On this week’s edition, Wil Wheaton speaks, Ubisoft gives free games, Nintendo fends off Hollywood, BioWare counts down to… something, and a Chinese gamer is stabbed in the brain and survives.
Wil Wheaton Speaks at PAX
Whether you know him as Wesley Crusher from Star Trek or Aoefel from the Penny Arcade D&D podcasts, there’s no denying that he is one of us, and his PAX East Keynote celebrated the gathering of 50,000 like-minded souls, and that the act of gathering together was something very special. He talked for an hour, so I’m not going to even try to sum up the rest of his speech; I recommend that you hit the link to see what John Funk had to say about it. (link)
Ubisoft Apologizes For DRM Outage With Free Games
It might have happened a little sooner than some people expected, but Ubisoft’s DRM Servers suffering a catastrophic failure was pretty much inevitable. So what’s the best way to apologize when people can’t play their games? By giving them other games for free! The gamers who suffered in the outage have been offered a free game, or special DLC for a game they already had. As an apology for the inconvenience. As apologies go, it’s not bad, but I imagine most gamers would have preferred not to have suffered at all. (link)
Hollywood Wants Second Bite of Nintendo Cherry
1993’s Super Mario Brothers might have been a disaster, but that hasn’t stopped Hollywood trying to make more Nintendo movies. According to NOA Boss Reggie Fils-Aimes, studios contact him about licensing rights ‘all the time’, and most are politely turned down. “…in the end, because we are a content company and are passionate about our franchises, it will be few and far between that actual deals are done to bring our franchises to life in a different way. These are our children.” (link)
BioWare Watches the Clock
Well, it’s given us a clock to watch at least. A countdown timer has appeared, not just on the main BioWare site, but also on the Mass Effect and Dragon Age sites as well. Speculation on what this is counting down to is rampant, from the announcement of any one of number of sequels, or perhaps the beta of The Old Republic. BioWare remains tight-lipped however, so we’re just going to have to wait until noon on Monday to find out what’s going on. (link)
Chinese Gamer Survives Knife Attack
A 17 year old gamer in China has survived being stabbed in the brain with a 12 inch knife after it was noticed that he was cheating in a game of Counter-Strike. The boy is recovering in hospital after a ten hour operation to remove the knife and is currently under observation to make sure there there are no further complications due to the rust on the blade. (link)
