Ah, the holidays. That time of year where your wallet is empty and your belly is full. It's a trade-off I'm willing to make. Especially if it means we get our hands on some delightful goodies, some perhaps gaming related!
But what do you get that special PC gaming enthusiast in your life? We here at Kotaku will be chiming in below in Kinja to let you know of our thoughts, but drop in your suggestions below, too! And let's amass the greatest gift suggestion for PC gamers in 2012 ever. Hardware, games, accessories are all welcome.
When Microsoft first announced its Smartglass technology at E3, I figured it would end up like the console's video marketplace, or Facebook application. A neat idea for the guys in marketing, but wholly uninteresting for the average user.
A few weeks in and I'm glad I've been proven wrong.
I've got the app installed on my Windows 8 PC, my iPad and HTC One XL, and while the phone version works well enough, it's on the tablet that the application really shines (the PC version would be great on a laptop, I guess, but on my desktop it's kinda useless).
While Smartglass retains the basic Xbox Live functionality of Microsoft's previous app, like access to messages, achievements and your friends list, it comes into its own when it's acting as an extension of your controller while you're consuming media on your console.
If you see an app, game or program on your tablet's screen, tap it and your console will boot straight to it. No more navigating through the console's laborious dashboard. It can also handle neat little touches like entering codes, giving you a touch-screen keyboard to type on instead of fudging through the console's d-pad option.
As far as aiding your gameplay, options are sadly limited right now. Forza Horizon has some cool map stuff, while Halo 4 gives you the game's Waypoint service on a screen right in front of you. And that's about it.
But the app is free, and seeing as I'm often nursing my tablet while on the couch watching TV (I watch a lot of catch-up TV on my 360) anyway, having an app like this to make things faster and easier is great.
Smartglass is currently available on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Windows 8.
One day, you might boot up a Wii U, see a bunch of Mii avatars gather in the system's main menu/plaza, and you will wonder: Why are these Miis wearing different-colored pants? What to the colors of these pants mean?
Good news. The Wii U's digital instruction manual explains the fashion rules for Mii pantwear. We're showing you that here. If you're short on time, jump 40 seconds in. If you want the context of how these Miis appear in the system, though, just watch from the start.
Based in the UK, mobile game publisher Chillingo has no real reason to celebrate the American holiday of Thanksgiving, but if that celebration means free copies of Totem Runner and Puzzle Craft then I'm willing to play along.
Besides, we're going to need something to do that doesn't involve moving about or looking over our engorged stomachs at the television set once all of the brown food has been stuffed into our eating holes, so five free iOS titles and a $1.99 copy of Cut the Rope Experiments HD should prove incredibly handy.
Now this could very well be an excellent card game, but it's still a card game. Clearly not the action-adventure experience you might think of when you hear the name Uncharted.
For more on this upcoming Vita game—called Uncharted: Fight For Fortune—head on over to the PlayStation Blog.
I've been playing around with Madden 13 for Wii U, which is a Madden game for the Wii U. If you have played a Madden game, you probably know what you are getting (football).
But! There are two big things you should know if you are considering playing this version of EA's massive concussion-simulation series.
1. You can use the Wii U's GamePad to draw routes for receivers, which is really cool because you can make Calvin Johnson do pirouettes in the backfield or tell Roddy White and Julio Jones to run at full speed into one another as hard as they can. It's fun. (Rather than shoot the same video footage again, I'll just point you to the above video, taken at a Wii U preview event. This version of the game is the same one you can buy on store shelves.)
2. Text on the GamePad is blurry and made my eyes hurt if I tried to use it for an extended period of time. The framerate is also not great when you use the GamePad and television simultaneously—everything gets all choppy and difficult to use. This is a problem. It makes this version of Madden 13 tough to recommend, as cool as the GamePad's new features are.
Out with the relatively old and in with the new, that's the theme of this week's list of Facebook games losers and winners, as Zynga's latest 'Ville title grows and its next-to-latest shrinks.
It's almost winter, a time when folks living on drafty farms suddenly wish they were someplace where they never had to leave the warm confines of a centrally-heated building. I'd like to think that's why FarmVille 2 has lost some 735,000 players in this week's chart, while CityVille 2 adds three million and change.
I just feel bad about Static HTML. It sounds like a really good time, surprised it's losing so many players. >.>
Want proof that people want to soar through the cosmos in video games again? The people who've helped Chris Roberts' upcoming space sim Star Citizen smash through more than $5.7 million of crowdfunding pledges are giving doubters all the evidence they might need. That's more than any other video game project has raised via crowdfunding.
$3,821,900 of that comes from direct contributions on the Roberts while Kickstarter accounts for the other $1,910,818. (These numbers are as of 9:30 AM ET.) Now, Roberts has the benefits of being synonymous with Wing Commander, one of gaming's true cultural phenomenon. But he's also making an ambitious new game on a platform that's taken for granted in a genre that's supposed to be dead and forgotten. And when news of Star Citizen first surfaced, it was impossible not to gawp at the huge sum Roberts was stumping for. So the fact that $2 million goal was eclipsed by a margin of more than double is a pretty impressive accomplishment. Star Citizen is about two years away, but now Roberts and crew have the cash to deliver a game that will be worth the wait.
On the biggest shopping day of the year, Nintendo is launching a limited edition Flame Red 3DS bundle, the company announced today. Out November 23, the bundle is priced at US$169.99 and comes with Super Mario Land 3D pre-installed in the system.
An internet cafe webmaster in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, Guangdong, was recently arrested for stealing user information, passwords, and money from the very same internet cafe he was working in. The method of his crime was something that seems like something lifted from the 1999 movie Office Space.
The internet cafe webmaster, surnamed Zhang, and an accomplice stole over $16,000 from some of the regulars at his cafe, as well as the cafe itself. Basically what Zhang did was he created a program where the computer would siphon money from a cafe's account every time a customer recharged their membership (a la Office Space).
Zhang, a technical school graduate, who had only started working in the internet cafe two years ago, suddenly came up with an idea to steal money. Internet cafe employees do not make a lot of money.
For example, whenever someone charged 100 yuan to their account, his program would basically take 50 yuan and put it into an account maintained by Zhang and his cohort. How Zhang got away with it was even more ingenious. Zhang put out a sign in the internet cafe stating that those who recharged their accounts by 50 rmb would get 50 yuan worth of service for free. By moving around the time paid for and the funds of various other customers around, no one noticed there was any money missing—not even the cafe itself. Over the course of a year the cafe started seeing a decline in revenue but it was thought to be caused by a decline in customers.
No one really knew what was going on until Zhang decided to get greedy. A long time patron charged 5 yuan from his net cafe membership card and found that his card was suddenly filled with 101 yuan. Being honest, the patron took it up with cafe staff who then found out that Zhang was messing around with the cafe's account database. Zhang and his accomplice are now in police custody for fraud and await sentencing from the court.
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Ah, the holidays. That time of year where your wallet is empty and your belly is full. It's a trade-off I'm willing to make. Especially if it means we get our hands on some delightful goodies, some perhaps gaming related!
