Microsoft has opened up the Xbox Live Rewards program to all users. The company tested the program in early November and worked out some kinks. Now all of you can take advantage of it! Check out some of the goodies:
Microsoft has opened up the Xbox Live Rewards program to all users in the United States and United Kingdom. The company tested the program in early November and worked out some kinks. Now all of you can take advantage of it! Check out some of the goodies:
Did any of you sign up? Are you excited by the program? Do you think it makes Xbox Live Gold more valuable than PlayStation Plus?
Actress, hottie, and World of Warcraft addict Mila Kunis would love to be in the upcoming WoW movie. Although she has quit the game cold turkey (for now), she seemed excited at the prospect of casting spells on the big screen. She told MTV:
Hell yeah! I would do it, of all things. I don’t know if I would want to be a big character in it, but I would totally want to run around as a little mage. Like a kick-ass mage. With pigtails? Mmmmm… Awesome!
Hot chicks that play World of Warcraft…awesome. This is a good excuse to look at more photos of this stunning woman. Let’s go!
In an effort to prevent his daughter from becoming a fan of the Los Angeles Lakers, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons resorted to lying to his daughter…and the lies were frickin’ hilarious! From the evil Kobe Bryant to the dog-hating Phil Jackson to the vampiric Pau Gasol…Simmons showed why he’s the most entertaining columnist in sports. Check it out:
The big strategic play? Lying. Sorry, I had to. This was important. I convinced her that the Lakers were bullies (she hates the concept of bullying; it drives her crazy in movies), that Kobe is a mean daddy to his young daughters and that Phil Jackson absolutely hates golden retrievers. Did I show her the Artest melee on YouTube, then point out Artest in a Lakers uniform and tell her that she couldn’t root for the Lakers because Artest might run into the stands and punch me during a game? Yes. Yes I did. The only time I screwed up? When I tried to convince her that Pau Gasol was a vampire — that made her like him more. (F***ing Edward. He swayed an entire generation of girls under 15.) Everything else worked. Everything. I killed off every possible Lakers chromosome.
I was actually reading this in bed, trying to sleep. Laughing out loud at this column delayed my slumber for an hour. Bill Simmons rules!!!
Back in Coffee Talk #250, RPadholic SlickyFats asked me, “Do you get invited to events or do you have to actively seek them out and invite yourself?” I wanted to answer that question in a Coffee Talk column to pull back the curtain on the videogame business and for self therapy.
Welcome to Coffee Talk! Let’s start off the day by discussing whatever is on your (nerd chic) mind. Every morning I’ll kick off a discussion and I’m counting on you to participate in it. If you’re not feelin’ my topic, feel free to start a chat with your fellow readers and see where it takes you. Whether you’re talking about videogames, your thoughts on the Grammy nominations, what Carl Froch’s wife was looking for, or Jayson Werth possibly signing with the Red Sox, Coffee Talk is the place to do it.
Back in Coffee Talk #250, RPadholic SlickyFats asked me, “Do you get invited to events or do you have to actively seek them out and invite yourself?” I wanted to answer that question in a Coffee Talk column to pull back the curtain on the videogame business and for self therapy. When I worked at Happy Puppy, GameSpy, Yahoo!, and G4tv, event invites were pretty much automatic. When I freelanced for high-profile outlets like FHM, GigaOm, Amazon, GamePro, etc., invites were pretty frequent. These days…not so much.
No matter what you’ve done in your career, PR people will forget about you once you stop serving a large audience. Their job is to promote their games to as many people as possible. Once you’re no longer useful to them, they stop calling, they stop returning your phone calls, they stop sending you games, and they stop sending you press releases. That’s just how it works.
Obviously this is a source of frustration for me. I’m trying to build and grow a web site. I need support from PR people. They control the information and coverage opportunities. On one hand, I completely understand where they’re coming from — I’m not as useful to them as I once was. On the other hand, I naively hope that people I’ve known for more than 10 years will help me grow my site. At the very least, I’d like to be invited to events that are miles away from my apartment. To be fair, I suck at self promotion and I hate groveling for stuff; I need to get over this in 2011 for the good of the site.
The good news is that I have several relationships with developers that many of you like. I will try to pull in favors for video interviews and stuff. Recently I was chatting with a pretty famous developer and he asked me what I thought about a recent press release. I told him, “I don’t know. Your flacks took me off the mailing lists. I don’t get your games or press releases anymore.” He was surprised and a little pissed off. He asked me if I wanted him to “fix” that situation. I declined. I’ll try to “fix” that myself next year.
