As you begin to contemplate your Thanksgiving meal, your family gathered around you, your loved ones embracing you, please be thankful you are not Sal9000.
Sal appears to be a man with very idiosyncratic needs, which he has attempted to satiate by marrying his favorite video game character.
Perhaps you think I have finally lost my last marble. However, please examine this footage. Courtesy of the radical realists at BoingBoing, this video shows that Sal married Nene Anegasaki, a character in the Nintendo DS game, Love Plus.
These unique nuptials were apparently broadcast on the Japanese video sharing site, Nico Nico Douga, a place where many strange things occur for, no doubt, extremely sound psychological reasons.
I don't wish to so much as broach the topic of marital consummation. However, I can tell you that attending the wedding, which was held, naturally, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, were the bride's virtual video game girlfriend, a live audience and, yes, a real religious priest.
I cannot find record of where the happy couple might be honeymooning, but I have an indelible fear that it might be in a very small, dark apartment somewhere in Tokyo. I trust they will have a large and healthy family.
Here's one that will undoubtedly send some gamers into a craze. A study from two Swiss human rights organizations, Trial and Pro Juventute, has found that some video games depict war and battle actions that in real life would violate international human rights laws.
The study attempted to determine if the acts gamers engage in while they play violent titles would "lead to violations of rules of international law, in particular International Humanitarian Law (IHL), basic norms of International Human Rights Law (IHRL), or International Criminal Law (ICL)."
To find out, Trial and Pro Juventute picked up 20 games, including Call of Duty 4, Metal Gear Solid 4, Far Cry 2, and others. It had "young gamers" play the games as three attorneys watched to find actions in games that in real life would violate rules and regulations that govern armed conflict.
The organizations said the study is not intended to "prohibit the games, to make them less violent or to turn them into IHL or IHRL training tools." Instead, the groups want to work with developers to ensure that in the future, their games observe real-life human-rights laws.
After evaluating the 20 games, the group found that in many cases, "shooter" games failed to take into consideration international humanitarian law.
... Read moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
The new metallic blue DSi with five titles.
(Credit: Nintendo)Starting on Black Friday, Nintendo will offer two new DSi bundles featuring metallic blue or white Nintendo DSi systems, plus more than $20 in DSiWare games, the company announced on Monday.
The new bundles will come with different games, depending on the DSi customers buy. The metallic blue version of the DSi will come with five Mario DSiWare titles, including Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again; Dr. Mario Express; WarioWare: Snapped!; Mario Calculator; and Mario Clock.
Nintendo's white Nintendo DSi comes preinstalled with Brain Age Express: Arts & Letters; Brain Age Express: Sudoku; Brain Age Express: Math; Clubhouse Games Express: Card Classics; and Photo Clock.
Nintendo said the DSi bundles will be available as long as supplies last, though a company representative wouldn't divulge how many units will be shipped. Nintendo also pointed out that although the white DSi has been around for a while, the Metallic Blue color is new. So far, Nintendo hasn't responded to my inquiry about whether or not it will offer a Metallic Blue DSi as a standalone unit after the bundle runs out.
Both the White DSi bundle and the Metallic Blue offering will be available in stores on Friday for $169.99, the same price as the standalone DSi.
See also: Be prepared for Black Friday tech deals
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
There is a view that removing all 15-year-old boys from this earth would not only help global warming but also our cultural horizon.
Supporters of this view will then be heartened to hear the story reported by the Chicago Tribune of a 15-year-old boy who suffered a serious trauma. His parents took away his Xbox.
The boy, a resident of Buffalo Grove, Ill., which sounds like the sort of place where discipline is imparted along traditional lines, decided to express his feelings and exert his identity. He called 911 in order to ask the police whether his parents were, indeed, within their rights to remove his gaming equipment from his sensitive little fingers.
However, brave as all 15-year-olds are, he appears to have hung up. So the Buffalo Grove police which, on its website, declares that it is "dedicated to making our community a better place to live and work", wandered along to his house.
Where they may have just laughed until their shirts billowed like the kaftans of the late Luciano Pavarotti.
Commander Steve Husak told the Tribune that the officers not only told the little tyke that parents do, indeed, have the right to take away his gadgetry, but that it might be an idea to listen to what they had to say.
It is not recorded why the parents took away the boy's Xbox. Perhaps it was because he's a vastly intelligent youth who will soon be the governor of Illinois.
Electronic Arts has closed the door on its game developer unit Pandemic Studios.
EA shut down Pandemic as a separate unit on Tuesday, laying off 200 employees, according to published reports, but moving a small core team to EA's Los Angeles headquarters. Those exiting include Pandemic's two founders, Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick.
