Have you ever looked at the back of a video game box and wondered what the heck “Experience may change during online play” in the ESRB descriptor means? Or have you actually had to suffer through an online Halo match where some prepubescent brat on the other end dropped racial slurs and f-bombs to the delight of his elementary school buddies? Sadly, there are a lot of jerkwads on X-Box Live who have no shame about blurting choice vocabulary words whenever they can. But according to Gamepolitics today, that will change very soon.
Microsoft has just received a patent for a real-time language censorer that will comb audio streams over XBox Live and block out the Big F. The device works, according to GP’s source Ars Technica, by monitoring phonemes and overriding recognizable words with silence or beeps.
It’s certainly impressive and could prove useful, but I have one issue with it. Is it optional? If it can be turned on and off at the user’s leisure then that’s great, but if it’s a static feature, then that reeks a little of forced censorship. Hopefully Microsoft will take it easy in this area.
The Nintendo DS is, without question, the best portable console currently available. Not only does it have a metric ton of good software in comparison to the PSP, it’s compact, innovative, and uniquely designed.
Yet still, you can’t help but feel that it’s capable of so much more. There are things the DS could do that’s regrettably absent out of the box. MP3 support? Video playback? Built in internet applications (Pictochat doesn’t count)? This thing was practically tailor-made to be a multimedia device.
That’s where homebrew comes in. For an admissible fee, you can make your DS do all the things it was meant to do. I’ve had my CycloDS Evolutionfor a couple of weeks now, and I gotta say, it’s been taking up an ungodly amount of my time. From playing Leisure Suit Larry to running NES ROMs to using my DS as an mp3 player for the car, I’ve gotten more entertainment out of $ 100 than is possible at that price. To show off all my favorite applications (and to give you a good idea of what homebrew is capable of) I’ve compiled a list of essential software. In no particular order:
Newcomers and veterans of Bullworth Academy are apparently none too pleased about the XBox 360 version of Bully: Scholarship Edition. Widespread reports all over the internet have pointed out freezing, framerate issues, and audio glitches.
After it became evident that the issue was on a large scale, Rockstar Games issued a statement:
We have just become aware of the issues people are having with Bully Scholarship Edition on Xbox 360. It appears that some older 360s are experiencing framerate issues, freezes and other problems. You have our word that we never experienced any of this in QA – in any of our offices or at Microsoft. I am horrified, and we are now working around the clock to rectify this situation. Thanks to Neo-Gaf for bringing this matter to our attention. We love our games and put a huge amount of energy and care into making them all that they can be. We would never shove anything out the door – we never have and never will. We apologise to everyone affected for the inconvenience. Respectfully, Sam Houser
It’s good to know that Rockstar Games (according to this statement, anyway) is on top of the issue. And speaking of Bully, I recently rediscovered my love for the game (the PS2 version). Perhaps a (somewhat late) review is in order soon.
It seems like only last week that the hotly anticipated Bully finally arrived, easily alluding attempts to get it banned or declared a ‘public nuisance’. Review scores were positive, and gamers the world over couldn’t get enough of rough (but likable) Jimmy Hopkins and his schoolyard misadventures. Although the game was shorter and easier compared to the series that popularized its engine, it was a wonderful and nostalgic experience.
Today, Rockstar released a revised version for the Xbox 360 and Wii consoles. Bully: Scholarship Edition features four new classes, eight more missions, extra items, two player mini-games, and online multiplayer. For those who bought the original PS2 edition, that’s more than enough bonus content to justify repurchase.
Unfortunately, history repeats itself with the frequency that the years pass. Once again, Bully’s release was followed by controversy. According to The Globe and Mail, a coalition known as the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (representing eight teachers unions in several countries) is calling for the game to be banned.
“We’re asking retailers to be responsible,” Emily Noble, president of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, said Monday. “Yes, they can sell it and make a buck out of this, but is this the kind of marketing that they want to be [doing], selling games that glorify violence?”
[...]
“What it does is it encourages kids to target other kids, to be a bully with other kids. This doesn’t help us as teachers in the work that we’re doing at school. It also targets teachers at the school as well,” Ms. Noble said.
You’d think that the amount of time since Bully was released would’ve been long enough for the CTF to, you know, actually play the game. The counterargument– that you really assume the role of an underdog who brings down cliques that are dominating the weaker students– has been established hundreds of times by now. Bully’s content is on par with a PG-13 movie, and its violence as brutal as River City Ransom.
