Daily Loaf

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 launched with the biggest one-day revenues in media history — that’s all media, including movies and television — with nearly 5 million copies sold in just 24 hours, sending well over $300 million flowing through the cash registers of Game Stops and Best Buys across the land. This game’s already a hit. I know. I was there on release day, waiting impatiently for the doors to open, and there were a few dozen people with me. The inevitable question that comes with such fervor: is it worth it? Yes it is, definitely. This is a great game, expertly executed and packed with hours of shooting, explosions, and fun. But it’s not without its issues and I do have some complaints.

Modern Warfare 2 takes place in the near-present, with soldiers fighting with mostly real world weapons in places like Afghanistan, Russia and Rio the American suburbs. Although there is a solo campaign mode (which I’ll get to in a minute), the core reason to buy and play Modern Warfare 2 is so you can compete with and alongside other players on-line. The variety of team-based game types and the experience system that lets you unlock new weapons and special abilities the more you play combine with the gold standard of first person shooter controls and game play to make a game worth playing for hundreds of hours (or more).

Be warned though, it will be tough going at first, especially if you’re new to the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare franchises. Read the rest of this entry »

You only need $100 and a Mac to develop apps for the iPhone. If it’s Twitter, games, email, GPS navigation or Facebook, “there’s an app for that” on the iTunes App Store. The iPhone’s success is largely owed to the developers, ranging from big name studios to a few guys in a garage (a la Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) who have made the device the Swiss army knife of phones.

Since its launch in July of 2008, the iTunes App Store has reached over 2 billion downloads and now has more than 100,000 unique applications available. What has made the rapid growth and success of the App Store possible are the more than 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program.

What’s it like developing for the iPhone? Why are developers gravitating towards it? Where do developers see mobile gaming going? The Daily Loaf sat down with a few iPhone developers last week to answer these, and other, questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we learned that Nintendo President of Japan Satoru Iwata felt the Wii is not in a “healthy” state and with the release of Electronic Art’s earning report yesterday it seems that EA, being the most prolific third party publisher on the Wii, can’t seem to avoid having the same feelings. Although EA is making the most profit with the Wii than any other console, “revenue is well below expectations due to underperformance of the Wii platform,” EA’s John Schappert told a conference call full of investors.

“I think the Wii platform has been a little weaker than we had certainly anticipated. And there is no lack of frustration to be doing that at precisely the time where we have the strongest third-party share,” EA CEO John Riccitiello said. “. . . we are reaching out to Nintendo to find ways to partner to push third-party software harder. I frankly think they need more beats in the year than they get out of a first-party slate to be able to have the Wii software platform perform as well as they would like and we are building the products that I think are the most highly rated on the platform and at this point in time, generating the most revenue of any third party platform.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since the Wii was released, third party attachment and peripheral makers have been having a field day. If it’ll attach to your Wii remote, it’ll sell. If it’ll make you feel like the hero in the game while simultaneously making people question your mental faculties, it’s a hot item in the minds of attachment makers. There have been swords, light sabers, golf clubs, tennis rackets, and bowling ball attachments to name a few. But none shame gamers as much as the add-on above. Read the rest of this entry »

Geek Squad and Best Buy are now offering the invaluable service of plugging in two cables for the low, low price of $129. Yes, that’s $129 USD, not $129 Mexican pesos. Not even the pitch-master Billy Mays combined with the spin power of Rush “El Rushbo” Limbaugh could get any sane consumer to buy this service. That is, unless you are above 70 years of age and all “vidja-games” are still called “Atari.” Although the in-store ad specified the PlayStation 3 as the console being set up, we imagine Best Buy and Geek Squad would be happy to take your $129 to set up an Xbox 360 as well.

This dear readers, is a rip-off. There is no other way to look at it. Yes, the service does include installing the latest firmware updates, set-up of one (read: 1, uno) solitary online account and the configuration of parental controls, but what 11-year-old neighbor couldn’t do this for you? In fact, if you can’t find an 11-year-old neighbor or relative, I’m willing to help out via e-mail. Just shoot an email to alexissantos@vgtribune.com, but whatever you do, please don’t waste $129 of your hard-earned money on a job that takes less than five minutes to complete.

[Source]

Yarr, mateys! It be Talk like a pirate day, in case ye not be knowin’. To give ye some fun on this day o’ international piracy, LucasArts and Telltale Games be offerin’ up the first episode in their new restart of Tales of Monkey Island.

