Joel Koh

You could try to make sense of the latest Killer is Dead trailer, but we wouldn't recommend it.

New Killer is Dead trailer is killer originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 07 Jun 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lionhead Studios has launched a brand new set of Fable-related forums, now available on the developer's website for users to discuss and dissect the popular series of role-playing games. Lionhead's also giving away virtual founders' medals to anyone who signs up in the forums' first two weeks of existence, and you can log right in using your Xbox Live ID.

The last game in the series, Fable: The Journey, arrived back in October of 2012, which raises the question of why the Microsoft-owned developer would announce brand new forums for an IP that's all but fallen off of the radar. Don't forget, though, that E3 is next week, and Microsoft has $1 billion worth of games coming to the Xbox One. The fates may dictate a return to Albion very soon.

Lionhead launches new Fable forums with suspicious timing originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ben Kuchera: Well, it seems like Microsoft listened. The company has detailed the licensing issues of the Xbox One, and the results are interesting. You’ll be able to buy any game on a disc or via Xbox Live on its first day of availability, you can access any game through the cloud using your account, and anyone in your home can play the game on your system. There are some very interesting wrinkles to this as well, including the ability to share your collection with family members. This is how Microsoft explains it: Xbox One will enable new forms of access for families. Up to ten members of…

sugoi-as-hell:

rubyfalls:

lemonistas:

twittysuch:

livefrommyhouse:

Lonely Island and Weird Al for GQ

I never knew I needed this until now. My life is complete.

I’ve forgotten all the words to the original version but I just confirmed that I do indeed remember all the words to “Amish Paradise.”

When I was a wee girl growing up in Lancaster County, PA “Amish Paradise” came out and was a monster hit locally, as you would expect. The song was so popular that the local radio station would play it every half an hour. Once the backlash started, the local “wacky” evening dj went legitimately crazy and locked himself in the booth and played “Amish Paradise” on air for at least 6 hours. Even the local cop who would do the traffic updates on the morning show called in and tried to talk him down. I went to bed and the song was on repeat, and when I woke up the next morning the dj was in jail. That’s my Amish Paradise story, enjoy.

But that bird’s hair

that Amish Paradise story is my favorite story ever probably

T

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Say hello to the bowel-loosening science behind the “zombies” of the Last of Us

Everyone knows Americans don't agree on pronunciations.

That's great, because regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting. 

Joshua Katz, a Ph.D student of statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Vaux and Scott Golder's linguistic survey, which looked at how Americans pronounce words (via detsl on /r/Linguistics).

His results were first published on The Abstract, the NC State University research blog. 

Katz gave us permission to publish some of the coolest maps from his collection.

The pronunciation of "caramel" starts disregarding vowels once you go west of the Ohio River

Residents of the far north have an oddly Canadian way of pronouncing "been"

For whatever reason, it's a "boo-wie" knife in Texas and D.C.*

UPDATE: Enthusiastic Marylanders have alerted us that there is indeed a town named "Bowie, Md." that is pronounced "Boo-wie." That solves that. No word yet from Texans. 

UPDATE 2: From a Texan: "It's pronounced Boo-wie because it's named after Jim Bowie (pronounced Boo-wie), who played a major role in the Texas revolution. That explains why we're the only ones who pronounce it correctly."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

A memorable aspect of Remember Me is its soundtrack, available now on iTunes or accessible through Spotify. As for the game, our review tried its best not to repress the whole thing.

• Edge (80/100): "Schlocky and silly in places, but potent and reflective in others, Nilin's tale has bags of heart to play off against its flamboyant bosses and existential quandaries, all grounded by a charismatic female star."
• Game Informer (78/100): "The environmental climbing sequences offer some simple fun, but the linear paths diminish any sense of exploration this otherwise would have achieved. Combat is filled with fresh ideas, but that creativity inhibits your capability in combat. Hopefully Dontnod doesn't forget any of the lessons it learned this time around, because a sequel could be truly memorable."
• GameSpot (70/100): "Remember Me is not the game its world and premise hint that it could have been; rather, it's simply a good third-person action game: entertaining, slickly produced, and flavorful enough to keep you engaged to the end of its six-hour run time."
• IGN (59/100): "Ultimately, it failed to challenge or excite me as a game, as all of its best ideas are confined to its overarching fiction rather than its gameplay."
• NowGamer (50/100): "This feels like an awkward first step rather than a finished product. As it stands, Remember Me is a series of mediocre gameplay ideas stapled to a pretty, hollow shell."

