My worst year on earth may well have been 2005. I had gone from a blood-and-guts newspaper writer to headcount hire sitting in a cubicle with nothing to do for weeks on end. I'd once been the coolest guy at the cocktail party, now I was just another stiff with a badge around his neck in the cafeteria. I'd moved from a log cabin in North Carolina to an apartment underneath the flight path of San Jose's airport. I couldn't be in my apartment without headphones on, pumping white noise into my eardrums. I literally went into therapy.

It took a long time to pull out of that funk. I did it with video games. I had a GameFly subscription. There was a GameStop near my work. Sometimes, there'd be a package waiting for me when I got home, postmarked from Denver, with a game sent to me by Brian Crecente, my comrade on the city desk at my old job.

Some were good—many were bad. But they were the games that got me through the worst year of my life.

***

I'm 38 years old. I come from the era when you bought your porn face-to-face. You just squared right the hell up and did it, convincing yourself that even though you were buying a skin mag on a Friday night, the fact someone else was working the cash register at a porn store meant they were the pathetic and desperate one.

Then the Internet arrived, and as Betamax and VHS took away the great shame of jerking off in a theater, the World Wide Web took away the need to make excuses as you slid cellophane-wrapped sex across the counter at places with names like V.I.P. News and Magazines. So when I reacquainted myself with Playboy: The Mansion yesterday at Video Game Headquarters here in Springfield, Ore., I concealed it among two other purchases and stammered out an excuse as to why I was buying this terrible game—which, not coincidentally, cost the most of all three.

"I, uh, write for Kotaku and this is for an article," I said, and I could feel Totilo's angry stare from a thousand miles away in Los Angeles.

My first trip to Playboy: The Mansion came courtesy of GameFly—in fact, I joked about that in an article I wrote about the service, then three years old but starting to get coast-to-coast attention. GameFly has provided me a ton of things I'm too ashamed to admit to trying. If that website ever gets hacked, I am done for.

I had no illusions about Playboy: The Mansion. It was basically The Sims gone topless. You built a house, had fake conversations and, like real Playboy pretended to care about the articles in the magazine. Only you were publishing it.

I didn't buy this because I wanted to customize the upstairs with bay windows and a $2,000 toilet, furnishings that are available in the game's extraneous decoration library. I wanted to see some nekkid women. Yet even by previous-generation standards the models were extremely plastic-looking. Which I guess is reality, now that I think about it. The game's quick tutorial level gets you to the action fast, taking care of all the articles in your first issue and sending you upstairs to photograph Julie McCullough, Miss February 1986. I immediately changed her into the leather pants outfit.

After that everything revolved around throwing parties. That's how you recruited subjects for your pictorials and articles. Some of the situations were comically bizarre. I introduced myself to a sitting U.S. senator, convinced her to pose nude for the next issue, took the pictures and then we screwed on top of a pinball machine in front of all the guests. Afterward, I bellied up for a drink, tried to hit on the reigning Playmate of the Month, and she kneed me in the balls. Then I turned on the jukebox and breakdanced to smooth jazz.

It had some really janky controls. Going upstairs or downstairs presented you with the strange menu option of "Use Staircase" or "Throw Party". When your model moved from location to location during a shoot you could end up completely lost behind backdrops and props, as I am in this video (which is not topless. But I wouldn't call it SFW, either.) She would often pick the strangest things to pose near, like a potted plant or the john.

I didn't kill much time with Playboy: The Mansion. It was reviewed very poorly and the drudgery of getting from one photoshoot to the next had none of the titilation and suspense of, well, buying a real Playboy and then driving home to see who was in the centerfold. It has one hell of a huge instruction manual—34 pages before you get to the credits. But it was supported post-release, with "downloadable content" before that became a dirty word. Probably because it was free.

The game provided very little in the way of a turn-on. Then again, the medication I was on had the dreaded certain-sexual-side-effect that made parts of my anatomy go into hibernation. I got a bigger tease from visiting the Pole Position in Vice City the preceding autumn. But Playboy: The Mansion distracted me for a good week, and making time go by quickly was about the best I could hope for in May 2005, seven years ago.

The Worst Year of My Life will be an occasional feature of Anger Management. Feel free to share with others the bad games that got you through bad times. Or the good ones.

