GotGame

Debrief: ladies and gentlemen, this man is Jason Bourne, the world’s most highly trained assassin. This $30 million dollar amnesiac is now completely in your control. Oh yeah, and his game, The Bourne Conspiracy, kicks ass.

The Bourne Conspiracy – on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 – puts you in the shoes of Jason Bourne as he fights, shoots and drives through the best actions scenes of the first film, The Bourne Identity. While we get to relive those moments in fine, bone-crunching fashion, we are also invited into Bourne’s past. “Interspersed throughout these familiar missions are playable flashbacks that hark back to the time before Bourne’s amnesia when he had no qualms about leaving trails of bodies and bullets en route to his objectives” (Chris Watters, GameSpot).

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Earlier this month, Sony introduced a new addition to the PlayStation Network: Qore.

The company describes it as a gaming-lifestyle program, packed with developer interviews, screenshots, downloads and other original content (and an easter egg here and there). It’s fully interactive, allowing the viewer to browse through the content any way you want, and it’s in glorious high definition, too.

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Strap on your boots and grab your supply pack, because Call of Duty is returning to platforms with a brand new sequel.

Call of Duty: World at War will have you trading in your M4 Carbine for a Thompson submachine gun, as this new title is set to take place in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. Activision has given the reins of the project to CoD3 developer Treyarch, and is hoping for a game that is as sharp as General Patton’s chin stubble.

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In the last few years, products and appliances, from the supermarket to the car dealership, have become more energy-efficient. Could video games go green? According to Choice Magazine, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Gaming systems, specifically PS3s, suck up a lot of electrical juice. But how much juice could a puny box possibly use, right?

In fact, leaving an inactive PS3 on costs nearly $250 a year in electricity bills, which is more than a refrigerator costs to run. This shocking outcome was determined by various energy tests conducted to calculate both the power usage and cost wastage.

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When you were in school, did you ever wish you could learn “Tetris Theory” instead of Geometry, “Space Invading” instead of Astronomy, or “Mario Painting” instead of Art? Perhaps it’s not as crazy as it seems, according to some teachers. Students are now closer than ever to being able to turn their wistful video game-laden daydreams into realities.

When I first entered my New Media Studies class in college, I was delighted to discover an entire section devoted to video games in my syllabus. At first I was shocked, but then it suddenly dawned on me: if I’m perpetually being told to analyze films in my classes, why not video games? They are both visual media that people took great care to construct a certain way, and they both have massive amounts of cultural impact that merit some exploring. I gleefully watched my professor present demos of “Doom” and “The Sims,” learning new and exciting tidbits about games that were once old news to me. Consequently, this is one of the few classes that I actually attended.

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Players of the PC version of Mass Effect are up in arms over the copy protection it uses, and worse, EA says the same system will be in Spore. This is the latest salvo in a year-long shootout over versions of Sony’s SecuROM product, which is getting increasingly intrusive. Each time a new version adds new restrictions, there’s a massive outcry… and then the next game comes out with an even more draconian policy. For a sense of the community’s mood, click this with care; there’s an angry guy in there.

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June has already been a month of spectacular breakthroughs in science, spanning from the creation of honest-to-god replicators to prototypes of holodecks. Well, we just hit another major breakthrough. On June 2nd, it was reported that for the first time, scientists enabled a paralyzed man to walk. For years, science fiction has delved into the idea of humans being capable of interfacing with machines using little more than their brainwaves. Logged into the virtual world of Second Life– a sim to end all sims that sports everything from shopping malls to a ‘living’ online ecosystem– a 41 year old man with a degenerative muscle disease was rigged up to do just that. Fitted with headgear that employed the use of three electrodes ‘listening in’ for brainwaves related to hand and leg motions, the man merely used his imagination and his avatar on-screen began to walk.
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Boom Blox. You’ve probably heard of it, but you may not know that it stars a bunch of characters cooked up by Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp after they dropped a bunch of peyote in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

When you boil down the game to its essential element, it’s Jenga on steroids. The game, a collaboration between Electronic Arts and Steven Spielberg, appeals to gamers of all ages in the same way that most casual games do: Take a simple concept (in this case, knocking down blocks) and add a few interesting bells and whistles.

One thing is clear: The art direction caters to the younger audience. Can you look past the dancing animals and truly appreciate the game on the merits of game play and design? Some of you can. But if you stop focusing your attention on the blocks and take a harder look at some of these creatures, you’ll notice there’s some pretty weird stuff going on that’s borderline subversive.

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Fans of last year’s post-apocalyptic shooter, S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, may be able to return to the site of everyone’s favorite Russian power plant in the near future. Game designer GSC Game World hinted at the possibility late last year, sending fanboys everywhere running to their favorite forums to gush. Nothing much has been mentioned since, but the company has been busy working on the expansion to Shadow, Clear Sky.

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Hear ye, hear ye. All brave players who delve into the mysterious and legendary game that is Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Hasbro’s tabletop, role-playing game that we all know and love has released its much anticipated Fourth Edition.

As hardcore D&D fans know, when the game maker releases an edition, it usually means the cleanup of confusing rules and regulations, as well as the addition of some really cool new ones.

Remember when the Third Edition came out? I certainly do. It got rid of that grossly confusing mess that was the THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0) system, a system where plus meant minus and minus meant plus (the rules for armor class were like scoring in golf, the lower, the better).

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The typical fare when you think “alternate universe” is ultra-modernized, sped-up and shiny, with floating cars. Like the Jetsons, but a bit grittier. However, there’s a new retro-futuristic that’s gaining popularity and esteem. While most other science fiction/fantasy game settings out there deal with what is most otherworldly, Steampunk threatens to go back in history and draw something much closer to both literature and historical context. It threatens, in short, to make history fun.

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Few games excite fight fans more than the Street Fighter series. There’s just something oh-so-right about hurling mystical fireballs and pummeling opponents with gravity-defying uppercuts. When Capcom released an announcement trailer for Street Fighter IV in October (below), fans the world over screamed “Shoryuken!” in unison.

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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.

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Recently, I came across a Sportbike and Formula1 racing trend in Second Life. The experience for me was something less than exciting… and perhaps a little depraved. I had no idea that SL had cars, let alone racing circuits.

The first SL race track that I competed on was entirely in Italian, so I kinda blew it off as merely an activity only Italians do due to their apparent predisposition to fast cars.

But after a bit of link-hopping I found that this trend is more widespread than I originally assumed. There’s even a midget racing circuit.

Naturally, a race wouldn’t be complete without SL’s news and TV organizations providing video coverage of tournament SLASCAR races.

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