3D Technology Invades CES, Gaming, Glasses? [Ces10]

Have you heard? 3D is the new it tech for 2010. Thanks to the staggering success of 3D film Avatar everyone seems to be hopping on board the third-dimension wagon. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we’re going to be treated to a wave of new schlocky science fiction movies and beloved franchises turned 3D with surrealistic effect. (Three Stooges in 3D anyone.) Instead peripheral makers, television manufacturers and television channels are all rolling out technology that will likely be obsolete before the decade even hits its teens. Many of these geewiz gadgets are debuting this week at the Consumer Electronics Show. Just today San Diego-based GUNNAR Optiks , maker of gaming glasses, announced a new line of 3D glasses for gaming These high-end glasses will work with standard 3D televisions and monitors, but, GUNNAR says, their glasses will feature distortion-free optics and ergonomic design. “While typical 3D eyewear is stamped from a flat sheet of plastic, GUNNAR lenses are shaped, formed and cut to provide distortion free optics,” said Joe Croft, co-founder of GUNNAR and EVP of Research Design & Development. “For the amount of technology and effort that goes into the creation and delivery of the content, it is a shame that the weakest link in any 3D system today is the eyewear used to view the final product. We are proud to announce our success in creating lenses of the highest optical quality to give a premium visual experience.” The glasses will start hitting later this year for $89 to $149 a pop. Glasses-free 3D, hopefully, will be hitting in a few more years. You do the math.

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3D Technology Invades CES, Gaming, Glasses? [Ces10]

Who Put Out The Most Good Video Games In 2009? [UPDATE] [Ea]