Godwin's Law states that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." As basically all video game discussion takes place online, let's just cut to the chase and give der fuehrer's take on recent topics of interest to gamers.

I wanted to rage about Blizzard's indefensibly stupid always-on DRM for a singleplayer game, but Kirk hit that subject as it was unfolding, and stayed on it like a german shepherd with its fangs in a mailman's ass. I wanted to curate the best angry review-bomb comments for Diablo III, but Bash beat me to that punch. So let's just go ahead and say it with Hitler, shall we?

Hitler Wants to Play Diablo 3

Adolf's pretty confident he's going to be the first to throw down in Tristram on the day of release. Then a power outage foreshadows everything the United States had to deal with.

May 13, 2012.
By Ezi0AuditoreDiFirenz

Hitler cant play Diablo 3

This was uploaded a day before the shit goes down, but Hitler's given the same news as the rest of us, and responds proportionately. He too bought a Razer gaming keyboard for this.
May 14, 2012.
By Tekisui Ki

Hitler Reacts to Error 37

Here we have it at last. The staff explain to Der Fuhrer that even if he's only playing singleplayer, he still needs for Blizzard's crappy servers to be working.

May 17, 2012.
By HeroicSock

Hitler finds out that the AC 3 Steelbox has no game in it

By far the best part is when the creator just gives up and goes (German nonsense.) (ANGRY german nonsense) during the off-camera rant. And that poor flunky, what the hell, he had to add it to the cart to see the price!

May 15, 2012.
By snoop466

Today I had to move my Xbox 360 console out of the way while I fooled with cables going through the back of my entertainment center. This happens frequently because of how I have to do video capture. As I grabbed the 360 and shifted it, I guess my thumb got within 5 millimeters of that stupid asshole eject button at the top of the machine, if it's standing upright like a tower. The slot came open, the console's Husqvarna fan cranked up, the disc dropped out, I banged my head into the cabinet and I was cursing the heritage of everyone in Redmond, Wash.

I hate that goddamn eject button.

To be clear, I have the Xbox 360 S—the slim design unveiled nearly two years ago at E3 2010. I have no idea who designed the capacitive eject button on this thing but it is more hypersensitive than the mother of the bride at a shotgun wedding. In airports and public restrooms I wave my hand at so-called motion detecting towel dispensers and faucets and soap dispensers like I'm trying to get Stevie Wonder's attention from across a crowded room, and nothing ever happens. But the most minute graze of that stupid tiny-ass dot on the 360 tray powers up the whole thing, threatening the disc inside or the game I am playing.

Why is this a concern? Well, come on. Have you played Skyrim on the Xbox 360? I have a $200 pair of headphones and yet through every cinematic I can hear that goddamn fan buzzing, sounding like it's slashing through the rainforest like a Peruvian coca farmer. The entire unit is rattling off the crappy particle-board wood of my shitty IKEA console. So I do what I do when the refrigerator starts groaning. I move the thing so it rattles less. And then all hell breaks loose.

What idiot designed this tripwire eject button? My God I can't imagine anything so stupidly concieved. Eject is a precipitous act. Eject combined with power-on is even worse. On the old 360, the eject button was an actual button directly left of the tray, or up if the console was standing in tower formation. There was no way to trigger it by accident if you were touching the console for some other reason.

And yes, there is reason to touch your console while it is powered on; as I said earlier the noise issue is one reason. Then there's also the other joy of the Xbox 360 Slim's case design—the stupid-ass USB trapdoor. Now, USB's big bitch is the fact that, because of the wafer in the plug, you never know which is the proper way to insert the plug. I've never done it right the first time. Never. But Microsoft decided to put the USB ports behind that stupid trap door, (carried over from the earlier design) assuring me that I have to use two hands and a fucking flashlight in my mouth to plug in the thumb drive or the joystick charger.

Yeah, yeah, this is a first-world problem. That's why it's in Anger Management. This is where we get to freely piss and moan about everything that bothers us. I'm not going to intellectualize a pet peeve. But the needlessness of that insipid futuristic your-lightest-touch-commands-obedience eject button makes me want to take a baseball bat to a toilet like Joaquin Andujar.

