Alright, I thought the thing about dudes being into the new My Little Ponies was funny at first, but this is taking the joke pretty far. Man I don't even know what to think of this fan project by (or how much time they must have already put into it)

http://www.mane6.com/

SIlly me I assumed Patrick was right in the quicklook was right about the hugging in return to dreamland.  But uh this entry on wikia is really pretty gross if true. 

http://kirby.wikia.com/wiki/Kirby%27s_Return_to_Dream_Land 

Food sharing by mouth-to-mouth food transfer has returned, and works the same as in Kirby Super Star, but now up to four players can share the same food

Whoah this Occupy stuff just went next level in Oakland  today

 Hope all you Bay Area duders stay safe out  there
 
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/02/BA8Q1LPI1J.DTL

yet another one of these really dumb studies about whether video games cause violence, this one claims that they do. 
 
one of these days I'd really like for someone to teach these psychologists that correlation does not equal causation, so they can stop wasting our time with these pointless studies that prove nothing.
 
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-uq-dangers-violent-video-games.html

New research by Dr. Brock Bastian from UQ's School of Psychology has found evidence that playing violent video games leads players to see themselves, and their opponents, as lacking in core human qualities such as warmth, open-mindedness, and intelligence...

Study participants were opponents engaged in violent behaviour against each other in the popular game, Mortal Kombat.

Dr. Bastian says he believes the findings of this study point to the potential long-term effects of violent video game play and suggest that repeated exposure to these dehumanising experiences may result in chronic changes in self-perception.

Don't now about all y'all, but this Wii U thing kinda reminds me of the SEGA  situation when they launched the Dreamcast and I feel like Nintendo may have just one last chance here to get some things right they haven't for a long time (e.g. online play, decent third party games, multi function device) . Or they are done in the console business for good.  I really hope I'm wrong.
 
A reputation is hard to regain when you've lost it, and I think Nintendo really hurt themselves in the long run by not getting the Wii platform to live up to its' software or hardware potential. They may have the largest install base this round, but they lost a lot of the hardcore  and casual gamers are notoriously fickle. I think the causal market has largely moved onto multi use devices like the ipad. A misstep here could be disastrous.

Unlike when they launched  the Wii their financial situation has now become somewhat precarious and their money maker backup, the handheld market, is starting to slip away from them. I I think it's safe to say the 3DS's semi dud of launch has really hurt them.  The Gameboy platforms used to be their cashcow .The Smartphone revolution has taken their monopoly away from them.  And may serve as final proof that game only device philosophy that Nintendo espouses is not a winning one in the marketplace.
 
they recently announced they are going to lose nearly a Billion dollars (US dollars) in the first 6 months of this year, which is highly unusual for a company that I've never known to be anything but profitable.  

 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-27/nintendo-predicts-first-annual-loss-in-30-years-after-cutting-3ds-price.html 

 

Nintendo Co., the world’s largest maker of video-game machines, forecast its first annual loss in at least 30 years after the yen reached a postwar high and the new 3DS console had weaker-than-expected sales.

The net loss may be 20 billion yen ($264 million) for the year ending in March, compared with a previous projection for a 20 billion-yen profit, Kyoto, Japan-based Nintendo said in a statement yesterday. That compared with the 12.2 billion-yen average profit of 22 analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg....
 
Nintendo also reported a first-half loss of 70.2 billion yen, wider than the 2 billion yen loss a year earlier

Of all the 1980's era classic cartoon/movie properties I've always felt GiJoe should be the easiest to make a decent game out of.  And yet that that has never seemed to even come close happening for reasons I can't fathom.
 
Given War for Cybertron and the upcoming Fall of Cybertron , Transformers feels the "closest" to having realized the potential of the property. He-man, Voltron, Thundercats agmes are basically non-existent Ghostbusters games are typically meh ( Ghostbusters the Game being at least a halfway attempt) and Dragon Ball Z is Dragon Ball Z. The Tron franchise might be the best, if for no other reaosn than the millions of lightcycle knockoff mini games it spawned across various properties.

Aside from a forgettable side scrollers in the late 80's and the dreadful adaption of the live action "accelerator" suit joke of a movie it's been a barren wasteland for the G.I.Joe license.
 
GiJoe is in theory a small anti-terrorist unit going on small surgical strikes against Cobra (terrorists with world domination goals), Night Creepers (professional ninja assassins) and MARS (an international  arms dealer) among others. That premise sounds straight up ripped out of any number of shooters out there today. I would think GiJoe could easily be adopted into a reasonable first person based squad shooter, especially if the early classic comic storylines (written by esteemable Larry Hama) were the source of inspiration instead of the goofy cartoon with all its' laser lights and Cobra-La and all that jazz. There were over 150 issues of the Marvel series, so coming up with an adaptable scenario shouldn't be difficult. 
 
I would think there would also be a market for it. Ancedotally I know a lot of parents who have kids who wants to play FPS games, but won't let them due to excessive violence. I think GiJoe could possibly tame it down into a T for teen type shooter with the brand giving the game some punch to keep it being DOA at retail.
 
The fact that no one has even attempted anything remotely like this blows my mind, given how strong the brand still is. Even if they put out some 2 out of 5 or 3 out of 5 turd of game it would seem to me to be some easy money for Hasbro.

