A 15-year-old boy, who called up 911 to ask if his douchebag parents had any right to take away his Xbox, learns the bitter lesson that having your parents feed, clothe and shelter you actually give them rights to take away your toys. That’s not fair!

Don Ivan Punchatz designed the whole packaging and promotional materials for the video game Doom. He died of a heart attack on Oct. 11.

Play Max Damage. A vanisher of hours.

Game designer Chris Tolworthy wondered: “Have you ever sat there reading a book or watching a movie, and thought, ‘I wish I was there, I’d like to talk to those people, I’d like to explore that world.’”

Then he stopped wondering and started making games. That is, a series of adventure games based on classic literature, called Enter The Story.

The first game in the series, Les Misérables: The Game of The Book, has finally been released in January 2009, after nearly a decade in development. Since then, the developer has announced a number of sequels: Dante’s Divine Comedy (second game), Hesiod’s Genesis of the Gods (third game), and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (fourth game). A new story is then scheduled to be added every 3-4 months. Any gamer who has purchased a game will get all previous games in the series for free.

[Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Not yet a game, but we're getting there]

link: “Interview: Chris Tolworthy“

The MMO The Matrix Online pulled the plug last July 31, but before it did, there was a party, an orgy of destruction in which players past and present had come to witness. Says one:

But we were in The Matrix Online for the final hours as well, and we managed to get some great screenshots from the end of the game. There were explosions, lightning bolts, oddly colored skies until finally…. in the last few hours… it became beautiful again. The green skies were rolled back in favor of a blue sky tinged with hints of red. Then, of course, we all got our plugs pulled and ended up smashed into… well… you know.

Before everything crashed, here’s its final moments, in very attractive screenshots!

link: “The Matrix Online: Wake Up“

I had played all the big titles at E3. Private showings of God of War III, Heavy Rain, Alan Wake. But at 4:00 on Thursday, I was wandering around the show floor, wondering what else I had to see. I saw a small little booth for Scribblenauts! in the Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment section. I mean, who goes to that booth? But I remember hearing about it on GAF, and so I decided to check it out.

Best game of E3? Without a fucking doubt. Anyone who says otherwise did not play Scribblenauts. Best game of all time? Jesus Christ, I don’t know, maybe. It’s a game that challenges your IMAGINATION. No other game has ever done that.

So listen to this story. I was in the early levels; I didn’t quite have an idea of how ridiculously in-depth the database was. I was summoning things like ladders, glasses of water, rayguns, what have you. But I reached a level with zombie robots, and the zombie robots kept killing me. Rayguns didn’t work, a torch didn’t work, a pickaxe didn’t work. In my frustration, I wrote in “Time Machine”. And one popped up. What the fuck? A smile dawned on my face. I hopped in, and the option was given to me to either travel to the past or the future. I chose past. When I hopped out, there were fucking dinosaurs walking around. I clicked one, and realized I could RIDE THEM. So I hopped on a fucking DINOSAUR, traveled back to the present, and stomped the shit out of robot zombies. Did you just read that sentence? Did you really? I FUCKING TRAVELED THROUGH TIME AND JUMPED ON A DINOSAUR AND USED IT TO KILL MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT ZOMBIES. This game is unbelievable. Impossible. There’s nothing you can’t do.

Holy fucking shit.

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Left 4 Dead 2, due for release in November, is loaded with the same awesome stuff, and more: new characters, new weapons, new monsters, new ways to die. Read here the exclusive hands-on preview.

An in-depth look into the rollercoaster ride that was the Sony Playstation‘s development.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in June 1991, Sony revealed to the world a videogame console on which it had jointly worked with Nintendo. This SNES with a built-in CD-ROM drive was a project driven by Ken Kutaragi, a Sony executive who had come out of its hardware engineering division. It was to be Nintendo’s route into a brave new world of multimedia, and a way for Kutaragi to show his company how important the videogame industry could be. But the very day after Sony’s announcement, Nintendo declared that it would be breaking its deal with Sony by partnering with Philips instead.

This humiliating turnabout enraged Sony president Norio Ohga, but though it seemed sudden from the outside, problems had been boiling between the two companies for some time. The main issue was an agreement over how revenue would be collected – Sony had proposed to take care of money made from CD sales while Nintendo would collect from cartridge sales, and suggested that royalties would be figured out later. “Nintendo went bananas, frankly, and said that we were stepping on its toll booth and that it was totally unacceptable,” explains Chris Deering, who at the time worked at Sony-owned Columbia Pictures but would go on to head the PlayStation business in Europe. “They just couldn’t agree and it all fell apart.”

But Ohga was dead set on remaining in the game. At the end of a July meeting to plan litigation against Nintendo, he declared defiantly: “We will never withdraw from this business. Keep going.”

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If you’re a really pissed off owner of an Xbox 360 console who recently scratched his head over the E74 error, like me, you should know you’re not alone. Some blog just found out a rising incidence in e74 errors, based on Google Trends data and the readers’ responses. One possible important word: NXE.

As we interpret the data, there’s been a sharp increase in the E74 error since the New Xbox Experience was released in November of last year. The obvious conclusion is that the system is being taxed by NXE in such a way that it’s more prone to E74. Alternately, a more sinister theory is making the rounds on forums that Microsoft has changed the diagnostics of the system to report the Red Ring of Death error as E74. This, however, seems unlikely as many in our poll are still reporting RROD failures post-NXE.

One oddity is that there is no correlation between the dates on which the systems in question were purchased and when they went belly up. The error usually occurred after anywhere from 12 to 36 months of use, with many of you claiming that trouble arose on consoles that have already been repaired for Red Ring of Death. Whatever modifications Microsoft has made to the console to improve its reliability in the past years seems to have no bearing on the likelihood of E74.

Further evidence for a recent E74 increase comes from our (again, unscientific) poll. Of those claiming to be have gotten the error, only 42 percent said that they had received it before the NXE update. To put that another way, 58 percent of the reported E74s have come in the last 12 percent of the console’s life. [Update: Engadget has put together a poll similar to ours, and of the more than 1600 people reporting E74 errors, 59 percent have received them since NXE launched.] Again, not scientific, but do a Twitter search for “E74″ and you’ll find five new reports of the error since yesterday.

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Cunt, the online Flash game, is surprisingly “addictive,” despite/because of its name.

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Some classic online Tetris for the hardcore fans.

A game company called If Software made what many of us just joked about: killing the demons of Doom in Diablo gameplay.

The website says:

DOOM: FoM is an RPG set in the classic world of Doom. You will fight many demons through the UAC facilities on Mars to the depths of Hell.

Download here (a very early release that’s more concept than actual game)

Piss-Screen is a urine-stream-controlled video game. Bad news for the swollen-prostate crowd. The Piss-Screen is a pressure-sensitive inlay for urinals, to play a game with your pee. The game is displayed on a screen above the urinal..

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This lucky dude got to play an Xbox 360 game on what currently is the world’s largest, highest definition 269-inch teevee.

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