All you need to do to pick up your free copy of the game is to head on over to http://www.playlikeapirate.com, plug in your email address and a password (they mail an activation code to you, so don’t fake it – although do be sure to uncheck the “add me to your mailing list” option if you don’t want further emails) and enjoy some time adventuring on the high seas – for free!

Keep in mind, this is only good until midnight tonight (Saturday, September 19th) so don’t wait if you want a copy.

I consider myself an authority on spotting losers because, well, I used to be one. I only exempt myself now because I’m married. Not to say that all married men make quality boyfriends; I just feel that if you’re able to convince a woman to marry you after five years of dating, either you’re not a loser or you’re extraordinary at hiding it.

Obviously there are as many ways to tell if a potential man-date is a loser as there are breeds of crotch ponies. To complicate things, everyone has their own definition of what constitutes a loser. For instance, you may be perfectly fine dating a man I consider a loser because you’re desperate or you’re willing to overlook his lacking qualities in lieu of, say, his bank account. With that said, below is a list of signs the guy you just met is a loser

-When asked what he does, he says, “I’m in a band,” or “I’m an artist.” Read the rest of this entry »

Back before it was the Wii, Nintendo had code-named its new console The Revolution, and when the best selling console of this generation did come out a few years back, its motion controlled game play was indeed revolutionary. Like so many revolutions, it didn’t quite live up to its original promise.

Take the original Wii Sports, which came bundled with the system and offered a whole new experience – tennis, golf, baseball, bowling, and boxing that all felt somewhat, or even a lot like the real thing. You couldn’t help but smile a big, delighted grin the first time you tried it. But then came almost everything else for the damn Wii. Shovels full of middling to poor games, just a few bright gems (mostly from Nintendo) trying to shine from the towering dung heap of third-party cash-ins and motion-gimmick nonsense. My Wii, like that of many gamers, sat lonely and empty and un-played.

But those big, goofy grins are back baby! Read the rest of this entry »

Sony’s ugly duckling PS3 Slim has toppled Wii Sports Resort from it’s #1 spot on Amazon’s video game bestseller list and has held its ground for 5 consecutive days. That’s a feat when you’re a Sony product going up against a Wii Sports title. The PS3 Slim would like you to forget the fact that Wii Sports Resort has been on Amazon’s top 100 for the past 130 days and that the PSP Go is nowhere to be found.

The Slim assures us it won’t meet the same fate as the PSP Go. Read the rest of this entry »

We thought we had it all. We could use the Wii remote as a sword, fishing rod, tennis racket, baseball bat, lightsaber and an assortment of other weapons and sports paraphernalia. But alas, we didn’t have it all. At least not until Let’s Tap.

Now, gamers can set their Wiimotes down for a change and tap their way to single or multiplayer victory. Or just have fun with fish in a pond or fireworks in the sky.

Let’s Tap introduces a new way to play with the Wii remote, but is it more tech demo than full-fledged game? Hit the jump and find out!

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Each July in San Diego, Christmas comes early for nerds and movie lovers alike in the form of Comic-Con, the nation’s largest comic/movie/game/geek convention.  While CL’s Kevin Hopp covered the movie news that his this weekend, I’ll be covering what many of the comic fans like me truly went to see: the costumed women of Comic-Con.

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It’s been a long time since I had a game experience more mixed than Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. There’s lots to like, some things to hate, a fair amount that’s on the border, and even something I hated and then came to like. Playing this game was like riding an emotional roller coaster as I went from mildly interested to mildly annoyed and back again. Okay, maybe not really a roller coaster so much as a see-saw in the kiddie playground, but you get my point. There are some thrills to be had, but also some jarring landings.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is the prequel to a game I never played, nor do you need to have played it. It’s a perfectly competent first-person shooter set in the Old West, full of two-fisted six-gun action and horse riding and even a lasso or two. You play alternately as Tom and Ray, defending your car repair business from angry public radio listeners who haven’t received their tote bags yet. Or rather, Thomas and Ray, two nasty Confederate soldiers who abandon their posts to try and save their farm from the evil Sherman as he marches through Georgia. That doesn’t work out too well, and the brothers end up fleeing to the wilds of the West, their preacher little brother William in tow. There they hear tell of lost Aztec gold, both fall in love with the same Mexican seductress, fight various tribes of Indians, and have their pasts come back to haunt them. There’s a lot of shooting. Read the rest of this entry »

I need your help amassing 43 million kills as quickly as possible. And it’s not just me – people around the world want you to join the battlefields of Wake Island, Guadal Canal and Iwo Jima right now. And if you can die or kill a few thousand times, that’d be awesome.

