Gaming Thread, Weekly Edition!

SilverGTP here, wishing a very Happy Mother's Day to all the Moronettes! For the rest of you; if you haven't at least called your mother by now then get to it!

This week's topics include videos from Halo 4 and Borderlands 2, family-friendly games you can play with your mom, focus testing with Gearbox Software, the Family Guy Online beta, a video game art exhibit, and the 20th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D. That sounds like a lot but I've shrunk it down to Moron-sized portions just for you!

Zakn and I enjoyed playing Team Fortress 2 with a few fellow Morons last Friday night. We had a blast, as always but we need more Morons! Everything is better with more Morons. Please join us this Friday, or suggest a new day and/or game to play. You never know, we might actually listen.

With an Xbox 360 and a Kinect, you can make excuses about why you don’t have time to video-chat with your mom in addition to explaining why you don’t call often enough. There are also plenty of free family-friendly games and apps using a Kinect - Kinect Fun Labs. Of course, you can always play Facebook games with mom, like Words with Friends and Farmville.

Microsoft is offering a new price for an Xbox 360 with Kinect bundle. There is no official announcement yet but rumors are that a 4GB Xbox with Kinect will cost you $99, with a 2-year Xbox Live Gold subscription commitment. Expect an official announcement soon, then place your orders. It's more than worth it, even if you only use it to stream Netflix and other content.

Here’s the Halo 4 first look video with 343 Industries:

Here’s a ton of gameplay footage from Borderlands 2, due this fall:

Speaking of Borderlands, Gearbox Software has a fantastic focus testing program. I have participated in numerous testing sessions and it’s always a blast. It’s also a great way to learn about the game development process because you play games at various stages of development. You get free snacks or meals and free swag, but the best part is playing games that haven’t even been announced yet. They have a detailed NDA but I can say that I’ve already played games due out this year, and games that have yet to be announced. The Gearbox staff always tells us that their attorney is a fencing champion and he will cut us bad if we violate the NDA. I participate in testing at their Plano, Texas headquarters but they may have other locations. Sign up and find out!

Are you a fan of Family Guy? I am, and I’ve been having a blast playing the Family Guy Online beta. You can play too, if you sign up and wait for an email stating that your free account is ready. Mine took 2 days, so be a little patient. It’s a browser-based game, requiring the Unity plugin. It is true to the Family Guy universe and you’ll be interacting with other players, along with all your favorite characters. There are mini-games, like catching the greased-up deaf guy and riding a mechanical Choco-Taco inside the Drunken Clam. There are loads of collectibles, such as the Palestinian alarm clock and Peter’s Surfin Bird record. There are fetch quests and combat quests so you won’t spend all your time just roaming around.

If you like art like I do, then you don’t like it at all. But if you do like it then you’ll want to check out The Art of Video Games at the American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. It will be on tour around the country until 2016 so check their website for location information. I hope there’s at least one rendition of a scantily-clad Lara Croft or Chun-Li but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Finally, I’ll end this week’s post with an old-school Nazi slaughter-fest. You can now play the original Wolfenstein 3D in your browser. ID and Bethesda mark the 20th anniversary by porting it to your browser. And it’s not even a Flash-based game. It was done with JavaScript and HTML 5. Enjoy your trip to the past with Wolfenstein 3D. As always, you can find me on Twitter.

I don't have a whole lot this week. I'm now convinced that Nintendo hates me and doesn't want me to finish Super Mario Land 3D. I am heartened by this. Gaming should be difficult and games should be hard to win. They should be even harder to be a "Completionist" at. I'll have to hash it out a little more in my mind, but I'm not big on the whole idea of games as interactive movies. Building from one Quicktime Event to another isn't my bag. That doesn't make it wrong, Just GET OFF MY LAWN!

On the Gaming with Mom thing; I have done some things with my Mother. We play Words with Friends. She uses Facebook, I use my Iphone. It's great fun. I used to play other Facebook games with her, but I kinda gave up on that stuff. Too much Farmville and some random Cooking game. In the end it was just too much clicking and not enough shiny things to hold my interest.

Big week in Releases. We have Diablo 3 and Max Payne 3. On the Max Payne front, I absolutely loved the first two games. Beautifully done, interesting combat, compelling story lines. I will be buying both. For Diablo 3, If there's interest in doing Moron Multiplayer, I am down. I recommend networking through the ever growing Steam Group! We passed 200 members, but please keep friending each other and joining games!. We had 3-6 Morons for TF2 night on Friday night, and Like Silver said we would like more! If there's a better time, or a different game you'd like to play, post about it in the Breitbart section.

Eve Online wise Hulkageddon is going at a pretty unprecedented pace. I'm betting that by Monday, 1 Trillion ISK in miner assets will have been destroyed. Hell it probably will happen shortly after this post goes live. Converted to Plex and therefore Dollars, that is $30,000 in assets. Eve is Serious Bidness indeed.

Economically it's a pretty mixed bag. Mineral prices are actually down. I'm thinking that most of it is due to due to what Jester called May Gray. I'm thinking thats part of it. It's also that the big wars in Null have basically ended. People have made their moves, and the Influence Map reflects it. As a noob doing t1 manufacturing to supplement my income from running missions, I saw huge swings in ship profits when wars kicked off. A Hurricane that I was making a 5% profit on suddenly I was pulling down 15%. I was selling them as fast as I could make them. With the wars wrapped up, demand for ships (and since ships are minerals) are down. I'm guessing that's more influential than Hulkageddon on the retail price of minerals. Who the fuck knows. I don't. Go hang with the nerds in Market Discussion. I did find this post very interesting. I will tell you that there's more mining in my little place in null than I have ever seen. TAGN had a great post about mineral prices and mining thoughts in reaction to some stats CCP released.

Here's a vid from the big fight I didn't get in on yesterday. This is next door to my first home in Null, so it's close to my heart :)

Kugu is Back! It was like nothing in Eve mattered for a week.

Follow me on Twitter, and don't forget to Call Mom!

posted by Gang of Gaming Morons! at 01:03 PM

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