I just cracked Manhattan on GTA IV (I can see my house from there!).
It's been said a million times over how intricate the design of Liberty City is but now you can see that because this guy matched up screen grabs of the game with actual photos of New York City.
When retiree John Kanzius was undergoing chemotherapy for terminal leukemia, he couldn't sleep. His insomnia may end up saving a lot of lives. Obsessed with finding a cancer treatment that had no side effects, he started puttering away in the middle of the night in his kitchen and garage with his wife's pie pans, a crude radio transmitter and some hot dogs. What he discovered may change the face of cancer treatment. When radio waves are passed through metal, it heats the metal up. Using this jumping off point, Kanzius injected hot dogs with copper sulfate solution to see if he could heat only specific areas of them. He could. And now millions of dollars in research is being thrown behind research into treating cancer with radio waves and gold nanoparticles. Did we mention Kanzius has no background in science or medicine, nor does he have a college degree? Equal parts kitchen science, cutting edge sci-fi and heartbreaking human triumph, 60 Minutesdid an incredible job covering it the other night. As Kansas himself says, "sometimes maybe you get lucky."
If you want to give your home theater sound system an intense workout, nothing packs more sonic muscle than a Blu-ray Disc. Most people are aware of the picture-quality improvement you get from a BD’s 1080p lines of resolution, but the jump in audio quality is equally impressive. A DVD cannot hold the uncompressed and HD audio tracks that a 50GB Blu-ray Disc can, and the difference is ear-shattering if you have a speaker setup that can take it. We put Cerwin-Vega!’s CVHD 5.1 system to the test to determine if the aural candy it produced from a Blu-ray Disc was as sweet as the look of the setup’s sleek, modern speakers.
It always stings when you pick the losing team, especially if you’re an early adopter spending your hard-earned green on a soon-to-be-obsolete technology. Sony recently won the high-def format war to succeed DVD with Blu-ray Disc, and all the major studios now support it.
If you’re one of the unlucky souls who rolled the dice on Toshiba’s competing HD DVD format before they mercy-killed it last month, you’re not alone. You’ve got to read Josh Levin’s hilarious article “I’m the Idiot Who Bought an HD DVD Player” in which he defends his reasoning (“I’m a gadget-loving cheapskate”) and is fed up with the ridicule.
“The format’s demise has brought HD DVD owners untold humiliation,” he writes. “[There are] reams of newspaper stories comparing them to the losers of yore who bought into Betamax and Laserdisc, the sad sight of desperate early adopters peddling brand-new players on Craigslist, and, worst of all, a website celebrating the similarities between HD DVD and Hillary Clinton. I’m sick of the mockery and abuse. You see, I’m one of the morons who bought an HD DVD player.”
You’ve got to love the self-absorption shown by internet types these days. They’re either insanely touting their own product…or dramatically predicting their own demise. Here’s a You Tube video that says, in effect, You Tube isn’t all that.
One of the reasons the video-game industry is so exciting right now is that so much is still in the process of being discovered. Every year is a pretty good year for music, but these days, each is not so noticeably better or worse from the year before. We haven’t had a 1968 in a while, let alone a 1787. But the degree of improvement the games industry goes through every year is nothing short of stunning. And just as with film where we get dumb stuff in the summer, smart stuff in the winter and just plain crap in February, games operate seasonally. Since a disproportionate amount of video-game money gets spent in the fourth quarter, the fall is a non-stop string of heavyweight titles. It starts with Madden in mid-August and peaks the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Add to that the fact that this holiday game makers have had enough time with the 360 and PS3 to really start unlocking their power, and it’s a recipe for an almost surreal number of shockingly good titles.
Owners of the 360 are drooling over Mass Effect, Bioware’s epic space opera that features, combat, exploration and conversation in equal amounts. PS3 owners finally get a couple of big hits with Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (which offers massive cartoon carnage) and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (which plays like a mix of Gears of War and Tomb Raider, and has some of the most impressive graphics ever done on a console).
Then there are the games out for both platforms (and sometimes more), such as Call of Duty 4, which brings the venerable franchise out of WWII and into present day to pulse-pounding effect. Assassin’s Creed puts you in the cowl of Altair, a crusades-era assassin who must eliminate key figures in ancient Damascus and Jerusalem for the greater good. Its combination of climbing, gymnastic feats and a system of social acceptability that dictates how crowds react to you is unprecedented. The new FIFA soccer is a great leap forward over previous versions if that’s your bag.
