A Microsoft chairman was quoted at CES as saying “If you’ve got a Christmas with one but not the other, it’s not going to be theirs.” Big words but.. meh.

But today SPOnG.com (an online gaming site) posted news of a circulating press release that dates a Christmas release for “Need For Speed: Most Wanted” - a title for Microsoft’s next generation XBox platform. Unfortunately the site hasn’t submitted scans of the release as proof, and Microsoft is maintaining a “We don’t comment on release dates” policy.

Gamespot’s weekly “Rumor Control” column has the story, and labels it as “Not Bogus”. Here’s hoping.

Edit: This looks legit. EA published their 2005 release schedule including some XBox Next titles. Awesome. Start Saving now!

Gary Grigsby’s World at War harkens back to the ole time favorite “Axis and Allies” but with a far more mature game system. They’ve more than doubled the spaces on the board, added unit supply, research and unit depth. Each vehicle has 12 distinct stats including attack power, armor, evasion, speed, etc. and all values may change over the course of the war through faction research. This adds tremendous replay-value and more strings to pull and control as you plan your longterm war strategy.

These guys took a long hard look at the best way to make A&A a more sophistimacated game and started over from ground up. If you grew up spending hours hunched over the dining room table conquering Russia, then you may want to give this title a gander. Russ and I have plans to run many games over email and challenge any of you desktop generals to join in.

Ukraine is weak!

The plot thickens!

“Publisher Take Two, whose plans for its sports game franchise have been hard hit by a string of exclusive license deals announced by rival Electronic Arts, may be in talks to sign a similar exclusive with Major League Baseball.”

Don’t threaten EA - This seems to be the lesson of late 2004. EA’s purchase of rights to both the NFL and ESPN has schooled Visual Concepts (NFL2K) and sent them scrambling to put their football engine to use with a new league. But EA continues to make a martyr out of VC, snatching up potential ALTERNATLVE football licenses.. like the Arena League.

You’re a jerk EA. An absolute kneebiter.

What’s left? CFL? World Leage Football? Maybe it’s time to bring back Cyberball.

Catalyst Drivers v5.1. If you’re running an ATI card then get em while they’re hot… though the release notes don’t say anything about adding enhancements to World of Warcraft.

CNN Money reports “EA teams up with ESPN”. If you can’t beat em, buy em.

This is not good news. EA won’t throw a loving arm around the ESPN series’ current developer Visual Concepts. Instead EA will most likely continue development through the current Madden developer Tiberion Studios.

Sports games sell consoles and Football is the biggest selling sports genre on the market. EA has now squashed all football competition in just a few months. Visual Concepts (owned by Take Two Interactive) were once developers of the [IMHO] superior football franchise, but now the’ve lost both the NFL player rights AND their ESPN branding to the trans megacorp Electronic Arts. EA’s Madden Football had a huge majority of the market-share.. they really didn’t NEED to pull this crap. This sucks.

The new EA/ESPN deal has been reported to last for 15 years. Yes 15.

Ok.. this article is downritght scary. Its also sad that people have this kind of view on gaming.

*shakes head*

Nothing upsets me more than this kind of Ignorance.

Winning Souls to Christ in The World of Warcraft: “Billy Houston, a Landover Baptist Senior High youth, has been sharing Jesus in the virtual gaming world for over three years. ‘I evangelized in Lineage 2, Everquest, Diablo, and a bunch of other games,’ he says, ‘but I haven’t seen nearly as many people who are as open to hearing the Gospel message as I have inside the World of Warcraft.’ Billy has what gamers call, a Level 57 Undead Priest with Holy Focus. ‘I’m also in one of the largest Christian guilds on our server,’ he says. ‘I think the reason so many people are open to hearing about Jesus in the World of Warcraft is because the majority of people who play the game are lonely kids who don’t have any friends. I doubt any of them play sports so you can pretty much guess that there are lots of gay boys and fat little pale-faced Wiccan girls on the servers who hate themselves and escape into virtual characters so they don’t have to deal with their pathetic lives. When they hear that someone loves them, even if it is just the Lord Jesus Christ, they always want to hear more!’”

Billy, I really pity you.

It seems we have another Alternate Reality Game (ARG) on our hands. If you recall the underground website for Halo 2 called “Ilovebees.com” where numbers and dates were listed. Turns out that these numbers are GPS for public telephones. When someone answered the phone and spoke the right passprhase a soundclip on ILoveBees.com was unlocked. When all the soundclips were spliced togehter it produced an entire Internet radio show set in the Halo 2 universe.

Well Errant Memory seems to be another ARG site and it’s starting from scratch. Things got kicked off early this morning. There’s a killer thread on Immersion Unlimited which seems to be the premier community that’s solving this ARG. Only a few hours old and they’ve already unlocked numerous portions of the website. This has, of cousre, produced even more puzzles to solve. Currently the state of game is confused (brickwall?), but I’m sure you’ll be on the forefront of this phenomenon if you stay tuned to that thread.

Check out some of the already unlocked pages.. some were unlocked from clues within the main site’s vid clip, and others were from other pages unlocked later. Read the thread for more information - some of the puzzles are so very very cryptic.. but yet the community is solving this crap faster than I can read it. Amazing stuff.

Some links from that site that have already uncovered:
.lc01
.explosion
.tunnels
.car
.wish
.hiddentext

Man. I don’t nkow what to say. Read the thread.

AMong the honoree’s this year is the Phantom (appropriate title) console, and of course, Duke Nukem Forever.

Wired said this gem about DNF:

“‘NASA has planned, designed, developed and successfully landed a rover on Mars in the time this game has been in development,’ wrote reader Ray O’Neill. ‘So much for deadlines.’ “

It seems that an inadverntant virus-like hack of the sims 2 is running amok.

Awesome.

“Something strange is happening in the Sims 2 multiverse.

Players of Electronic Arts’ enormously popular simulated life game are complaining that their artfully-crafted homes and mansions are beginning to resemble the Twilight Zone, thanks to an artifact of the game’s design that causes hacks to spread like viruses from user to unwitting user.

Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need to empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope — every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal. “