On Wednesday, EA CEO John Riccitiello provided evidence — in chart form — that his company published the most well-reviewed games of 2009. Wanting to test his assertions, I dug into the data and found some surprises. The EA chart was shown at an investor’s conference, designed to appeal to people who EA hopes will think positively of the company’s stock, which is labeled as ERTS. So they show off unusual stats, as you can see above, such as the number of games delayed or not delayed. That sends the message that: You can trust our company to deliver on its promises when we say we will. That’s sort of interesting, but how about this idea that EA puts out the most good games? The chart you see above was created by EA and pulls from Metacritic , the aggregator site that pulls review scores mostly from gaming outlets that publish review scores (i.e not Kotaku). EA had gone into the site and counted up the games released between January 1 and November 30, 2009 that scored an 80 average or more. The evidence points to EA not only improving quality year over year — I haven’t met a gamer who would deny that — and now leading in quality — which is more controversial. Shall we check that? EA EA counts itself as having 19 80+ games. If you do the most generous counting, you actually get 25. Let me show you ( Metacritic average in parentheses ): The Beatles: Rock Band (92) Dragon Age: Origins (91) FIFA 10 (91) Left 4 Dead 2 (90) Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box (89) Skate 2 (89) NHL 10 (88) Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (88) Fight Night Round 4 (87) Boom Blox Bash Party (86) The Sims 3 (86) Madden NFL 10 (85) Tetris (85) Battlefield 1943 (84) Need for Speed Shift (84) Brutal Legend (83) NCAA Football 10 (83) Dead Space Extraction (82) Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure (82) Mirror’s Edge PC (81) The Sims 3 World Adventures (81) EA Sports Active (81) EA Sports More Active Workouts (81) Left 4 Dead Crash Course (80) NBA Live 10 (81) I can see why EA didn’t count some of the above 25 in its chart. In fact, I can get to their 19 easily. Let’s knock out six listings: 1) Mirror’s Edge PC, because it’s a port of a 2008 game 2) Burnout Paradise Ultimate Box (compilation of an ‘08 game), 3) The Sims 3 World Adventures and 4) EA Sports More Active Workouts (which both expand and somewhat require ownership of their earlier edition or edition’s peripherals), 5) Left 4 Dead Crash Course DLC and… Well, 6) could go one of two ways. We could not count Rock Band, which EA distributes but doesn’t publish, or we could not count the PSP Minis release of Tetris. This is a hefty amount of 80+ games. If we average the full 25, we get this: EA’s average 80+ metascore is 85.20 . Let’s not count six games. We’ll include Rock Band but not Tetris. Then we get 85.95. It goes down only to 85.58 if I use Tetris and not Rock Band. [UPDATE: I originally used the 360 Dragon Age metascore of 86 but have since updated the math above using its PC score of 91. Seemed only fair given PC was its lead platform. I've gone through this post and updated all listings to reflect the highest score given to any PC or console version of these games.] Let’s see if EA counted its competitors correctly. Activision Activision is listed as having only four 2009 games with 80s or higher. That matches what I found: Modern Warfare 2 (94) Guitar Hero 5 (89) Guitar Hero: Metallica (86) DJ Hero (87) A little math shows that: Activsion’s average 80+ metascore is 89. Better than EA’s, but it’s only four games, and really, if you want to do a fair comparison of publisher quality, you’d have to do an average of all their games. Also notable is that there was a wide disparity between some versions. I used the highest Guitar Hero score, which was an 89 on the Wii. The game averaged an 85 on the Xbox 360. Ubisoft Moving right along, here’s Ubisoft, listed as having only two over-80s by EA. But if you go past EA’s cut-off date of November 30, Ubi manages a third. Assassin’s Creed II (92) Might and Magic Clash of Heroes (86 *Game was released in December) Dawn of Discovery (82) More math: Ubisoft’s average 80+ metascore is 86.67 with Might and Magic. It is another publisher with just one 90+ game. THQ THQ time. EA counts four 80+ games. I think they forgot Rocket Riot, an Xbox Live Arcade game. Let’s make it five. Dawn of War II (85) Red Faction Guerilla (85) UFC Undisputed (84) WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2010 (82) Rocket Riot (80) Result: THQ’s average 80+ metascore is 83.2 . They had no 90+ games. Take Two Interactive Then we come to former EA target of acquisition Take Two Interactive, listed as having six games that were at or over 80. I count