An Electronic Arts spokesperson confirmed the news to CNET, but called it a consolidation rather than a closing, saying that the company merged Pandemic with EA's nearby LA campus. The core team of developers integrated into EA will continue to work on Pandemic properties.
An internal memo by EA Games Label Senior Vice President Nick Earl also confirmed the closing, as reported by the Web site Kotaku.
"I want to make it clear that the Pandemic brand and franchises will live on," wrote Earl in the memo. "In the months ahead, we will announce plans for new games based on Pandemic franchises. This type of change can be difficult. But the situation calls for us to act decisively, to take control of our destiny and to run a stronger, more focused development operation. That's how we will continue to make great games in our LA studios."
The EA spokesperson also confirmed that the Pandemic brand and franchise are still alive and well, and that EA is still very committed to it.
Started in 1998, Pandemic Studios was later bought by Electronic Arts in 2007 as part of a deal for which EA paid $860 million for both Pandemic and Bioware. Pandemic is behind the design of many popular titles, including Star Wars: Battlefront, Mercenaries, and Full Spectrum Warrior. The studio's most recent game for EA, The Saboteur, will hit stores next month.
On the plus side, Bioware seems in little danger of closing. With its slew of blockbuster games, such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins (which triggered more than a million downloads of premium content in its initial week), Bioware has proved to be one of EA's more successful studio purchases.
Hit by weak game sales, EA has been hurting since last year when it warned that 2009 would be a tough one. The company said at the time that it would need to cut staff, trim product lines, and close studios. EA initially announced job cuts of 10 percent of its workforce, then later revised that to 11 percent. In January, EA also jettisoned Pandemic's studio in Brisbane, Australia.
Electronic Arts has indeed struggled this fiscal year, announcing higher losses and lower sales for its first quarter and again for the second quarter, ended September 30.
The continued downturn forced the company earlier this month to announce additional job cuts of 1,500 employees beyond the initial 11 percent. With the layoffs scheduled to occur by March of next year, the game maker hopes its actions will trim annual expenses by at least $100 million.
"Laying off employees and closing facilities is never pleasant--we have a lot of compassion for those impacted--but these cuts are essential for transforming our company," said EA CEO John Riccitiello in an earnings call following the announcement of the cuts.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is enjoying big success.
(Credit: Infinity Ward)If you think Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has had a major impact on just the video game industry, you may need to adjust your expectations.
According to Activision Blizzard, the game's publisher, Modern Warfare 2 has set records across the entire entertainment industry.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the "biggest entertainment launch in history," Activision said in a statement. In its first five days of availability, the game set a worldwide record with about $550 million in sales, according to internal Activision figures. It's impressive. But more impressive is the list of launches that it beat out.
In the first five days of availability, Modern Warfare 2 has eclipsed the largest worldwide box-office opening, held by "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," which tallied $394 million over its first five days. It also beat "The Dark Knight," which holds the U.S. box-office record with $203.8 million in first five-day sales.
The game also narrowly trumped Grand Theft Auto IV, which captured $500 million in sales in its first five days of availability.
In other words, Modern Warfare 2 has had a major release.
The game's success also translated to major numbers on Xbox Live. Activision reported that "more than 5.2 million multiplayer hours were logged playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on the first day alone." On November 10, 2.2 million unique gamers played on Xbox Live, setting a new one-day record for the online-gaming platform.
Of course, it should be noted that all these figures come from Activision's internal estimates, which might differ from the NPD Group's official totals when it announces November video-game sales.
But until then, Activision can (rightfully so) celebrate Modern Warfare 2's success. And maybe the video-game industry, which has always received second billing to film in the entertainment space, can finally stake its claim to the top spot. Video games are, based on Modern Warfare 2's success, just as viable an entertainment platform as movies.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
The Wii is coming to...Sports Authority?
(Credit: Nintendo)You might be used to buying your video game consoles only at an electronics store, but all that will soon change. National sports retailer Sports Authority announced Tuesday that it will start selling the Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit Plus in its stores.
Aside from being able to pick up a Wii and Wii Fit Plus, consumers will also find Sports Authority stores that boast a Wii "interactive fitness experience." The section of the store will have "knowledgeable fitness trainers allowing customers to try Wii and Wii Fit Plus before they buy."
While it's certainly interesting to see a Wii being used by a fitness instructor in a sports store, Sports Authority said it believes that it will help set it apart in the marketplace. According to the company, users will now be able to "satisfy their fitness- and sports-gaming needs under one roof."
But just how much of a benefit Wii Fit actually affords its users is up for debate. Sports Authority might claim that it helps users "achieve better health," but a recent study (PDF) from the American Council on Exercise found that the game offers a "very, very mild workout."