The Simpsons game is out, which might not be the most innovative game ever made, but is an absolute hoot, with the the writing and voice acting is all by the TV show’s talent. It’s a must-have for fans. Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band represent a new high for music-based games. Guitar Hero 3 adds online play and new songs to its already wonderful guitar/bass formula. Rock Band one-ups Guitar Hero by adding the ability to play drums and sing, letting four people thrash their way through the Pixies’ Waves of Mutilation at once. Those with the Wii can grab the mind-bendingly adorable Super Mario Galaxy, a landmark achievement in game design.
And there’s more. Much more. We haven’t even mentioned Bioshock, Crysis, Project Gotham Racing 4, Halo 3, Hellgate: London, Ace Combat 6, Skate, World in Conflict, Metroid Prime 3, Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass and Orange Box. And if we did we’d be just scratching the surface. Turns out it’s a good year for games. And an even better year for gamers.
Halo 3 is here at long last, and amid the marketing tsunami, lapidary packaging options, piles of ancillary merchandise and alternating waves of hype and backlash, it turns out there is actually a game in there as well. And, unsurprisingly, it’s quite good. The single-player campaign is meaty and satisfying, if a little short (and I’m not usually someone who complains about short videogames), and the virtues of Halo’s multiplayer action are well documented at this point. However, neither of these, shiny and next-gen though they might be, represent much of a leap away from previous versions of the game (not that I had any expectation or desire that they would). Rather, what’s kept me up later than is reasonable for the past few nights is two new features that take Halo 3 into an entirely new realm—its Forge and Theater modes.
Forge is a tool that lets you modify the game’s multiplayer maps. You can’t terraform or create buildings, but you have absolute control over everything on the map that isn’t nailed down, as well as access to a full laundry list of all the weapons, vehicles and equipment in the game that you can place anywhere you like. Last night I created a map called Beach Party. At either end of the gorgeous white-sand beach on the map Last Resort, I placed a stash of brute lasers (which take three seconds to fire after you pull the trigger, but destroy everything in their path) and Gravity Hammers (imagine a golf club with nitroglycerin on the end of it). In the middle, between the weapon stashes, I placed a massive pile of fusion coils (exploding boxes), grenades and propane tanks, on top of which I placed a Mongoose (dune buggy) and a Banshee (one-man hovercraft). The slightest shock to the Death Pile (as it has come to be known) causes a highly unpredictable explosion, complete with flying, vehicle-shaped shrapnel. For good measure, on the high walls around the beach, I placed several rocket launchers for comments from the peanut gallery. Last step was to grab all the spawn points (places you restart from when you die) around the map and scatter them around the beach and walls. Suffice to say that when you put 8 trigger-happy people in there, things get heat up real quick. That’s my kind of party.
But there’s more. As my friends and I tear each other to shreds in the most spectacular ways we can imagine, the entire proceeding is being recorded by the game in the background. After the match, I can pop into Theater mode and play the whole thing back. Better yet, I can detach from my player’s perspective and fly around to different vantage points as the pre-recorded action unfolds. Finally, once I find a particularly juicy moment, like when Jeremy causes a chain reaction by knocking Greg and his Mongoose into the Death Pile, shooting him and his ride up over the seawall and out of sight, I can set up my shot, then work the camera as I roll tape. Once I have my 10-second mayhem masterpiece, I can upload it to Xbox live where the world can view it. It’s an immense amount of fun, but more importantly, for how powerful its creation tools are, it’s shockingly easy to figure out. Within minutes you’re making things. Within half an hour, your brain is churning like the QE2’s engines, as you come up with ever more fiendish machinations.
So while Halo 3 the game is very good, Halo 3 the creation tool borders on revolutionary, taking you from active participant to true co-creator of your interactive experience. This is the first stab at a new kind of experience for console-game players (PC users with programming chops have been able to do this for some time). It will most certainly not be the last.
For a demo of Forge in action, here’s one of Bungie’s development team showing how it all works.
Eat one piece of candy and it's a delicious treat. Eat 300 pieces of candy and you'll be curled up on the floor begging for someone to end your miserable existence.
So it is with the E3 videogames conference. There comes a time every year when the giddy rush of seeing tomorrow's games today wears off and you find yourself helpless, pummelled by a massive onslaught of titles. On Thursday alone, for instance, I saw Age of Conan, Kane and Lynch, Fallout 3, Flatout Ultimate Carnage, two Looney Tunes games, Rise of the Argonauts, Turning Point, Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron, Thrillville: Off The Rails, Lego Star Wars Complete, The Force Unleashed, Fracture, Call of Duty 4, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, Castlevania Rondo of Blood, Hellboy: Science of Evil, Contra for DS, Silent Hill Origins, Dewey's Adventure, The Agency, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Harvey Birdman, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, Rocketmen, Puzzle Fighter, Wii Fit, Super Mario Galaxy, Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Super Mario Strikers.