seven, because I’m including The Bigs 2, which may have gotten a 76 on the Xbox 360, a 68 on the Wii, but got am 80 on the PS3. GTA Chinatown Wars (93) GTA IV: The Lost and Damned (90) GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony (89) Borderlands (84) NBA 2K10 (83) Beaterator (80) The Bigs 2 (80) I do Take Two no favors for the average here by including The Bigs 2, but I did just make them look better by counting it in the overall tally, right? Anyway, Take Two’s average 80+ metascore is 85.57 . And look! They have two games with a 90 or above. Nintendo Now we got to Nintendo, a publisher I think a lot of gamers would assume would be the answer to the question posed in the headline. EA counts Nintendo as having had 16 games rated 80 or up this year. I’m with them. One could count a 17th title, the DSi application Flipnote Studio, which, at a 93 score, was the highest-rated software from the company this year on Metacritic, but it is so not a game. Metroid Prime Trilogy (91) Mario and Luigi Bowser’s Inside Story (90) The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (87) New Super Mario Bros. Wii (87) Punch-Out (86) New Play Control Pikmin (84) Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (84) Art Style Digidrive (83) Art Style Pictobits (83) Rhythm Heaven (83) Pokemon Platinum (83) Mario Vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again (82) Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon (81) Art Style Box Life (80) Wii Sports Resort (80) Wii Fit Plus (80) You could load up this one with caveats, noting that the Metroid and Pikmin games aren’t new, but let’s include them. Nintendo’s average 80+ metascore is 84 even. Credit them with a pair of games at 90 or above. Sony How about Sony? They are the makers of what Metacritic declared to be the platform with the best-reviewed games of 2009 . Looking at them as a publisher of games on PS3 and PSP, EA counted 15 80+ games. I don’t get that. I counted 13. I added a 14th, PixelJunk Shooter, which was released after EA’s cut-off date but would seem invalid to exclude for timing reasons. If anyone can find the two other games that EA counted and I missed, let me know. [UPDATE: Readers found one: Zen Pinball. I've added it and updated the averages.] Uncharted 2 (96) God of War Collection (92) Killzone 2 (91) MLB 09 The Show (90) Wipeout HD Fury (89) LittleBigPlanet PSP(88) PixelJunk Shooter (87 *Game released in December) Flower (87) PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe (86) Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time (86) infamous (85) Patapon 2 (81) Resistance Retribution (81) Buzz! Quiz World (80) Zen Pinball (80) Let me average that up for you. Sony’s average 80+ metascore is 86.6 . Not shabby at all. Plus, the company can boast four 90+ games, albeit one of them a compilation of PS2 hits. Microsoft The final publisher considered by EA was Microsoft. They count six titles at 80 or above. Forza Motorsport 3 (92) Shadow Complex (88) Trials HD (86) Splosion Man (84) Halo 3 ODST (83) Halo Wars (82) Let’s crunch that. Microsoft’s 80+ metascore average is 85.83 . EA didn’t tally the top scorers for Capcom, Sega and Warner Brothers. All had a batch of stellar games, so I figured I’d do the work. Capcom Capcom — four games at 80 or above Street Fighter IV (93) Resident Evil 5 (85) Marvel Vs Capcom 2 (82) Monster Hunter Fredom Unite (81) Capcom’s average 80+ metascore is 85.25. Sega Sega – three games at 80 or above Empire Total War (90) Football Manager 2010 (88) MadWorld (81) Sega’s average 80+ metascore is 86.3 Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment -two games at 80 or above Batman Arkham Asylum (92) Scribblenauts (80) Warner’s average 80+ metascore is 86 . They’ve got a 90+ as well.’ The Answer(s) It’s no surprise that EA’s chart accurately showed that the publisher had the most well-reviewed games, though, thanks to Kotaku, you can now see what those games were. This breakdown shows a couple of other things: 1) While EA had the most games that received 80+ scores, its average score for such titles settled between its two most prolific game-publishing competitors. It beat Nintendo but was beaten by Sony. 2) It’s clear that no matter how many well-reviewed games a publisher has, getting an 80-89 score is far easier than getting a 90+. That seems to be the big equalizer among these top publishers. No one makes lots of those and few make more than a couple. So which company made the most good video games in 2009? Probably the one you like the most. But if you want to try using numbers to back it up in 2009, I think you have to go with EA for quantity or Sony for 90+ excellence and a higher average score from its 80+ titles.

