Posted 10/17/09 at 11:40:06 PM by Justin Kerr

What do pacifistic mailmen do when they “go postal”? Well, if we limit our sample group to a single mail handler from Philadelphia, then you turn to a life of crime by stealing the easily identifiable video games shipped by online rental service GameFly. The disks come in an easy to spot bright orange package, and Reginald Johnson stole every envelope that he could get his hands on, a tally which would add up to more than 2,200 disks over a six month period. After jacking the disks, he would turn around and sell them to a local Gamestop for a tidy profit.

After being confronted by Police, Johnson led local authorities on a high-speed chase which ended with him crashing his SUV, and being tracked down on foot. When he was finally apprehended, police found 81 stolen games in a duffel bag he was carrying with him. For his crimes, Johnson is likely to receive 12 to 18 months of jail time, and will likely be in search of a new career upon release.

2,200 video games would fetch a tidy sum, but he is still pretty far from beating the record for disks stolen. That honor falls to Myles Weathers, a mail handler from Springfield Massachusetts who managed to swipe over 3,000 DVDs before he was caught.

Did these guys actually think they could get away with this?

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Posted 02/23/09 at 06:55:16 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Will Windows 7 bring glad tidings for gamers? Chris Lewis, VP of Interactive Entertainment Business for Microsoft EMEA, certainly believes the new OS will keep gamers happy.

"It's all good news - it's even more robust, it's quicker relatively, and the early testing cycles are proving very promising overall,” an excited Lewis told Gameindustry.biz in an interview. He said the company will divulge more details later this year.

Lewis didn’t forget to reassure gamers that Microsoft remains committed to PC gaming. “Ultimately we're a Windows and PC company at heart,” Lewis accentuated Microsoft’s commitment to its roots.

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Posted 02/11/09 at 10:00:00 PM by Norman Chan

The odds have always been stacked against Call of Duty: World at War. This sequel revisits an undeniably exhausted FPS setting—World War II—and wasn’t designed by series creator Infinity Ward, but Treyarch has delivered a sufficiently compelling shooter. World at War doesn’t bring any lasting innovations to the FPS genre, but it has enough unrelenting shootouts and dramatically scripted events to keep us immersed in the action.

Read on for the rest of the review!

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Posted 02/10/09 at 09:15:58 PM by Will Smith

No one makes a big open-world role-playing game like Bethesda. That’s what the Elder Scrolls games are famous for, and that’s what the company has brought to the post-nuclear-holocaust milieu of Fallout 3. The game takes you to the world outside Vault 101, the charred remains of the Washington D.C. metro area 200 years after the nukes flew. Truly, Bethesda has built an amazing world.

And this world is the star of the game. Fallout 3 is massive—closer to a single-player MMO than a traditional, linear single-player RPG. As you explore the Wasteland, which surrounds D.C., you’ll meet hundreds of people, many of whom have their own stories to tell, and find hundreds of locations to explore. These range from fully fledged towns to survivalist outposts to ammo caches to camps for the various factions that populate the land. As in Oblivion, you control your progress through the game. Should you choose to skip the main quest, you can explore the world and look for adventure, completing quests and reaping the rewards along the way.

Read on for the rest of the review!

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Posted 12/01/08 at 04:06:13 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The exact nature of the impact that video games have on humans is a contentious issue among researchers and any possibility of a consensus seems inconceivable. It is almost like an incessant war between the myriad of video game researchers across the globe with contradictory video game studies being continuously exchanged by them instead of lead.

The founder of the Smith & Jones Centre in Amsterdam - Europe’s very first and sole video game de-addiction clinic - Keith Bakker has downplayed video game addiction, which he believes is immensely exaggerated. Only 10% of all compulsive gamers, according to Bakker, are actually addicted to video games, while the rest are riveted to video games as a direct result of social problems confronting them.

His postulate is remarkable in the sense that it views social isolation to be a cause of compulsive gaming in most cases rather than an effect, as is commonly perceived.

“If I continue to call gaming an addiction it takes away the element of choice these people have,” says Bakker. “It's a complete shift in my thinking and also a shift in the thinking of my clinic and the way it treats these people.  In most cases of compulsive gaming, it is not addiction and in that case, the solution lies elsewhere."  

Mr. Bakker’s views must have come as a huge disappointment to Hollywood stars, who have been planning to use video game addiction as a pretext for future rehab visits after having expended all other plausible excuses.

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Posted 10/24/08 at 04:28:29 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Amazon has agreed to acquire casual web gaming company Reflexive Entertainment. The move marks the internet behemoth’s foray into casual gaming. Reflexive was constituted in 1997 and is stationed in Orange County, California. Reflexive is working on a game development and distribution service called Reflexive Arcade.

The Reflexive Arcade service will be restricted to only PC, Mac and web-based games. The true motivation behind this particular acquisition is not yet known. The two companies haven’t made the details of the transaction public.

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Posted 09/02/08 at 11:08:52 AM by Paul Lilly

From baseball's Mitchell Report to track star Marion Jones being stripped of her Olympic medals, the awareness of drug use in competitive sports is at an all-time high. So high, in fact, that even professional gaming can't stay ducked under the radar.

Casting aside for the moment whether or not gaming qualifies as a 'sport,' there's no debate to the amount of money being made in professional gaming. Major League Gaming gives up to $100,000 a tournament in prize money, and the other U.S. based major league, the newly minted Championship Gaming Series, has awarded as much as $500,000 in tournaments. The tally gets even higher when expanding to a global view.

And whether or not you count professional gaming as a sport, with that much money at stake, is anyone surprised that accusations of drug use have started to be thrown? According to GamePlayer, an Australian lead gaming site, some of the commonly abused substances include marijuana, amphetamines, Dexamphetamine and Methylphenidate (Ritalin), Caffeine, and FpsBrain.

In a followup to the story, GamePlayer pinged Alex Walker, the director of the Australian World Cyber Games Tournament, who readily acknowledged that players are abusing drugs in order to enhance their performance. Walker notes seeing "a number of players at national tournaments who came in "baked" purely so they could play better." 

As professional gaming grows in popularity, drug use could potentially become an even bigger problem. But at the current profit margin, gaming leagues can ill afford to implement drug testing, and DailyTech notes that a strict drug enforcement policy that includes marijuana could be met with a backlash among gamers.

Thoughts on the subject? Hit the jump and let us know.

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Posted 09/01/08 at 11:31:50 AM by Paul Lilly

All that experience in court looks to be paying off for Microsoft. After all, how else could you explain receiving $20.75 million from the very company whose patents you're using. Confused? Let's backtrack.

In 2002, Immersion took exception to the rumble effects in Microsoft's controllers for the Xbox and sued the Redmond giant for patent infringement. Microsoft ultimately settled with Immersion, agreeing to pay $26 million to end the litigation, but not without a clause. Before agreeing to pay the sum, Microsoft stipulated that if Sony should ever license Immersions force feedback technology for it's PS3 controllers, Immersion would have to pay a portion of the settlement.

Immersion did end up settling with Sony last year, and that's good news for Microsoft. It took some legal wrangling to get it done, but Immersion has finally agreed to pay Microsoft and make good on the clause.

"We are pleased to have reached a resolution to our legal dispute with Immersion that includes a $20.75 million payment to Microsoft," said Steve Aeschbacher, associate general counsel for Microsoft. "We are gratified that we have successfully resolved our claims under the 2003 settlement we negotiated with Immersion, which provided benefits to both companies and specific rights to Microsoft."

And Microsoft has every reason to be pleased. Legal costs aside, the payment whittles down the company's initial $26 licensing settlement to just over $5 million.

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