Last week, Battlefield 1943 went live on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Each platform is now racing to be the first to 43 million in-game kills, and I’m right there on the front lines of the X-Box 360 doing my part. And what happens when we reach the blood-soaked final goal? A new map, Coral Sea, becomes available for all of us, and the killing can continue on a brand new field of battle! Normally the release of a new map for an online shooter wouldn’t get me this fired up, but the fact of the matter is, Battlefield 1943 is addictive, high energy fun, and right now I can’t get enough of it.

The game is an online first person shooter set during World War II. Players are randomly assigned to either the Japanese or U.S. Marine side of one of three different battles. Before you join the fight, you choose from one of three weapons kits: Read the rest of this entry »

Nerds rejoice!  Finally geekdom is not only cool, it’s kind of hot.  I present to you, courtesy of our good friends at Playboy, G4TV’s resident temptress Olivia Munn from Attack of the Show.  The geeky goddess is the magazine’s latest cover girl and here is proof that playing video games all day can be sexy (ok, that’s a stretch).  Also included are some of the Rabid One’s favorite selections from Playboy’s “Sweetest Tweets,” the geekiest hot girls to follow on Twitter.  If these gals don’t make you want to press UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, START than there is something wrong with your joystick.

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Parent company of Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax Media Inc. announced today that it has acquired (i.e., gave large sums of money to) id Software. What does this mean for id Software and Bethesda? All id Software titles already committed to a publisher will continue down that path, but all forthcoming id Software titles will be published by Bethesda. The acquisition is not only a mere publishing deal, but will include more financial backing for id Software and presumably entail creative collaboration between both developers.

“This puts id Software in a wonderful position going forward,” said id Software’s Technical Director John Carmack.  “We will now be able to grow and extend all of our franchises under one roof, leveraging our capabilities across multiple teams while enabling forward looking research to be done in the service of all of them.  We will be bigger and stronger, as we recruit the best talent to help us build the landmark games of the future.”

Did ZeniMax Media and Bethesda see something of id Software’s behind closed doors that caught their attention? Or was this a move that was a long time coming? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Here’s the presser: Read the rest of this entry »

A little nostalgia can buy you a lot of leeway. The new version of Capcom’s Bionic Commando is the perfect example – it’s a sequel to a much beloved classic from 1988. But things have changed since that glorious 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System days, and characters with names like “Rad Spencer” and “Super Joe” don’t quite cut it anymore. Nor does the name “Bionic Commando,” for that matter. But this sequel is a completer update – from the 8-bit side scroller to full-on 3D, open-world (kinda) third-person shooter. It’s an update in every way, but it keeps that most important element of the original: You play a guy with a bionic arm that can shoot out Inspector Gadget style and let you swing from things like Spider-Man. As long as it gets that right, the game is more than halfway there.

Read the rest of the review, with video, after the jump:

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It’s the classic philosophical puzzler that ultimately led to the death of Socrates: who would win in a fight between plants and zombies? And just like plants beat Socrates, if you play your seeds right, so too will they defeat the oncoming zombie hordes. It won’t be easy. It will take a lot of mouse clicks. Some plants won’t survive the war. But in the end, Plants vs. Zombies is totally worth it.

There’s no doubt that it’s a name meant to provoke laughter and interest. Zombies are all over the place these days (at least in video games), and everyone from Call of Duty: World at War to lowly little desktop casual games like this one are trying to jump on the hot, new moldering corpse bandwagon. Plant vs. Zombies belongs in that loose category of Tower Defense games – you control some base of some sort (in this case, your house) and you need to array and organize your defenses (in this case plants) against the oncoming baddies (yep, zombies). Each level brings new zombies, new challenges, and of course, new plants.

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You should never grocery shop when you’re hungry or review a game when you’ve just quit after dying at the same spot twenty times in a row.

I just ate a sandwich, but I’m not going shopping. I also just boiled away most of my affection for Velvet Assassin in a frustration-infused prolonged session of being shot again and again and again by Nazis while wearing a nightie. And for the first time in the game, there wasn’t any morphine to take the edge off.

OK, let’s back up. Velvet Assassin is a third-person stealth-based action game. Set during World War II, the game sets you up as a sexy British assassin named Violette who infiltrates German-occupied territory to kill Nazi jerks and blow people up. It’s actually based on a real British secret operative, Violette Szabo, which is pretty cool.

