The Need For Speed series recently celebrated their 100 million mark in the sales of titles in the series.

To highlight this event, the NFS community had Vehicle Styling Director Andy Blackmore on the new podcast, 100 Million Special. Interested listeners can find that here.

Also an extra, United States players can get a code for the Coke Zero Dodge Viper SRT10 from MyCokeRewards by going to the Need For Speed: Shift Facebook page.

Demon’s Souls releases tomorrow exclusively on the PlayStation 3. Check out my review here to get a feel of what it’s going to be like.

With the assistance online component of the game going live on October 6, Atlus has also smartly decided to start a wiki page about Demon’s Soul as a real-time strategy guide that will assist in a different way than Demon’s Souls online function.

This couldn’t come at a better time because gamers are going to need to help each other to complete sections of the game.

Be sure to bookmark the wiki here.

A few months ago, Stephen Dinehart’s inner tech geek flashed on. Flexing mental muscles he hadn’t used since grad school, he set out to create The Narrative Designer’s Network, which officially launched Tuesday.

Sporting a slick front page and a pronounced audio intro, the Web site is a product of Narrware, an indie developer. Dinehart, creative director at the company, hopes the site will foster community among narrative designers, though he said it could also benefit gamers.

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As with anything, when it comes to the gaming industry, there’s tons to complain about. Casual games, for instance. Or monstrous price tags. Just choose your poison.

But the biggest problem, by far, is that they’re too damn long. In this fast-paced culture, who has time for 20 hours (and upwards) of gameplay? We can’t even find time to cook our own food anymore, let alone churning through whole days playing video games.

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Simplification for the masses.

Nintendo’s doing it, catering to the casual crowd with its dreck for the Wii, and Microsoft aims to do the same with Project Natal.

“Blasphemy!” old-time gamers say. But simplifying things really isn’t so bad. Simple games like Today, I Die show the benefits of paring games down to their core, and by becoming increasingly accessible, games can become experienced rather than played.

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One of my dear friends, who I am now gravely worried about, recently purchased The Sims 3. When he told me the “great news,” I simply responded by telling him that I was unaware that he became a woman, excuse the politically incorrect metaphor.

But really, what is so great about The Sims?

Besides, once you played the first Sims, you’ve essentially played them all.

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In this interview, we get a glimpse into gaming’s future from a narrative designer duking it out in the field.

As writer and narrative designer, Stephen Dinehart helped bring WWII to life in the RTS Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. A featured blogger for Gamasutra, he runs the Narrative Design Exploratorium and now works at NarrWare, an indie developer.

He’s written extensively on the field of narrative design and is exploring new ground in the gaming industry. Today he sheds some light on what narrative design is all about, as well as his ideas behind dramatic play.
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The Nintendo Wii ignited a popular fascination with gaming. Its motion-based controls appeared to be the future. With Microsoft and Sony both developing their own answers to the Wii, it certainly appears that motion controls are now going to be around for a long time.

While many are excited for this, real gamers are left weeping. To real gamers, the idea of having to deal with these gimmicky devices is as appealing as rubbing shards of glass in one’s eyes.

With that painful imagery aside, let me just say that classic controllers > those things that make you move and wave your hands in an awkward fashion. That is not fun. That is just stupid.

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