If you’re one of the three people that listened to the last Radio 404 show, prepare to be mildly entertained once more, there should be another show up in the next week or two.

You have been warned.

There is now an album of pirate hip hop out. By pirate I of course mean of the swashbuklin sort. You can preview the tracks or download / buy the album from CD Baby over here.

Avast ye landlubbers!

P.S: Soundtracks are an essential part of life, something SpiKe will discuss in his hotly anticipiated Quake Warts / TF2 review…

It’s been a damned good year for games financially, selling large numbers all over the place with the big jump being largely due to MS and the Halo 3 franchise.

The hardware sales aren’t even comparable and I’m guessing Sony is still loosing money hand over fist on the PS3, looking at its pretty woeful numbers. They’ll be a Christmas pickup for sure, but enough to bump it into second behind MS? Doubtful.

You can read the numbers over at CNN here.

Edit: A thorough market analysis and  cost benefit report of the respective publishers campaigns is inherent in Spike’s upcoming review of Quakewars. He tells me he’s formulated a new macro economic module from the data he’s got on users versus sales. Can’t wait to read it.

This article over at the BBC looks at next gen gaming.

Thing is, it actually just looks at marketing Assasins Creed for the Xbox 360, which is no bad thing but the fabric of the argument i.e. What it takes to be next gen isn’t truly explored. It does give us some more info on a game I want so bad it’s a kind of lust though. So read it you filth peddlars.

Of course, the idea of next gen will be fully explored in Spike’s upcoming review of Quake Wars, which he assures me is well underway…

The Government is about to launch a review into games.

The idea is to identify any negative affects they have on children and better ways top regulate the industry. I’m not exactly thrilled by yet another ‘psychologists review’ of gaming, sponsored by the government but I’m hoping the findings are balanced. ELSPA have got in there early and are working with the review, as are some senior developers, here’s hoping it balances out. You can read more here.

Of course all of these social ills will be blown away by the compelling argument for sohial cohesion through gaming put forth in Spikes upcoming Quake Wars review…

We should totally be going to the World Cyber games finals. They’re being held in Germany in 08, so no excuses my European brethren. The UK did well this year too here, have a read.

All of this while we await SpiKes reviews of Quake Wars. He tells me it’s coming…

Seriously this is no joke.

The US congress is debating what to do about the standard of lyrics in Hip Hop, as can be seen here.

Master P and David Banner are squaring off in the mother of all battles, one for clean lyrics the other for diiiirty words. The battle is on, each one gets 60 seconds and congress is the judge. Scream fo who ya like!

Then it would start with a fireball being sited screaming across the sky near south America.

When that fireball smashed into the earth near Peru it would leave a crater almost a hundred feet wide by twenty feet deep.

Locals would feel ill upon entering the crash site and devlope bizarre symptoms including breathing difficulties and other maladies. Local cattle would likely fall sick and become irratable or die.

Authorities would rush to the site to try and ascertain what was happening around the impact site, and that would just be the beginning…

Kind of like exactly whats happened in Caracas today then.

Bastards.

I refer of course to EA and the deathly remnants of Westwood that created C&C3. It’s a damned good game to be sure but the difficulty curve is more of a cliff than a slope.

I’ve been steadily munching my way through the GDI campaign as an appetiser and I have come up against one of those ‘this mission is so annoying’ missions. Not as annoying as the ‘baby level’ on Max Payne, or even one of those ‘Run one man into the middle of fifty snipers and get a box then come out alive’, no this is a different form of annoying.

Essentially I have a base which is being severely jacked. I ave to defend this base until reinforcements arrive, which I duly do. Then we discover that the reinforcements are stuck and need assistance to get through, so I have to send much needed reinforcements from my belegaured HQ far into the ether to recuse the guys meant to be rescuing me.

It gets better.

Upon rescuing these guys I then have to drive them past another enemy base hidden in the south corner, just to get them near my own, original fucked up joint. So I duly do this, not only do I do it but I manage to all but destroy the hidden base in the journey. By this time however my original HQ is totally destroyed, it has been overrun by massive swarms of tanks and bombers.

Fuck.

Therefore I duly try and unpack my new base literally anywhere else, but the game insists I have to move it back to the original scorched ground that was base number one. So I do this, the game then lets me repack the base and promptly move back to where I wanted.
Obligingly the bad guys follow in their thousands against the small handful of hand tropps I’ve got left.

I use the special ability of one of my remaining vehicles and mine their entire route. Blowing the hell out of them.

I barely scratch a third of them before they’re over the bridge and on the doorstep of my new base.

So I load and repeat and this time sucker them further and further into the map, using my guys as a lure and hitting them form fortified positions before moving. This time I fare better. I kill about two thirds of them.

Just when I’ve got this cycle down and I’m fairly sure I can trade every one of my mens lives heavily for at least one of their tanks, I look down the map.

They’ve circles another entire army around my flank and raped my base using this second attack force.

I’ve played through the level for about 9 hours straight now, beginning to end, mid point loads to later saves and it really makes no difference. I just cant win it. I wouldnt mind if the whole game thus far had been a sloping path of difficulty, this time however I’m cruising, then WHAM.

GG playtesters, this one just went from challening to annoying. At about hour 12 I will come to your houses and kill you.

The internet exists is for really shite comic books to get published. If you go to this site you’ll see a whole host of them.

I mean, check out the game genies 9/11 strip. These guys can’t even get bad taste right.