Good Morning to you all, I just got back from “Midnight Madness” at EB. At 12:07a I picked up my copy of Halo 2!
w00t!
Also if anyone is interested there is a Halo 2 Tournament happening this week at local EB’s across Boston.
Get playing!, enjoy.

Metal Wolf Chaos (a Japanese game to be published in the US in March for the Xbox) puts you in the shoes the President of the United States.. who, uh, at the begining of the game, jumps out the window of the Oval Office just before the entire second storey of the White House explodes. You then must kill everyone you see, including helicopters, marines, tanks, the works - as you make your way to Air Force one, which launches out of the Washington Mall Reflecting pool and clips the roof of the Lincoln Memorial.

I’m not kidding. Oh yeah - the President is seemingly wearing his everyday clothes - a suit, armored, mechanized, and bristled with ginormous guns.

Check out this gameplay video. The audio translations stink of Zero Wing.

This game just looks AWFUL, but still could be a blast while drunk, or alongside a bunch of your friends who .. uh.. proabably should also be drunk. I gotta admit the weapon-switching animation is damn cool - especially when the Presdient goes all Death Blossom.

You’ll see.

Anyway, if this thing plays anything like a Genesis-style shooter than it might actually be a runaway hit, so long it never, ever, attempts to take itself seriously.

tick tock

Following an official release date announcement and this weekend’s stress test, Blizzard has opened the World of Warcraft beta to anyone and everyone. Head over to www.WorldOfWarcraft.com to sign up.

this image has to be one of the best quoting for this scene in StarWars. Of course, if you don’t play network games — you won’t get it.

Recently released to open beta particpants the game’s introduction movie is available to download in stand-alone form. This is one of the best looking game cinematics I’ve ever seen.

Go to fileshack to grab it, a free registration is required. Me wanna play now.

The shit? Or Bullshit?

The 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition features a 2MB Level 3 cache and hyper-threading technology to boost performance.

The Intel 925XE Express chipset platform is an extension of the 915/925X Express chipset family launched earlier this year. The enhanced offering features a faster 1066MHz system bus, the main data path between the CPU and system memory.

With a maximum data throughput improvement of up to 33 per cent between the CPU and system memory (compared with systems using an 800MHz system bus), a 1066MHz system bus can enable faster frame rates for both gaming and video editing, Intel claimed.

Oh intel… your Hyperthreading so sucks.

I’ve been seeing these pirated systems here in Boston for over 6 months. They harass you in the mall trying to sell you a Nintendo 64 look-alike controller that plugs into your TV. It’s a shame that these kinds of products can even last 6 months and I’m glad to see them being shut down.

GamesIndustry.biz - Nintendo of America shuts down 8-bit pirates: “A pirate operation providing video game systems featuring unlicensed NES titles has been shut down by Nintendo of America, with the US District Court granting a temporary restraining order against two companies involved in their sale.”

I love Bees (That Halo 2 Marketing thing) is complete. You can see all of the audio files in chronological order on the site. And if you havent seen the Halo 2 footage on gamespot, namely the official Movie 2, you’re in for a real treat.

OH HALO! COME TO ME!

The October issue of Game Developer Magazine contains a ranking of the top 20 Game Publishers for the last year. Each pub was scored on a wide range of criteria including original intellectual property, review score average, etc, so they’re not simply ranked in order of revenue. Still, I was shocked at just how much some of these publishers pull in.

D-eeer.. holy crap! 3 BILLION from EA alone?

The article details each of the publishers with a little writeup on their business and game dealings of the last year. I didn’t realize Namco has been around since the 50’s, nor that Microsoft Game Studios started in 1975 ( Flight Simulator Series ) two years before Activision and a good decade before Electronic Arts (1982).

Subscriptions to Game Developer Magazine are only open to game development industry members, but you can find it for sale at Microcenter. I’m sure other super bookstores stock it, too.