General Gaming

Playing a 3DS with a Playstation Controller?

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:24:36 +0000

Modding at it's best, a japanese gamer plays Monster Hunter with a modded PS controller and 3DS.

See the youtube page for more info.

Teen Stabs Mother

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:25:53 +0000

On Feb. 19 in Japan's Aichi Prefecture, police arrested a fourteen year-old boy. Earlier that evening, he apparently stabbed his mother with a sashimi knife. The cause? A dispute over a video game purchase.

At 5:35pm, the teen stabbed his mother in the back one time, reported Yomiuri News. The mother, age 50, suffered serious injury, but was able to call for help right after the stabbing. Police arrived soon thereafter and took the child into custody.

"Since she got angry at me for buying a video game without permission and confiscated it," the teenager said, "I got pissed." And then you stabbed your mom.

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Ehhhh, I still stick to saying that video games had nothing to do with this.

Game Consoles Makers Make Next to Nothing

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:23:33 +0000

Taiwanese company Foxconn, the maker of most of the worlds electronics and our favorite gaming consoles, announced that it had raised the wages of junior level factory workers in Shenzhen from 1,800RMB (US$290) to 2,200RMB ($349) a month.

The move to raise wages comes at no surprise as Foxconn and many of Apple's suppliers in China have come under scrutiny over employee treatment practices. Foxconn itself has been under the public eye since a series of suicides by young workers during the summer of 2010.

Reuters reported that this is the third time that Foxconn has reportedly raised its base wages for junior level factory workers since 2010. According to Reuters, the pay at Foxconn three years ago was only 900RMB ($142).
"As a top manufacturing company in China, the basic salary of junior workers in all of Foxconn's China factories is already far higher than the minimum wage set by all local governments," the statement said.

"We will provide more training opportunities and learning time, and will continuously enhance technology, efficiency and salary, so as to set a good example for the Chinese manufacturing industry."

While at the surface Foxconn only looks to be raising wages because of the recent reports by US media on Foxconn's business practices, another less known reasoning behind the wage is recruitment and the flow of workers. Many Foxconn factory workers are not lifers.

According to the China Daily, back in 2010 the monthly turn over rate for ground level factory employees at Foxconn's Shenzhen plant is at 5%. While 5% looks like a small number, Foxconn's Shenzhen plant employs 420,000 people in Shenzhen, that is almost the size some small US cities (for those of you who can't do the math, that's 21,000 people that leave Foxconn a month).
Despite the huge turnover rates, suicides, and all around bad press, Foxconn Shenzhen still has millions of migrant workers clamoring to work for the company. That isn't the case for its plants that are moving inland. According to China Daily again, the move for having factories move inland is because it has become too expensive to continue in Shenzhen. The pay rate at Foxconn Hebei (in north China) is only 1,080RMB a month.

Another motivator to moving inland and raising Shenzhen wages is the yearly Chinese phenomenon known as the Spring Festival Holiday rush (春运). It is estimated over 100 million migrant workers from all over China traveled from where they worked back to their home towns during the Spring Festival (or Lunar New Year). Generally during the time of the Spring Festival, all of China hits a slump in terms of productivity. The Airports and Train Stations are mobbed with people trying to get tickets to go home and spend the festival with their families. Foxconn is not immune from this phenomenon.

Foxconn's pay increase also comes at a time when the cost of living in Shenzhen has gone up. The rise in the cost of living in Shenzhen hasn't reached Beijing or Shanghai levels but it is increasing.

Whatever the reasoning is behind the wage increase by Foxconn, it could just be a manifestation of multiple factors—from the increase in cost of living along Shenzhen, to just the overall development of China—our favorite toys might now longer be made for cheap in China.

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makes me feel kind of bad :(

Cancer that is killing Bioware.

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:16:30 +0000

BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler is trying to delete her Twitter account as of yesterday after feeling the hate of gamers who are angry about what she apparently said in a 2006 interview.

She's been called terrible things on the Internet, after a flame that was lit by a post on Reddit calling Hepler, as the "cancer that is killing Bioware." She's worked on Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The original Reddit post that surfaced earlier this month was a screenshot of the BioWare forums with alleged comments from Hepler's interview with website Killer Betties.

Reddit /r/gaming moderator ohemeffgee removed the post for violating Reddiquette. He cited some of the problems:

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Gamers are not people to piss off.

Favourite Console of all time.

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:16:52 +0000

I had a brief look through the topic titles and hopefully this hasn't come up before. If it has, feel free to lock it/remove it.

Anyway, was just thinking of stirring up some discussion with a question of what everyone's favourite console is and why.

I'll start

It was a tough choice between the original Playstation and PS2 but I think in the long run PS2 took it by just the tiniest fraction and that's because I think there were more games on PS2 that I absolutely loved.

