Modern Warfare 3 is going to sell millions of copies when it hits gaming retailers this November, and those millions of players are going to need quality gaming eyewear.

Or at least that's how gaming glasses maker Gunnar Optiks sees the world, and they're prepared for those lens-craving gamers with the limited edition Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Gaming Eyewear. They're fashionable. They're sexy. They minimize eye fatigue, reduce glare, improve focus, and sharpen detail. Hell, they're amber tinted. You see someone wearing amber tinted glasses, you know shit's about to go down.

They've even got the Modern Warfare 3 logo stamped on them, letting everyone know that you're a video game player that had at least $99 laying around at some point (prescription solutions are available as well, but the price is likely much higher).

Each pair comes with its own carrying case, and a pouch to carry said carrying case. You can place the pouch inside a padded briefcase for even more unpacking fun, though Gunnar doesn't sell an official model yet.

It's all up to you. Are you a serious Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 players, or are you not dedicated enough to make sure your eyes are at their best? When the folks that did buy glasses are wiping the maps with your corpse, don't go running to Gunnar.

Bastion's deep voiced narrator Rucks is a serious guy, full of insight and detailed information to help the Kid rebuild his world. Turns out he's not the only technological maverick in this universe.
In this video Rucks gives an account of his history with Aperture Science founder and lemon enthusiast Cave Johnson. At least their hypothetical history. This isn't the first time Bastion and Portal 2 have crossed paths. Judging by the awesome level of the first two crossovers, let's hope it's not the last.

A Pennsylvania lawyer is blaming an addiction to video games for his shoddy work on a multitude of cases, the York Dispatch reports.

Matthew Eshelman, a 43-year-old now suspended-lawyer, was fired from his firm in 2007 because of multiple cases that he flubbed on because his attention was split between his job and his addiction to video games. Eshelman cites stress at home and from work as the root of the addiction.

Instead of seeking treatment for his addiction, Eshelman opened his own firm, and the situation got worse, he says. Enough of his new clients complained about his failure to do his job that the case was taken to court, where Eshelman was originally sentenced to a five years suspension. However, the court took into account his record before the addiction and lessened the suspension to three years.

At least 17 cases which were mishandled by Eshelman in his private firm were used as evidence against him during his trial. Most involved bankruptcy, divorce, and debt collection. Apparently, Eshelman not only mishandled his clients' money and ignored their angry calls, but also missed multiple deadlines and was caught lying during at least one case filing.

No information has been released regarding the games to which Eshelman is addicted.

Pa. lawyer suspended, blames video-game addiction [York Dispatch]

When a handful of Colonial marines face-off against a never-ending swarm of acid-blooded xenomoprhs, the ending is never pretty, and rarely happy. Here's the debut trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The terror of the original films comes flooding right back as this trailer unfolds, lending creedence to Luke Plunkett's observations from Gamescom last week. This is the original films recreated in video game form, and the sense of terror and panic those movies gave us is present and accounted for. I'm a bit scared.

Thanks to NeoGaf for digging this up!

Valve's yet-to-be released Dota 2 has its first champion. The publisher held a tournament for the still-unreleased game at the Gamsecom video game conference last week. It wrapped up over the weekend. There are spoilers ahead, in case you haven't looked up the winner yet.

The 16 top-ranking Dota teams from around the world battled it out in what Valve is calling "The International", the first of their annual Dota 2 championships. The International had a a group stage, double elimination playoff format, and was spread out over four days of Gamescom.

Ukrainian team Na'Vi beat the Chinese team E-Home in three out of four matches, making the fifth tie-breaker match unnecessary. Videos are available online of the entire match which lasted almost an hour. You can watch the match without commentary, or with it in a multitude of languages.

Valve promises another International competition next year, though the date and location have yet to be determined. Na'Vi took home the pride of first place, as well as a $1 million grand prize. Nvidia also provided hardware prizes for the winning team, as well as all hardware for the championship.

Dota 2 will be available on Steam in beta, and those interested in early registration can sign up to be placed on a waiting list, according to the tournament website. Dota 2 will also be available on PC and Mac later this year.

[Dota 2 International Championship Tournament]

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result," wrote Winston Churchill, in The Story of the Malakand Field Force in 1898.