Whatever you're doing with Durango, Microsoft, don't ever do this again.

Hey folks, Something Negative is a rant. Love it or hate it, we all need to blow off steam on Fridays. Let yours out in the comments.

In a week filled with video-game related drama, one of the main stages has starred 38 Studios. The developer, based in Providence, Rhode Island, is evidently out of money, and can't repay their loans. Worse, the loan in question was from the state of Rhode Island, potentially leaving taxpayers footing the bill for incomplete MMO development. So with the situation changing almost hourly, here's everything we know about the saga of 38 Studios.

What's the history of 38 Studios, in a nutshell?

38 Studios, under its original name Green Monster Games, was founded by baseball star Curt Schilling in late 2006. (The name change to 38 Studios, after Schilling's jersey number, came in 2007.) As a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, Schilling was instrumental in their 2004 World Series victory — and immediately became something of a New England local hero for it. He last pitched in 2007 and officially retired from baseball in 2009.

Meanwhile, Schilling had long been a big fan of MMORPGs, even showing up at the occasional sports press conference wearing an EverQuest hat, or even, in 2006, showing up as an NPC in EverQuest II. That he founded a game studio for his second-wave career was not surprising. Green Monster Games started in Maynard, a Boston suburb. Not long after, writer R. A. Salvatore and artist Todd McFarlane came on board to create a new, original fantasy world for the studio's games. The goal from the start was an MMORPG, codenamed Project Copernicus.

In 2009, 38 Studios acquired Baltimore-based developer Big Huge Games, who took on the development of a single-player game in the same fictional universe, which became this year's Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

Okay, how does Rhode Island figure in to all this?

Massachusetts is by most metrics doing very well as a state. The Bay State has an enormous number of tech companies, including a huge number of game development companies in the metro Boston area.

Rhode Island, unfortunately, has not been faring as well as their neighbor to the north. In the economic downturn that has lingered since 2008, the Ocean State has had a persistent problem of high unemployment and the other issues that come with. It's quite common for states to target specific industries for growth through use of incentives and other financial policies, and enticing a modern tech business or two to come south seemed like a good idea at the time.

So, in July, 2010, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (RIEDC) voted 8-1 to approve a $75 million incentive package for 38 Studios that would lure the developer to Providence. In exchange, the state expected to see the creation of at least 450 high-wage, high-skill jobs.

Was it all one big $75 million loan? From the state?

Not quite. The RIEDC is a quasi-public agency that operates with funds allocated by the state legislature, governed by a Board of Directors. State governor Lincoln Chafee is the current chairman of the board.

The RIEDC sold bonds to raise the money. 38 Studios received payments from the state in installments, for meeting certain milestones: successfully relocating their office by a certain date resulted in a $9.4 million payment, successfully hiring a staff of 80 resulted in another $17.2 million, and so on.

To date, 38 Studios has received slightly less than $50 million of the guaranteed funds.

Is this how they paid for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning?

No. Amalur was developed mainly by Big Huge Games. The funds from the RIEDC were always aimed at completing Project Copernicus, the primary project of the Providence studio.

So is the deal that 38 Studios can't pay the loan back?

Pretty much. The studio owed the state a "loan payment guarantee" of $1.125 million on May 1, but blew the payment. They spent the following week in talks with governor Chafee, as reported by local CBS affiliate WPRI on Monday, May 14. Governor Chafee told press he was working to help "keep 38 Studios solvent."

On Wednesday, May 16, the RIEDC held an emergency session with 38 Studios, which Curt Schilling attended. Neither the RIEDC nor the studio announced any clear outcomes from the meeting.

On Thursday, May 17, 38 Studios' chief financial officer hand-delivered a check for the $1.125 million to the RI EDC offices. However, within the hour state officials discovered insufficient funds in the account to draw on, and they returned the check.

On Friday, May 18 (today), 38 Studios successfully delivered the $1.125 million to the RIEDC—$1.025 million from the studio's account, and the remaining $100,000 via a personal check. However, in order to make the payment to the state, the company apparently stiffed their staff. 38 Studios failed to make payroll today, which bodes very ill indeed.

Didn't I read something about Schilling being against government interventions in business?

