Muckbeast

The Nintendo Wii is a smash success, but not with a lot of serious, hardcore gamers.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With a few years left in the Wii’s lifecycle, now is a good time to go after those serious gamers. My suggestions, or what would make ME buy/play more Wii games:
Serious Gamer [...]

Often these types of legal proceedings are pretty dull, but I find this one interesting: Bethesda Sues Interplay Over Use Of Fallout License
Fallout rights holder Bethesda Softworks has made good on its threat to sue developer Interplay for allegedly failing to hold up its end of agreements inked in April 2007.
The plaintiff said because of [...]

Perhaps because I make games and because I believe so strongly in the importance of community in MMOs, I like to think that my industry treats its customers better than other industries. Apparently I am not just wrong, but getting more wrong by the day.
Some examples:
World of Warcraft: They have bragged for years about their [...]

Ok, this is very immature. But I cannot help it. I am a PC fanboy at heart, and every time the PC gets a better version of something than the consoles I am happy.
Valve Confirms Left 4 Dead DLC Free On PC, Paid On Xbox 360
Living up to previously-made claims that Left 4 Dead would [...]

The last blog post inspired some interesting thoughts and opinions. So I did a little surfing and found some interesting articles (with pictures of course) that touched on the issue as well.
Boobs Through the Years
Soul Calibur IV keeps laying on the sexuality
Soul Calibur IV gets boob job
This is a particularly interesting topic in light of [...]

This is a really interesting idea for game financing. It sounds utterly impossible and unlikely to ever work, but it is still worth pondering. Gabe is a smart guy with a great history in the industry (his company is Valve, you may have heard of it… they did Half Life, Steam, Left 4 Dead).
Valve’s Newell: [...]

Wow. The bad news just keeps rolling in. This was reported on Gamasutra:
Sony Online Entertainment Lays Off 41
This is after they recently reported losses of over a billion dollars (Sony, not SOE specifically), and the CEO of Activision threatening to stop making games for the PS3 if they don’t cut prices.
EQ2 struggles to maintain a [...]

I met Jon Radoff, the founder of gamerDNA, at IMGDC. He is an all around great guy and a pioneer in the MUD/MMO/online gaming industry. His new company is extremely interesting and already has a couple of really fun applications out there. Without spoiling the more detailed article, gamerDNA basically creates a community out of [...]

I was reading another article from one of my excellent Bright Hub writers and it got me thinking about this topic:
5 Best Wii Games for Couples
Aside from the Wii, is there any platform at all that really makes an effort to develop gaming content specifically for couples? And I am not referring to sexual related [...]

This story has been reported in a few places, and of course EA makes it sound like they just parted ways, but the ugly truth is pretty obvious. Warhammer grossly underperformed, and as a result Mark Jacobs has been sacked. While I feel he and EA/Mythic did a horrible job overall with Warhammer (despite it [...]

I just returned from a really exciting event. My wife and I led a roundtable about text games at the IMGDC. We were very pleasantly surprised by how packed our roundtable was. People seem to still be very interested in text games!
I am more energized than ever about Threshold, Primordiax, and the other games we [...]

The closing down of an MMO is a sad event. Thousands of players have just lost the core of their gaming community, and they really have no recourse. I recently wrote two articles about the development history of Tabula Rasa and its final event:
History, Timeline and Post Mortem of Tabula Rasa
The End of Tabula Rasa [...]

The video game industry netted over $20 billion dollars in 2008. It continues to expand into new markets and new platforms. The Netbook is the next logical platform for growth.
For detailed analysis, please read this article I wrote and then tell me what you think about the topic:
Netbooks Are the Next Gaming Platform

I’d really [...]

As you may recall, I wrote a review of Age of Conan a few months ago: Age of Conan is a Hot Mess. My review was extremely unfavorable. I have followed the game in the news since then, and while I have read about improvements nothing has really addressed the (imho) core flaws. Then I [...]

I imagine some of you have read a few of the articles from the last year or so where writers try to draw comparisons between raid leading in a game like WoW, and management in the business world. I seem to recall the Wall Street Journal even wrote about it. I must admit, every time [...]

This is an abbreviated version of the story designed to get some discussion going. For the full story, with all the details, read my article here: Wikipedia’s War on Gaming History and Threshold RPG .
1) Wikipedia is full of people gunning for an administrator promotion. In the current climate, the easiest path is getting articles [...]

Achivements are the new hot feature in MMOs. I’m not sure who had them first, or who does them best, but there is no doubt they are popular as heck. In every game that has them, people seem to really get into collecting them. Even when there is no in-game benefit, just piling them on [...]