The thrill of survival in the face of danger is so satisfying and scary that we recreate it in a thousand ways, among them the adrenaline-pumping sensations provided by video games. The cleverest, most sophisticated pastimes we have yet devised give us the means to simulate or even invent new forms of terror and release in the midst of every kind of danger and the threat of an imaginary doom. Beyond this, I would argue, games are designed to produce for us not only the thrill of danger and survival, but the ecstasy of reincarnation. They bring us through death, and to the other side.

I want more LIFE, fucker, is what Roy Batty says to Tyrell in the versions of Blade Runner that I prefer. In this movie, Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, is a biorobotic creature who has run great risks to confront his own inventor, Tyrell; it's the allegory of what a man would say if he could speak to the God who created him. In the movie, an apologetic Tyrell explains that he cannot, alas, offer the furious Batty more life, because of this and that flaw in the design, there are insuperable obstacles, he's tried, he can't. And Batty gets so mad, that, well...

But in the world of games our desire for more life is satisfied in a neverending flood. We can die a million deaths and come back unscathed after each one; just push this button.

(An old-fashioned Super Mario Bros. death | Mongo's Mania)

Games have changed a great deal in this respect; for one thing, GAME OVER used to be a much costlier affair. In the 8-bit days, death meant losing all your character's attributes, all his jewels, coins, weapons and experiences. It was in some ways like real-life death (or maybe the Buddhist version of it.) You were forced to start over absolutely, from nothing. There was a certain Puritanical satisfaction in this hard reality, I must say. You must learn your lesson, the game's underlying message seemed to suggest. There is no free ride for you, not ever. (Human ingenuity being what it is, there were, and are, a number of ways to foil the unpleasant consequences of total 8-bit doom. For example, there's this gang of modern NES enthusiasts I know at Oberlin College who recently kept a single game of Super Mario Brothers 3 going uninterrupted for over a month, and came in the fullness of time to taste the joys of the eighth world. World without end, amen.)

There was, though—there is—no real terror in game-death, or nothing very comparable to the terror we feel at the prospect of complete annihilation. And in the modern game, even less so.

The deadly risks, the need for valor and daring, the hair's-breadth deliverance; these attributes are all still there, but today's games keep you alive for a lot longer, and the cost of death in general has become relatively slight. Your progress may entitle you to reenter the world at a way advanced level; long investment in a role-playing game is rewarded with a richly developed character that may persist for months or years. The underlying logic of newer games is in balancing the thrill of escaping danger and dismemberment with various other complications in the gameplay, with aspects of exploration and literary elements that provide not just the adrenaline spikes of a shooter game, but permit the player to give rein to a range of more complex intellectual pleasures, to curiosity and narrative appetite. Increasingly, the game is more than a question of win/lose; it's more and more like a dream, a totally immersive fantasy.

This desire for complexity is well served by the semi-death in the modern game, where the player retains certain artifacts or experiences from his former life. But there's another way of looking at it, too. The retention of assets from previous incarnations mirrors the way we make and remake ourselves in waking life. My friend Kip Hampton put this well. "In your life, when everything crashes and burns, you aren't rebuilding from scratch. Even though it feels like death when you have to put the world as you knew it aside and reinvent yourself, it's not a true death, because you carry your knowledge and experience along with you."

(A modern rewindable Braid death | Official Braid site)

This ultimately means that there is more and more to learn about the world and about ourselves as we play. For example, there was little opportunity to explore ethical questions in the early games. Nowadays the player may find himself in all sorts of interesting quandaries such as those posed by the designers of Fallout 3, a game which permits players to achieve success through either evil or noble behavior. Kip says that he went through the game a first time, identifying as the hero, and then set out to play a second round from the other side; he found to his surprise that even in play, he couldn't force himself to push the nuclear button and destroy a whole city, with its thousands of imaginary innocents.

Other players, of course, may have no such qualms, or may have them only now and then. And maybe the deliberate, imaginary satisfaction of our craziest, most random, bloodiest and most irrational impulses, too, has its uses.

