Look at that beard. That beard screams freedom. It also screams “we’re in Afghanistan with zero idea of how to win or how to get out.” The beard is the star of Medal of Honor, EA’s rebooting (please consider “rebooting” to be a noun here) of a franchise that fell off the cliff, oh, after Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. It’s due next year for the usual platforms; more info will be revealed at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, which I wouldn’t watch if my life were on the line. The game, to be set in Afghanistan, is said to be inspired by “real events,” i.e., the sales of Modern Warfare.

It’s a pretty big deal, inasmuch as a video game story can ever be a big deal. The very first Medal of Honor, confusingly also called Medal of Honor, released for the PlayStation in 1998, essentially invented the WWII shooter sub-genre. Call of Duty, I think we can say, was Activision’s attempt to cash in on the success of Medal of Honor. How the tables have turned!

So let’s take a moment to reminisce about playing Operation Market Garden over and over again for the past 11 years.

The question now becomes, how long till we’re tired of the modern setting? I think we’ve all shot our fair share of Nazis in various video games over the years, but how long till we’re bored shooting nondescript “ultra-nationalists,” “separatists,” or any other word but, gasp, “terrorist?”

And does it ever weigh on your conscience as you’re playing these modern games, “Hey, there are guys my age in Afghanistan for real doing this”? It’s one thing to land on the beaches of Normandy over and over again, or recreate some Napoleonic era naval battle, but dodging IEDs from the comfort of your big comfy couch while that same thing is happening for real right at that very moment…

I don’t know, modern war games are just unsettling to me.

But the people have spoken: modern warfare is here to stay. Given EA and Activision’s track records, I fully expect to be see Modern Warfare 7: Waiting Around for Orders All Day Long by 2012.

Rumor no more! Are you standing? Then sit down. Are you sitting down? Then stand up, then sit down again, for there’s huge news to share: Michael Jackson is now confirmed to have written the music for Sonic The Hedgehog 3.

There’s a magazine in France called Black & White. It’s Michael Jackson’s official magazine over there. Check out the cover:

Looks great, right? Right.

In the latest issue, composer Brad Buxer said the following:

B&W: Can you clarify the rumor that Michael had in 1993 composed the music for Sonic 3 video game, for which you have been credited?

Buxer: I’ve never played the game so I do not know what tracks on which Michael and I have worked the developers have kept, but we did compose music for the game. Michael called me at the time for help on this project, and that’s what I did. And if he is not credited for composing the music, it’s because he was not happy with the result sound coming out of the console. At the time, game consoles did not allow an optimal sound reproduction, and Michael found it frustrating. He did not want to be associated with a product that devalued his music…

B&W: One of the surprising things in this soundtrack is that you can hear the chords from Stranger in Moscow, which is supposed to have been composed later…

Buxer: Yes, Michael and I had composed those chords for the game, and it has been used as base for Stranger in Moscow. [...]

So there you have it, Michael Jackson did, in fact, write the music for Sonic The Hedgehog 3, as the rumor had gone for so many years.

Surely this belongs in that “shocking moments” thread on NeoGAF.

via Reddit

Does getting every achievement in World of Warcraft mean you’ve “beaten” the game? I wouldn’t say so, but that seems to be the meme going around, with word that a man in Taiwan has ticked off all but one achievements in the game.

The character, Small Gray (according to Google Translate), has 986 of the game’s achievements. There are 986 achievements in the game, but sharper eyes than mine have noticed that he only got to magic number 986 via a glitch. He’s actually missing one achievement called “BB King,” but he glitched the game to give him one, unearned achievement.

The bottom line is, the guy has 986 out of 986. Good for him.

The beauty of this is that a new patch, Patch 3.3, comes out in the next few days, so he’ll have a whole bunch of new achievements to attain.

More importantly than any of this: achievements are dumb. I don’t care for them, no sir.

Call of Duty Classic, the hip and groovy new name for the ol’ standby that is (was? Tense: who needs it?) Call of Duty 1, is now available on Xbox Live for 1,200 Microsoft Points/SpaceBucks. I don’t know if there’s any improvement over the original version of the game.

Anyway, here’s a video showing off the first 10 minutes of the game, which first came bundled with the omega version of Modern Warfare 2.

I can hear 14-year-olds screaming, “Eeeew, it’s not even modern!”

Fools.

