You've got to be pretty bold to use your iPhone to count cards in a Vegas casino, especially now that they're on the lookout for such behavior.

http://i.gizmodo.com/5154258/card-co...ur-legs-broken ...

Over the course of three epic games, we've come to know the people, aliens and vehicles of the Halo universe in intimate detail. From Grunts and Gravity Hammers to SPARTAN-IIs and Scorpions, Bungie's expansive Halo universe is chock full of military minutia. And in the eyes of the developers at Ensemble Studios, that wealth of information set the Halo franchise up perfectly for adaptation into the real-time strategy realm, one of the most detail-oriented genres in gaming.

Each day this week, IGN will be taking an exclusive, in-depth look at Halo Wars, the newest entry in the Halo saga and Ensemble's final game as a studio. Each video and written feature will tackle a different aspect of this Halo-themed RTS, from the sweeping storyline to an up-close look at the Halo series' troops and vehicles over the years. Today's installment presents an introductory look at the forces of the human United Nations Space Command and those of the alien Covenant coalition.


Click the image to view our Halo Wars: UNSC vs. Covenant video special (HD available).


In the 15-mission Halo Wars story mode, you'll be in control of the UNSC the entire time, and you'll gain access to various human military vehicles and units along the way. But that doesn't mean the Covenant are left out of the party. In Halo Wars multiplayer and skirmish modes, the alien forces are fully playable. And although they follow the same basic rules as their human counterparts, the Covenant are quite different from the UNSC forces in several key ways.

Each multiplayer and skirmish battle in Halo Wars starts with the construction of a base, and you'll approach that task a bit differently depending on which faction you take into battle. UNSC forces depend on Supply Pads to collect resources – the more of these you have at your disposal, the quicker your support ships can ferry in supplies. In order to produce units, build vehicles and use special weapons like the orbiting Spirit of Fire's Magnetic Accelerator Cannon, you'll want to build Supply Pads quickly and in as many places as possible.

But that's just the beginning. If you want to move beyond Warthogs and marines, you'll need to start building Reactors, which boost your army's tech level. Reactors let you build new unit types, upgrade current ones and beef up your special weapons. Each Reactor you build bumps your tech up a level, maxing out at four. Get to this point, and you'll be able to create the expensive, slow and altogether awesome Vulture super-air unit.


You'll want to build plenty of Reactors and Supply Pads as the UNSC.


If you decide to go the Covenant route, you'll be using Warehouses instead of Supply Pads, but the idea is similar. Build and upgrade these so your compatriots in orbit can ship supplies down to you using gravity lifts. But whereas the UNSC rely on the brute force of Reactors to increase their tech, the Covenant take a more elegant approach.

Being the history-obsessed group that they are, the Covenant must build a Temple to research their sacred Ages. Once you build your Temple, you'll unlock the first round of tech upgrades, and researching the ages of Doubt and Reclamation will open up even more. There are only three Covenant tech levels compared with the UNSC's four, but each Age is expensive, and the Temple is fragile. If it's destroyed, you lose all your tech until it's rebuilt.

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/954/954306p1.html ...

Over the course of three epic games, we've come to know the people, aliens and vehicles of the Halo universe in intimate detail. From Grunts and Gravity Hammers to SPARTAN-IIs and Scorpions, Bungie's expansive Halo universe is chock full of military minutia. And in the eyes of the developers at Ensemble Studios, that wealth of information set the Halo franchise up perfectly for adaptation into the real-time strategy realm, one of the most detail-oriented genres in gaming.

Each day this week, IGN will be taking an exclusive, in-depth look at Halo Wars, the newest entry in the Halo saga and Ensemble's final game as a studio. Each video and written feature will tackle a different aspect of this Halo-themed RTS, from the sweeping storyline to an up-close look at the Halo series' troops and vehicles over the years. Today's installment presents an introductory look at the forces of the human United Nations Space Command and those of the alien Covenant coalition.


Click the image to view our Halo Wars: UNSC vs. Covenant video special (HD available).