Many of them are good, some excellent, but I'm definitely approaching my 300th piece of candy. Anyone for a game of chess?
Our summer intern Lynsey Gilchrist would like you to get up off your ass:
At the company’s E3 press conference Thursday, Nintendo announced a new game for its Wii console: Wii Fit. The game calculates players’ body mass index based on age, height and weight, then creates a set of fitness goals. The game features programs like hoop twirl (twirl a virtual hula hoop) and soccer heading.
Also Thursday, the New York Times reported on a growing trend of schools using Dance Dance Revolution as part of P.E. class. The article cites a study that said kids expend more energy playing DDR than sitting and watching TV or playing traditional video games. Of course they do—you expend more energy doing just about anything than you do sitting on a couch.
It’s the middle of summer. Put down the controller, go outside and kick around a real soccer ball. Maybe the calorie difference isn’t a lot, but virtual reality can’t compete with real fresh air and real sun and interaction with real people.
The E3 videogame expo is known as much for its parties as it is for being a videogame showcase. And while you obviously can't judge a game by its party, occasionally the two intertwine to form a near-perfect expression of purpose.
Take last night's party for Electronic Arts and MTV's new baby, Rock Band. Held at the legendary Troubadour club in West Hollywood, it was a model of execution, from the zero-hassle valet service to make you feel like a star, to the crowd levels inside the small-to-medium-sized venue that was full enough to create intense energy, yet still allowed absolute freedom of movement and instant open-bar access. On stage were an explosive double bill featuring The Eagles of Death Metal and Queens of the Stone Age, two groups that exhibit high levels of both musicianship and pure rockstar glamor. Lost in the cacophony a mere 15 feet from the stage, the healing power of rock coursed through me in waves, making me entirely forget the 15 hours of meetings and presentations I'd just sat through.
Earlier in the evening, a four-person team from Harmonix, the company behind Rock Band and creators of the original Guitar Hero had taken the stage, and using musical videogame controllers corresponding to guitar, bass, drums and mic, pulled off two blistering songs. While they sounded fantastic, they also had the good sense to get off the stage and let the pros take over. It was a good choice that followed many others they've made recently.
Earlier in the day I had the opportunity to play Rock Band's biggest competitor, Guitar Hero 3. Rock Band and Guitar Hero have something of a history. Harmonix developed the first Guitar Hero for PS2, which was a massive sleeper hit. They followed that up with the rampantly successful Guitar Hero 2 for both PS2 and Xbox 360. During Guitar Hero 2's development, publisher Red Octane was purchased (along with the rights to the Guitar Hero name) by Activision for $100 million. Here's where things get sticky.
Harmonix (the people who actually made the game itself) was purchased in a seperate deal by MTV. They didn't have the Guitar Hero name, but they had its originators. Now MTV is partering with the industry's 900-pound gorrilla, Electronic Arts, to put out Rock Band, a game that lets you simulate rockgod-dom to an entirely new level. Not only is there the aforementioned four-person co-op play that loops drums and singing into the mix, but it appears MTV was able to provide some serious music-industry mojo in the form of a killer music lineup.
Make no mistake, Guitar Hero 3 is fun, and has several improvements over its predecessors, including online play, an interesting battle mode, and a larger number of songs featuring the original music. But with Rock Band tuning up in the next room, Guitar Hero is having a hard time getting any attention. This is mainly due to the fact that Rock Band takes nearly every feature of Guitar Hero to the next level. One of the most significant manifestations of this is its downloadable content. We're talking entire albums, all in their orginal formats. Yesterday Harmonix announced that you'll be able to download the entire Who album, Who's Next, in Rock Band format, and that new music content will be debuted for download every week. It's an absolute paradigm shift as far as serving their audience goes, and shows a very canny understanding of where the real money is going to be as games mature in this generation.
Just as their party erased the aches, pains and stress of the day, Rock Band will do something similar in your living room, letting you crawl inside the music and experience it in a more visceral, creative way. These guys are going to make 18 bazillion dollars and they're going to do it by making millions of people very happy. And it's a loud, sweaty, beautiful thing.
The Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, better known as the U.S.'s big videogame tradeshow, gets under way in earnest today, but early rumblings began last night, when Microsoft held their annual press conference. But apart from Microsoft's Peter Moore comparing the Halo trilogy to Star Wars (note to Peter, know your audience and don't pee on their Koran) it was relatively uneventful.