I am rather afraid of heights, and one evening I was discussing this irrational fear over dinner with our friend Jake, who is this amazingly doughty, worldly, fearless-seeming guy who used to run a safari company in Kenya. And it turned out that he, too, is really scared of heights. So I shared with him my theory as to the reason for the fear, which is as follows. When you are standing on the edge and looking down, there is some part of you, a tiny part, that is wondering what it would feel like to fall; that is actively imagining falling. And then, there is a part of you, just a very tiny little bit, that is absolutely longing to try it. What you really fear is that the rest of you will act on that microscopic impulse, listen to that bitty little maniac in there...

"Stop it!" Jake roared in a panic. "Stop it I am going to climb on this table and jump off it RIGHT NOW."

Maybe that's ultimately just what gaming is for, to give us the thrill without the cost, to satisfy the urge to risk everything, anything, to fall, to drown and burn, to kill and be killed, to explore the dark corners of our own minds, to expiate the sins in our deepest and most frightening part.

Gamescom was invaded by the depths of hell this weekend. But it was mostly a low-key affair.

Diablo III demons of all types appeared at the misty Blizzard stage. The horned creatures mostly just walk around the stage in this video, sometimes menacing at folks in the audience. These fury monsters entertained the crowd in silence, but if you listen hard you might be able to hear the cry of 1,000 cursed souls. Or maybe that's just the Starcraft II fans at the next booth.

As video game arcades across the country blink out like lights on an artificial discount store Christmas tree, commenter Blessrok asks us to imagine the arcade of our dreams in today's short but sweet Speak Up on Kotaku.

I have an interesting question for everyone. Arcades, I love em, you love em, but they're all going out of business. If you were to start an arcade in this day and age what would it be like? How would you attract customers? What types of games would you stock it with? I miss arcades; they were a huge part of my life growing up. I'd love to see an arcade resurgence.

How about all of you?

The iPad 2 is "about half" as powerful as modern games consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, according to graphics genius John Carmack.

In an interview with Tom's Hardware, Id Software's John Carmack—one of the most knowledgeable, influential, and affable graphics programmers of the last twenty years—spoke at great length about the power of mobile hardware (and more) with Tom's Guide.

We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to mobile development. We have more power than you can afford to take advantage of. We can afford to put all of this optimization effort into the consoles because we know that we're going to make tens of millions of dollars by doing all of this, and while there are a few iOS apps that have made money like that, you don't go into making an iOS app expecting to make tens of millions of dollars, and you also wouldn't want to spend the extra year hyper-optimizing things. But they are so powerful already that you don't need to, and that's obviously going to be getting much better still, where you've got the quad-core CPUs and the crazy graphics hardware. There's been incorrect hyperbole about the power of these devices, where people are saying that they have console-level performance. The iPad 2 has about half the performance power, and that's a ballpark estimate. But that does mean that mobile devices coming out, certainly next year, will be flat out more powerful, and they'll probably be powerful enough where you don't even need the hyper-optimizing, that you could do a fairly easy port-over of your technology and assets. The biggest issue is going to be total distribution and storage space.

Interview: id Software's John Carmack [Tom's Guide]

NGP Is Four Times More Powerful Than...

We've established that the Sony's upcoming portable wonder-machine, the NGP, isn't quite as powerful as a PlayStation 3. Further clarifying how much this thing can bench press, Epic's Mark Rein tells us that the device, which can run his company's Unreal graphics engine (think Gears of War, Mass... More »

It's time to strap on your space suit, dual wield your space guns, and take out some space zombies on the moon, as Activision and Treyarch launch the all-zombie Rezurrection map pack for Black Ops on the Xbox 360.

What you see above is perhaps the most bizarre Call of Duty screenshot I've ever posted, complete with colorful anti-undead ordinance, mighty zero gravity jumping, and a lovely view of Mother Earth on the horizon. I like the moon. I like the moon because it's close to us.

But not so close that zombies would really be a threat. Zombies on Earth are bad because the planet is covered with thousands of years' worth of corpses, waiting to rise. The moon does not. They could probably just wait a few days and come back when the zombies have starved to death, if not for their hubris. Damn that hubris.

The Rezurrection map pack features the Moon map and four remastered zombie maps from Call of Duty: World at War, and is available for purchase right now for 1,200 Microsoft points.