Things are a little bit crazy here today. The biggest problem is that, oh, 40 percent of our posts aren’t posting when we schedule them to. It’s an aggravation that we really all could do without. But moving on, we have a new trailer from Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption. We also have a release date: April 27, 2010 for North America, and three days later everywhere else.

What do I know about Red Dead Redemption? Very little, to be honest. We speculated that East Side Dave would be in the game, but there’s zero evidence to that effect.

There’s almost a comedy about this next story: Australia has banned another video game because it’s too violent. (What is it with Australia and banning violent video games?) The game is CrimeCraft, and it has been refused classification by the ratings board down there.

The game was refused classification because “there is insufficient delineation between the ‘fictional drugs’ available in game and real-world proscribed drugs.”

In other words, the in-game drugs aren’t “fake enough” for the Australian Classification Board.

CrimeCraft is sort of an FPS MMO.

You’ll recall that this same board refused classification for several other games, including Left 4 Dead 2 and Risen.

No, I’ve never heard of Risen.

I wonder, what is it about this board that makes it so ornery? You never hear about the ESRB refusing to rate a game here in the U.S.

I could go on, but Australia is so far from me, you know.

This may be the first holiday season in a long time that Sony is looking forward to. Some 440,000 PS3s were sold last week (compared to 550,000 Nintendo Wiis), and Sony says demand for the system was at “an all-time high.” Good thing for that price cut and re-design, right?

Sony told Gamasutra, which I’m putting here for your convenience:

In today’s economy, consumers are drawn to items that offer the most value for their money, making the PS3 an ideal choice for those who want a comprehensive gaming and entertainment system all in one package.

That’s a fair point. Three-hundred dollars gets you a Blu-ray-playing, online game-ing, Netflix-streaming… you know the deal. The PS3 at $300 is so much more attractive than, what, the $500 Sony wanted for so many years?

Besides, for $500, or a little more, you can build a reasonable gaming PC. It won’t blow you away, no, but a proper PC is so much more versatile than a static consoles.

So now we wait for Microsoft’s numbers.

Did any of y’all take advantage of any Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Awesome Tuesday deals? I saw a few PS3 bundles here and there, but I spent a few dollars on Steam buying Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, and Mirror’s Edge. Steam makes it too easy to spend money!

What is the allure of cheating in video games online? Who takes team deathmatches so seriously that he needs unlimited ammo, no clipping, infinite life, and other assorted nonsense? It’s stupid, and if you try to cheat online you deserve to be banned. So forgive me for not giving a damn about the 2,500 people that were just banned from non-dedicated servers for cheating in Modern Warfare 2.

The news broke on Twitter, as it often does these days, that Steam has slapped the taste out of the mouth of 2,500 miscreants caught using some of those Modern Warfare 2 exploits.

I’d pretend to care, but that would be half-hearted at best.

And wasn’t Infinity Ward’s peer-to-peer model supposed to cut down on cheating?

And while I began this a few words ago wondering why people cheat, well, the answer is irrelevant; people cheat online. It happens. In fact, I ran into some cheaters in Team Fortress 2 at the weekend. Know what I did? Changed servers. Problem solved.

Interrupting your Thanksgiving Day weekend (and my Team Fortress 2 Sniper marathon) with a quick deal that will appeal to many of you (I should hope). You know Steam, right, Valve’s digital distribution deal? There’s a crazy, multi-day Black Friday sale going on right now that includes Left 4 Dead 2 at $37.99 (25 percent off the regular price) and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for $2.49 (75 percent off the regular price). A vanilla bullshit at Starbucks costs more than that.

Keep in mind that this is a multi-day sale. It started yesterday, and will continue for a few more days. My advice is to check the Steam site every morning for the next couple of days lest they sell, I don’t know, Half-Life Source for 75 cents or something.

There’s probably a million and one such deals online. I recommend you keep your eyes on a site like cheapassgamer.com for Black Friday/Cyber Sunday/Cyber Monday deals.

Back to sniping.

Yoichi Wada is the president and CEO of Square Enix. Square Enix is a very big video game developer and publisher, responsible for games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts. Hence, his words mean an awful lot. His latest words: console gaming, as we know it today, has only a few years left in it. The future? It’s all about the network, baby!~

The background: Yoichi Wada gave an interview to MCV, a British publication. Good on him. It’s not exactly a wide-ranging interview, instead strictly focusing on the future of video games. Considering his job title, you’d have to assume he knows what he’s talking about.

