money on live-fire training with its multi-million-dollar shoot-em-up compound.
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Goal is to assist moms and dads in buying family-friendly entertainment for their kids. Video games are a popular item on the Christmas wish lists of kids, which