Gamertell

According to our traffic reports, you, our valued readers, crave more data on the Halo 3 “Marathon Man” achievement. I will not lie, this warms my heart. It means that there are new players still trickling into the game, a phenomenon I heartily doubted would occur. At the very least, it means that old players who remained firmly entrenched in the multiplayer milieu, that denigrating digital pit of infamy, are at least taking a look at the campaign mode.

So, for your reading pleasure, I hereby confer upon you a series of posts which contain transcripts of these enigmatic forerunner structures taken directly from the game, along with my humble analysis of each. For the locations of these back story tidbits, refer to the excellent post by our very own Phil Madison via our not so very own GamesRadar. Enjoy!

Click through for the full transcripts…

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As part of Gamertell’s exclusive look at the music behind FIFA Street 3, we received an early version of the game’s soundtrack to review.

Die hard fans of groove music and football (not the American kind) will be mightily pleased with EA Canada’s new entry into the FIFA Street series. Scheduled for release on February 18, 2008, the game features a bevy of phat beats and Gamertell was lucky enough to get an exclusive early listen.

The soundtrack features more than thirty songs and by more than twenty artists, most of whom are international or world music performers…

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Seth MacFarlane will be hosting the Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts this year. The event will feature winners from over thirty categories and is scheduled to take place on February 15, 2008 at the Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts. To cut to the heart of the matter, the nominees for best game of the year are as follows:

Assassin’s Creed by Ubisoft
Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces by Relic Entertainment
Mass Effect by Bioware/Microsoft Games
Skate by Electronic Arts

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New Mexico Democrat Gail Chasey is getting set to draw the ire of some of her consumer constituents, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report. The lawmaker announced impending legislation last last week (January 25, 2007) that would levy a one percent tax on video games and televisions sold in the state. According to Chasey, the program will “Improve the academic performances of our kids” and help to fight child obesity.

Money from the fund, which is expected to garner four million dollars each year, will also be used to finance field trips to state parks and other outdoor areas. Chasey, a former educator, intends to use these outdoor classrooms to encourage healthy and active lifestyles for the students and bolster academic performance. The program is titled “No Child Left Inside,” a snarky homage to the current administration’s education policy. 

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Advocates of hard line parenting strategies that preclude video games are starting to loosen the ban in the face of entertaining, family oriented titles for the Wii. A story from the online version of Halifax News tells the tale of one Canadian mother who never thought she would enjoy video games, especially with her kids.

Kelly Bearne, wife and mother of two, now enjoys Wii games on family night with her children and husband. The new gamers are responding to easy to learn titles that have caused the console to become so popular among non-traditional gamers.

The Big Brain Academy series focuses on math and cognitive skills, and it’s also been released for Nintendo’s portable system, the DS. Alzheimer patients have even reported that playing these kinds of games have helped to delay the degenerative effects of the disease. 

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We’re starting to see the effects of radical demographic changes spawned by the success of Nintendo’s Wii and casual gaming. Males eighteen to thirty four are no longer the golden boys, er, gamers. When a fifty-year-old man from a retirement community admits that, “I was hooked,” in reference to his new Xbox 360, well, that is certainly a sign of change…

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Activision is supporting the success of Guitar Hero III with new downloadable content on Xbox Live. Song packs by epic seventies bands went live yesterday (January 24, 2008) and are available for the cost of 500 Microsoft points, or $6.25 (US).

Now I’m not saying Guitar Hero III is a bad game, but I never thought the song lineup was impressive to begin with, especially not when compared to the bad-ass-ery that is Rock Band. It’s like Guitar Hero III is suddenly realizing “Hey, we completely forgot about the seventies. What’s wrong with us?” and now they’re trying to catch up…

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Doom co-creator John Romero removed negative posts about Gamecock head Mike Wilson from his blog earlier this week (January 22, 2008).

The latest move comes after the epic riposte Wilson delivered in response to the negative comments, which were posted by Romero last week. In an open letter to Kotaku, Wilson writes that Romero’s “unparalleled work ethic and strong character [have]…left only a bloody trail of ex-wives, fatherless kids, and ill advised breast implants strewn across this fair nation.”

The public debate was sparked by Romero’s take on the controversial Diakatana ads, which he claims were Wilson’s idea. The game, widely regarded as a commercial and artistic failure, is rendered inappropriately but also accurately here…

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The Chicago-based company Überclock hopes to offer consumers a cheap alternative with two new models of customized CPU’s, both of which utilize overclocking to boost system performance

Garage PC enthusiasts of the 1980’s and big CPU manufacturers like Intel needed to find a common ground which would let tech savvy consumers maximize performance without running the risk of destroying their equipment. Intel also wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t be “too easy to take a $170 chip and make it run as fast as the $975 model,” as the product site states.

The compromise is a line of overclock-friendly chips that had a price-graded component called a “multiplier,” which is unchangeable on all of the chip models except, of course, the most expensive one. The higher the multiplier, the easier it is to overclock your PC to ri-god-damn-diculous speeds. According to Überclock, this means “Intel gets to sell its processors at different price points, allows overclockers to do our thing, and manages to give us…

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The same site that reported the impending split between Bungie and Microsoft a full week before the official press release has now posted an in-depth interview with an anonymous member of the Xbox 360 development team. 8Bit Joystick posted the interview yesterday (January 19, 2007) in an e-mail question-and-answer format. Lengthy and technical responses to questions posed by “Jake,” the post’s author, seem to confirm that the inside source is legitimate and well informed. When asked about the estimated 30% failure rate of the Xbox 360:

It’s around 30%, and all will probably fail early. This quarter they are expecting 1 M failures, most of those Xenons. Some of those are repeat failures. Life expectancy is all over the map because the design has very little margin for most of the important parameters. That means it’s not a fault tolerant design. So a good unit may last a couple of years, while a bad unit can fail in hours. I have a launch unit and have not had a single problem with it. And it’s used a lot. But I don’t know anyone else with a 360 that hasn’t broken, except you now. There’s no way to tell when yours might die…

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