In the 15-mission Halo Wars story mode, you'll be in control of the UNSC the entire time, and you'll gain access to various human military vehicles and units along the way. But that doesn't mean the Covenant are left out of the party. In Halo Wars multiplayer and skirmish modes, the alien forces are fully playable. And although they follow the same basic rules as their human counterparts, the Covenant are quite different from the UNSC forces in several key ways.

Each multiplayer and skirmish battle in Halo Wars starts with the construction of a base, and you'll approach that task a bit differently depending on which faction you take into battle. UNSC forces depend on Supply Pads to collect resources – the more of these you have at your disposal, the quicker your support ships can ferry in supplies. In order to produce units, build vehicles and use special weapons like the orbiting Spirit of Fire's Magnetic Accelerator Cannon, you'll want to build Supply Pads quickly and in as many places as possible.

But that's just the beginning. If you want to move beyond Warthogs and marines, you'll need to start building Reactors, which boost your army's tech level. Reactors let you build new unit types, upgrade current ones and beef up your special weapons. Each Reactor you build bumps your tech up a level, maxing out at four. Get to this point, and you'll be able to create the expensive, slow and altogether awesome Vulture super-air unit.


You'll want to build plenty of Reactors and Supply Pads as the UNSC.


If you decide to go the Covenant route, you'll be using Warehouses instead of Supply Pads, but the idea is similar. Build and upgrade these so your compatriots in orbit can ship supplies down to you using gravity lifts. But whereas the UNSC rely on the brute force of Reactors to increase their tech, the Covenant take a more elegant approach.

Being the history-obsessed group that they are, the Covenant must build a Temple to research their sacred Ages. Once you build your Temple, you'll unlock the first round of tech upgrades, and researching the ages of Doubt and Reclamation will open up even more. There are only three Covenant tech levels compared with the UNSC's four, but each Age is expensive, and the Temple is fragile. If it's destroyed, you lose all your tech until it's rebuilt.

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/954/954306p1.html ...

For more than a year, you've been reading about James Grayson's impending war with the Chimera -- a tale that'll fill in the gap between Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2 -- and you've been salivating. You've been dreaming of firing your shotgun on the PSP, infecting the game with your PS3, and taking down conversion centers with your bare hands.

In one month, Resistance: Retribution will be upon us.

Still, that's a long time to wait, and rather than leave you desperately screaming into your pillow for 30 days, IGN's bringing you four behind the scenes videos straight from Sony Bend. That's right, you're going to be getting the inside scoop on everything related to R:R -- the story, the voices, and more. Can't wait? You don't have to. Click the videos below, my friend.

vids here --> http://uk.psp.ign.com/articles/954/954400p1.html ...

Most games are simulations of real-life experiences; glamorous and exciting fantasies of activities that are denied to us in real-life, whether that be running an NFL franchise or blowing off some dude's head.

Now, new experiences are now being offered that force us to consider what is appropriate or otherwise as interactive experiences, even for adults. We can mostly agree that it is okay for Niko Bellic to mow down some innocent, or shoot a cop, or murder a rival. These are all vile crimes that we accept as entertainment for adults. But very few of us believe it is okay for a character to take on the role of that most disgusting criminal, the rapist.

Last week, Amazon pulled from sale a Japanese Hentai game called RapeLay in which the main character indulges in the most horrible and violent sexual crimes. Nobody believes this to be an unreasonable course of action by any retailer. And yet, if Amazon had pulled Grand Theft Auto 4, the hue and cry would have been immense. It looks like we are okay with casual mass-murder, but not okay with rape.

It would be facile to try to make the case that 'if murder is okay then rape should be too'. It is understood in our culture that there really is such a thing as the heroic killer; but never a heroic or like-able rapist. Rape in entertainment is almost always about the victim's response to the crime; never about the criminal's motivation. Rapists in fiction, unlike murderers, are afforded zero sympathy by the writers and by the audience. Rape, also, is not just a disgusting crime; it is also a potent symbol of oppression, a favored tool of oppressors throughout history, and today.