Metareview: Remember Me originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 03 Jun 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The virtual reality Super Nintendo emulator is just as weird as you’d think

Animation artist and Vimeo user DantheAdMan created a video of abstract motion sculptures with an fighting twist: each figure is a Street Fighter character in action.

According to the video's description, the artist created the video as a way to teach himself Cinema 4D and Vray in his spare time. The geometry of each figure was set up using tracers, Xpresso and Thinking Particles, in addition to motion captures from an archive and Xbox 360's Kinect.

You can watch the video above for a lesson in abstract fighting. The two and a half-minute demonstration features series favorites Chun Li, Ken, Blanka and more.

Used games, Twitter complaints, and Sony: Why the Xbox One “backlash” doesn’t matter

Flickrator Jamie McCaffery discovered how to clone Teh Qte. “My first attempt at sequence photography,” he explains. “I could have picked a better backdrop and a faster shutter speed, but the real goal was to practice the technique.” With cuteness times seven in the foreground, any backdrop will do.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Pups

The Xbox One will kill used games and control second-hand sales, and that’s great news (Really!)

Despite all this Xbox One whoopla going on, Microsoft hasn't forgotten about its other horse in this console dog and pony show. In fact, the company hopes to continue to move substantial numbers of the Xbox 360 over the next five years, according to senior vice president of Interactive Entertainment Yusuf Mehdi.

"We believe over the next five years we can break a 100 million unit installed base," Medhi said during an interview with OXM. "That's something we're shooting for, it's not a financial plan as such, it's just rough numbers if you will. To sell another 25 million, half of those will probably come from replacements, but half will come from new buyers."

"The way we'll break into those segments," he continued, "is by hitting new price points, getting new classes of entertainment to come with the Xbox, and breaking into new customer segments." We're not quite sure what a new class of entertainment for the Xbox might mean, or what customer segments remain untapped after such a long console cycle, but "new price points" sure does pique our interest.

Microsoft wants to sell another 25 million Xbox 360 consoles originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 25 May 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Singer and YouTube star, Smooth McGroove, performed and posted an acappella version of the The Moon theme from DuckTales.

Gleason has recorded numerous classic video game acapella covers, including Guile theme from Street Fighter 2, The Legend of Zelda Overworld theme and the Dr. Wily Stage from Mega Man 2. He has even recorded a Pokémon theme parody acappella called "Try To Catch a Few."

The Smooth McGroove YouTube channel has 193,474 subscribers and roughly 9 million views. The singer has a 22-track album out on iTunes for $9.99 featuring acapella covers of video game classics.

Smooth McGroove, whose real name is Max Gleason, recently told GamesBeat that he quit his full-time music teaching job to focus full-time on recording.

I...

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Dual Destinies, previously announced as Ace Attorney 5, will be available as a downloadable title for Nintendo 3DS in North America and Europe this fall, Capcom announced today.

Set eight years after his last court appearance, Dual Destinies sets Phoenix, his team at the Wright Anything Agency and his new associate attorney Athena Cykes on a new round of cases. Players must solve the mysteries surrounding a destroyed courtroom and head into court against Gaspen Payne, younger brother of previous games' antagonist Winston Payne.

Players will also use Athena's unique psychoanalysis ability to scrutinize witnesses and use readings of their "Mood Matrix" to determine their emotional state — and whether or...

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Orson Scott Card is a bigot and a homophobe, but how should that impact our love of his work?

Imagine you forget to watch a new episode of Game of Thrones the night it airs. Even if coworkers stay mum about important plot points, Twitter is abuzz with spoilers. Fortunately, there's Twivo, a new program that allows Twitter users to censor their feeds from mentioning a certain TV show (and its characters) for a set time period. Jennie Lamere, a 17-year-old girl, invented the software last month—and won the grand prize at a national coding competition where Lamere was the only female who presented a project, and the only developer to work alone. Internet: Meet the reason we need more women in tech.