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Who Put Out The Most Good Video Games In 2009? [UPDATE] [Ea]

Achievement Chore: She Plays For Gamerscore, Whether It’s Fun Or Not [Gamerscore]

It’s 9 p.m. and I’ve lost my fifth straight game of Madden NFL Arcade to the same person, each time by 30-0. My opponent has a gamerscore of more than 165,000. But it’s not because she’s good at football. “I hate sports games,” Kristen says with a weary laugh, reminding me for about the fifth time this Thursday night “I had to ask someone what a sack was. They said it’s when you tackle the quarterback. I said, ‘Which one is the quarterback?’” Only in name are Kristen and I playing Madden NFL Arcade. Instead we are “boosting,” – throwing games to each other, more or less, to rack up multiplayer achievements. I’ve already gotten 50 points the easy way. Now it’s her turn. It is a substantial part of how Kristen, whose last name I’m withholding out of concern for her privacy, has become, according to one leading compilation, the No. 4 ranking woman, worldwide, in Gamerscore. Her tag is CRU x360a – go ahead, look it up. Kristen – CRU or Crubie to some online – is a 24-year-old stay-at-home mom in northwest Indiana. You call her extremely motivated. You can call her obsessed. You can also call her an achievement whore, like she hasn’t heard that from every piss-ant with a 5,000 gamerscore in the underground zone. Bottom line, she’s is really effective at piling up her gamerscore. But she’s not sure when, or if, she will stop. A Race to the Top “It was a friendly race at the time,” Kristen says of the beginning, three years ago, when she got serious about her Gamerscore. “It was to 20,000. My buddy was at 15,000 and I was at 13, I was 2,000 behind him. I said, ‘OK, this might take years.’ Kristen had bought an Xbox 360 in early 2007 and, like most, it wasn’t because it offered achievements. She was a multiplayer gamer on a few titles she enjoyed – shooters mostly. Then she joined a Gamerscore league. And then she got into this side bet. “Once I found sites that had guides on which were the easy games, I beat (20,000) in like a month and a half,” she says. “It got me hooked and it was like a drug. A bad drug. A bad habit.” Soon enough Kristen managed to fall in with some elite players in the achievement grinding world. One, named Smrnov, who is the global No. 10 on MyGamerCard, praises Kristen’s team-spirited achievement hunting. “CRU was unselfish in the help she offered our team, and has always been reliable for getting the game time in, which is a very hard trait to find for spanning so many different games, versus a single one,” he says. Stallion83, the global No. 2 on that list, played with Kristen in those early days, and was most recently her boosting partner on Damnation – a terribly received game. (“We managed to have fun talking about The Leprechaun movies,” he says. “Party chat has made some of these games less painful.”) “She was just a nice person,” Stallion83 recalls,”like one of the dudes. Most girls cause drama and try to get attention. I didn’t see that with CRU.” Both he and Smrnov heap praise on Kristen’s FPS skill. “A great FPS player,” says Smrnov. “In addition, she’s very good about figuring out the best strategy for completing a game quickly and doing all associated research. She has both gaming skills and gamerscore skills.” But that doesn’t keep Kristen from going after the kids’ stuff, too. Last week, Spongebob: Truth or Square put her over 165,000. It’s a cute detail but it barely scratches the surface of Kristen’s performance over the past three years. Nor does the four-game Gamefly subscription, in constant rotation. That’s to be expected. And the shelf full of games, many of them years old and still waiting to be played, well, what would you consider impressive? A hundred and sixty? She bought Jumper: Griffin’s Story – one of the worst reviewed games ever in Xbox 360 history. The day Modern Warfare 2 was released, she spent all her time on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. American Idol? She put the microphone in front of a speaker and played songs into it to ace the performances that much faster. It didn’t work for Sing It: High School Musical or Hannah Montana, so, she had to belt those out herself. “They’re easy enough songs; It’s not bad, there’s no one looking at me while I’m playing it,” Kristen says, “but my friends (on Xbox Live ) see it, and all the guys can’t believe I’m playing that game.” Remember that deal a few months back, when a someone tried to round up a 1,000 players to log in to NBA Live 07 and get the 100 gamerscore achievement for 1,000 players being online at the same time? Kristen was a part of that, with two versions of the game, one she had to go out and find for $3 at a game store, and the other playing on her Japanese 360. Yes, she has an NTSC: J console. Kristen got that to play BioShock’s Korean version, which has a separate achievement list. She’s gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. She’s gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand in Japanese. “I haven’t even opened the Saint’s Row 2 Japanese version, or the Saint’s Row 1 for that matter,” Kristen says. She’s eyeballing a PAL console, but even an Arcade will be close to $300 with shipping and, “Do I really need to play BioShock again?” Some of the region-locked Japanese games she plays are bought by pooling money with Stallion83, Smrnov and others in the ultra-gamerscore crowd, and the group then trades the discs around by mail. One game, Clannad , was picked for its low-hanging fruit. It’s a “visual novel,” sometimes called a dating sim, but as the choices are all text-based the gameplay should be pretty easy, right? “It’s a text game, and you have to choose A or B, you only have these text options,” Kristen said. “But I’m sitting there on Google Translate trying to translate these strategy guides and match up (Japanese) characters to make my choices. And I’m thinking ‘Why the hell did I buy a Japanese Xbox and this game, this is just retarded.’ It’s so embarrassing trying to match characters to a language I don’t even know. I’ve spent $400 on a game I can’t even read.” It makes me wonder. These are called games. And technically, she’s playing them. But is this even fun? Is this ever fun? “I definitely play more games I don’t enjoy than games I do,” she says. “Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don’t enjoy.” Kristen’s husband doesn’t even know why she sticks with it, if something like CSI: Hard Evidence is so unfulfilling for her to play. “Sometimes I’ll be playing, and he’ll ask, ‘Did I have to buy that or did someone else buy it?’” Kristen says. “And I’m like, ‘Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie to you?’ And he walks away, saying ‘I can’t believe you’re playing that.’ To me that’s more embarrassing than playing Disney: Sing It.” A Mother’s Work Kristen is careful to remind me that she does have a life outside of gaming. “I’m an avid paintball player; I have my own gun, although that’s also another expensive hobby,” she says. “But yeah, I’d much rather go out to a bar, go bowling, play darts or pool than sit at home and boost games all night. I’m still young.” She’s also the mother of a six-year-old girl. You can do the math there, it means Kristen became a mom at age 18. Before then, she was a rather typical kid, if a little tomboyish, and absolutely delighted by video games. Kristen says she’s played them since she was five. When she lived with her parents, new games and new consoles were common, especially around the holidays. When she had her daughter and moved out of the home, her original Xbox and her beloved NES – which she still has even though it won’t work – stayed behind. The Xbox 360 she bought a little more than three years ago marked her re-entry to games since having her daughter. Sometimes mother and daughter play – Spongebob was one such example. But Kristen had to load up one of the five other gamertags she keeps on the console for family and friends to play. Boosting games might sound out of bounds to some gamers, but it’s entirely within the ultra-gamerscore ethos. What isn’t, however, is having anyone get an achievement for you. Even your six-year-old girl. “She climbed up and said, ‘Let me play,’ so I said, ‘Just a second,’ and put her up with another (gamertag) and let her play,” Kristen says. “Sometimes she’ll say ‘Look, Mom, I got an achievement too!’ She gets excited.” This isn’t something Kristen wants to encourage. “I don’t want her to get addicted like I am though,” Kristen says. “She doesn’t really see me play too much, actually.” Her husband, Jeff, doesn’t game much at all himself. He owns a towing business that provides a comfortable lifestyle and accommodates both his interests and Kristen’s gaming. He’s rather mellow about all the time she spends with games, if not the money, and keeps both in perspective. Some guys have wives who spend a ton of money on clothes, or dislike spending as much time around the house as she does. “I have some hobbies myself that are fairly pricey and I can’t really blame her for that,” Jeff says. “However, occasionally a string of new games will come out within a two day span and magically a few hundred dollars will be missing from the bank account. With as much time as she has allotted for video games and the kid I can account for her whereabouts at any given moment so I’m certain that she isn’t cheating on me.” Even pressed for a ballpark estimate, Kristen doesn’t know how much her obsession with Gamerscore has cost in the preceding three years. “My pro system is $250, my Japanese console cost $400, the hard drive I put on it was $50 – I don’t want to see the number, and I’m sure Jeff doesn’t want to see it,” she says. “But I think it would be cool to know.” There’s another number about which she seems even less enthusiastic, though. And that’s the next big milestone for her gamerscore. Calling It a Career Two hundred thousand. According to MyGamerCard, only one other woman has a total that high (with a second very close to reaching it.) And yet when Kristen brings it up, it’s with a tone of voice that ponders what she will do then. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to get there, for what it will force her to consider. The simplest answer is by far easier said than done: Just quit. “I keep saying when I get 200,000 gamerscore, I’m going to retire,” Kristen says. “There are people who do that. I say it now, but I don’t think you can ever actually quit. It’s like a drug. It is addicting.” And she uses that word often enough that I figure I should bring up the subject. Carefully. I would never say video game addiction isn’t real, knowing that real people do indeed battle it . I also believe it’s a topic given to alarmism. And I’m not a psychiatrist, so it’s not my place to go diagnosing other people’s behavior. But I ask Kristen anyway. Maybe, has she ever considered talking to someone about her gaming? “I wouldn’t say I need to talk to someone,” Kristen says after considering the question for a long moment. “I’m not hurting someone by doing this. My family life is not being hurt. Granted, it’s like an addiction, but I’m not hurting anyone. Well, I’m getting little sleep sometimes, but that’s on me. “Besides, I saw where someone had gone to be treated at a rehab center for video games, and it was something like $30,000 a year, and I thought, ‘Do you know how many Xboxes and games I could buy with this?’” she says, without a trace of irony. “I don’t think so.” When Kristen is most at ease with her gamerscore is when it describes how she’s good at something. How she’s figured out a way to beat the system; or how she’s actually put in the time to get the “General” achievement in Call of Duty 3 – getting 40,000 points in ranked matches – to collect a rare 100+ gamerscore achievement. “It’s very much a personal pride thing, being ranked in the top five in the world in something, whether it’s gaming or the fact I’m a female gamer,” Kristen says. “I’m never going to be in the Olympics, so I’ll be a great gamer. It’s something I know I’m good at.” But I hope when she breaks 200,000 she can put the controller down. She spent the first three years of her adulthood being a mom. I suggest to Kristen that, maybe, she’s spent the last three in front of a console, trying to get some of that lost time back. Kristen ponders this, and seems to agree. “Maybe,” she says. Maybe then she can call it even.