Yes, yes, you did, and local media in New England are particularly angry about that. Just today, Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory wasted no words in an editorial about the hypocrisy inherent in a "small government," "free markets" millionaire taking $75 million from the state to fund his highly risky pet project.

Is there anything about this that isn't a mess?

Nope. The head of the RIEDC has already resigned, and yesterday Joystiq reported that various executives' profiles kept mysteriously appearing and disappearing from 38 Studios' website. It seems likely that some corporate "reorganization" is in order.

So what happens next?

Well, that's the $75 million question, isn't it?

38 Studios is apparently still hard at work on Project Copernicus. Although until today roughly nothing had ever been seen of the MMO project, studio representatives told Chafee (who then told the press) that launch is slated for June, 2013. 38 Studios released the first footage of the game a few hours later. It is theoretically possible that at this time next year, 38 Studios will be successfully launching their game and will successfully repay the state from the revenue.

Sure, "theoretically." But realistically, what's likely to happen to the RI taxpayers?

MMORPG development is notoriously risky, and it's a pretty crowded market. The signs do not look promising.

Thanks to the way bonds and compound interest work, meanwhile, if 38 Studios ultimately defaults, the state will have to make up for far more than $75 million. WPRI crunched the numbers, and found that the taxpayers of Rhode Island could be on the hook for over $112 million by the year 2020.

38 Studios did put the Kingdoms of Amalur and Project Copernicus intellectual property up to the state as collateral, according to Joystiq, which means that should they default the state might be able to recoup some money by selling the IP to another developer or publisher—if anyone wanted to buy it.

This doesn't sound like it will have a happy ending.

38 Studios may have gotten footage of Project Copernicus out today, but we still know effectively nothing about the game. Either they're keeping everything very tightly under wraps, or they just don't have much to share.

Meanwhile, PR for Boston-area MMORPG developer Turbine (Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online) reached out to us earlier today to announce a large recruiting event in Providence this coming Tuesday. It's clear they hope to snap up staff who are currently in the area working on Project Copernicus.

Given that so far, Turbine always pays their programmers, they may well find a few folks willing to jump ship. And sending developers running back to Massachusetts may be the most sadly ironic outcome of all.

Game of Thrones' Tyrion Lannister may be a small man, but he's got a big heart, huge ambition, and is surprisingly good at killing people, all things considered.

He's also got something in common with Mario, if this goofy image floating around the internet is to be believed—one bite of a magic Mario mushroom and he turns into… Dr. Gregory House. Ha!

I do see the resemblance, though to be honest.... I mean, House is cool and everything, but Tyrion is way cooler. This is something of a mushroom-downgrade.

Dave Bunting (who readers may remember as one of the musicians behind that amazing closing credits anthem for the DS game Aliens: Infestation), decided to put the two images together into one super Gregryon Lannihouse monster that will haunt your dreams forever:

---

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GAH.

The series "13 Ways to Die" just took up the subject of Sniper Elite v2 and, though we've seen exploding testicles and other grisly slow-motion demises already, they weren't presented in the form of a propaganda film from dubya-dubya-eye-eye, with a jaunty ragtime accompaniment. It's a cracking good morale booster for our boys over there. Pip pip.

[h/t forsinain42]

When I run my mouth about international soccer, I sound like a complete and total imbecile. When a Brit does the same thing about basketball, it is 100 percent comedy gold.

Riffing on the American tendency to force catch phrases into sports commentary, CPU vs. CPU comes up with a bathtub full of lines that puts shame to Saturday Night Live's "Sweet Sassy Molassy" skit from 12 years ago. I especially like Chris Martin cleaning up "like a teenager after a heavy Internet session" and Chris Paul's game being compared to a Samuel Beckett play. Calling every basket a "goal" and the San Antonio Spurs "Tottenham" are also nice touches.

NBA 2K12 Video - San Antonio Spurs vs. Los Angeles Clippers (HILARIOUS) [Operation Sports]

Going on about five years now, EA Sports' FIFA and NHL series have been reliably acclaimed, strong-selling titles, a remarkable run for a video game genre and publisher so henpecked by hardcore gamer criticism. Both games have smart, motivated, multinational communities that greatly value evangelizing for their sport in North America and appreciate what these two video games have done in that regard. It's easy, from a distance, to get the sense these are perfect sports video games.

