Well for those of you readers that are WoW fanatics, welcome to the start of another QQ fest!

Today they released 3.0.2 and I specc’d my Warrior and Mage played 2 games of AV and BAM the bugs started happening. Right now the Blizzard mainframe appears to be dead promising start to the new expansion(not yet released but some are considering the patch part of it….which it is)

Anyways Warriors are fun Druids are still OP i’m looking at my mage like “Wait theres more than one viable dps spec now? NO WAY!” surprisingly even the people i know who theory craft dont even know what to do and I cant get answers because the servers are down as well as the Blizzard website.

More on this tomorrow

Here’s a quiz for everyone. Which system are these games for? Can you tell which ones are Wii games? Does the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 even have exclusive anymore? Answers at the bottom of the page.

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1. Condemned (PS3, XBOX 360)
2. Universe at War (XBOX 360)
3. Baroque (Wii)
4. Dark Sector (PS3 and XBOX 360)
5. Okami (Wii and PS2)
6. Obscure: The Aftermath (Wii)
7. Viking: Battle for Asgard (PS3 and Xbox 360)
8. Rainbow Six (PS3 and XBOX 360)
9. Worms (Wii)
10. Ninja Reflex (Wii)
11. Supreme Commander (XBOX 360)
12. Opona (Wii)

I hope you noticed that all the Wii games look the same. As I mentioned here, there’s a style that’s seems to have been adopted and that’s not great. There was the one survival horror game for the Wii - Obscure - which could just be Condemned for the Wii. I expect poor reviews and poor sales. It’s also fun to see that Okami comes out on the PS2 and Wii.

You might have also noticed that the PS3, as great a system as it is, doesn’t have much in the way of exclusives coming. The ones that are coming don’t have screens up on Gamespot so I couldn’t grab them. On a positive note for Microsoft, there are two RTS games coming out exclusively on the 360. Console RTS is a notoriously unreliable genre, but it’s also a genre that doesn’t have competition from PS3 coming quite yet.

If you knew which system each game was on and the name, I am sorry, truly sorry.

(*note - I purposefully did not include games coming out on all three current gen systems, which is mostly just Iron Man right now. Also, all screens from Gamespot)

I’m not going to make the argument that the only good games for the Wii are first party games. That’s been said enough. Plus, there are good third party games (No More Heroes, Zak and Wiki), but those don’t sell like they should.

Over the course of it’s existence, Nintendo has fashioned a style for it’s first party games. Now the third party games have evolved to look like Nintendo games. Look at this poorly named game. (World of Goo? Seriously?) If I were to show you screens to 20 new games, including this one, you probably couldn’t tell me which ones were PS3 or 360 exclusives (wait, they make exclusives for the PS3 and 360?!), but you can definitely tell which ones are on the Wii. It’s not bad to have a style, but it does pigeonhole you.

(survey coming soon)

I want one. I don’t know what I would use it for really, but I know that if I had one, I would be a better person today.

I want people to be able to see my emotion when I get killed in an FPS (well, not Halo) or even on the off chance that I will them. I want to be able to be see the facial reaction of CGI beautiful women. I’m especially excited about the potential of meeting a guy, playing as a girl, seduce me with winks and nods (and nudges?).

Really what I want, is for life to become more and more like Minority Report. The second to last film Tom Cruise made before he declared his insanity, Last Samauri appropriately being the last one, makes me jealous.

This neural headset would make smart people with quick reaction times get the advantage they appropriately deserve. Since it reacts to electrical responses in the brain, intelligence will finally provide benefit. I’d like to think that makes me a better gamer, which isn’t hard since I am bad. I may actually be stupid, but that can’t make me worse than my poor thumb-eye coordination.

The front page of BBC news is touting video games. It appears that video games are popular and make companies tons of money (the article claims $3.03 billion in the UK alone). Who knew?

The video game industry is richer and more profitable right now than the movie industry. There is less quality competition and higher real profits. That will adjust over the next 20 years as companies come and fail repeatedly, but the power is being transferred into fewer and fewer companies - Activision/Blizzard (Vivendi) and EA obviously at the top of the game design heap and they are rolling in monies. But new good companies pop up and give us good games too (and then get bought). With XLA and PSN, companies can make sweet games for cheaper. they make enough money and get enough exposure to build up funding for bigger projects. This is an exciting time for gamers.

Copy and Paste FTW

My view on the wii zapper:

It just doesn’t seem comfortable.

moving around (with the nunchuk’s thumbstick) adds something of an ambidextrous challenge to games that takes a bit of getting used to, and may be downright frustrating for some.

I want to use the trigger with my right hand, but then would have to hold the whole thing in my left hand so use the nunchuck. And the trigger is sticky from what I’ve read. Though the CNET review above did say itwas worthwhile. But someone will come out with a better one. Mad Catz, are you listening?

And no, I haven’t used it. I’m commenting uselessly. Ignore me if at all possible. All the reviews have mentioned that the Zelda game that comes with it is wicked fun and since the bundle is only $20, I might eve buy it if I owned a Wii. I do not. But I do love them!

There is another gun out there now, and it looks ridiculous. But is it better? Such things remain to be seen.

(One final note - one of the comments on the CNET review said “Has potential with some software upgrades” which makes no sense. It’s a couple of pieces of plastic! What software are you upgrading? And don’t tell me that the poster meant games. Games haven’t been called software since Doom came out.)

If you had any doubt about what kind of effort it takes to make it in game design, look here.

He’s in game design grad school and already has a Master’s, but his stories sound exhausting. I thoroughly recommend reading the design posts.

ESPN has a fascinating article up about Tiger Woods. Woods is the most dominant competitor in sports right now, with a slight lead on Federer. The article shows a little bit more about who he is, though without an interview with Woods himself.

Woods has always guarded himself and while he has seemed human, he has also seemed distant. The article’s author Jamie Diaz wants Tiger to be like us and wants us to see Tiger that way. I believe he succeeds because by the end of the article, I just wanted to give Tiger a hug.

It is curious the difference between A-Rod and Tiger. Each is dominant at his chosen profession and keeps the media at arms length. Tiger is more real though. A-Rod’s comments on the world all seem be pre-planned. It is sad because if you watch him play, he obviously gets down after mistakes and excited after successes. He seems most real while fielding because he isn’t showing off, he has no persona. The only way to be a good fielder is to focus. After a big hit, he becomes less real, not because he can do amazing things we cannot, but because his celebrations often don’t seem genuine. I like seeing him do a bat-flip because that’s real attitude and bravado. He wants to be seen as humble, but he’s not that humble. He’s amazing though, so its okay to not be perfectly humble. Sometimes you are just badass.

Woods knows how to do that. He knows he is the best and sometimes you can hear it in his comments or see it in the way he looks at them. He doesn’t seem fake when he makes a nice shot. He is celebrating the shot and his own success, not trying to please the fans.

I think A-Rod is a real person somewhere, but Tiger makes me root for the favorite. He seems genuinely happy about the whole experience.