The big points: physical media (DVD-based games and the like) has no future, so you’d better be cool with things like Xbox Live, PSN, or Steam; 2005 will be seen as the year that everything changed, when console manufacturers changed their mentality from being primarily hardware/console-based to network-based (Xbox Live and eventually~! PSN); Final Fantasy XIV, which is an MMO, may well be more important for Square Enix than Final Fantasy XIII since it’s part of the “new wave” of online, social games.

OK!

Now that that’s out of that way, well, yeah, Wada is 100 percent correct. Console gaming, as we know it, or even used to know it, will die either with this generation or the next. Think of your Xbox 360 and PS3: they’re basically low-end PCs, especially in the 360’s case. (Though I think it’s safe to say that the PS3 has some life left in it, it’s just going to take someone with a lot of money to actually develop a game from the ground up for the system. I’m thinking God of War III will be that game.) Microsoft is most up-front about this: play with Twitter or Facebook! Watch Zune movies! Have a party with your friends! Oh, also, it can play video games, too!

The Xbox 360 came out four years ago. If it weren’t for Xbox Live, or the constant updates the system has seen via software updates (the NXE, Netflix streaming, Twitter/Facebook, etc.), we’d be clamoring for info about the next Xbox already. When was the last time you read so much as a thinly sourced rumor about the next Xbox?

In other words, we’re going to be with the current generation of consoles for a little while, which speaks to Wadas’ point: from 2005, the network matters just as much, if not more so, than the consoles themselves.

(Incidentally, I’m currently in the process of building a gaming/new main PC to replace a 3-year-old iMac for this very reason: why should I play Team Fortress 2 with, what, 15 other people on Xbox Live (versus the several thousand on the PC version), or play Fallout 3 with no access to mods?. I just bought this monitor, and will be adding components as the weeks go by. Any tips (GPUs, CPUs, motherboards, etc) would be greatly appreciated.)

And then there’s casual games! Not everyone has the time required to play “hardcore” games like Fallout 3 or Dragon Quest, so why not fire up a round of Wii Sports, kill off some steam, then go about your business? Needless to say, game publishers make a nice chunk of change on these “simple” games, being that they cost so little to develop, making them fairly important for the bottom line.

If you want to get crazy, then you can think of things like the OTOY and OnLive and Spawn Labs, which promise, to varying degrees, HD-level games over a broadband connection. How well that actually turns out in the real world, who knows, but you can be guys like Wada are paying attention.

I don’t know, this is all over the place. The gist of it is this: we need to recognize that game consoles are little more than dumbed down, low spec PCs. That’s not an insult, of course, just a statement on their underlying technology. Soon, if not already, it’s going to be less about the number of gigaflops the system can process than wether or not you can play Fun Simulator 2 with 87 of your Twitter friends.

You know what I mean, right? I don’t know, too much apple pie yesterday~!

Flickr

Machinima.com has become quite the growing viral attraction in the last year. They hover around 60 million monthly video views spread across their network, up from just 20 million a year ago, with most of the views coming from their hilarious YouTube channel and the website itself. Machinima’s makes their own content, as well as showcasing the content of private contractors, and has many popular series including Halo’s “Red vs. Blue.”

This announcement comes just before Machinima’s Inside Gaming Awards, which will air on December 15th. Nominations for the Inside Gaming Awards, which include 18 categories such as Game of the Year, Best Weapon, and Best Multiplayer, will open on November 27th.

I’ve never hidden my disdain for Metacritic (and GameRankings, but mostly Metacritic), the Web site that aggregates review scores for video games (and movies and so forth). It’s an insane concept: let’s round up all of these ostensibly separate opinions, throw ‘em in a blender, and come up with a single, solitary number that conveys a game’s entire worth. Balderdash, I say. Review scores aren’t a standardized measurement—a 9.2 over at IGN doesn’t mean a 9.2 at Edge, or an A over at 1UP.

This latest news pleases me. The Cowen Group (one of those fancy research companies whose analysts are always quoted in news stories) has released the details of a study that shows, plainly, that a game’s review score is the least important barometer that people pay attention to when shopping for games. That is to say, whether a game gets an 8 or higher (or lower!) matters very, very little to a person when they’re at Wal-Mart or Best Buy, or cruising the latest releases on Amazon or Steam.

The study found that people pay attention to the following items, in order of most important to least important, when shopping for video games: genre; whether or not it’s a familiar game series; price; word-of-mouth; advertising; publisher reputation; and, lastly, Metacritic score.