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Achievement Chore: She Plays For Gamerscore, Whether It’s Fun Or Not [Gamerscore]

Achievement Chore: She Plays For Gamerscore, Whether It’s Fun Or Not [Gamerscore]

It’s 9 p.m. and I’ve lost my fifth straight game of Madden NFL Arcade to the same person, each time by 30-0. My opponent has a gamerscore of more than 165,000. But it’s not because she’s good at football. “I hate sports games,” Kristen says with a weary laugh, reminding me for about the fifth time this Thursday night “I had to ask someone what a sack was. They said it’s when you tackle the quarterback. I said, ‘Which one is the quarterback?’” Only in name are Kristen and I playing Madden NFL Arcade. Instead we are “boosting,” – throwing games to each other, more or less, to rack up multiplayer achievements. I’ve already gotten 50 points the easy way. Now it’s her turn. It is a substantial part of how Kristen, whose last name I’m withholding out of concern for her privacy, has become, according to one leading compilation, the No. 4 ranking woman, worldwide, in Gamerscore. Her tag is CRU x360a – go ahead, look it up. Kristen – CRU or Crubie to some online – is a 24-year-old stay-at-home mom in northwest Indiana. You call her extremely motivated. You can call her obsessed. You can also call her an achievement whore, like she hasn’t heard that from every piss-ant with a 5,000 gamerscore in the underground zone. Bottom line, she’s is really effective at piling up her gamerscore. But she’s not sure when, or if, she will stop. A Race to the Top “It was a friendly race at the time,” Kristen says of the beginning, three years ago, when she got serious about her Gamerscore. “It was to 20,000. My buddy was at 15,000 and I was at 13, I was 2,000 behind him. I said, ‘OK, this might take years.’ Kristen had bought an Xbox 360 in early 2007 and, like most, it wasn’t because it offered achievements. She was a multiplayer gamer on a few titles she enjoyed – shooters mostly. Then she joined a Gamerscore league. And then she got into this side bet. “Once I found sites that had guides on which were the easy games, I beat (20,000) in like a month and a half,” she says. “It got me hooked and it was like a drug. A bad drug. A bad habit.” Soon enough Kristen managed to fall in with some elite players in the achievement grinding world. One, named Smrnov, who is the global No. 10 on MyGamerCard, praises Kristen’s team-spirited achievement hunting. “CRU was unselfish in the help she offered our team, and has always been reliable for getting the game time in, which is a very hard trait to find for spanning so many different games, versus a single one,” he says. Stallion83, the global No. 2 on that list, played with Kristen in those early days, and was most recently her boosting partner on Damnation – a terribly received game. (“We managed to have fun talking about The Leprechaun movies,” he says. “Party chat has made some of these games less painful.”) “She was just a nice person,” Stallion83 recalls,”like one of the dudes. Most girls cause drama and try to get attention. I didn’t see that with CRU.” Both he and Smrnov heap praise on Kristen’s FPS skill. “A great FPS player,” says Smrnov. “In addition, she’s very good about figuring out the best strategy for completing a game quickly and doing all associated research. She has both gaming skills and gamerscore skills.” But that doesn’t keep Kristen from going after the kids’ stuff, too. Last week, Spongebob: Truth or Square put her over 165,000. It’s a cute detail but it barely scratches the surface of Kristen’s performance over the past three years. Nor does the four-game Gamefly subscription, in constant rotation. That’s to be expected. And the shelf full of games, many of them years old and still waiting to be played, well, what would you consider impressive? A hundred and sixty? She bought Jumper: Griffin’s Story – one of the worst reviewed games ever in Xbox 360 history. The day Modern Warfare 2 was released, she spent all her time on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. American Idol? She put the microphone in front of a speaker and played songs into it to ace the performances that much faster. It didn’t work for Sing It: High School Musical or Hannah Montana, so, she had to belt those out herself. “They’re easy enough songs; It’s not bad, there’s no one looking at me while I’m playing it,” Kristen says, “but my friends (on Xbox Live ) see it, and all the guys can’t believe I’m playing that game.” Remember that deal a few months back, when a someone tried to round up a 1,000 players to log in to NBA Live 07 and get the 100 gamerscore achievement for 1,000 players being online at the same time? Kristen was a part of that, with two versions of the game, one she had to go out and find for $3 at a game store, and the other playing on her Japanese 360. Yes, she has an NTSC: J console. Kristen got that to play BioShock’s Korean version, which has a separate achievement list. She’s gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. She’s gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand in Japanese. “I haven’t even opened the Saint’s Row 2 Japanese version, or the Saint’s Row 1 for that matter,” Kristen says. She’s eyeballing a PAL console, but even an Arcade will be close to $300 with shipping and, “Do I really need to play BioShock again?” Some of the region-locked Japanese games she plays are bought by pooling money with Stallion83, Smrnov and others in the ultra-gamerscore crowd, and the group then trades the discs around by mail. One game, Clannad , was picked for its low-hanging fruit. It’s a “visual novel,” sometimes called a dating sim, but as the choices are all text-based the gameplay should be pretty easy, right? “It’s a text game, and you have to choose A or B, you only have these text options,” Kristen said. “But I’m sitting there on Google Translate trying to translate these strategy guides and match up (Japanese) characters to make my choices. And I’m thinking ‘Why the hell did I buy a Japanese Xbox and this game, this is just retarded.’ It’s so embarrassing trying to match characters to a language I don’t even know. I’ve spent $400 on a game I can’t even read.” It makes me wonder. These are called games. And technically, she’s playing them. But is this even fun? Is this ever fun? “I definitely play more games I don’t enjoy than games I do,” she says. “Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don’t enjoy.” Kristen’s husband doesn’t even know why she sticks with it, if something like CSI: Hard Evidence is so unfulfilling for her to play. “Sometimes I’ll be playing, and he’ll ask, ‘Did I have to buy that or did someone else buy it?’” Kristen says. “And I’m like, ‘Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie to you?’ And he walks away, saying ‘I can’t believe you’re playing that.’ To me that’s more embarrassing than playing Disney: Sing It.” A Mother’s Work Kristen is careful to remind me that she does have a life outside of gaming. “I’m an avid paintball player; I have my own gun, although that’s also another expensive hobby,” she says. “But yeah, I’d much rather go out to a bar, go bowling, play darts or pool than sit at home and boost games all night. I’m still young.” She’s also the mother of a six-year-old girl. You can do the math there, it means Kristen became a mom at age 18. Before then, she was a rather typical kid, if a little tomboyish, and absolutely delighted by video games. Kristen says she’s played them since she was five. When she lived with her parents, new games and new consoles were common, especially around the holidays. When she had her daughter and moved out of the home, her original Xbox and her beloved NES – which she still has even though it won’t work – stayed behind. The Xbox 360 she bought a little more than three years ago marked her re-entry to games since having her daughter. Sometimes mother and daughter play – Spongebob was one such example. But Kristen had to load up one of the five other gamertags she keeps on the console for family and friends to play. Boosting games might sound out of bounds to some gamers, but it’s entirely within the ultra-gamerscore ethos. What isn’t, however, is having anyone get an achievement for you. Even your six-year-old girl. “She climbed up and said, ‘Let me play,’ so I said, ‘Just a second,’ and put her up with another (gamertag) and let her play,” Kristen says. “Sometimes she’ll say ‘Look, Mom, I got an achievement too!’ She gets excited.” This isn’t something Kristen wants to encourage. “I don’t want her to get addicted like I am though,” Kristen says. “She doesn’t really see me play too much, actually.” Her husband, Jeff, doesn’t game much at all himself. He owns a towing business that provides a comfortable lifestyle and accommodates both his interests and Kristen’s gaming. He’s rather mellow about all the time she spends with games, if not the money, and keeps both in perspective. Some guys have wives who spend a ton of money on clothes, or dislike spending as much time around the house as she does. “I have some hobbies myself that are fairly pricey and I can’t really blame her for that,” Jeff says. “However, occasionally a string of new games will come out within a two day span and magically a few hundred dollars will be missing from the bank account. With as much time as she has allotted for video games and the kid I can account for her whereabouts at any given moment so I’m certain that she isn’t cheating on me.” Even pressed for a ballpark estimate, Kristen doesn’t know how much her obsession with Gamerscore has cost in the preceding three years. “My pro system is $250, my Japanese console cost $400, the hard drive I put on it was $50 – I don’t want to see the number, and I’m sure Jeff doesn’t want to see it,” she says. “But I think it would be cool to know.” There’s another number about which she seems even less enthusiastic, though. And that’s the next big milestone for her gamerscore. Calling It a Career Two hundred thousand. According to MyGamerCard, only one other woman has a total that high (with a second very close to reaching it.) And yet when Kristen brings it up, it’s with a tone of voice that ponders what she will do then. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to get there, for what it will force her to consider. The simplest answer is by far easier said than done: Just quit. “I keep saying when I get 200,000 gamerscore, I’m going to retire,” Kristen says. “There are people who do that. I say it now, but I don’t think you can ever actually quit. It’s like a drug. It is addicting.” And she uses that word often enough that I figure I should bring up the subject. Carefully. I would never say video game addiction isn’t real, knowing that real people do indeed battle it . I also believe it’s a topic given to alarmism. And I’m not a psychiatrist, so it’s not my place to go diagnosing other people’s behavior. But I ask Kristen anyway. Maybe, has she ever considered talking to someone about her gaming? “I wouldn’t say I need to talk to someone,” Kristen says after considering the question for a long moment. “I’m not hurting someone by doing this. My family life is not being hurt. Granted, it’s like an addiction, but I’m not hurting anyone. Well, I’m getting little sleep sometimes, but that’s on me. “Besides, I saw where someone had gone to be treated at a rehab center for video games, and it was something like $30,000 a year, and I thought, ‘Do you know how many Xboxes and games I could buy with this?’” she says, without a trace of irony. “I don’t think so.” When Kristen is most at ease with her gamerscore is when it describes how she’s good at something. How she’s figured out a way to beat the system; or how she’s actually put in the time to get the “General” achievement in Call of Duty 3 – getting 40,000 points in ranked matches – to collect a rare 100+ gamerscore achievement. “It’s very much a personal pride thing, being ranked in the top five in the world in something, whether it’s gaming or the fact I’m a female gamer,” Kristen says. “I’m never going to be in the Olympics, so I’ll be a great gamer. It’s something I know I’m good at.” But I hope when she breaks 200,000 she can put the controller down. She spent the first three years of her adulthood being a mom. I suggest to Kristen that, maybe, she’s spent the last three in front of a console, trying to get some of that lost time back. Kristen ponders this, and seems to agree. “Maybe,” she says. Maybe then she can call it even.