Lamere is a high school senior from Nashua, New Hampshire, who likes building robots, hiking, and entering "hackathon" competitions. At her all-girls school, the Academy of Notre Dame in Massachusetts, she's the only student participating in these sorts of events. Hackathons (which have nothing to do with illegal hacking) bring together programmers, developers, and designers, who compete to code an innovative new program in a limited amount of time. Lamere entered the TVnext Hack event,  put on by the ad agency Hill Holliday in partnership with Mashery, in Boston on April 27 along with about 80 other competitors—all of them male, according to Lamere and one of the judges. (Mike Proulx, a spokesman for the event, says he believes other women participated, but didn't present completed projects.)

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The average H1-B earns more than the average American.  But you know, keep on spouting your ignorance.

Your breasts do not need shaped armor, and in fact breast-shaped chest plates may kill you

BioShock Infinite players will soon be able to take a piece of Columbia home with them: A Songbird plushie is now available for pre-order in the Irrational Games store for $55.

The Songbird, a giant mechanical bird-like creature, is a major character in BioShock Infinite. The smaller, somewhat softer plushie — it's made of metal, wire and plastic — is 7 inches tall and has a 14-inch wingspan. Toy manufacturer NECA is making the plushie, which features a black body with orange and gold accents; Irrational Games senior character concept artist Robb Waters designed it.

There's no word yet on when the plushie will be released, but fans can pre-order it now.

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Stop us if you've seen this one before. YouTuber MisterMulluc took the song from "Hell is Other Robots," the ninth episode ever of Futurama, and gave it a Source Filmmaker twist. Mr. MisterMulluc has some serious skills, even one week after the video was posted.

Source Filmmaker strikes again with fan-created Futurama fun times originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 05 May 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nnnnice Games, the Netherlands-based studio behind the unfortunately named browser game Starcoons, announced today official plans to change the name of the racoons-in-space project following controversy over the accidental use of a racial slur in the game's title.

Starcoons will now be known as Curio's Starquest, the studio revealed in an official statement. According to the developer, the team was not aware of the cultural issues associated with the game's original title.

"The reason for this change of the title is that we acknowledge the fact that our former title might raise some eyebrows about the use of the word 'coon' of which we missed the controversial meaning due to cultural differences," reads a statement. "We hope that with...

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"I think 'overwhelmed' is the right word," says Rami Ismail, the business half of Dutch design duo Vlambeer.

The interview is over. The story, told in pieces at least a hundred times in bars, at hamburger joints, on stages and in private circles of up-and-coming game developers, has now been told for the first in its entirety. It is a story about the little guy getting bullied and making a stand. And winning.

It is the story of Ridiculous Fishing, and how two men from the Netherlands rallied the worldwide community of independent game developers to take on the practice of game cloning and reclaim their invention to launch what will become (for a time) the best-reviewed iOS game of 2013.

Only when the tale is told, all at once,...

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A digital version of Mega Man 3's official soundtrack is now available through Capcom's equally intangible web store, for the default price of $8.95.

The 39 track album includes such classics as "Shall we go on a Magnetic Continuous tour?" and the game's title screen theme, which has been scientifically proven to be one of the most effective pump-up jams of all time.

The soundtrack was composed by Capcom composer/sound designer Yasuaki Fujita, under the alias "Bun Bun." Fujita was also responsible for the soundtracks to NES versions of The Little Mermaid and Darkwing Duck, as well as Panic in Nakayoshi World, which as far as we can tell is some kind of Sailor Moon/Bomberman thing.

Mega Man 3 soundtrack now available originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 24 Apr 2013 03:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From a message:

I don’t think you can really say that there’s no such thing as a bad female character. And the way you’re approaching this is (possibly unintentionally) indicating that you believe that. We very much do have a problem in fiction works where some writers over-sexualize female characters instead of developing their personalities -This is a problem because in same works, the men are often far more dynamic. To me, this means we still need more females in stories and more females creating stories

Right. I’m sorry if it looked like I was saying that there’s no such thing as a bad female character - there obviously is. In debates like this it tends to polarize the two sides of the argument, pushing each party to extremes, so let me clarify my stance. I’m not saying that we should blindly love ANY character simply for being female while heaping praise upon the creators for creating a female character. I absolutely think that we should be pushing for better, more well-rounded, more diverse female characters, and that we should hold the writers accountable for their shortcomings. However, my problem with the initial post that started all this is that it displays an attitude I see all too often: “because sexism exists, it would be better if there were no female characters rather than ‘bad’ female characters.”

(Watch out, it’s a long one under the cut!)