Let’s look at this.

• Genre Obviously. If you don’t like FPSs, odds are you’re not going to like Modern Warfare 2 or BioShock or Left 4 Dead 2. If you are a fan of the genre, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll derive some entertainment out of said games.

• Familiarity This helps explain why all the big games for the past few years have all been sequels. If you liked Left 4 Dead 1, you can pretty safely assume you’ll enjoy Left 4 Dead 2. Well, unless you’re one of the boycotters. It’s merely more of the same. New Zelda? Sign me up. Final Fantasy XXXIV? I loved the other thirty-three!

• Price Well, yeah. How many people enjoyed all those Guitar Hero games, but then bailed out when it became a yearly $150+ affair? (Not that you have to re-buy the instruments every year, no, but you play one of these games and you’ve played them all.) Remember when PlayStation games were $40?

• Word-of-mouth You’re at the store with your friends, “Oh, don’t buy that, I heard it sucks.” Or, “Dude, did you buy Game yet? The multi-player is wicked awesome.”

• Advertising I readily admit to being susceptible to advertising. I had zero interest in buying Assassin’s Creed II until I saw that slick Justice trailer on TV. A few days later, and I’m jumping around the rooftops of Renaissance Italy.

• Publisher reputation Remember a few years ago when everyone hated EA? You know, ea_spouse and all that. (By the way, what publisher do we all hate now? My guess is Activision.) I’m going to assume that only the “hardcore” gamers give a turkey what company publishes (or develops) a video game. Why haven’t I bought Call of Duty: World at War? Because it was developed by “the other guys,” Treyarch, and not good ol’ Infinity Ward.

• Score Who honestly walks through a Best Buy and says, “You know, I was going to buy Game 2: The Sequel, but IGN (or whomever) only gave it a 7.3”? The number itself is meaningless, and if you’re even remotely interested in a game you’d do well read every single review you can stomach. And by read the review I really do mean sit there and absorb what the writer is trying to convey; don’t just skim it and say, “eh, looks neat.”

In conclusion, review scores are dumb; aggregating review scores is monumentally dumb.

You’ll find that opinions vary with respect to Tekken 6’s netcode. I didn’t run into too many problems, but others certainly have. What are you going to do, right? Come November 26, you can, I don’t know, apply the update that will hopefully clear up some of those glitches. So that’s what you can do.

Namco (I’m not typing Namco Bandai more than once) will push the update in two days, and it will do a number of things to help alleviate any online issues you run into. For one, the game will better optimize your opponents based on location, ping, etc. to hopefully find a better match. The strength signal bars have been tweaked, making them a little more accurate. Oh, and “The fight data will be optimized in order to reduce the bandwidth load on the host’s console.”

So it sounds like it may help y’all.

You know what may also help, fellow Xbox 360 players? Smashing the controller against the wall, then buying either one of those MadCatz controllers or a full-on arcade stick. The standard Xbox 360 controller is rubbish at the game.

In other Tekken 6 news, the PSP version of the game is out today. I know nothing about it, but I can’t imagine the PSP being too wieldy when playing a fast paced fighting game.

At least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook this past week, which I guess means the feature is a bit of a success. (You’ll recall that Microsoft launched Facebook and Twitter to so much enthusiasm last week.) Mysteriously, Microsoft didn’t reveal the number of people who logged into Twitter. Is this the end of Twitter?

No, of course not. Maybe it just means that Xbox Live users don’t see any value in using Twitter when there’s no way to click all those bit.ly links?

In related “social” news, Microsoft says that around half a million Last.fm account were created with the launch of Xbox Live-Last.fm compatibility.

Needless to say, these applications weren’t a total waste of time on Microsoft’s part. I’m still not convinced of the value of using Facebook or Twitter from the couch—don’t you have a Facebook or Twitter application on your phone in your pocket?—but I’m decidedly non-plussed by all these newfound “social” applications. It doesn’t help that, generally speaking, I’m an anti-social jerk :-)

Now, there’s a larger point to be made here about whether or not we actually want our video game consoles to become little more than low spec PCs. If you had a top-of-the-line PC, why would you want to buy the PS3 version of, say, Fallout 3 when you can grab the PC version, what with all those mods and whatnot?

Maybe I should save my beans and buy a gaming-worthy PC in the next year, and actually play games like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Fallout 3, and Call of Duty the way they were meant to be played? I’m very much considering it. Too bad I know *nothing* about what makes a good gaming PC these days.