But they've still got to show something new every year, and today's announcement of NHL 13's feature set shows a gameplay focus common to both titles. That shouldn't be surprising, they're both built at the same studio, EA Canada in Burnaby, B.C.

While there's inevitably more to come on both titles, both games' focus on movement and player intelligence show the conundrum a an annual sports title can get into by being too good. Change nothing, and you're taking your customers' $60 for granted. But try to fix that which ain't broken, and you risk tarnishing what's already a good product.

In both cases, EA Sports promises revolutionary new gameplay is coming to these titles, a bold claim that is almost never supported when it comes time for the reviews, even if the features deliver as advertised. NHL now gets "True Performance Skating," described as "a game-changing innovation," that layers physics-driven skating on top of the requisite hundreds of new animations. "True Performance Skating, combined with the Skill Stick, finally gives gamers access to the entire toolset of an NHL player," said the official release today. "True Performance Skating authentically replicates the explosiveness, momentum and top end speed displayed by today's NHL players."

Sounds a lot like "Complete Dribbling" in FIFA 13. "Players change direction quicker, are more explosive accelerating with the ball, and are more effective shielding defenders for longer stretches," said its news release on Tuesday. Combined with the refinement of the "1st Touch Control," FIFA is looking to open up its motion system and make humans more able to contest the ball against bot opponents, as NHL is making human players more nimble against bot defenders.

"Attacking intelligence," is the other phase FIFA intends to deliver. "Players have the ability to analyse space, work harder and smarter to break down the defense, and think two plays ahead," goes the promotional copy. "Plus, players make runs that pull defenders out of position and open passing channels for teammates."

On the other side of the building at Burnaby, NHL 13 is working on something called "Hockey IQ." In that system, "all players are now fully aware of every other player on the ice, resulting in quicker, smarter and more true-to-life decision-making."

These are not the kind of things that can be easily verified. They need huge sample sizes to be observed. E3 gets going in a couple of weeks, and it's absolutely the worst place to evaluate a work-in-progress sports video game. If it's hands-on, the experience is very guided and the game is often one of six that writer has seen that day. And the noise and breakneck pace of an entertainment expo is in no way the same experience as what you will have in front of your TV this September.

So while FIFA and NHL have earned some benefit of the doubt, their claims rate as much skepticism as any other sports video game's, if not more because they're promising game-changing innovation on top of something already accepted as best-in-class. The fact they're both evolving in the same areas leads me to believe these two groups are borrowing each other's technology, and that's fine. But it does raise the question of whether it is more optimal in one game, or if it had to be broadened to serve both.

It's not always about mouse and keyboard versus controllers; sometime the choice to play on PC or console comes down to a question of community. Let's help commenter Daemon_Gildas figure out how to play Borderlands 2 in today's Speak Up on Kotaku.

Okay, fellow gamers, I need some advice!

I've always been fond of playing games with Controllers, as opposed to Keyboard and Mouse, and there's no way you're going to convince me otherwise, so leave that out of the equation.

Should I purchase Borderlands 2 for the Xbox 360 or the PC?

I have a pretty decent gaming rig now, although I would be surprised if it can handle Maxed graphic-setting without some hiccups. The 360, on the other hand, seems to be showing its age a bit these days, and I'm not particularly fond of Xbox Live anymore (ever since the new UI update, the things have just been a mess).

Thing is, I've never actually taken the plunge to play PC games over Consoles. Sure, I play all of Blizzard's games, but it's more in spite of the fact they're on PC, not because of it. As well, I'm horrible when it actually comes to maintaining PC's, not even knowing when or if to download drivers unless I run into a technical issue, and even then I get fed-up with the process pretty quickly.

As well, what's the PC Borderlands community like? I played Borderlands 1 on the 360, and it was a pretty mixed-bag. Is that the same of the PC version, or is it a little more positive?

No, it's not the result of a customizable weapon. It's just 2K community manager Elizabeth Tobey's dachshund, Pancake. Isn't Pancake just adorable?

The real Borderlands 2 collector's edition won't come with a dachshund to sit pretty in your loot chest, but it does come with a bunch of other goodies.

Pancake is famous [dahanese via Reddit]