A couple of game release dates were announced, a special edition (and surprisingly boring-looking) Halo 3-themed Xbox 360 was revealed, Microsoft rolled out some well-spun figures to illustrate their market dominance, a new Halo trailer was shown (spoiler: the game will feature both aliens and explosions). Don't take this as slagging off Microsoft's fall lineup in any way—they have a remarkably strong string of games on the way—it's just we've come to expect big announcements from these events, and Microsoft's pronouncements of how they're going to incinerate the competition, while possibly accurate, aren't exactly earth-shattering.
What was shattering, however, was the exclusive first look I got afterwards at Sony's Killzone 2, for PS3. The live demo of one of Killzone's levels was one of the most realistic and visceral depictions of war I've seen. It didn't really come across as revolutionary in terms of gameplay, but the visuals indicate a clear move into another realm of the technology of virtual destruction. With the PS3 now priced at $500, this one's going to sell a lot of systems, and could provide a much-needed shot in the arm for the wounded Goliath of the games industry.
Senior Editor Scott Alexander is having a blast playing the new video games and hanging out with beautiful women at the Electronic Entertainment Expo this week. From left to right: Playboy Radio Morning Show host Andrea Lowell, Scott, PRMS go-go dancer Katherine Thom and PRMS host Kevin Klein.
If you have yet to activate Playboy Radio on your Sirius account maybe our funny Q&A with Andrea and Kevin in the August issue will prompt you to. If not check out Andrea’s site—I’d opt in.
In honor of the iPhone, Franklin Avenue unearths a series of old AT&T TV commercials from 1993 that do an eerily accurate job of predicting our technological future. As the blog points out, “Now nearly 15 years old, it's hard to believe, but these ads came out before the Internet had really taken off, before flat-screen HD sets, before DVRs, before DBS systems like DirecTV, before iPod, and even before cell phones hit critical mass.” A YouTube video documents it all.
Laugh all you want, but last weekend, the American Medical Association debated a proposal to determine if video-game addiction deserves a formal medical diagnosis. Wednesday, the AMA softened the proposal, saying overuse of games can be a problem, but not calling it a formal addiction.
If the group had adopted the original measure, it could have paved the way for insurance coverage of video game addiction.
Groups like On-Line Gamers Anonymous cite examples of gamers who have stopped socializing and even foregone necessities like eating and showering to play games for hours or days on end. Many doctors, though, said you can’t compare something like excessive video-game playing to alcoholism. The AMA recommended the American Psychiatric Association research the problem for consideration in the 2012 American Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders.
I have to admit I thought this was a bit ridiculous. Then I read the manual’s complete listing of disorders and realized that if there are clinical diagnoses for “bed wetting not due to a medical condition,” fetishism and problems adjusting after relocating, then maybe this kid deserves a clinical diagnosis as well.
I just cracked Manhattan on GTA IV (I can see my house from there!). 
When retiree John Kanzius was undergoing chemotherapy for terminal leukemia, he couldn't sleep. His insomnia may end up saving a lot of lives. Obsessed with finding a cancer treatment that had no side effects, he started puttering away in the middle of the night in his kitchen and garage with his wife's pie pans, a crude radio transmitter and some hot dogs. What he discovered may change the face of cancer treatment. When radio waves are passed through metal, it heats the metal up. Using this jumping off point, Kanzius injected hot dogs with copper sulfate solution to see if he could heat only specific areas of them. He could. And now millions of dollars in research is being thrown behind research into treating cancer with radio waves and gold nanoparticles. Did we mention Kanzius has no background in science or medicine, nor does he have a college degree? Equal parts kitchen science, cutting edge sci-fi and heartbreaking human triumph, 60 Minutes 
If you want to give your home theater sound system an intense workout, nothing packs more sonic muscle than a Blu-ray Disc. Most people are aware of the picture-quality improvement you get from a BD’s 1080p lines of resolution, but the jump in audio quality is equally impressive. A DVD cannot hold the uncompressed and HD audio tracks that a 50GB Blu-ray Disc can, and the difference is ear-shattering if you have a speaker setup that can take it. We put 
It always stings when you pick the losing team, especially if you’re an early adopter spending your hard-earned green on a soon-to-be-obsolete technology. Sony recently won the high-def format war to succeed DVD with Blu-ray Disc, and all the major studios now support it. 
One of the reasons the video-game industry is so exciting right now is that so much is still in the process of being discovered. Every year is a pretty good year for music, but these days, each is not so noticeably better or worse from the year before. We haven’t had a 
Senior Editor Scott Alexander is having a blast playing the new video games and hanging out with beautiful women at the 
In honor of the iPhone, 
Looks like our intern Lynsey Gilchrist has been reading the medical journals again: