Popular gaming league selected to officially endorse clothing lineup.

Empire Arcadia, a gaming league composed of exceptional diehard players, recently joined forces with clothing line Jinx to represent its latest clothing lifestyle. Viewers who tuned in to G4TV were treated to a 30-second clip showcasing the spirit of what Empire Arcadia, featuring its founder, “Triforce” and Justin Wong, who currently holds the title as all-time fighting game champion in North America!

The commercial contains a variety of clips derived from recent documentaries on Empire Arcadia including brief glimpses of the league in action, training at its home headquarters while of course, featuring the players sporting Jinx’s apparel consisting of contemporary tee-shirts, hoodies, and other unique selections. The clip ends with the founder’s firm mantra: “We get into it… how do YOU get into it?”

Speaking as a longtime, avid gamer, I am thrilled to see companies extending sponsorships to gaming leagues like Empire Arcadia.  The organization is literally growing by leaps and bounds as it continues to  focus on building teamwork, core values and supporting/hosting community events that impact the lives of gamers of all ages.

Check out the commercial in its entirety below…

Hat Of Sheer Awesomeness!

By now it should be a given you’ll be buying Scribblenauts when it comes out mid-September.  If Scribblenauts doesn’t nab a Game of the Year award or two then something has gone horribly wrong somewhere, and its sheer charm and creativity make it a must-have.  Still, Warner Bros. and 5th Cell seem worried that Maxwell, the main character, is too intimidatingly awesome, and have taken steps to make sure that the player is properly prepared to control him.  Simply put, if you reserve the game you get a rooster hat.

This giant red hat comes exactly as you see in the game, with three red blobs sticking out the front and white ear coverings that, sadly, aren’t actual headphones.  Despite its technological limitations there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do with headwear like this, making it one of the most useful pieces of swag ever.  It’s only available at GameStop and EB Games in the US and Canada, but seeing as there’s one on every street corner that shouldn’t be too much of an impediment.

Contrasting two press conferences.

The point of an E3 press conference is to generate excitement for the upcoming year, and today I got to experience two of them. While I’ll admit I only saw Microsoft’s online while being able to see Electronic Arts’s in person, the quality difference between both the presentation and information was night-and-day. While Microsoft wanted little more than to grab Nintendo’s casual gaming market while furthering the Xbox 360 as a multimedia device, EA wanted to produce killer video games.

It’s not that there wasn’t good info in the Microsoft press conference, it’s just that it was presented in such a way as to completely minimize its impact. Fable II should be an excellent action RPG, but they showed a lengthy full-motion video followed by actual gameplay of walking around talking to NPCs. Yay? Being able to call in friends for multiplayer co-op with almost no fuss at all is going to lead to some amazing kick-ass moments, and none of those moments involves chatting with fake polygon people.

Compare this to EA’s live gameplay demo of Mirror’s Edge, which was a complete run-through of the first level. All I wanted after seeing it played was to run out and buy the game immediately. I want to jump around in an urban playground, taking out cops and not being required to fire a single bullet in the whole game if I didn’t want to. EA’s presentation highlighted the parts of the game that look fun and amazing, creating (at least in me) a desire to get out there and play!

Microsoft wasn’t all bad, though. Both Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 and Galaga Legions looked like a blast, and the track lineup for Rock Band 2 looks incredible. But Lips is another Karaoke Revolution clone, the new dashboard is an iTunes clone, and don’t even get me started on the Avatars. The few minutes of awesome couldn’t even begin to balance the snoozefest of online game shows, or the deep hurting of You’re In the Movies. Hell, the biggest announcement was a partnership with Netflix, and while that’s all very cool and an excellent bonus feature, it’s got nothing to do with gaming.