This is a hard-core stealth game, which means if you get spotted by the fascists, they’re probably going to kill you within seconds. Luckily for you, the world of Velvet Assassin is filled with shadows and dark corners, giving you plenty of places to creep along and get right up behind someone for that silent, bloody close-in dagger work. Drag the body into the shadows before the others notice, and you can keep your cover. You get guns too — mostly a silenced pistol, but later shotguns, sniper rifles, and a sub-machine gun at the end. These of course attract a lot of attention, and while it’s easy to gun down enemies, it’s easy for them to return the favor, so it’s vital to make good use of cover.

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Here’s a sentence you don’t see very often: “The video game is better than the movie.”
Most of the time movie-based games are rush jobs, made to cash in on whatever success the movie might have at the box office. They have a low shelf-life and even lower expectations among gamers. Most of the time, they’re a safe bet to avoid. But what about when the movie’s really bad (like X-Men Origins: Wolverine)? Will the game be that much worse, or will it manage to overcome its nasty origins and work as a good game all on its own?
In this case, it’s absolutely clear that it’s the movie pulling the game down, and not the other way around. I can say with some confidence that the vast majority of the problems I had with X-Men Origins: Wolverine (the game) are directly related to story and plot elements they were saddled with from the film. Whenever the game developers had freedom or pushed boundaries, the game excelled.

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In this episode, the GammaTesting.com guys (including CL’s own Brian Ries) discuss the fine art of ignoring accuracy while wielding dual SMGs, groove to Overkill’s fantastic soundtrack, accuse Headstrong of (possibly) using the Grindhouse-style to mask bad dialogue and voice acting, and, finally, confront those mommy issues we’ve been dealing with. Well, dealing with since watching the end of Overkill.

The GammaTesting.com guys talk about how amazingly beautiful a war-torn African town filled with zombies can be when rendered by the Xbox 360. The zombies are kinda pretty, too, until you shoot them in the head with your pistol. But does shooting uncountable numbers of infected undead make you a racist, thanks to RE5’s japanese developers? Listen up and see:

I think everyone can agree that the best thing about being a mob boss is that you get to boss people around. It’s right there in the title, “mob boss.” Because you’re feared and/or respected, tough guys do what you say, even if that means blowing up some building, shaking down some store owner, or taking out some troublesome made man from a rival family. It’s good to be boss. Normally no fan of movie to game adaptations, I never looked at the first Godfather game from a couple years back. When this new one came around last week though, and I heard it was kind of like Sims Mafia Don, I thought that sounded like something for me. I like telling people what to do. I love the Godfather films. Perfect!

OK, so it’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it is a solid, fun game. Read the rest of this entry »

April has been the month of Vin Diesel in America. Who would have thought such a thing would ever come to pass in our lifetimes, but here it is. Many have apparently gone out an seen Fast And Furious, an aggressively mediocre, overly-digitized, woodenly-acted action movie that somehow made $120 million in just two weeks. I’m personally responsible for $5 of that, I’m sorry to say, but I couldn’t help myself. Vin Diesel’s gravely monotone had hypnotized me after hours of playing that other Vin Diesel release of April, Wheelman.

Wheelman is sort of Grand Theft Auto Lite. You’re in a big city (Barcelona in this case), and you can pretty much steal any car you see, drive around in it, and run things over while shooting people. There’s a story going on, and it’s pretty inscrutable, derivative and uninteresting. You’re Milo, a wheelman who’s looking for work driving for various Barcelona criminal types, all part of your bigger effort to infiltrate them and, well, you know, do something. I don’t know what. The story’s a mess, and everyone has thick accents that make them hard to understand. Of course even with subtitles it’s not easy to figure out what’s going on. It also clearly doesn’t matter.

Bad dudes give you missions to do bad things. You get guns, and sometimes you run around shooting people and most of the time you drive around hitting and occasionally shooting people. Read the rest of this entry »

Much like opera, professional wrestling works for me in an abstract and nostalgic way more than up close and in person. I used to go to opera a lot actually. I used to watch wrestling every week, too. Now I mostly play video games it seems. And while I like an occasional aria, I love the fact that opera is out there and appreciate its rich cultural heritage. I don’t think I would actually like watching wrestling any more – Ultimate Fighting has stolen it’s place in my heart – and wrestling games have gotten more and more complex. It’s great in theory that men take steroids and shave their chests and slam each other around for a few hours a week, but I can’t be bothered to take it in. All of which explains why WWE Legends of Wrestlemania is the perfect wrestling game for me.