That could throw a wrench in Sports Authority's plans as it attempts to make the case that the Wii and the Wii Fit Plus make sense next to other products designed specifically to improve the health of its users. As appealing as it might be to some, Nintendo's game might not be able to stand up against fitness-focused products.
Regardless, Sports Authority has thrown its support behind Nintendo's console. The Wii and the Wii Fit Plus will be available in 102 stores starting on Thursday. It will be rolled out to remaining company stores by spring 2010.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Sometimes, one's biases can balance out very nicely. So please let me lay mine out in all their militant glory.
Bias No. 1: I do not play many video games, and Call of Duty does not impact in any way upon my emotional or personal life.
Bias No. 2: Members of my family were arrested by Stalin's miserable cohorts and abused daily in Siberian labor camps, from which only some emerged and even they were permanently scarred.
So I truly do not have a heavily armed platoon in the feral battle currently waging between Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and the fine nation of Russia.
According to the vaunted experts at Hellforge, the designers of this sickeningly successful Call of Duty game decided to push the creative boundaries. The chaps at Infinity Ward incorporated a "No Russian" mission in which people who seem to reek of rather pure vodka massacre lots of folks, leading to--disgust upon depravity--the erection of statues of supposed deceased terrorists in Washington, D.C.
The game, you see, imagines a world in which the Russian Federation is being ruled by extreme nationalists. Positing such a heinous concept clearly took a huge level of imagination and led to Russian gamers expressing their internal pain at such monstrous cultural insensitivity.
Russian politicians, perhaps the most independent-minded in all the world, huffed and puffed and threatened to the degree that the console version has been banned, according to the Mirror newspaper. The controversial scenes have also reportedly been removed from the PC and Steam editions.
I am not sure either side comes out of this looking, well, brave.
Somehow, I have a sense that the game designers at Infinity Ward might have known that a little controversy would be caused by scenes so clearly offensive to a nation of peace.
However, I am also concerned that the Russians might be overreacting. If Salman Rushdie had written such an imagined scenario in one of his books of so many words, would the Russian government have banned the book? Would it have sent some operative to stab him with an umbrella or poison his sushi? I think not.
So why get so worked up about something that will largely be played and pirated by youths of an already doleful spirit?
It is hard enough these days to select a country for villainy in works of art. I notice that in Bond movies, where once evil had its origins in Eastern Europe, now it emerges from some indeterminate or impotent nation in order to keep feathers muffled rather than ruffled.
By getting upset about a video game with an obviously false and fictional characterization, Russian politicians are surely giving it far more credence than its creation merits.
I mean, it's not as if Infinity Ward had shown scenes of Polish officers being murdered by Russian soldiers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, is it?
With Electronic Arts' recent $400 million purchase of Playfish, social games are all the rage in today's tech industry. That's no surprise: lightweight games on social networks (which people usually play while they're goofing off at work) and social games have attracted huge player numbers with the biggest titles boasting 20 million to 60 million regular players.
City of Eternals.
(Credit: Ohai)But here's the worst kept secret about the genre: most social games aren't very, well, fun. They offer limited interactivity, game play challenge, and graphics. Consequently, players aren't invested enough to spend much money on them, especially compared to "hard-core" massively multiplayer-online (MMO) games. Even with the better social games, average revenue per users is less than a $1 per person.
By contrast, millions of World of Warcraft players willingly pay $15 a month in subscription fees alone. But, what MMOs like WoW have in revenue, they lack in growth due to the high technical hurdles and subject matter. WoW seems to have tapped out at around 12 million players, far less than the largest social games. And while the sustained revenue is great, attracting new players remains a challenge.
Enter City of Eternals, a Web-based MMO with a modern vampire theme from a new start-up called Ohai. After a long conversation with company CEO Susan Wu, a pioneer in the online gaming and virtual goods space, there are a number of reasons I think Ohai has the potential to succeed in the sweet spot between social games and hard-core gamer MMOs, and why the shift to social connection could become gaming's next big thing.
Ease of play
The biggest game platform isn't the Nintendo Wii or the iPhone, it's Flash, a browser plug-in installed on more than 99 percent of the world's PCs. An estimated 200 million people already play casual Flash-based games.
And while most MMOs require a huge client install, Ohai CTO and game industry veteran Don Neufeld (Everquest II, PlanetSide), and his development team (Free Realms, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons and Dragons Online) have re-engineered Flash into an MMO platform that pretty much anyone can play, without having to install additional software or hardware upgrades. As Wu put it, this means Ohai can build "Games for your aunt who plays FarmVille on Facebook and your cousin who can't play World of Warcraft on his school PC."
