Gamertell

Score Hero - is that ver. two? Or eleven? I say they change it to Score Hero 2000: The Reckoning after hearing that GuitarHero developer, Harmonix, donated $2,000 towards upgrading their servers. Said Harmonix prez, Alex Rigopulos on the Score Hero forums:

“Hey everyone, I just kicked in a big donation on behalf of the whole crew here at Harmonix. You guys are awesome!”

Score Hero, which boasts over 38,000 registered users, is a community fanbase for GuitarHero and GuitarHero II (PS2 and XBox 360) and showcases faux-rockdom accomplishments. Their financial goal for upgrading the site’s servers was a not-so-modest $10,000, but with the huge help from Harmonix, the goal was met and exceeded. Not too shabby, Harmonix; I’ll crack open a Red Stripe and drink to your health. Cheers to the Score Hero community and their new servers!

Site [Score Hero] Read [Joystiq]

This past Sunday, in Essex England, twenty-four year old Adam Mapleson was on his way to work via the railway station when he witnessed two armed and masked men robbing a female security guard. Racing to the aid of the woman, (witness’ accounts state that Adam had attempted to block the thugs’ escape) he was shot at close range in the chest. He is now reported to have regained consciousness and is in stable condition at a Southend Hospital.

According to The Sun Online, “The woman guard escaped shaken but unhurt — as did a male colleague who was driving the security van in Rayleigh, Essex. The robbers - wearing scarves around their faces - fled with a security box belching red dye. Their haul is likely to be worthless.”

What likely won’t hit the airwaves (or net-waves?) as hard is the fact that Adam Mapleson was a gamer, who listens to black metal and in every picture on his Myspace Page is dressed in black. Now, far be it for me to pontificate the jurisprudence of social mores and how backwards they may be, but it just goes to show that looks or interests does not a man define. With that said, I’d like to invite Jack Thompson take a peek at a slice of this hero’s interest in gaming: Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, FEAR, GTA: San Andreas, UT2004, Dawn of War and Mark of Chaos.

For all the negative media around gaming and gamers, I can’t help but notice that when the facts don’t appease the agenda, no matter how insignificant, those facts are lost. Where’s Jack Thompson now?

Read [Kotaku] Read Also [The Sun Online]

When it came to FPS deathmatches on the PC, I was always on the receiving end of a severe thrashing. I quit playing when I stopped having fun playing thirty seconds or so into each match before being forced to watch my teammates finish the round.

For those of you who manage to wipe the floor with the competition, there’s a new site aimed at you. Tournament.com is a new site which will host cash tournaments on Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and Counter-Strike: Source, fully licensed by Valve. But it’s not all free gaming for money - users are required to create an account and download their client before players can pay-to-play for a chance to win.

Currently, Tournament.com is hosting free play until the service officially goes live next month and they’re offering $500 every day to the top ten most active players in a 24 hour period; $250 in the Americas and Canada and $250 in Europe respectively; that’s $50 for each of the 10 players who likely spends far more time than I could imagine playing online. To keep the matches fair, Tournament.com have a proprietary anti-cheat system and an in-house team of dedicated anti-cheat experts.

For those who can’t help but squander their mortgage online, Tournament.com has taken steps to prevent too much financial collateral damage:

“To ensure responsible gaming, Tournament.com allows users to stake no more than $10 per match and deposit a maximum of $150 in their account each month.”

In addition to that, they offer a customer services team who will be able to offer you guidance and point you in the direction of professional support in the instance you feel the service is having a negative effect on your life. Fancy that! As of this writing, I wasn’t able to find out concrete details on how it calculates, but from what I gathered, once you deposit money into your account, you’re able to stake some on a match and if you or your team wins, you’ve won your share of the total invested cash. And for those who are as afraid as I am to sink money into what amounts to thirty seconds of mayhem before the sting of death:

“The service also provides a ranking system that allows players to view other users’ skill levels, and a handicap system to allow players of all levels to play against one another.”

All this and Clan support should make for a solid, cheat-free experience with two of the most popular FPS available.

Site [Tournament.com] Read [T3]

University of Illinois researchers recently studied the impact of video game magazine’s depictions of overly muscular male characters on the drive for muscularity among preadolescent boys. According to the News Bureau of the University of Illinois, the study consisted of two rounds of testing conducted one year apart with researchers administered questionnaires to groups of two to five boys, separated by visual barriers who were then asked to report the genres of magazines they read each week. “The boys’ drive for muscularity was gauged using a child-appropriate version of a standard “drive for muscularity” scale. Drive for muscularity was defined as desire for muscle mass.”

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Just as there is no “I” in team or ice in hot tea, government legislation has little business trying to substitute the responsibility of parents with laws.

In an article by GameDaily, the New York state senate passed a video game bill, SO5888, sponsored by Senator Andrew Lanza (R-I, Staten Island), which seeks to:

“[E]stablish an Advisory Council on Interactive Media and Youth Violence to review the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) rating system and its effectiveness, as well as recommend further steps that can be taken “to curb children’s access and exposure to ‘adult-only’ material.”

This leads me to think that this is not as much an issue of free speech here as it is an insult to the efforts of the ESRB.

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GameIndustry wrote an interesting article regarding the unapologetically surprising success of Microsoft’s XBox 360 and how at this juncture, in it’s battle to succeed over Sony, it’s dominance may be undermined by what they so eloquently describe as the “problem of hardware reliability and customer service, an area in which the Xbox 360 has a track record that is nothing short of utterly appalling.”

Now, I can only rely on my personal experience to expound upon, because while my 360 has never caught the Red Ring Flu, I got a bunk disk tray that refuses to close, and in those few uncertain moments where the drive pretends to operate correctly, it conjures up noises I’ve not heard since I decided to take a pair of pliers to an old broken stereo I dissected when I was 13.

What happened to consoles that lasted through an entire generation? I owned one NES when I was 8 years old, and as of last summer, it still works. Yea, yea, I get it - technology has changed and the components of current-gen machines are far more complex than those of yore, but let’s put this into perspective, shall we? The NES was a more complex machine than, say the Atari, and it was cutting edge for it’s time.

So, is it just sour grapes on my part? My 360 was two months out of their retroactive year warranty so I’m forced to pay to fix a machine fourteen months after I bought it new - yea, I guess it is sour grapes, but when I invest $400 into a piece of technology, I expect it to not fall apart after 14 months. So now, I get to watch Bioshock, Mass Effect and Halo 3 approach with naught but a tear in my eye. Wish me luck in saving up to pay to have it fixed.

To their credit though, they have updated their repair policy to include free shipping, a renewed year warranty for out-of-warranty consoles, the return of same console sent in (rather than a replacement console) and faster turnaround for repairs. I guess I have something to look forward to.

Read [GameIndustry] Also Read [Kotaku]