Legends is all about the nostalgia. It allows you to re-live key, dramatic match-ups from the first decade and a half of Wresltmanias, spanning the golden age of 80s and 90s wrestling. Hulk Hogan, Andre The Giant, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Ric Flair, and scores of others – even Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream! – all make appearances in the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you make a video game based on a movie that every critic said was just like a video game? I’d assumed they’d just take the lazy, easy cash-in route and take the movie and render it in pixels and then add 10 more hours of Angelina Jolie’s ass. Because somewhere there’s a movie exec saying, “Come on, who wouldn’t pay $60 for 10 hours and two seconds of that?”

Hopefully no one, and luckily cooler heads at developers Grin prevailed. Although it’s a little sad that the star of such favorite films of mine (really) as Hackers and Cyborg 2’s butt is nowhere to be seen in Wanted: Weapons of Fate. They don’t even have an Angelina Jolie impersonator’s butt! They do have someone doing a really solid Morgan Freeman impersonation though, and some hard to understand French accents. Oh yeah, and a pretty decent game.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate is actually a sequel to the movie (which is loosely based on the comic book), a trend I like in licensed video games.

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First of all, let’s get the big question out of the way first: Is Resident Evil 5 a racist videogame? Not really. It’s just racially insensitive and culturally clumsy. More on that in a bit. The second big question: Is Resident Evil 5 a good game? Yes it is, depending on how you play it, except for the parts that suck.

Capcom had a daunting challenge to follow up the almost universally adored and acclaimed Resident Evil 4, a fun, cool, strange, challenging game that re-wrote a lot of the rules of the standard survival horror series and was almost the only reason to buy a Nintendo Gamecube. Resident Evil 5 tries to build on that success, and it definitely feels like a successor. It controls much the same way, has some enemies that carry over from the last game and has just as nonsensical a plot. It’s also shorter, more streamlined and maybe more racist (again, more on that in a bit).

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New release Madworld for the Nintendo Wii: It’s Sin City meets The Running Man meets Escape From New York. What more do you need to know? Well, you should probably know it’s actually just kind of mediocre and occasionally dull, more like The Spirit meets The 6th Day meets Escape From L.A.

Anyway, Madworld is a blood-soaked, profanity-laden, super stylish action game for everybody’s favorite family-friendly game console.

Before I got my hands on it, I hadn’t turned on my Wii in months — not since Wii Fit came out, and that exercise program only lasted a week or so. As many have lamented, no one’s really making much in the way of hard core or cool games for the Wii these days – it’s mostly just shovel ware for kids with the occasional gem from Nintendo. The cool games that do come out on Wii, like Rock Band, have better versions on the more powerful consoles, so why buy them? But developers are starting to expand their horizons, and Sega brings us this bloody romp that’ll have you flipping your wrists to cut dudes in half with a chain saw, ram sign posts through their skulls and slam them into spikes over and over again.

Madworld has mad style. It’s all black and white, comic-book-style art — very reminiscent of Sin City. This style serves double duty – adding real visual flair and interest to the game while at the same time hiding the Wii’s lesser graphical prowess. The only color is red (well, a little yellow too), and almost all of that red is blood. And there’s lots and lots of blood. Read the rest of this entry »

I really like the word stymie. I think I first came across it while playing an old tabletop role-playing game called TORG, where it was a game mechanic that happened to your characters, setting them back from beating the bad guys. Games, especially video games, are of course all about putting up challenges and having the players overcome them. But stymieing someone is more than just challenging them: it’s making things so difficult that they want — or are forced — to give up. Last week I played two games that just totally stymied me, not because the game play involved was challenging, but rather because the lack of fun forced me to quit playing them.

First off, there’s Tom Clancy’s HAWX, Read the rest of this entry »

I say this a lot: “Comedy is hard.” I don’t do comedy in my own writing. I throw in some funny here and there, sure, but usually to relieve the tension or because some amusing moment grows out of the larger narrative. But I can’t imagine writing a full on piece of comedy. It’s just too easy to screw up, because few things grate more than bad jokes. Weirdly enough then, the worst part of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3)is not the comedy — not that the humor shines or even really succeeds very often– but it’s more consistently enjoyable than the actual game play, which is consistently dull, mixed with healthy doses of crappiness.

