Get excited folks, because for the LOW price of twenty dollars a month, you can enjoy unlimited track time and competition in the (hopefully) soon to be released iRacing! Twenty dollars will give you everything you need to experience a new way to train and to compete…well, almost everything.
If you’re like me, you spend hours preparing to draft the best fantasy football team ever (and yet still end up in last place, losing to the person who was on auto-draft…life just isn’t fair). Manning or Brady? LaDainian Tomlinson or Adrian Peterson? With so many draft kits available, how are you supposed to know which to choose? EA Fantasy Football is hoping you’ll pick them, since they’ve teamed up with Madden to take the fantasy football craze to a whole new level.
Business, Nintendo Wii, Technology
Nintendo’s desperate appeal hasn’t been heard. In a continuation of the patent infringement suit involving Anascape against Nintendo and Microsoft, a U.S District Court Judge recently upheld the previous decision made in May. That decision states that Nintendo is in the wrong…in fact, 21 million dollars in the wrong!
In case you aren’t in the know, the Texas-based Anascape originally sued both Nintendo and Microsoft (talk about David versus Goliaths) for allegedly infringing on 12 controller designs that they had patented between 1999 and 2004.
NCAA Football 09 looks SWEEET! With the addition of new features such as home-field advantage (in which sideline cheerleaders shake their booty for you as you go in for the game winning score) and enhanced breakaway animation (which allows you to look like Reggie Bush as you continually cause defenders to break their ankles trying to keep up with your jukes), this game looks like a sure-fire hit. Except…
The Loner. That’s how society thinks of the stereotypical gamer. He sits in his room all day, playing a never-ending game, while the only social interaction is the voice he hears in his headset while making his latest kill. Why does he do this? According to society it’s because he has little or no social skills, so he has to hide behind a make-believe character. Well society, you’re wrong!
As a study by Dan Loton, a Psychology graduate from Victoria University showed, contrary to popular belief there is no direct correlation between game-playing and social skills. In fact, even among the problem gamers (who were identified in the study as those who spend fifty hours or more a week gaming), only one percent of them were identified as having poor social skills.
True, certain role-playing games, such as World of Warcraft, do have a tendency to lead to an almost addictive habit. Still, while it is hard to have an active social life when one is more concerned about climbing the guild rather than the social ladder… this isn’t quite as common as your parents might have you believe. In fact, WoW can help develop skills that can be used in the real, as well as the virtual world.
Similarly to the rest of us, pro athletes take gaming seriously, perhaps a little too seriously. Don’t believe me? Well, they care about their gaming enough to cheat in order to gain more experience and achieve higher levels.
Just consider Gilbert Arenas, who has openly admitted to cheating at Halo. The idea that he plays a “social-doubles” game with a friend where they each play with phony teammates in order to drive up their experience points is appalling to many gamers.
Arenas is guilty of the gaming equivalent of using steroids, and should be punished accordingly. That said, the fact that Arenas cares enough to resort to using this “performance-enhancing” technique demonstrates a new trend: the intermixing of gaming and athletic cultures.
Kevin Garnett, the recently announced cover boy of NBA 2K9, demands that you play his game. His famous ferocity is being brought to the campaign trail, and everyone better be prepared. Do you really want to disobey someone who gets as intense as this?
Considered by most analysts to be the best basketball game on the market, NBA 2K8 was a hit with the addition of the slam-dunk contest and improved signature animations. Still, even though 2K Sports was considered to be the better game, its main rival, EA’s NBA Live, was able to outsell it with a larger marketing budget. Additionally, it didn’t hurt that the cover person for NBA Live was Gilbert Arenas, who is a bit more of a showboat, and therefore better at getting attention than 2K8 cover boy, Chris Paul. This year, it looks like that will be reversed.
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Sorry, Gamers. If you thought ESA’s loss of 5 million dollars last year would confirm they made a mistake by moving and downgrading the annual E3, you are about to be disappointed. The only complaint ESA apparently took into account from last year’s disastrous event was the annoyance felt by those forced to walk around at the new Santa Monica location. Santa Monica’s layout forced attendees to walk from venue to venue (and hey, let’s face it, we’re pretty much used to walking no more than the distance from our consoles to the fridge), so this year, E3 will be returning to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the booth babes won’t be returning with it.