If Sierra’s entire AGI library is re-released, maybe the CTF can rail against Leisure Suit Larry. Or hey, I hear Golgo 13 on the NES is pretty racy.
After all the hype, censorship, legal threats, political yammering, rating refusals, and rampant idiocy surrounding “Manhunt 2″, the game is finally scheduled for release tomorrow- just in time for my favorite of all holidays. It’s certainly been a long and grueling stab in the ankle, for the future of the game as well as those who kept up with the anti-fun giblet storm.
In a not-uncommon development, reviews of the game have already begun pouring in. As of this moment (10:53 AM EST), Metacritic has given “Manhunt 2″ a score of ‘71′ for the Playstation 2 version and a ‘69′ for the Wii, which equates to ‘mixed or average’ according to the site. There is currently no percentage on Rotten Tomatoes.
While not astonishingly terrible (a starting score of 30 would be something to worry about) it’s not really a good start. But you can expect the scores to change dramatically over the next few days, after the game has actually been released. The lowest score so far (that I know of) is a ‘40′ from 1UP (4.0, ‘bad’) The highest is a ‘92′ from NGamerUK (no link avaliable… hey wait a minute, UK!?)
The original “Manhunt” on the Playstation 2 has a score of ‘76′, or “generally favorable”
In other news, Gamepolitics reported this morning about the possibility of “Manhunt 2″ actually being released today. I wouldn’t be surprised, but that will require some investigation on my own part. It’s normal for games to be released on Tuesday (and everybody, including me, is going to be busy tomorrow), but come on, blood and gore goes with Halloween like a knife through a turkey.
The 40GB model will be the cheapest Blu-Ray player currently available, and will actually cost less than the Xbox 360’s $ 449 Elite model. Finally, those of us with more lint than crisp bills in our pockets will be able to play the anticipated games on the horizon. Unfortunately…
Unsurprisingly, the Reporter also says the console will have the same stripped-down form factor as the European 40GB PS3, with just two USB ports, no memory card readers, and the still-baffling lack of software-based backward compatibility.
The 2 USB ports I could easily deal with. But no memory card slots or backward compatibility? That’s a major letdown. Given how tremendous the back catalog of Playstation titles is, and the fact that most of the good games are (currently) on the older systems, what’s the deal here?
On the other hand, the Playstation 2 still widely available and very affordable. But if you don’t own one and have to shell out the extra $ 130 just to have it next to your neutered PS3, guess how much you’ll end up spending.
When I was a kid, TurboGrafx-16 was one of those consoles that I wanted solely because of the name. I mean, come on. ‘TurboGrafx-16′. It didn’t just have Grafx, it had turbo Grafx, and that ‘16′ suffix made it all the better because it was a number higher than ‘8′. Incidentally, that’s the same reason I wanted an Atari Jaguar (RARRRW!) for about a day and a half.
Alas, I never claimed a TurboGrafx-16 as my own, mostly because I never saw one. The game section (more specifically, ‘corner’) at our local ghetto Wal-Mart was dominated by Sega and Nintendo products, and absolutely nothing else. I grew up assuming that the TG-16 was a fantasy some kids at school had collaborated on for a creative writing assignment.
Evidently it wasn’t though, as the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console has effectively demonstrated. Since the debut of the system and its emulation service nearly a year ago, over a dozen TG-16 titles have been added to the North American menu, allowing me to play the games that didn’t exist in my little closed off Seahaven.
Like a lot of the big ‘we’re totally amazing and awesome’ consoles of the early-to-mid 90s, the TG-16 was given a CD add-on. Although it was the first system to do such a thing, it didn’t have the impact that Nippon Electric Company (NEC) hoped it would.
Two of the TurboCD’s offerings (‘Gate of Thunder’ and (‘Super Air Zonk’) will be added to the Virtual Console, according to Gamespot, although they won’t be on discs and hey, waitaminute- the Wii only has 512 MB of internal memory. How is downloading a 700 MB CD supposed to work out? Obviously a lot of compression has been involved with these downloads.
From what I’m seen of the discussion after the GameSpot story, there’s a lot more history about NEC and their ill-fated CD add-on, so be sure to check it out.
Last December, things were relatively quiet here at Quad’s Corner (then called “World 7″). I had just set up the blog a couple of months earlier, and wasn’t really sure what to do with it. On a whim, 