So feel free to jump in and give your own opinion about your favourite console, whether home or handheld. I would say to think of something besides PC because obviously every PC is different and while you may love your PC you can't really speak for the entire market of PCs while with consoles you know all the versions and builds much easier. If it really irks you however to talk about PC then I don't really have a massive issue with it

Can you believe it?

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 19:48:41 +0000

wow, you know keith, I was at the future shop and asked about a game (Tales of Vesperia), he said he's never heard about it plus never played it in his whole life so yeah. I mean, weren't salesmen/women supposed to know everything pertaining the products they got in store? Wow, I'm like abashed and astonished at this.

S.W.A.T Go After Gamer

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:17:21 +0000

When the S.W.A.T. arrived at a North Texas home in Lewisville, there were told a shooter was in the house. There was, but it wasn't the shooter the police expected. It was a kid playing Call of Duty: Black Ops.

On Monday a little after 5pm, a teenage boy was playing Call of Duty: Black Ops on Xbox Live. He and his friends were hanging out and talking in an online lobby between matches. According to the teen, whose parents asked that he not be named: "Some dude just popped out of nowhere, and basically said he's going to hack me, he's going to get my information, call the swat team over to my front yard."

The teenager ignored the threat and kept playing with his friends on Xbox Live.

According to CBSDFW news in Dallas, a message was sent to the city via the AT&T Instant Message Relay Service, which is designed for hearing impaired individuals to contact someone via telephone. The message stated that someone had been shot, and there was a shooter inside the house.

Officers arrived at the boy's Lewisville home, but did not see any signs of a shooting. The boy's parents noticed a S.W.A.T. encircling the house. One officer began calling the boy's name with a bullhorn.

"We were all scared, out of our minds," he told CBSDFW. "Didn't understand why they were here. We thought there was some stranger some dude running around our house, hiding behind the boat. We didn't know. We didn't expect nothing."

Frightened, the family called 9-1-1, and the operator connected them to the police, who told them to come out of their house.
The teen said he didn't know who pulled the prank. Police are looking into the matter, and trying to get a subpoena to get the necessary info to snag the gamer who sounded this false alarm.

source

the person who did the hacking is screwed if found.

What People think of Gamers

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:20:13 +0000

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very nice.

$40,000 to Patch a Video Game

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:30:46 +0000

Well, this is bananas. According to Double Fine's Tim Schafer, the cost of getting a patch up on a modern console (presumably he means the Xbox 360 and/or PS3) is $40,000.

That's not to upload downloadable content. That's just for a patch.

"Those systems as great as they are, they're still closed", Schafer told Hookshot. "You have to jump through a lot of hoops, even for important stuff like patching and supporting your game. Those are things we really want to do, but we can't do it on these systems. I mean, it costs $40,000 to put up a patch – we can't afford that! Open systems like Steam, that allow us to set our own prices, that's where it's at, and doing it completely alone like Minecraft. That's where people are going."

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if they did their job in the first place, there be no need for patches.

Child Left in GameStop

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:29:03 +0000

Attention parents of the world: GameStop is not a babysitting service. That fact was made abundantly clear to 21-year-old Kethia Dagrin-Francois of Florida when police arrested her for child neglect after her five-year-old son was found wandering the parking lot of Boyton Mall.

According to authorities shoppers discovered the young boy wandering the parking lot of the Boyton Mall alone on Sunday afternoon. He was taken to the mall's guest services counter, who attempted to contact his mother via intercom for 20 minutes before contacting the local police. Once police arrived they walked the mall with the child, searching for his mother. Returning to guest services they came across the boy's aunt, who told police his mother had been searching for him for 15 minutes.
It had been 50 minutes since he was found in the parking lot.

Reports say the mother arrived shortly after the aunt was found, telling police she taken the boy to GameStop to play a video game while she went shopping. She told the five-year-old to not leave the store until she returned.

She told the five-year-old.

So Dagrin-Francois was arrested and charged with child neglect. She was released Monday on $3,000 bond.
You hear that sound? That's the sound of thousands of GameStop employees cheering. During my time as an employee for the retail chain there wasn't a day that went by when some parent didn't let their child run rampant in the store, knocking over display games, rearranging shelves, and basically acting like a child does when their parent isn't around.

Even worse, these parents are leaving their young children alone in a store full of strangers. Strangers that could do the child harm, sure, but also strangers that have no responsibility for their child's safety one way or the other, so when they go wandering out into a busy mall parking lot, no one is going to stop them.

So no, GameStop is not day care. It's not a babysitting service. It's where gamers go to buy overpriced used games, and that's no place for an impressionable young child to wander about on his own.

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I be happy to be left at a game store