So yeah, I get a fraction of the coverage opportunities I used to get and it kind of sucks. I’m going to try to change that in 2011. Also, I’m making a list and checking it thrice — I will never forget the PR people that still send me games, email me press releases, and invite me to events…nor will I forget the PR people that completely dropped me.
Thanks SlickyFats! This was therapeutic.
Eurogamer posted a hot rumor that the original Halo is going to be remade using the Halo: Reach engine. When asked about this rumor, Microsoft PR responded with the following:
Right now our focus is on supporting Halo: Reach. We have nothing to announce at this time.
In my head this is the PR equivalent of *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*, “It’s coming!” What do you think? Is a Halo remake in the works? Would you buy it?
I’m not sure how I missed this — former American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi is writing a memoir called A Helluva High Note! She was absolutely useless on the show and wrote one of the crappiest songs ever recorded (“No Boundaries”). That said, prior to Idol she was a successful song writer and producer. Here are more details from EW:
A spokesperson for It Books (a division of HarperCollins) confirms with EW that the songwriter/TV personality’s memoir, A Helluva High Note, will hit shelves on April 26, 2011. (The news was first reported by Radar earlier today.) The tome won’t only cover DioGuardi’s two-season stint on Idol, but also “her life and career as a producer, songwriter and artist,” according to an It Books publicist.
I might have to buy this for the unintentional comedy. There’s a good chance it will top Dave Batista’s Batista Unleashed for the highest concentration of unintentional idiocy per page. Anyway, enjoy Kara’s naked picture from Allure (above) and her crappy song (below).
Kindly check out these screens of Sega’s upcoming Binary Domain for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This squad-based shooter is being headed up by Toshihiro Nagoshi, best known as the producer on the Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball Games.
[nggallery id=32]
Kindly check out these screens of Sega’s upcoming Binary Domain for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. This squad-based shooter is being headed up by Toshihiro Nagoshi, best known as the producer on the Yakuza and Super Monkey Ball Games. In a recent press release, Nagoshi described his vision for Binary Domain:
What I wanted to create this time was a dramatic and energetic sci-fi shooter. When you hear sci-fi you may think of cold, clinical environments but with Binary Domain I wanted to combine this with a deep human drama. The keyword we have in mind for this project is ’Life’. I wanted to make something that will be accepted by both the Japanese and Western markets, and this fundamental theme is something everyone knows but which the full extent of can be difficult to grasp.
It sounds cool on paper! What do y’all think of Binary Domain’s concept and screens?
Here’s a cool factoid that’s a testament to the power of the PlayStation 3: the U.S. Airforce has used Sony’s console to construct an extremely powerful supercomputer for a relatively cheap price. According to UPI:
The U.S. Air Force used 1,760 Sony Playstation 3 video game consoles to create a supercomputer at about a tenth the normal cost for such a setup, officials say.
Named the Condor Cluster and to be unveiled Wednesday, it’s the fastest interactive computer the Defense Department has, the Air Force said.
Part of me wishes I was still at G4tv just so I could post this article and watch the flame wars. “PS3 am more powerfulz than Xbox 360! The Navy uses it! February 27th!!! Fore!!!”
This “spy” video allegedly shows the Sony Ericcson Z1 — the rumored PSP Android phone. It’s super grainy, so it’s hard to tell exactly what it is. The Android part seems accurate, but it’s impossible to tell if the handset can play PSP games. Check it out and share your conspiracy theories (please)!
In a Q&A with Big Think about his novel Luka and the Fire of Life, author Salman Rushdie spent some time talking about Rockstar Games’ Read Dead Redemption. He seemed fascinated by the game’s mix of storytelling and open-world interactivity. Rushdie said:
The game that my 13 year-old boy Milan and his friends all seem to be playing right now is this wild west game called Red Dead Redemption and one of the things looking over… I mean I don’t even pretend to understand what is going on really, but one of the things that is interesting about it to me is the much looser structure of the game and the much greater agency that the player has to choose how he will explore and inhabit the world that is provided for you. He doesn’t… in fact, doesn’t really have to follow the main narrative line of the game at all for long periods of time. There is all kinds of excursions and digressions that you can choose to go on and find many stories to participate in instead of the big story, the macro story. I think that really interests me as a storyteller because I’ve always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end — to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.
I’m a big fan of Rushdie and was totally jazzed to hear his thoughts on videogames. (On a side note, I totally marked out when he asked J.K. Rowling about Severus Snapes’ motivations in a Deathly Hallows Q&A.) However, not everything he said was positive. Check out the video clip if you have a chance and let me know what you think (please)!