It’s not like EA didn’t have their duds as well. SimAnimals was so info-lite that I’ve no idea if it’s better than its mediocre video. Gabe Newell’s PowerPoint presentation of Left 4 Dead tried its level best to make a game about co-op zombie killing with adaptive scenarios generated on the fly based on player performance sound boring. There was even a presentation on Nucleus, and online reputation tracker that will also help with microtransactions. But for every person who tried to kill the excitement stone-dead there were three who filled the stage with their presence. I don’t care about basketball in the slightest but Bill Walton was so much fun to watch as he upstaged Peter Moore that it hardly mattered. Even better than that was Will Wright, sounding almost completely unscripted and 100% fascinating. You can’t go wrong with someone who comes up with the unit of measure of 1 God to describe the time it takes to create all of Earth’s unique species. EA has been trying to shed its “Evil Empire” reputation for the last several years, and putting the focus on new and creative games presented by the enthusiastic people behind them is a great way to do it.

Press conferences are tricky things. It’s easy to end up sending the wrong message, no matter how on-target it must have sounded during the planning stages. What I got from both Microsoft and EA was a desire to change into something different, but only in EA’s case was that a good thing. I’m pretty sure Microsoft is going to have some great stuff coming up amidst the irrelevant shelf-filler, but I’m absolutely certain that EA is going to have a very interesting year.

This blog article should be recognized as the sole opinion of the editor and does not necessarily reflect TNL’s official position on the subject.

Or at least its promotional artwork.

The SITE Intelligence Group mine terrorist message boards daily for evidence of terrorist activities, and they find all sorts of interesting things. One of those things was the above image from Fallout 3, which sadly lacks a man, faithful doggy companion by his side, pumping hot lead into the twisted nuclear zombie survivors that make life in the postapocalyptic age such a tricky prospect. Apparently, Al Qaeda are so confused and misguided that they believe a nuclear-ravaged Washington DC doesn’t need anything else, and I’m willing to bet the message board was filled with obnoxiously short posts best summarized as “Dude, awesome! (smiley face)”.

It’s worth noting that, contrary to initial reports, the SITE Intelligence Agency didn’t believe this was a commissioned piece demonstrating “the feasibility of nuclear strikes against the US and Britain.” While terrorists in general can be depressingly effective, they tend to work low-tech and aren’t widely known for their ability to generate high-end computer renderings. Their ability to appropriate images for their own (sometimes bizarrely amusing) ends is, however, somewhat better documented. Just ask Bert.

The future of the feature is obvious, and console gaming needs to embrace it.

It's been a long time since the days of the Doom wad, when obscure tools were required to make maps and only the truly dedicated could create something worth playing.  Level design tools have come a long way since then, and now anyone with creativity and a bit of perseverance can play game designer.  While the distribution methods on the PC side of things have evolved nicely, with the clear leader in the field being Trackmania's incredible community website, consoles…  Hmm…  How to put this kindly…

Level distribution on consoles sucks syphilitic goat wang.  That's the polite, sugar-coated version.

N+ had its online level distribution yanked by Microsoft at the very last second.  Boom Blox lets you share your levels with friends, putting Nintendo in the unique position of being smarter about the ways their online infrastructure is used than Microsoft.  Echochrome is even better, automatically uploading a handful of user-created levels every week or so in addition to allowing users to trade.  Taking things a step farther, Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy will allow players to upload their levels to BlastWorksDepot.com to share with the world, and Little Big Planet will do roughly the same thing a few months afterwards.  Now we're talking!

Tangent-  Part of the reason given for Microsoft pulling the plug on N+ level sharing was fear of rude words and genital-shaped creations polluting the minds of America's youth and upsetting their lawyer-happy parents.  While I have no doubt that there will be more than a few giant penis bosses to download for Blast Works, Nintendo is still showing themselves to be less afraid of the shenanigans their users get up to than its more "mature" competitors. -End Tangent

Creating things can be a lot of fun, although I'll admit I'm not particularly good at it.  There's not much point, though, if you can't share what you've made with other people, and so far it's been very difficult to do on consoles.  The PC world has been dealing with the content for years without any problem, and in the age of memory sticks, USB drives, and web browsers built right into the system it's time for the console world to follow suit.  Every game with a level editor needs to have a web site where users can upload, trade, and rate their levels, from now on.  It's being fixed, slowly, but two games working to build an online community around shared content barely qualifies as a nice start.

This blog article should be recognized as the sole opinion of the editor and does not necessarily reflect GotNext's official position on the subject.