Jokes, an area where all taboos are broken sooner or later, rarely touch on rape. Gags and skits about rape are not unknown, but they are about as culturally acceptable as jokes about race-lynching or the Holocaust.

Games about Rape

But here we are, talking about games about rape. As games become more graphically realistic, and as game-makers become more sophisticated crafters of experience, so the realism of the fantasy is 'improved', and so the reach of fantasy lengthens. The rape game of today is a very different proposition than, say, Custer's Revenge. One was a crude expression of ignorance; the other is a detailed fantasy world allowing for multiple expressions of sexual violence, and delighting in the pain and trauma such activities induce.

There can be no doubt that watching someone die in a videogame is a vastly more realistic experience now than it was 20 years ago, even when you consider the rich and varied 'unrealistic' stylization of killing in games. It follows that simulating a sexual crime now is a far more realistic experience than it ever has been.

Worse, there is a vast market for rape as entertainment. The fantasy of rape is not uncommon; now the market is being offered new and potent tools through which the fantasy can be indulged.

As members of a business that creates everyday fantasies, we must confront our response to the existence of ugly fantasies. I have no doubt that graphically realistic games will be widely available in the near future, that depict all manner of sexual depravity. Do we, as a business, acknowledge any responsibility about this trash? Or do we hope that the public's response will be to divorce one set of fantasies from another, as we divorce pornography from other forms of visual entertainment?

Not only this, but the time must be coming soon when a game-maker is able to tell a story about sexual crime in a sympathetic way; how far are we from a 'game' that attempts to tell the story of a rape victim and which, inevitably, features the crime itself as part of its narrative? (Roberta Williams' 1990s horror game Phantasmagoria featured a rape-scene, and violence against women, but did not dwell on the emotional impact of the crime, so much as the gothic disturbances that had promoted the crime).

When such a product becomes available, will we, as a business, be able to present it as an important work, or will it be engulfed by the monstrous market for violent, interactive pornography?

Unfortunately, a retail ban on games that glorify rape is going to be no more effective in stemming the availability of such products, as a retail ban on violent, sordid pornography has been. We are entering a world where every taste is accommodated by easily downloadable entertainment, and games are just a part of that mix.

But games, unlike books, pictures and videos, involve activity. This, and gaming's relative newness, presents a difficulty. Without encouragement and education, the public at large is not going to be so willing to make a complete disconnection between games about football or petals on the wind, to games about rape, in the way that they have about, say, a Tom Cruise movie and a shameful skin-flick. If we are unable to recognize this problem and deal with it, we will be unable to cope with the difficulties it will present. ...

MCV takes a look at Wii's upcoming New Play Control! range

Nintendo is bringing some reinvented GameCube classics to the Wii over the next few months - and MCV has been granted an exclusive look.

Titles such as Pikmin, Pikmin 2, Mario Power Tennis and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat are guaranteed a warm reception at retail – and to wow Wii consumers.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/33262/Excl...ntendo-preview ...

The Gamecube and Wii emulator for Windows has seen a new beta release, heres the news from the official site:


Download Here --> http://www.dolphin-emu.com/downloads.php ...

The Gamecube and Wii emulator for Windows has seen a new beta release, heres the news from the official site:


Download Here --> http://www.dolphin-emu.com/downloads.php ...

As we've learned over the past 72 hours, Microsoft is clearly changing its approach to the Zune. And connected TV. And just about every other entertainment-related aspect of its business. As it seeks to better connect people via its software and devices (and make "The Social" something worth showing up to), Robbie Bach has explained that the company's new retail focus actually has a lot to do with it. The bigwig recently sat down in front of 150 students in order to take questions and relive some childhood memories, and given that kids always say the darnedest things, it's not shocking to hear that some of the conversation was awkward, if not comical. Point blank, Bach was asked if Windows 7 would be better than Vista, and he expectedly shot back with "Windows 7 is a huge step forward." There's far too much dialogue to cover in this space, but if you're looking for a little insight from the top, feel free to wade through the read links below.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/14/h...-zune-windows/ ...