Got a few thousand Wii Points to spend? It’s worth investing them in the enchantingly odd (and odd-titled) Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People. The first two episodes of the game series that defines acronymic awkwardness are now available on WiiWare, and provide welcome resuscitation for the sporadically dead genre of yore: the Point and Click Adventure.

Based on the long running online animated cartoon Homestar Runner, S.B’s.C.G.F.A.P focuses on the Macho Libre figure of Strong Bad and his frequent attempts to make Homestar’s life a misery. The first episode sees him, among other things, ruining Homestar’s attempt to win The Free Country Tri-Annual Race to the End of the Race, using a metal detector to find buried treasure, and chain-sawing bushes to death in order to gather their precious branches. It’s all madly surreal stuff, brilliantly written and spoken in wonderfully self-mocking internet idiom. And it might remind you of such classics as…such classics as…DAY OF THE TENTACLE!

“Pistols on Licence to Kill! No Oddjob! Isn’t there an option to disable the body armour?”

 
Hear that? That’s the sound of gamers talking. And not through a headset which sounds like they’re holding an angry bee in their mouth as they do so. About which game? Goldeneye 007. Granted, Rare’s masterpiece/fluke is now a jerky and unplayable mess, but at its time of release, it laid down both the technical and social foundations of split-screen multiplayer gaming. So why have these foundations been abandoned, and why has nobody returned to build a party house upon them?

After spending some considerable (and often unnecessarily extended) time driving around the environments of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2, it becomes apparent that the hybrid genre it champions, that between First Person Shooter and free-roaming Role Playing, reveals something very telling about the new sociological terrain that videogaming is (or rather isn't) heading in.

Okay, so any World of Warcraft player knows how annoying the scourge disease was during the in-game Halloween celebrations. Sure, it was fun for the first ten minutes to go around infecting others, making a massive zombie army to attack one of the capital cities. However, after an hour of constantly being infected and dying, I was unable to accomplish anything and ended taking a break from the game until the Halloween celebrations ended. However, experts are saying that this annoying yet harmless addition to WoW can be used to study terrorism.

Due to the nature of how the disease spread, expert Charles Blair believes that the game could information on how terrorists form tactics and plans (http://www.cetisresearch.org/people/blair.html). In order to effectively spread the disease, a player must go to a town or city and infect other players. This can be done by simply attacking each other, using an ability which throws so liquid that infects people in a small radius, or by doing a channeling ability which sacrifices the player at the expense of infecting a large area around them. Similar to actual terrorist tactics in the real world, studying players' reactions to such events is being used to gather data for what would happen in the real world. Some players try to stop the infection from spreading. Some want to join the leagues of the undead. Others run away, or stop playing all together. However, due to the fact that dying really isn't a big deal in World of Warcraft (simply speaking with a spirit healer or running to their corpse revives a player), the study is being taken with a grain of salt.

The big winners in the Golden Joystick Awards 2008

The votes have been counted, the numbers crunched, the joypads finally put down and the curtains drawn onto a cold autumnal morning, as the results of the Golden Joystick Awards 2008 have been announced with no real shocks, surprises or curve balls being thrown by the gaming public it seems. In fact it's as clear as the aforementioned autumnal morning which game has clearly triumphed across the board this year; Activision-Blizzard's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It scooped the awards for best multiplayer and was the ESA PC Game of the year too with gaming website GamesRadar.com also voting it online game of the year. To round off a great haul of awards, Activision-Blizzard were also voted as the Future UK Publisher of the Year. And it doesn't end there with the Call of Duty series with Play.com nominating the next installment of the series, Call of Duty: World at War as the One to Watch for next year.

In other awards, Rockstar North were voted as the CVG.co.uk UK Developer of the year, an award that went alongside Grand Theft Auto 4's triumph in the awards for the BBC 1Xtra Soundtrack of the Year (remember this the next time you're performing a drive by to the backdrop of Evil Woman by ELO, a stranger juxtaposition I cannot think of....) and also the Arvato Digital Services Xbox Game of the Year. The full round up of the awards presented are show below;

Perhaps the biggest gaming juggernaut of the past decade has just reached its pinnacle of 11 million subscribers. Yes folks, there are 11 million subscriptions to World of Warcraft right now, making Blizzard’s MMO a force to be reckoned with. World of Warcraft is easily the biggest thing to happen to online gaming in a long time, and shows no signs of stopping.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> World of Warcraft is currently playable in North America, Europe, Russia, Latin America, China, Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. It’s available in eight different languages, and continues to grow each day. WoW it’s self was the best selling PC game of both 2005 and 2006, only being beat out in 2007 by its expansion, The Burning Crusade (The Burning Crusade sold about 2.4 million copies worldwide in it’s first 24 hours of release.)

PC Vs Console Gaming Part 2

PC Vs Console Gaming Part 1