Dale Weir's blog

You're an X-ray Technician, you're bored and you love gaming... what do you do? You scan all of your gaming equipment from the NES Zapper Light Gun to the PlayStation 3 (80GB), of course!

We all know we'd do it too if we could. Growing up I had an intense urge to take apart my Atari 2600, NES, SNES and N64, but about all I could muster was the courage to open up my SNES controller. And that was largely because it was not working right.

Reinier van der Ende, the X-ray Technician, did what we wished we could but also managed to spare our warranties while giving us something really cool to look at.

Over one decade after announcing Duke Nukem Forever, 3D Realms has to close its doors taking the industry's most famous piece of vaporware with it.

In a prepared statement, Take-Two VP of communications Alan Lewis said:

"We can confirm that our relationship with 3D Realms for Duke Nukem Forever was a publishing arrangement, which did not include ongoing funds for development of the title. In addition, Take-Two continues to retain the publishing rights to Duke Nukem Forever."

A representative for Deep Silver and Apogee Software said they "are not affected by the situation at 3D Realms. Development on the Duke Nukem Trilogy is continuing as planned."

Duke Nukem Forever was not the only project that 3D Realms had worked on, but it was probably the one that the developer was most known for.

Given these tough economic times, the performance of titles like Prey and ongoing development costs, 3D Realms finally had to lay off its entire staff.

After the launch of Sega's ridiculous Sonic and the Black Knight, it is fitting that I came across this video (posted on Sega's PR blog no less). It is a speed run done in Sonic Unleashed for the PlayStation 3, by an unknown Japanese gamer who displayed a level of skill and reflexes in the game that definitely deserved recording and saving for prosperity.

In the level, the unknown player puts Sonic through his paces at breakneck speed. From the word "GO!", he is a blue blur and more amazingly, the world around him is nothing but a beige blur. Okay it is just a speed run, but when you watch enough of them starring Sonic, and especially those taken from the new Sonic titles, if you're like me, you get an intense feeling of nostalgia.

Given enough time (and interest?) there is a developer out there that might be able to do something impressive with the Dead Rising franchise on the Wii. Apparently that developer wasn't contracted by Capcom to develop this "port".

When will Final Fantasy XIII ever be released?

It's not a good sign when a 2008 release date, slips to 2009 and now 2010. Making things worse is the exclusivity deal Square-Enix struck with Microsoft—FFXIII would be released simultaneously on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 outside of Japan—Square-Enix has announced that development wouldn't even begin on the 360 version until the PS3 version was finished. How much does that add to development time?

2010 sounds optimistic.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. Someone or someones decided he or she or they didn't like playing Mirror's Edge in the first-person and hacked the game (PC version) so that it could be played from an over-the-shoulder viewpoint. That's all well and good as long additional steps were taken to fix any side-effects of the switch. But none were. Instead, we see a character model that was never made to be seen during normal gameplay instances and as a result looks pretty laughable.

What a way to start the new year.

1UP.com was a very popular gaming website, full of veteran and new gaming journalists and home to my favorite audio podcasts and video podcasts. It was one of the few online gaming sites that managed to flourish after the dot com debacle of the 1990s—some will remember that it was born from much of the remains of Gamers.com. It was under the umbrella of magazine publisher Ziff-Davis, a publisher that at one time published almost every magazine that I bothered to read.

But 1UP.com wasn't making money. Or least it wasn't making the kind of money that Ziff-Davis needed to keep the network and all of its sister websites up and running. Rumors had been swirling for years that Ziff-Davis was in financial trouble, but nothing ever came of them. In fact, many just believed it was the print magazines that would take the fall. And they did, but as we now know, the online outlets would not be spared.

Word dropped yesterday, but the aftershocks are still resonating in game journalism circles. And it is interesting to watch because though from competing outlets, many of the 1UP Network staff had close relationships, both working and personal, with other writers. While reading the coverage from these writers, you can't help but feel their pain and anger while writing about their peers and friends who are now out of work.

Ok, we're a little late, but technically you can wish someone a happy New Year until March of that year. So on behalf of GameCritics.com, have a Happy New Year. Hopefully, 2009 will be an improvement on 2008!

A guy in a go-kart, on a highway, swerving through traffic, tossing banana peels in front of cars in adjacent lanes... You'd have be nuts to attempt this... or you could be none other than everyone's favorite French practical joker, Rémi Gaillard—I don't know who he is either, but he does a mean Mario impersonation.

Adult Swim goes back to the original PlayStation and shows us why there was no sequel to PaRappa the Rapper 2.