This could be the start of a trend as well as a potentially lucrative business for a generation of young players with too much skill and too little money. One Fivesquids (an online community where you offer your diverse skills for pay) user going by the name of TobySmith is offering the following:
I will be your personal online bodyguard for 30 minutes in any of the following shooters on Xbox 360: Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty Black Ops, Halo Reach, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. I will be by your side the entire time and will fight for you, keeping enemies away from you, protecting you when you snipe, even SACRIFICING MY LIFE to save yours. This is 1/2 hour of GAME TIME, meaning time taken to join a game won’t be included.
Now, let’s look a this offer carefully. FPS games like the ones Toby is offering his skills for are fun to play. They’re actually arguably the most fun things on earth as they are the best selling entertainment franchises around. But they can also be the most infuriating when you realize that the most valuable aspect of these games, online play, is mostly dominated by a generation of (usually) younger kids who can kill you before you’ve even had time to figure out where you are on the map. There’s a visceral satisfaction at playing these games but one that quickly fades away in a sea of frustration unless you too dedicate immense amounts of time playing. If you don’t, you will likely die and respawn 4 to 5 times a minute. Controllers will be thrown and screams will be had. True story. If you’re older than high-school/college age, the time it takes to be even remotely on an even ground is simply time you don’t have. Someone like TobySmith just might tilt the balance you way enough to make the game worth playing. And make himself some nice cash in the process.
Some people may see a virtual bodyguard service such as this one as a form of cheating. Or if not as egregious as cheating, at least self-defeating; playing these games is all about getting good. But it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes all you want is to get some headshots!
There is precedent to this kind of service. One only has to remember the gold farming factories for MMORPGs like WoW.
Yes, that’d be how much Modern Warfare 3 was managed to sell in 5 days. Considering Activision recently announced they sold $400 million worth of retail sales in the first day alone, it’s clear that MW3 will easily eclipse the billion dollar mark. Not only is this impressive, it’s actually mind boggling. The $775 million figure is more revenue, faster than any other entertainment launch, ever. More than any movie, any album, anything.
To date, Activision’s highly lucrative Call Of Duty franchise has grossed north of a cool $6 billion.
You can add eye-tracking to the ever expanding list of ways in which you can control videogames, after wands, touchscreens, motion detectors and in some cases even brain waves. Tobii is a company that specializes in eye tracking technology and now they’ve put together an honest-to-goodness retro-style 617lbs arcade cabinet that showcases their technology. Powered by Windows 7 Pro 64bit and a Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66GHz processor, EyeAsteroids is a game that uses only one button: “Start”. The Earth stands in the middle of the scree and after a quick calibration, all you have to do is look at an incoming asteroid, pause slightly to shoot and move on to the next target. Avoid shooting power-ups and that’s about it. You can watch the video below to see it in action. Look awesome to us!
Of course, unless you take dives in pools of money daily, this is geared more towards an arcade parlor owner, as each machine costs a reported $15,000. And there will only be 50 made, so get your hands on one quick if you’re interested.
Arcade machines were for a long time the only way that you could get any gaming done. Home consoles wouldn’t conquer the living room properly until the mid 80′s and for a good period from the mid 70′s onwards, Atari was pioneering the genre. Most of you don’t need the brief introduction to the company, but we’ve come across way too many teens lately who’ve shockingly never heard the name. Sadly, they won’t be able to appreciate the beauty in this docking station for the iPad, a collaboration between Discovery Bay Games and Atari. Just dock your generation 1 or 2 iPad and instantly get access to 99 games, among them classics like the original Pong, or Asteroids. Sadly, the games are not included in the $60 price. A 25 game pack is $1, while $15 gets you the whole library.
The market for gaming mice is very healthy these days. Anyone making gaming devices, wishing to garner more than a sliver of purchases from the gaming world at large has to do something pretty amazing, or do something subtle really well. Logitech has tackled the latter with their latest G300 gaming mouse. The G300 doesn’t have an excessive amount of buttons or an obscene amount of DPI resolution or wildly adjustable parts. What it does have is class and the ability to suit both left and right handed players without looking like a cybernetic monstrosity. “Less is more” doesn’t do the G300 justice as they do more with less, better than most competitors do with “way too much”.
The G300 sports 9 programmable buttons, much more than can usually be supported by ambidextrous enabled devices, and doesn’t waste time on excessive programming support. Many of us gamers getting into our golden years don’t have the time or the patience to deal with tweaking to that level. Maybe it does it more justice to call this a mature mouse than an unsophisticated one. It has clean lines and an almost too narrow body that help fingers easily locate all the buttons. The G300 does add an uncharacteristically gamer-ish backlighting which is giving more sway to the Razer style that Logitech normally does. The only other ‘tamed’ feature that might actually be missed is the 1990′s era scroll wheel.
The things that marketing executives come up with sometimes baffles the mind. In the latest case of creativity gone wild, one of Sony’s agencies (or perhaps Sony’s own marketing arm, we’re not sure) has devised a peculiar promotion for the game Uncharted 3. Since the game revolves around a ring, Sony’s put up a website called “Grab The Ring to promote the game and give out prizes, including a $10,000 grand prize. This is how it works: you activate your webcam and extend your arm into a particular zone of the screen, as if holding out your hand to “grab the ring.” You then… hold on to it for as long as you can. The longer you hold it, the more stuff you win, which includes an in-game T-Shirt after 15 seconds up to a mystery weapon after 2 hours. But it’s not just in-game rewards, as each day the person who holds on the longest will win $500. And at the end of the 2 week promotion period, whoever held on the longest gets to take home $10,000. As of this writing, the time to beat is 6:01:36.
Now… here’s a tip, folks. It turns out that you don’t really need bionic muscles. If you read the FAQ, you find out that it’s ok to prop up your arm. As long as you’re sitting in front of that webcam and that it’s actually your own arm (and not a rubber dummy), you can rack up the hours. So go ahead and take a day off work, because $10,000 are up for grabs! The contest ends November 14, 2011.
Much as it’s quickly becoming a great platform for gaming, your iPhone (or any touchscreen-only smartphone) still lacks fundamental controllers that anyone who grew up gaming has become accustomed to. There’s just something intrinsically annoying about having to touch a screen instead of joysticks; gaming isn’t the same without the feedback you get from feeling that button under your thumb. To address this issue, the iControlpad connects via Bluetooth to your iPhone (or any of a long list of devices) and gives you traditional, physical buttons. There’s six face buttons, a D-pad, two analog nubs and two rear buttons. Finally, there’s an accessory that allows you to attach your device to the iControlpad so that you have a single gaming unit.
Of course for this to work, your chose game has to allow control via the iControlpad. Fortunately there are tons of these and to find out if your favorite one is supported, just check out the links at the bottom. It’s $75 and is currently in stock.
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