I think the main problem with this is fairly obvious: it’s a step backward to erase female characters and allow readers and writers to remain in their comfort zone by dealing with only male characters. But the other, more glaring problem to me, is the implication that female characters simply could not be written as well as male characters, or that men are “easier” to write, or that the OP would naturally default to a preference towards male characters since they were less likely to be portrayed in a sexist way.

The problem with that is that we CAN’T have a non-sexist female character. This is the world we live in. Even the savviest lady writer is going to mess it up somehow. That doesn’t mean we should give up. 

My overall beef with the post is one that hits close to home, because I myself am greatly guilty of it and am in the process of trying to change: many viewers and readers react negatively to a female character automatically, without consciously realizing why, and then find many reasons to justify it (even in the case of female characters who have yet to even make an appearance, i.e. Tauriel in the Hobbit, or Black Widow or Catwoman before their movies came out). And the characters that people hate aren’t just the bikini babes, bending seductively over cars. If you could see my inbox from the last several days from when I asked people to submit a female character that they disliked, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a female character who didn’t make an appearance. And the characters who were accused of being sexistly written: nearly every female character from Game of Thrones (except for Arya incidentally, what do you suppose that says?), Skyler White, Katniss Everdeen, Vanellope von Schweetz, Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Stephanie Brown, Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, one for Donna Noble even, River Song, Amy Pond, every lady who’s ever appeared on Supernatural, Irene Adler, Jane Foster, Pepper Potts, Emma Frost, Jean Grey, etc etc etc etc

Are these characters perfect? OF COURSE NOT. Some of them are deeply flawed and written in a problematic way. But then you see the reasons - she sleeps around. She hates or is otherwise an inconvenience to a male character. She is shrill or nagging, or she displays traditional femininity. Her clothes are too revealing. She broke up with the main character. She led the main character on. She’s manipulative. She lies. She’s too self-assured. She’s not assertive enough - or she’s too assertive. She made a choice that ended up going wrong. She’s a bitch.

Look at that landmine. Think about which sins we would forgive a male character for committing. Think about which sins we wouldn’t even notice, should a male character commit them. Think about the “villainous” traits which we actually enjoy watching a villainous male character display - why is Loki “just misunderstood” while Cersei Lannister is “a bitch”? We expect these characters to be PERFECT - but not too perfect. God forbid she enjoy sex, or show cleavage, or fall in love, or have children, or not be a warrior woman, or make bad decisions. How could any character ever live up to that?

I would never say that we should be satisfied with the status quo e. We need to push for the characters we want to see - but we have to support the ones we already have, or we won’t GET any new characters, because female characters are JUST TOO DARN CONTROVERSIAL. And when the writers muck it up, we blame the WRITERS - and we hope that they’ll do better and that the character can be saved. If you hate the way a writer writes women, don’t read that writer. Because it’s not even the worst of the female characters, the bottom of the barrel, the props and arm candy, that people are taking issue with - it’s the Catelyn Starks and the Sansas and the Skyler Whites. And you can’t even start to argue with me that these characters are poorly written or “sexist.” This is where you have to accept that the problem might be with you.

I don’t expect this change to come easy. I too tend to react negatively to female characters, and I need to be told off, and I need to question my own reasons. Because we all live in this messed-up system together and we’re going to do sexist things without even realizing it. That’s what I’m trying to raise awareness about. If you’re a die-hard Sansa Stark hater, I don’t expect it to be easy for you to turn your opinion around right away - as long as you look critically at yourself and ask yourself the hard questions. I know it seems weird to police what you do and don’t like…but the truth is that a lot of this isn’t personal preference at all, but something that society has ingrained into you. 

At the very least, this is something we have to be aware of, and be talking about. That’s all I’m trying to do.

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The team at Tested got a chance play around with Team Fortress 2 using the upcoming Oculus Rift headset, and they recorded half an hour of gameplay for us to virtually enjoy. Not "virtually" as in we'll "almost" enjoy it, but "virtually" as in "virtual reality"-based enjoyment. Just watch the video.

Kickstarter backers should receive their Oculus Rift dev kits by mid-April, with pre-orders hitting a little later in the month. For those expecting a kit, check out Valve's list of handy tricks for setting up VR in TF2.

Thirty minutes of Team Fortress 2 in virtual reality caught on camera originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Apr 2013 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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EA earned hatred with poor games, lack of vision, and contempt for the audience, not homophobia