Nintendo's Wii Speak - Apparently ok to sell on....

In the interests of fairness (common sense and some web related outrage), Nintendo has back tracked on the Wii Speak code system that effectively ties it to one Wii.

Granted this solution requires a one phone call to Nintendo to obtain a new key, but hey, better than nothing eh? EH? :)

A good example of a company not too proud to admit a mistake, and here is hoping that others follow suit.

Linky

Fi Club at Ruuts!

I am Kaiser Soze.

Bike Hero!

Link to article asplaining it.

Deadly Sins

From Cracked.com
The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Gaming

#5.
Humpophilia (Lust)

Imagine It:

The worst possible thing that can happen to anyone has just happened to you. You’ve been killed. In a game.

You were manning the rear gun of a Warthog when the driver pulled hard right to avoid a group of Covenant Hunters and slammed your head right into errant sniper fire. Your whole life—all ninety seconds of it—flashes instantly before your visor. Then your head is snapped cleanly off like a breaking celery stalk, and tumbles down a grassy hillside.

Yet, you live. For a few precious moments, your consciousness remains, and through fading vision, you watch the Warthog driver stop, leap from the vehicle, and run to your body, which has fallen belly-down over a rocky outcropping. What’s he doing? Is he trying to help you? Can’t he see it’s too late?

Gingerly, delicately, the driver steps up to the rear of your body, then backs up a few inches, steps forward again. And again. He mutters “heh…awesome.” Yanking your eyes from the image of your body being defiled, you are affronted by two armor-plated testicles descending from above. The man crouching repeatedly over your head pauses only to take several screen caps.

Your brain finally ceases activity, and you log off to take the longest, hottest shower of your life.

Why It’s Seriously Not Cool:

No one likes to get raped, and it’s even less pleasant when you’re dead. Humping someone’s dead body isn’t just nasty, it’s downright insulting. You’ve killed him; you won. Chill out with the aggressive homoeroticism already.

There’s a reason that in all of human history, there’s never been a civilization that showed dominion over their opponents by humping their freshly killed corpses on the battlefield. Except the Sumerians, but everyone thought they were dicks.

Appropriate Punishment:

In-game, real-time ritual castration to be performed by the respawned victim.
The 7 Deadly Sins of Online Gaming

Shoot It Up

This Fi Club looks to be gun-toting-split-screen-tastic. We should have a couple of boxes running with some split screen L4D and Gears 2. We should be able to get both co-op campaign and 2v2 for Gears which will be ace.

So, Munchk is to bring his spare box, and possibly a TV, although I do have a monitor and speakers, but I need you to bring an RGB cable if we're doing that.

k 0 0 k 1 e please can you bring your copy of Gears 2?

Ruut, please can you bring your everlasting Pizza Hut coupon?

And we need a couple more controllers. Don't mind who brings them.

We can also have a look at Fallout 3 on a spare account (so I get a clean run and no free achievements.)

Nintendo Can Fuck Off Too

Nintendo can join Epic's Mike Capps in kissing my ass. Destructoid.com report that Nintendo are using single-use activation codes to tie their largely pointless Wii Speak peripheral to a single console. The code allows you to download the channel software that the Speak uses - a driver if you like.

This is the latest incidence of publishers striking back at used game sales, which is an epidemic crushing profits and putting the entire industry at a near standstill. The situation is reminiscent of the film industry and its dreadful collapse after rental stores opened their collective doors and killed consumer motivation to purchase or travel to the theatre to watch movies.

I cannot believe that Nintendo lose a lot of money through second hand peripheral sales. To me this shows a complete lack of faith in consumer attachment to this device, they just want to make sure everyone has to buy it first-hand before they decide it's shit.

NXE: Games on your HDD

Here's a couple of quick links to some interesting information about installing and playing games from your HDD, courtesy of the NXE due on the 19th November.

First, from Eurogamer is a fairly detailed look at how fast games load and stream from your HDD compared to the DVD.

The methodology for the tests was remarkably straightforward - my workhorse Xbox 360 Elite ran a carefully selected range of ten top games, first from DVD, then from hard disk. Video captures of both gameplay run-throughs allowed us to get frame-accurate loading times (rounded up to the nearest half-second) and the comparison of the selected footage could also be used to judge any differences in game performance.

Second is a video from IGN showing how much quieter you can expect your Xbox 360 to be when streaming from HDD instead of DVD.