Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 11:40 pm
Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 11:20 pm
MTV Games and Harmonix are officially embracing the weekly Rock Band night at your local pub, backing an initiative known as Rock Band Bar Nights to help promote watering holes who host such regular events.
The folks behind Rock Band appear to be taking the opportunity seriously, with a series of promotional tools to highlight Rock Band Bar Nights registered businesses. These include a Bar Night exclusive e-commerce store, online friendliness via the Rock Band Facebook and Twitter accounts and “exclusive Rock Band product offerings.”
The first of those offerings is a five song disc preview of The Beatles: Rock Band, available only to Rock Band Bar Nights participants. It’s just a week away and a five song rotation will quickly wear thing amongst drunkards, but it’s something!
Coming later are some online tools that will help fans of drinking alcohol close to a copy of Rock Band find locations that offer this combination. MTV Games will release “an online application searchable by zip code and a mobile version available for download as a free iPhone application” so you’re never too far away from knowing where the nearest Rock Band bar night is.
As a fan of imbibing and making an ass of myself on stage, this is great news.
Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 11:00 pm
Barron’s has a long article up about Blizzard’s corporate overlords at Activision-Blizzard, and as is usual with most pieces of Activision news, people will probably see in it what they want to see. Those who think Bobby Kotick is just a money-grubbing exploiter will find more fuel for their firey fanboy rage: apparently he’s a follower of Las Vegas casino entrepreneur Steve Wynn, and is modeling some of Activision-Blizzard’s business plan off of that guy, Shareholders, however, will probably be thrilled. In terms of a purely financial sense, Activision-Blizzard is apparently one of the shinest futures around, with Kotick bragging that videogames will eclipse film and TV in terms of moneymaking in just a few years.
From our perspective, as longtime fans and players of Blizzard’s games, the most interesting thing I see here is that Barron’s makes no distinction at all between Activision and Blizzard any more — the Activision-Blizzard company, according to the article, is equally responsible for both the Starcraft and Transformers franchises. Obviously, as gamers, we see a huge distinction between those two: one is a classic, storied, much-loved videogame series, and the other is a cash-in on a license that’s panned everywhere but the box office. But for the financial guys, they’re just both properties of Activision-Blizzard. That’s not to say that our Blizzard is entirely lost (anyone who was at BlizzCon last week knows that’s not true), but it is a sign that the merger is no longer news. From an outsider perspective, Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft are just two cash cows from the same company.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items, Economy, NPCs
Activision-Blizzard and their financial future originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 11:00 pm
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story is on a very very short list of games releasing before the holidays that I plan on purchasing—with my own money!—and completing from start to finish. That’s rare!
While not normally a fan of the role-playing game genre, I’ve been a big fan of the Mario & Luigi RPG games. The unappealing prospect of spelunking Bowser’s bowels isn’t something that will turn me off, not when I know that bad guy Fawful will be around delivering ace dialogue.
Two new videos from Nintendo show off some Bowser related gameplay, plus highlight some of the “belly laughs” we’ll be experiencing in Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. The latter is just after this.
Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 10:53 pm
If you’re very clumsy (or you love watching TV in the bathtub) Sony Japan has just the thing for you. The Rimotokomanda RM-PZ3SD
universal remote comes in a palette of soothing colors, works with a wide variety of sets (including those by Panasonic / National, Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Victor / JVC, Sanyo, Aiwa, Sharp, Funai / PRECIOUS, NEC, Fujitsu, Pioneer, Philips, and, of course, Sony), and offers at least a modicum of water-resistance for wet-handed TV viewing (we’ll leave that part up to your imagination). To be unleashed on the Japanese buying public “soon” for ¥2,468 (around $26). More pics after the break.
[Via Boing Boing]
Continue reading Sony unveils waterproof universal remotes for deep-sea TV addicts
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Sony unveils waterproof universal remotes for deep-sea TV addicts originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 10:53 pm
While it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given the fairly
steady growth netbooks have seen since their inception as a product category, it’s still pretty notable that they’ve apparently now managed to nearly double traditional laptops in sales growth during the second quarter of this year. That word comes from market research firm DisplaySearch, which found that netbook shipments grew an impressive 40% compared to the same quarter last year, as opposed to 22% for plain old laptops. As excitingly illustrated in the chart above, however, that still leaves netbooks (or “mini-notes”) well behind laptops in terms of total shipments, although that seems almost certain to narrow considerably in the months and years ahead — at least until the line between netbooks and laptops becomes so blurred that we just start calling everything “laptops” again.
Filed under: Laptops
Netbook sales growth doubles laptops in Q2 ’09 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 10:40 pm
Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 10:23 pm
We’re starting to get the feeling they just didn’t know about WiFi in Waterloo until now, because almost every BlackBerry hardware rumor we’re hearing lately is all about how RIM’s adding the wireless networking spec and everyone’s oh-so-happy. Case in point: today we’ve got word of a new BlackBerry Essex, which is essentially… the Tour with WiFi. Seriously, that’s the whole rumor, and we’re guessing it has something to do with Sprint mandating WiFi on all of its future handsets, so it’s not even particularly wild. Don’t get us wrong here, we’re glad to have WiFi — it’s extremely nice on the Bold, and it certainly improves battery life — but considering the sorry state of the BlackBerry browser and the continued lack of real IMAP on the BlackBerry platform, we’re just wondering when BlackBerry fans will have some real changes to get excited about.
Filed under: Cellphones
BlackBerry Essex to bring WiFi on Tour? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 10:20 pm
The recently announced Ubisoft Toronto studio has a new boss, Assassin’s Creed producer Jade Raymond, Ubisoft announced today. She’ll be overseeing the new studio, focusing on “AAA games and new intellectual properties.”
Raymond will be working under the “governance” of Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft’s Montreal and Toronto development studios, at Ubisoft Toronto which is said to be home to some 800 jobs. As of right now, Raymond is toiling away as executive producer on Assassin’s Creed II and “other Ubisoft projects” according to the release.
Jade joined Ubisoft’s Montreal studio in 2004 as a producer, but has kept a lower profile during the development of the sequel while still impressing the powers that be at corporate. We wish the Ubisoft Toronto team best of luck and godspeed to new executive headshots.
Posted by on August 31, 2009 – 10:00 pm
Barred from discussing secret stuff related to my and Fahey’s PAX planning I can nevertheless report that we’ll be in the same location later this week as 1000 of the new Street Fighter IV sticks pictured here.
Our PAX calendar runneth over. And even our pre-PAX calendar does as plans are taking shape for some mid-week Kotaku adventures in Seattle.
Since we can’t talk about that stuff and because I’ve lost track of the absurd number of MMOs Fahey has put on his agenda to check out (he’s attending the Saturday Star Wars: The Old Republic demo, of course), let’s just keep our PAX planning update to these SFIV sticks.
As of September 4, Mad Catz will be selling 650 Xbox 360 versions of the “Limited Edition ‘Femme Fatale’ Street Fighter IV Arcade FightStick: Tournament Edition” stick; 350 of the the PlayStation 3 version. Two per customer. Available at PAX, or on the Capcom and Mad Catz online stores. U.S. consumers only. $159.99. I do believe that exceeds my and Fahey’s per diem. Not that I’m a fighting game person anyway.