World of Warcraft turns 5-years-old today. Back on November 23, 2004, a year before the current generation of video game systems even began (with the launch of the Xbox 360), Blizzard released the massively multi-player online game at a time when massively multi-player online games were still largely the haunt of hardcore gamers, people with fast Internet connections who were willing to pay $15 per month for access to a game that they already bought. Who can forget the message board threads: Why do I have to pay for a game that I already paid for at the store? How do you beat the game? What happens if and when I stop playing?

You won’t stop playing. Five years in, Blizzard has 11.5 million (as of December, 2008) subscribers all over the world. (Note: Not every region of the world has a pay-per-month regime. You pay by the hour in China, for example.) In these five years, the game has gone from plucky upstart, going up against other, well-established MMOGs, to the undisputed number one such game. Now, that may not necessarily be a good thing, but it’s hard to see someone knocking World of Warcraft off its perch. Well, someone other than World of Warcraft II.

I’m a veteran of vanilla WoW, but only just. I bought the game in September, 2006; The Burning Crusade came out a few months later. I bought the game because I was roped into some consulting session for a rather big company. “Hey, you’re young. Play WoW and Second Life and tell us how we can better reach young people through them.”

I don’t know if the company got what it wanted (surely it didn’t!), but it certainly set me on my current path of, oh, you know, playing the game for at least three to four hours per night on most nights of the week.

It’s pretty funny. When the game launched in 2004, I was a freshman in college, and one of my two roommates was all about the game. We’re talking stay-up-until-4am-every-night-of-the-week-to-play-it. I had no idea what the game was about, but I distinctly remember the day he walked into the dorm room with a box from Amazon: “Gentlemen, it’s here.” (Actually, knowing the kid, it was probably more along the lines of, “Yes, it’s here! Fucking A~!” Memory fades, I’m afraid.) I’m like, so what? Can’t you see we’re playing Halo 2? (Halo 2 was very big that year. I was a good sniper. It was the last time I played a multi-player game with any conviction.) I’d say we teased my roommate about his “addiction,” but I had no idea what the game was about. I had never played any of the other Warcraft games, nor Diablo. Again, I was not, and still am not, a PC gamer, so the entire Blizzard catalogue played no role in my life.

The point is, the game’s launch came and went, but my only experience with it was waking up at 3:00AM because my roommate yelled, “Yes! I can buy a mount now!”

Then September of 2006 rolls around, and I’m forced to buy the game for that aforementioned consulting session. I still had no interest in the game, and was only creating an account as part of my job. (Well, “job” only in the loosest sense of the word, getting paid to try to help a huge company better tap into the “young people” market.) So walk back to my room from the local Best Buy (I wasn’t boycotting it back then. You can listen to my ordeal as told on the podcast here.), and install it on my iMac. I create an account, and create my first character. It was an Undead Warrior named Rocktober—Undead because I thought they looked (and still look) the best, and Warrior because, well, Warrior is the noob class, right? “Warrior? I bet you get a sword and stuff. Count me in.”

I still have that character to this day.

I then set aside Rocktober, and created a Night Elf Warrior on a different server so I could play with a friend of mine. (I had casually mentioned that I was playing WoW now, and he flipped out. “Oh, dude, join my server and I’ll hook you up.”) I named the Nelf Warrior Zardoz, in honor of that godawful Sean Connery moviethat I had just seen in a movie class I was forced to take. (We all needed an “art” class, so to speak, and watching and critiquing movies was considered “art.” Fair enough.) I was able to get Zardoz all the way up to level 58—it was harder to level in those days—before growing bored of the game. The Burning Crusade was installed somewhere around this time.

A year went by without me really playing the game. Note that I was still paying for the game, just not playing it. I don’t know, I guess I never bothered to cancel my subscription. Maybe it was too much of a hassle, or maybe I didn’t notice such a small amount of money leaving my bank account every month. The point is, I’ve been paying my $15 per month non-stop since September, 2006.

I’m probably never going to stop paying, either.

So here’s to another five years (well, three years in my case) of unpredictable PUGs, guilds joined but not really participated in, Auctioneer-assisted money-making, and lost sleep. So much lost sleep.

You’ll recall that Microsoft recently banned a bunch of people from Xbox Live because they had modded their 360s. Modding is against the rules, don’t you know? Microsoft told VentureBeat not to believe the numbers being thrown around—the number most relayed is 1 million banned 360s—because it never releases numbers to anyone.

