video games

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Are you an independent musician looking to promote your work? Might wanna check this out: you’ll soon be able to add your own original music to the popular music game Rock Band! Indie artists and bands will use Microsoft’s XNA Creator’s Club to mesh the song’s MIDI file to the format used by the game. The work will then be submitted to other Creator’s Club programmers for critique and then must meet final approval by Harmonix and MTV Games. After they go live the songs will sell between 50 cents and 3 dollars, with the artists getting 30% of the cut! Not a bad business model at all, and there’s the potential for some great publicity for indie musicians....

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Not even the sub-Atlantic metropolis of Rapture is safe from the global financial meltdown. In a move that would certainly have Andrew Ryan spinning in his grave had he been given a proper burial, Take-Two Interactive is delaying the release of its much-anticipated BioShock 2, the sequel to the critically-acclaimed 2007 first-person shooter that challenged players’ morality as much as it did their aim.

The cause for pushing back the release? To give BioShock 2 more development time and because the retail environment for the near future is being forecast as bleak. The game is now said to be coming out in “fiscal 2010″… which could mean anything. Take-Two’s stock dropped a dollar and a half following the news.

Bummer. BioShock 2 was the video game that I was most looking forward to. But I guess in the meantime I’ll have to make do with playing the original BioShock...

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The long-classic MechWarrior video game franchise (which is based on the venerable BattleTech universe) is finally getting some new love, courtesy of a full-blown relaunch of the series courtesy of Smith & Tinker and Piranha Games. Simply called MechWarrior, the new game will be on PCs and Xbox 360. IGN has the initial details and check out this first bit of footage to be released from the game…

Looks like old school MechWarrior with a bit of Gears of War mixed in. That’s pretty hella sweet! 🙂...

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Earlier this week LucasArts unloaded the very awesome news that it has commenced to re-releasing many of its classic games via Steam!

I had never used Steam before, but the prospect of once again playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (right) was too good to pass up, so I went to the Steam site and purchased the game. For $4.99 you get the CD-ROM “talkie” version from 1992, guaranteed to run on a Windows Vista system! LucasArts is also publishing anew The Dig (LOTS of people no doubt happy about that one), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, Armed and Dangerous, LOOM, LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventure, Star Wars Battlefront II, Star Wars Republic Commando, Star Wars Starfighter, and Thrillville: Off the Rails.

And LucasArts has promised that many more classic games will ...

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What? An orchestra playing a concert of music from a wide variety of video games? That’s exactly what PLAY! A Video Game Symphony is.

And it’s coming to the Raleigh/Durham/Cary area this Saturday, July 11th, courtesy of the North Carolina Symphony and the Concert Singers of Cary. The performance will be at the Koka Booth Amphitheater.

Here’s the e-mail that I received this afternoon from Lauren Trojan:

Hi Chris,

I read your recent post about the “Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer,” and thought you might be interested in another never-before-seen event in Raleigh. For the first time, Play! A Video Game Symphony will be presented by the North Carolina Symphony at Koka Booth Amphitheatre on Saturday, July 11, 2009. Since this is a non-traditional Symphony concert and would be of interest to your blog following, I hope you will consider mentioning the event on your blog.

PLAY! is a

...
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It was back in February that I first started playing Fallout 3: the next generation follow-up to the classic computer role-playing series of the late Nineties. I have been playing on and off since then, but in the past week or so decided to plow on through to… whatever the heck it was that was waiting at the end.

A little while ago, after logging just over eighty hours of game time since then, I completed Fallout 3 at long last. By my calculation I could have wrapped everything up in about twenty hours, if I hadn’t been such a fiend for exploring the Capital Wasteland (what the irradiated ruins of Washington D.C. are called almost three hundred years from now).

And I still didn’t get to scout out every location on the map! There’s roughly 1/4th of the Capital Wasteland – almost entirely in the northeast quadrant – ...

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About the same time in 1984 when the video game industry was crashing in the west, a computer scientist named Alexey Pajitnov was busy playing with his first computer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow… and wound up creating one of the most classic – and addictive – games ever.

The Guardian has a great story about Tetris on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary. Among the highlights: how Pajitnov came up with the concept, the tale of how this communist-era game became a capitalist’s dream product, and how Tetris has inspired everything from architecture to conspiracy theories....

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What I would give to have a brain gifted enough to handle stuff like math and software coding (and I’ve tried folks, believe you me). ‘Cuz then I could maybe work for a company like Bethesda Game Studios, who not only are very talented at making video games like Fallout 3, but also have a twisted sense of humor.

So I’ve been working my Fallout 3 character through the Capital Wasteland, 200 years after the nuclear exchange between the United States and China. Just levellin’ him up more or less. Well tonight I wound up in the ruins of Arlington National Cemetery…

Out of curiosity I went looking for Arlington House, which was the pre-Civil War home of Robert E. Lee and his family. It wasn’t hard to spot and I gotta give serious props to the Bethesda staff for including such a nice historical location…

Guess ...

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It’s been known for a few months that in the upcoming BioShock 2 players will be stepping into the boots of the first-ever Big Daddy: the prototype of the ones that you fought in the original BioShock. The cover of the July issue of GamePro reveals the design. And the mag promises to deliver a lot more details when it hits the stands.

(By the way, according to the comments on the above-linked post that’s a camera on your Big Daddy’s helmet. So research is once again part of a BioShock game.)

Meanwhile, Digital Spy has some more info about BioShock 2‘s particular moral choices and the first time I’ve seen a release date given anywhere: October 30th. Just in time for Halloween 🙂...

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