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Achievement Chore: She Plays For Gamerscore, Whether It’s Fun Or Not [Gamerscore]

Gearbox Said Nothankyou.jpg To A Blade Runner Game [Gearbox]

Here’s a story close to our hearts . Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has revealed that his studio recently wanted to develop a Blade Runner game. A game that, sadly, never saw the light of day. “One of my partners, Brian Martell, had Blade Runner on the list [of IPs we wanted to use],” he told the Official Xbox Magazine. “We chased it down and we coulda had it. But that one failed on the business side, because the way we wanted to do it we wanted to spend 25 million dollars. And when you do the math on that, we weren’t going to make it back.” Shame. Then again, the world already has a Blade Runner game and , advanced years or not, it’s fantastic. So it’s not a total loss. And what is it with Gearbox and movie adaptations? Blade Runner, Aliens, Heat …what’s next, Robot Jox? Because that would be awesome . Gearbox: Blade Runner canned because it wouldn’t sell [OXM]

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Gearbox Said Nothankyou.jpg To A Blade Runner Game [Gearbox]

Personal Trainer: Math

A classroom at the tip of your finger! Have you ever struggled for exact change at a cash register or fought over how to divide a dinner bill? Do you have trouble getting your kids interested in their math homework? Personal Trainer: Math takes the pain out of arithmetic by providing a fun and rewarding way to improve your math abilities! The innovative 100-Cell method makes learning a game. These fast-paced, high-speed arithmetic problems keep your math basics fresh, from addition to subtraction and multiplication to division. Daily math drills and an attendance record help keep you on track. As your calculation speed improves, earn medals in each exercise to prove your mathematical mastery! Forty different exercises, from simple addition and subtraction series to more elaborate multiplication tables and calculation ladders, provide tons of ways to build on your knowledge and improve your arithmetic skills until all your math worries evaporate forever!

A fine (more…)

Learn Math

Practicing your skills and honing your knowledge of facts can be fun with Learn Math for Nintendo DS. From DreamCatcher Interactive, this collection of math games can by synced with syllabuses for grades one through four, making it easy to ensure problems are just hard enough to keep students both interested and motivated. .caption { font-family: Verdana, Helvetica neue, Arial, serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; } ul.indent { list-style: inside disc; text-indent: 20px; } table.callout { font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, serif; margin: 10px; width: 250; } td.callout { height: 100 percent; background: #9DC4D8 url(http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/detail-page/callout-bg.png) repeat-x; border-left: 1px solid #999999; border-right: 1px solid #999999; padding: 10px; width: 250px; } ul.callout { list-style: inside disc; text-indent: -12px; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.5em; } h5.callout { text-align: center; } img.withlink {b (more…)

Math Blaster in the Prime Adventure

Math Blaster in the Prime Adventure brings intergalactic intrigue to NDS. Get ready to use addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to navigate a variety of fast-paced games and help restore order in the galaxy. With all the appeal of the original hit PC game and the portable, touchscreen technology of NDS at your disposal, the Prime Adventure was developed by Knowledge Adventure to make brushing up on math skills a truly enjoyable undertaking. .caption { font-family: Verdana, Helvetica neue, Arial, serif; font-size: 10px; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; } ul.indent { list-style: inside disc; text-indent: -15px; } table.callout { font-family: verdana; font-size: 11px; line-height: 1. 3em; } td.vgoverview { height: 125px; background: #9DC4D8 url(http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/detail-page/callout-bg.png) repeat-x; border-left: 1px solid #999999; border-right: 1px solid #999999; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; padding-bottom: 10 (more…)