Deep social network integration
City of Eternals is fully integrated with Facebook and soon Twitter, but that doesn't mean the game is only playable within the social network. Players' Facebook profiles follow them into the vampire world, so whenever you're curious, you can click on a fellow vampire, and check their Facebook profile. This is the first time I've seen this feature in any MMO, and it brings in some new possibilities--making it much easier to socialize (and of course flirt) within the game. Wu told me City of Eternals' gender spread is 50-50 (extremely rare, compared with male-dominated MMOs), so I wouldn't be surprised if it became a major online hotspot for socializing. Especially since the game isn't about geeky elves and orcs, but far more popular vampires--see below.
Subject matter
The Twilight book series has sold more than 85 million copies worldwide; the Underworld movie franchise has brought in more than $300 million in theatrical sales; and TV's True Blood and Vampire Diaries both have huge cult followings. Vampires are obviously pervasive throughout popular culture, but there's yet to be a full-fledged vampire MMO.
Still in Alpha stage, Wu told me that players average 12 logins per day in the game, with an average session length of 5 to 6 minutes, fulfilling one of the company's goals of making a "bite-sized MMO."
City of Eternals is Ohai's first of many of what they call "MMOs for everyone." Of course, there's still a lot of unknown variables. The vampire craze may wane too soon, and as the Electronic Arts purchase suggests, the competition is huge. Maybe I'm crazy, but by next year, I think there's a good chance the most popular MMO on the market won't be World of Warcraft, but City of Eternals, or another game that crosses the boundaries between MMO and socialized gaming.
U.S. video game industry sales plunged in October, dropping 19 percent from a year earlier, and 16.4 percent from September, according to data released Thursday by the NPD Group.
But with the tremendous, record-breaking, out-of-the-gate performance of Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and the coming holiday season, NPD is bullish on the industry's fortunes for November.
Still, the $1.07 billion in total sales turned in by the industry in October were paltry, compared with $1.32 billion in October 2008 and $1.28 billion in September 2009. NPD analyst Anita Frazier tried to soften the blow a little bit in her monthly report, noting that while sales were down precipitously in October, it was still the third-best October sales report turned in by the video game industry.
"The continued economic turmoil, and in particular the troubling unemployment rate, is undoubtedly impacting industry sales," Frazier wrote in a statement. "Our latest Economy Tracker indicated that although consumers' general opinion about the economy is improving, their outlook on their own personal situation is worsening. If consumers' personal outlook continues to erode, they could very well be much more conservative with their holiday shopping this year."
That last sentence is no doubt one of the most chilling group of words imaginable to the honchos at companies like Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Activision, and many others involved in putting video game hardware and software in consumers' hands, especially as their most important sales months of the year are now at hand.
As always, regardless of the monthly results, the big console makers each had some things to celebrate in the NPD numbers.
For Nintendo, which has seen sales of its once-high-flying Wii dip and perceptions that the console's days of seeming infallible may be over, the numbers had some hope: in October, the Wii took back first place among the consoles--respectively the Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Sony's PlayStation 3. In October, Nintendo moved 506,900 Wiis, beating out the PS3 (320,600) and the Xbox (249,700).
Sony was coming off the first month the PS3 won since being launched in the fall of 2006, but while the console was beaten out by the Wii, there must certainly be some measure of gratification in having the PS3 come out ahead of Microsoft's console offering.
"In October, we saw continued momentum [for the] PS3, with nearly 70 percent growth, when compared to last October," Peter Dille, Sony Computer Entertainment of America's senior vice president of marketing, said in a statement. It was "the only console to see any growth year over year."
NPD itself touted Microsoft's chief bragging point for October: "Across all categories, the Xbox 360 platform contributed the greatest portion of total industry sales, representing 27 percent of total industry sales for the month," Frazier wrote.
Yet despite the record-smashing first-day sales posted this week by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the video game industry as a whole is facing a very painful reality: If sales don't improve quickly, there will be layoffs, slashed budgets, canceled games, and more.
Electronic Arts, for example, announced this week that it is planning to lay off 1,500 people as part of a major restructuring--the company's latest--and as a way to stave off growing losses.
And while the industry may have hoped that console sales--especially with prices for next-generation hardware now at their lowest levels ever--would help it rebound, Frazier did not offer much hope.
"Year to date, the hardware category has experienced the sharpest decline in the industry, with unit sales down 10 percent compared to the same time period last year," Frazier wrote. "Recent price cuts helped spur a one- to two-month increase in unit sales, and this month's Wii sales reflect that boost, but the other platforms have not sustained the sales momentum [after] price reduction."