Again, the larger debate is: should you be allowed to mod your console? I think so, but that’s probably because my opinion on every single issue is, “So long as you don’t bother me in any direct way, do what you want.” You bought the hardware (the 360 itself) so if you want to whip out a soldering iron or flash its DVD drive with a custom firmware, be my guest.

At the same time, Microsoft has the right to say, “Look, Xbox Live is a service that we’re trying to keep as clean as possible. If you’re playing a game on a modded console, it’s much harder for us to ensure that the service is as clean as possible.” (Where “clean” means free from cheating, hacks, etc.) Plus, why should someone be able to play a pirated copy of Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live when everyone else paid for it? It’s not “fair,” if you will.

That a law firm is possibly looking to start a class-action lawsuit over the bans is sorta silly. The law firm may have something when it comes to Microsoft owing some of these people money for the remainder of their Xbox Live contract, but I don’t know what the EULA or TOS for Xbox Live says about service termination. If you’re banned for being a jerk, are you entitled to any money left over on the contract?

The moral of this particular story is, no, Microsoft didn’t ban “1 million” Xbox 360s.

A surefire way to avoid being banned? Don’t use your modded Xbox 360 on Xbox Live.

This is the worst time to be a gamer. Yeah, it’s great that so many good games have come out recently (take your pick from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed II, Left 4 Dead 2, etc.), but it’s pretty difficult to shell out $60+ every other day in the span of two weeks.

This list may help. It’s a bunch of older Xbox 360 games for up to 75 percent off the regular price. Granted, I don’t exactly see Modern Warfare 2 or Left 4 Dead 2, but I do spy veritable hits like GTA IV and Guitar Hero World Tour and Lego Batman and TNA Impact.

I’ve listed TNA Impact primarily as a joke, because as we all know, nobody watches TNA. It’s a shame since so many of those wrestlers (Kurt Angle, AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Christopher Daniels, Nigel McGuinness, etc.) are pretty darn good.

Is saying “I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player” the new “I read Playboy for the articles”? It might as well be. But get this: I play Modern Warfare 2 for the single-player. I stink at multi-player, so why even bother? That said, I know that many of you bought the game merely to play the multi-player, and thus have no idea what the single-player’s story is about. Thank God for this video, then.

It’s a 60-second recap of the game’s single-player storyline, such as it is.

Red Dawn was more plausible, yes.

There really is something to be said about being the first to the dance. I’m pretty sure we can all agree that Steam was the first big digital distribution service for video games, and I also think we can all agree that it was something of a success. But how big a success? Stardock, which owns the Impulse distribution service (and published Sins of a Solar Empire), believes that Steam enjoys 70 percent market share of the digital distribution business.

It sounds impressive, and it is, but it’s important to recognize that digital distribution is still in its infancy. In other words, Valve has a 70 percent hold on a not-that-big-yet business.

Not that digital distribution isn’t the future. I rated the Sony PSP Go so highly partially because it represents a necessary step forward in the way in which we buy games. (I tell you what I’m not looking forward to today: walking into a GameStop, getting into a “conversation” with the guy there, when all I want is a copy of Assassin’s Creed II. I still haven’t forgiven Best Buy for violating my Civil Rights, so I’m not going giving the ol’ blue shirts any of my business. Unless there’s some indie video game store in Manhattan that I’m not aware of, it’s going to have to be GameStop. Shudder.) That Sony decided to nearly ruin it by only including an 802.11 chipset is another matter entirely.

Xbox Live has shown that you can distribute full, current-gen games to a console crowd, and PSN and Virtual Console prove that people are cool with the idea of buying and downloading older games to local storage. The days when video game = shiny disc are numbered.

I’m only now realizing there wasn’t really a point to these past few words, just reiterating, for the 100th time, that I’m fully prepared for an all-digital future.

Sharper eyes than mine have spotted this little easter egg in the Google Chrome OS Demo video that Google published yesterday. (Or were you completely off the grid yesterday, and didn’t know that Google hosted members of the media to demonstrate Google Chrome OS?) Big Boss? An e-mail from Yoji, asking you to be on time today? Snaaaaake!

So yeah, apparently someone on the development team is a big Metal Gear fan. (Yoji Shinkawa is a character designer at Konami, and Big Boss hopefully needs no explanation.) Google instantly wins, like, 10 Awesome Points for the references.

And that’s all there is to say.