Every Single Article Written by N - All 1343
I Hope The Spike Video Game Awards Aren’t Completely Awful. Again.
Do you know what the best part of last year’s VGA Awards show was? No, it wasn’t the exclusive trailers (even the initial unveiling of our beloved Skyrim), or Neil Patrick Harris, or the train wreck that was the entire rest of the show. No, it was Jeff Green’s vitriolic teardown of the show on his blog. Rockets ablaze and hell’s fire abound, he ripped the show to shreds for being a pandering piece of garbage constructed by people who have no idea what video games are or who actually played them. Instead, Spike produced an embarrassing show that no decent gamer would be proud of. So are they changing it up even slightly this year?
Uh, no. Apparently not.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Now Available For Digital Purchase, For Twice The Retail Price!
While we’re talking about how expensive stuff is today, PlayStation 3 owners in Europe-land are now available to purchase the favored Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the price of €49.99 directly from PSN. As in, you can just turn on your console, press a few buttons, maybe whip out a credit card to remember a few crucial numbers, and Eidos Montreal’s cyberpunk adventure will download directly into your house with the only middle man being the PlayStation Network. It sounds like a near miracle to get even a recent blockbuster release via legitimate download (much like Steam on PC), but it comes at a (financial) price: you can find the game for much cheaper at retail, who still seeks to ruin everything when it comes to the future of gaming.
Notch Steps Down As Minecraft King
On his blog today, Minecraft developer Notch (real name: Markus Persson) is stepping down as project lead for the game, two weeks after the game went “1.0”. It’s not hard to blame him, if I’d been working on the same game for years and my reputation was primarily banked on its runaway success, I’d be looking forward to moving on and exploring the galaxy of game ideas I’ve built up in my brain. Of course, now that he’s infused with millions of those Minecraft dollars, he can basically do anything he wants.
Trent Reznor’s ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Soundtrack Unleashed: Free 6-Track Sampler To $300 Deluxe Edition
If you were awake early this morning (or paying particular attention) then you saw Trent Reznor unveil the ‘Dragon Tattoo’ soundtrack that he’s been working on for the past fourteen months with Atticus Ross (who soloed on The Book of Eli soundtrack). Together they’ve been known for their work on Nine Inch Nails, but you may remember them earlier this year on stage at the Kodiak Theater to win Academy Awards for their musical work on ‘The Social Network’. Since this is released by The Null Corporation, Reznor’s private label, there’s going to be plenty of options to acquire their industrial instrumental work. I’ll explain more after the break!
Chrome Eclipses Firefox in Browser Wars, Off To Olympus To Fight Zeus
It took three years, but Google’s super-light Chrome browser finally crept over Firefox’s distant second-placing in the browser market. While the difference between the two is only a fraction of a percent, it bodes pretty well for the search engine company (and Android caretaker) because their share has been on a rocket ride straight to the moon. The story’s a little different State-side, but has Google’s browser taken up a roost as your primary surf engine? Read the rest of this article…
Anyone Else Still Reading Engadget? [UPDATE: EIC Tim Stevens Responds]
![Anyone Else Still Reading Engadget? [UPDATE: EIC Tim Stevens Responds]](/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/EngadgetRead6604-650x365.jpg "Anyone Else Still Reading Engadget? [UPDATE: EIC Tim Stevens Responds]")
It’s now been eight months since the Engadget Exodus, in which a large group of key editors at the tech blog fled the many tentacles of The AOL Way to form The Verge, a sparkling new tech/lifestyle website. While I still visit Engadget on a regular basis, I still can’t help but feel that the soul of the site left when Joshua Topolsky decide to leave. Engadget still claims a much larger audience than The Verge (which turns a month old tomorrow), that it’s under a different editorial direction now doesn’t mean that it can maintain its pace. Who knows, maybe The Verge will only find a niche spot in the blogosphere despite the large, blank checks that SBNation is writing to build it. So what is it about Engadget that makes it feels so normal now?
Facebook Now Allows For Incredibly Long Posts, Feisty Internet Debates Find New Venue
Today our favorite social network announced that it has increased the maximum limit on post lengths to 60,000 characters. For some perspective, that’s about 10,000 words’ worth of prose, a fifth of a NaNoWriMo, and really, a ton of text. The increase seems to have been handed down arbitrarily, but transmitting a ton of text is hardly a chore for Facebook’s hardware, the test will be in our patience in reading text framed in narrow blue reply boxes. But does this increase in the sheer amount of content people can post change the face of Facebook?
Forget 3D, Where’s My Virtual Reality?
Somewhere around the time most of our audience was being born, virtual reality was somehow gaining traction as a favorable man-machine interface. According to movies like Lawnmower Man and Ghost in the Machine and books like Snow Crash and (kinda) Neuromancer, there was a future in which we wore big, bulky headsets with some tracking gloves and interacted with 3D objects and menus or folders or something. 3D gaming would have become an entirely different genre entirely and there would be absolutely no need for large displays in the real world. You could simply live in a storage shed with a power outlet and a broadband connection and exist in an entirely different universe. So why didn’t it take off? And how awesome is it? Let’s cover the pros and cons of this synthetic reality that never became.
TV Commercials Are Full Of Beautiful Women (That Aren’t Celebrities!)
Yes, I seriously dug around the internet for a picture of Zooey Deschanel in a promo for New Girl just to use as a masthead image. Too bad she’s a celebrity and obviously doesn’t qualify under the guidelines of this article! Have you ever stopped a commercial (okay, it’s difficult on live TV, I get it) just so you could see a random pretty girl in an ad that only exists for a fraction of a second? No? Well, I have! And now it’s my time to show off some recent picks from my list of admirable cuties!
TV Shows You Can Stop Watching Right Away
There’s plenty of garbage on television and while new shows hardly need our help being fed into the maw of the Cancellation Monster, we sure do wish a few more would disappear from the airwaves. We tried – we really did try – to give these programs a fair shake, but watching them is a bit like letting a ghost pass through you, a chilling feeling that there’s not much left before their icy demise. Which ones are they? Well, you can watch an episode, but that’s just too painful. Instead, just read our notes after the break!
