This week we explore the role-playing potential of Google Wave, play New Super Mario Bros. Wii, explain why PC gamers care about dedicated servers, and learn how to be a (fake) DJ. This is what gamers were talking about this week.
The sky? She is falling. Nintendo has taken a beating in the first half of the year, and for the first time in six years the company is projecting its earnings to fall. The 64.59 billion ($709.3 million) the company earned in the April to September is a 52 percent drop from the same period last year, when the company posted profits of 144.83 billion ($1.59 billion).
While 360 gamers have been enjoying their demo for a day or so now, PC gamers saw their demo pushed back so Valve could tighten up the game. After customers who preloaded the demo downloaded a new version and waited until early Wednesday evening, they were finally able to play.
Kingdom Hearts comes back in a major way on the Nintendo DS with this tragic adventure!
Though the DSi was just released earlier this year, Nintendo has already announced the next iteration of the wildly popular handheld: the DSiLL. Revealed at a press event in Tokyo, the new DS will feature larger screens than its predecessor but few other improvements.
Borderlands was a highly anticipated release on the PC, but a one-week delay of the PC launch meant that console gamers were able to enjoy the gun-collecting goodness ahead of their PC gaming brethren. A few gamers were lucky enough to find stores that were willing to sell the boxed PC copy of the game before the street date, however, but when they installed the game and tried to play, they found that without the title being authenticated online, the disc and key were worthless.
The trend of downloadable updates to classic games continues, but this time Nintendo is revisiting one its own aging franchises: Excitebike. The company recently announced the upcoming Excitebike: World Rally, a remake of the bike racing game originally released in 1985, which will be coming to WiiWare.
From the early days of the printing press to the dawn of the VHS era, it’s been a clich that the first thing humans do upon inventing a new medium is distribute pornography with it. While this clich may hold true for most humans and most media, there is one conspicuous exception: the computer geek. From Nethack to play-by-post forums on the WWW, the first thing that computer geeks do upon inventing a new medium is play Dungeons and Dragons with it—the porn comes later, after the role-playing game itch is scratched.