Oh Joy mega corporations are trying to use congress to kill teh Interwebs yet again
 
from
http://www.pcworld.com/article/242776/showdown_looms_over_new_controversial_antipiracy_bill.html

 SOPA (PDF), which is modeled partly after the Senate's PROTECT IP act, will allow copyright holders to obtain court orders to block sites that allegedly infringe on their property. Targeted sites would include sites operated for the sole purpose of infringement (or that "have only limited purpose or use other than" infringement), as well as any site that "engages in, enables, or facilitates" infringement.

The heavy-handedness--and broadness--of the bill is troubling to many people. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), calls SOPA "disastrous" and "the worst piece of IP legislation [they've] seen in the last decade." 

According to the EFF, SOPA would essentially allow copyright holders to force service providers to "disappear" certain websites, which endangers both Internet security and sends a "troubling message to the world: it's okay to interfere with the Internet, even effectively blacklisting entire domains, as long as you do it in the name of IP enforcement."

I was looking for the DOTA page on the gb wiki couldn't find it and instead found this 

Multi Online Battle Arena page
 
when and where did this term come from? I have never heard it before (obviously) despite playing Warcraft III Dota for about 4-5 years. Seems like  a goofy name.  Wikipedia seems to suggest Riot games came up with term when they launched League of Legends but that doesn't mean we should just call it whatever they say we should call it. Blizzard and Valve certainly don't seem to be embracing the term. And I haven't seen it associated with Heroes of Newerth. And for the record Wikipedia doesn't either. That to me at least suggests that term is not popularly embraced (at least yet). So why should GB call it something different than perhaps most of its' players do?
 
I can guess why Riot game would prefer the term MObA, cause I'm sure Valve or Blizzard (probably valve) has trademarked the term DOTA (and thus Riot can't use the term w/o copyright infringement issues and also probably wouldn't anyway as they wouldn't want to give free advertising to their competitors anyway). But I'm not really sure why that matters in the long run, i.e. do many game retail packages proclaim what genre it is on the box that you are holding?  Or in their tv or magazine ad spots?
 
Do Mario games call themselves platformers, or James Bond games proclaim that they are first persons hooters? I've never noticed any ads for them to that effect.
 
What's the harm in calling this first wave DOTA clone games, DOTA games or DOTAlike games (ala roguelike) ? What am I missing here?
 
I think most gamers are more likely to know what "DOTAlike" means than MOBA.
 
I realize games usually  have acronym template names for  genres (SHMUPS, FPS, RTS, MMORPG, JPRG, etc all come to mind) but I dunno MOBA seems kinda silly to me. I think the birth of a new genre deserves better, Just my 2  cents

Have many people really lost meaningful weight using  fitness video games?  Most of the ones I've tried like Wii fit really didn't seem to do much at all. I'd be curious to see if there's been any unbiased studies done on the topic.

The only one I can ever remember playing and feeling like I ever got an actual workout was the DDR series. And perhaps coincidentally (or not?) it's also the only one in my experience that was remotely fun to play.
 
It seems to me there is low hanging fruit here for an aspiring fitness genre developer for a concept that actually seems to produce results and that's the P90x franchise/craze. It's certainly the regimen du jour (like Tae Bo and such before it) and it's heavily promoted on all the ESPN properties (guess they are done using nutrisystem).  Ancedotally it's the only one of those sorts of regimens I've actually seen work for friends and family. That stuff can get you seriously ripped. 
 
but even if it didn't it still has enough mindshare that I could see the brand being really valuable for a fitness game.
 
Furthermore they have a version called "Insanity" that doesn't require any equipment. Seems to me it would be pretty easy to adopt the workout vids into a connected KInect game to enhance the experience.
 
the reason I could see people actually going for a Kinect game version is that the P90x workouts are really really hard and you are allowed  by the workout to stop anytime you are overwhelmed (in fact in the videos I've seen many of the example instructor minions regularly collapse from exhaustion). So I could see how it could be useful to have something like Kinect keep track of how much you actually do from day to day.  And possibly make it more fun to do. I know if I tried it I'd need some sort of reinforcement to keep me going.
 
I still can't fathom why no one has come out with an honest to goodness good fitness game for the Wii or Kinect yet. The fact people so many copies of that Wii Fit nonsense should developers there is a market for it.  A good portion of the original console gamer generation like myself are aging to a point where our metabolisms are slowing and in general have considerably less time for gaming with no side benefit. And hey America in general is really fat, and constantly spending money on garbage diets and such to lose weight. So there's cash money to be had here for developers.

And this time it struck  my favorite team, the Cleveland Browns, in particular the running back Peyton Hillis. He is out once more when the Browns really need him.
 
Last year he was the lovable hard working running back. Ultra team man, loved to hunt, blow up linebackers . Touchdown scoring machine.
 
This year he whines about getting disrespected by not getting a contract extension, is back to being chronically injured Peyton Hillis as he was with the Denver Broncos. To make matters worse he sat out against Miami because he was worried he might be too weak to play after having strep throat and his agent was worried he might get hurt!
 
Oy vey this is awful. 

http://www.daytondailynews.com/dayton-sports/cleveland-browns/is-the-madden-cover-curse-striking-browns-rb-hillis--1273125.html?cxtype=ynews_rss