Dale Weir's blog

New images have emerged from the upcoming videogame adaptation: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. Starring Smallville's Kristen Kreuk as Chun-Li, it also features Michael Clarke Duncan as Balrog, Neal McDonough as M. Bison, Chris Klein as Charlie Nash, Moon Bloodgood as Detective Maya Sunee, Taboo as Vega among many others.

The Legend of Chun-Li is directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak for 20th Century Fox and is due in theaters on February 27, 2009.

This is ironic and funny to us, but no doubt embarrassing for Nintendo. Here is a company that limits its games by way of complicated friend codes, weak online features and even its hardware like Wii Speak so as to keep the horrible realities of the online world away from its (apparently) fragile and corruptible userbase. But within one of the special press-only Animal Crossing: Wild World (NDS) cards, you find a racial slur... created by one of the people (its unclear who) hired to play the DS game.

A pre-played version of 2005's Animal Crossing: Wild World for DS, sent out to media outlets to encourage connectivity with the recent Animal Crossing release for Wii, contains at least one shocking addition, reports MTV Multiplayer. Importing the saved data from the DS cartridge sent by Nintendo into Animal Crossing: City Folk introduces a host of changes into the game, including one, suddenly no longer E-rated character, Baabara, who now greets players with: "How are you, Ñ---á?"

Ok, that title is a bit off. What it should say is that most videogame addicts aren't actually addicted to games.

That was the finding of Keith Bakker, founder and head of The Smith & Jones Centre in Amsterdam. This clinic, opened in 2006, was the first and only clinic of its kind to treat gaming addicts.

Many will remember when this clinic was first opened. It was reported that there was a flood of inquiries from concerned parents and young adults just coming to grips with the then exploding genre of games: massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

Using traditional abstinence-based treatment models the clinic has had very high success rates treating people who also show other addictive behaviours such as drug taking and excessive drinking.

But Mr Bakker believes that this kind of cross-addiction affects only 10% of gamers. For the other 90% who may spend four hours a day or more playing games such as World of Warcraft, he no longer thinks addiction counselling is the way to treat these people.

"These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies," he says.

"But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers - this is a social problem."

Thanksgiving is fast approaching and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is trying to get the word out about the conditions turkeys are born into, raised and slaughtered in just so they can become that delicious dining table center piece on the last Thursday of November.

In typical PETA fashion, it has co-opted something that mainstream society can relate to (Majesco's Cooking Mama) and made sure its version hemorrhages buckets of blood (blood pours from broken eggs!). And it also makes sure to throw as much chilling information and videos into the mix as "bonuses" to further shock you into vegetarianism.

Whether this will persuade meat eaters to change their ways is debatable—I, for one, kept playing trying to better my score—but whatever your view, Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals Unauthorized PETA Edition is an entertaining diversion.

Bill O'Reilly must have had an intern scouring the Internet for news because the Internet-only version of the Heidi Klum Guitar Hero World Tour commercial was the subject of discussion on last week's The O'Reilly Factor.

The twist is that O'Reilly thinks like most red-blooded American (male) gamers, that Heidi Klum in nothing but a T-Shirt and underwear is very appealing.

But in an effort to not come off as sexist or offend his conservative viewers who might have a problem with the video—and his approval of said video—he asks two pundits to chime in. And in another twist, the conservative female pundits see nothing wrong with the commercial for the most part. 

Anyone with a gaming magazine, website or blog knows the wrath of fanboys. No opinion, no matter how well thought out, matters except their own and damn anyone who thinks otherwise. We have had our share of "negative reaction" from the occasional negative or overly critical review, but thankfully, have never witnessed the pathetic lengths MetaCritic users have stooped to. 

'We contacted (MetaCritic games editor Marc) Doyle for clarification, and he told us that the issue of unbalanced user reviews "hasn't been a systematic problem" on the site. According to Doyle, it's only really popped up recently and mostly for console-exclusive titles. Two other strong examples exist: Resistance 2 has a Metascore of 89 with a user score of 5.3/10, and Little Big Planet has a Metascore of 95 with a user score of 6.1/10.

Doyle says the issue stems from the site's foundation. User reviews were allowed to be entered before a game's release because they "wanted people who had legitimately played the game ahead of its release to post them." Stacked on top of that was a desire for an easy sign-up process. "The founders were really interested in not having people sign up for a really huge registration process just so they can participate on the site," Doyle said, adding, "Obviously that's been exploited."'

The Wii was seen on HBO's True Blood of all places this past weekend. HBO seems to have just taken that product placement money and didn't think twice. No observation, no explanation during its brief appearance. There wasn't even the cursory, "I play videogames because being a 200-year-old vampire I can no longer play golf or sports during the day." None of that. They just made sure the Wii-mote was in view and dropped the "Wii" name a few times.

This has April Fools joke written all over it, but this is October so... what the hell? Senator Barack Obama and Governor Sarah Palin are playable characters in the upcoming DLC for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. I can understand why no Joe Biden, but why no John McCain? It's ironic that the candidate with actual military experience is excluded in favor of the Vice-Presidential nominee with more star power.

This dude is lucky on two fronts. A) He found a woman who would sit through a play session of Chrono Trigger and B) he found a woman that was happy to say yes after said play session. There have to be easier ways to pop the question—hacking a game isn't child's play—but maybe it was worth it for this guy just to hack one of his favorite games. That the young lady said yes was a bonus.