A little background: No, you’re not forgetting anything – there haven’t been any other Matt Hazard games. The conceit of this game is that Matt Hazard used to be a popular action game character from way back in the 8-bit days. The opening cinematic tells his story, voiced by Arrested Development star Will Arnett as Matt Hazard. He does his standard gravely tough guy voice, and it mostly works. The set-up made me chuckle. The load screens gave me a smile. Then it came time to play this ugly, third-person, cover based shooter and I was a lot less happy. It’s not horrible, but it’s not fun either. There’s some interesting variety as the game mixes and matches genres from Hazard’s prolific game past. So you might end up fighting cowboys alongside zombies alongside space marines. My favorite baddies are from a kids water pistol game Hazard was in called Soak-em. But there aren’t that many of them and the weapons they drop aren’t fun.

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Killzone 2 is an expertly made, AAA video game. It’s one of the best looking game I’ve played. The models and animations are fluid and life-like, the details gritty and immersive. This is just a flat out, no denying it, impressive visual experience.

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This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. And I love it. I’m not even going to try and defend myself, other than to say sometimes the craziest shit can be fun. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is ridiculous, crazy, and totally fun, and I’m not entirely sure why. It features a ridiculous, hackneyed story that’s poorly written and beyond contrived. It’s got uninspired, merely serviceable graphics, and utterly typical, unimaginative third person shooter, cover-based game play. And I spent the weekend playing the hell out of this game, often in lieu of playing clearly “superior game” Killzone 2. Why is this? I have a theory. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, this is awesome. Really. Just awesomely funny. I mean, what good is a depression if you can’t laugh at it? And what’s funnier than real people pretending to be video game characters? From the video humorists at CB Fresh comes this vision of what would happen if Street Fighter IV was really about the economic crisis instead of, well, whatever the hell it’s actually about. To be honest, the Wall Street Fighter story is actually probably more compelling and logical than whatever’s supposed to be going on in actual Street Fighter IV.

Video below the jump:

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My whole basis for judging value in an entertainment product comes from Street Fighter. Back in my late high school/early college days, my friends and I played a heluva lota Street Fighter 2 at the arcade. It’s a quick game, and at a quarter a pop, you could spend a lot of money fast if you die too fast, too often (which I did at first). But eventually we all got better. I remember one regular at the arcade was so good he’d actually pay for other people to play against him because no one would throw away their quarters with him at the joystick. He would even give lessons on how to pull off a special move or time the perfect throw. I never got great at the game, but I got decent, and could pretty much count on $5 in quarters lasting me a solid hour in the arcade. I decided that $5 was therefore just about the right amount of money for an hour’s entertainment. Weirdly enough, almost two decades later I still think that’s the right price, although I’ve sure as hell spent lots more money for much shorter entertainments since then. At $60 though, Street Fighter IV is a bargain.

Read the full review, including in-game video below the jump:

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People say video games are bad for you, but those people are jerks, because games are in fact awesome for you. I think. Maybe. Well, some of the time anyway. Edge had this thought-provoking rundown of 15 benefits from gaming including sharper vision, better imagination and reasoning skills, and recovery from injuries.

To be honest, I think they probably stretched a little to put some of these on the list. But one advantage I’ve noticed, one you don’t hear people talk about: the benefits of the distraction factor when it comes to avoiding other, even worse habits, like smoking or overeating. I’ve found that, contrary to stereotypes, there’s no better way to stop me from snacking between meals than getting engrossed in a good game for a few hours. If the game’s good, it’s easy to ignore the munchies. There’s some interesting science to back this up, as a study of hardcore online gamers recently showed that the BMI of those who play a lot of games is actually lower than the average person. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big fan of nudity in games, as I am of nudity in most situations.

I like how it helps push us past this last, weird, Puritan taboo this country has about sex and body image and all that. Never afraid of courting a little controversy if it gets them a lot of free press (you’re soaking in it), Rockstar Games has included some genuine, unabashed, in your face full frontal nudity in the new download-able episode for Grand Theft Auto IV. What’s particularly brilliant: They’re not using it to titilate — no tits at all in fact, just some jack-ass businessman getting a massage while he wheels and deals with a biker gang. It’s meant to make teeneage dudes uncomfortable, and it works great on that front.

Want to see for yourself? Of course you do. Follow the jump [potentially NSFW, depending on how your work views video game nakedness].

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