I tried to offer a similar promotional deal when I sold my old games on Craigslist, but apparently that's a Class 4 felony in Illinois

The Collector's Edition of CD Projekt's forthcoming PC RPG The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings has been revealed by Gamestop. In addition to its more conventional collector's edition gewgaws and bibelots, this collector's edition includes a sculpture of the head of the game's protagonist, Geralt de Rivia. It's not life size, but it looks pretty respectably large. CD Projekt has repeatedly denied rumors of a planned “Ultimate Edition” in which the head will actually be animatronic and sing Cy Coleman's "Witchcraft" when activated, with spokesmen for the company insisting that CD Projekt's reported recent purchase of several thousand surplus Big Mouth Billy Bass motion sensors was “pure coincidence.”

I'm a big fan of the original The Witcher, which was easily the best RPG/unlicensed pharmaceutical manufacture simulator released by a Polish developer in the past five years, but this isn't for me; the current trend for increasingly elaborate and costly special editions just doesn't interest me much. I'm a simple man with simple needs. But if you're currently redecorating your home or office and have decided that the glowering visage of a battle-scarred albino swordsman, alchemist, and monster-hunter-for-hire is just what you need to tie the room together, opportunity knocks.

Planned Duke Nukem game suffers unexpected setback; in other news, water still wet

It seems that the planned Duke Nukem game for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, Duke Nukem: Critical Mass, isn't going to be happening after all. Gearbox, which acquired the rights to Duke Nukem from 3D Realms back in September, has apparently pulled the plug on the handheld system spin-off, which was being developed by Frontline Studios. Gearbox is reportedly still still going ahead with its plans to release Duke Nukem Forever next year, though if the 13-year history of Duke Nukem Forever's development is any guide there will soon be another indefinite delay when the head of the project decides to scrap everything to start over on a different engine, or the programmers are abducted for ransom by Columbian guerrillas, or a meteorite flattens Gearbox headquarters, or whatever.

What would have been Duke Nukem: Critical Mass will instead be released in modified, de-Duked form under the title Extraction Point: Alien Shootout, which has to be one of the most aggressively bland names for a video game since the days of Combat and Adventure on the Atari 2600. It sounds like it should be shelved alongside those generic boxes of cereal that characters on sitcoms eat when the network doesn't want to use a real brand name. They may as well have just called it Military Terminology: Science Fiction Violence.

Is anyone actually surprised by this turn of events? It's Duke Nukem, a subject I've had occasion to mention here before. If history teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that there will always be some sort of complication for anyone foolish enough to defy the natural order and actually attempt to release a new Duke Nukem game. We're talking about a franchise whose flagship sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, has been in development hell since 1997, roughly two-thirds of the character's entire existence. The franchise has spent those 13 years under nigh-perpetual siege, endlessly afflicted by legal battles, staff turnover, missed release dates, massive financial losses, wrathful angels with flaming swords leading plagues of locusts, etc.

I just wonder why the Duke Nukem series became this way, afflicted by enough misfortune to kill any other series several times over and yet seemingly unable to die. Did someone involved in the production of Duke Nukem 3D defile an ancient Egyptian tomb? Did 3D Realms raise the capital to make Duke Nukem Forever by selling bones looted from Indian burial grounds? Did the whole staff take take a trip to New Orleans, get drunk during Mardi Gras, and run into an old cemetary yelling, "Voodoo is total bullshit, and may the angry ghost of Marie Laveau afflict me with some sort of horrible voodoo curse if I'm wrong?" It must be something.

Somehow, the words "From the makers of the 3DO" just don't inspire much confidence

Panasonic has announced a new portable handheld game system called the "Jungle". It will apparently be focused on online gaming, and has a touch pad and full keyboard alongside more console-style controls. Not much is known yet, aside from the fact that one of the flagship titles will be a Battlestar Galactica MMO.

First impression: Awful name. I applaud Panasonic's attempt to offer a change of pace from the "game systems that sound like acronyms for government agencies" style of naming seen in the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, but ”Jungle” sounds like an internal development codename that Panasonic forgot to change for retail. I would have thought it obvious that naming a video game system after vegetation was a bad idea, but I guess not.

Older handheld systems did it far better than their modern successors in this regard. The Nintendo Game Boy, the Sega Game Gear, the Atari Lynx, whatever the hell that portable version of the TurboGrafx 16 was called... THOSE were names for game systems. On the plus side, the inevitable Guns N' Roses references that will appear in every video game press article about this system from now until the end of time pretty much write themselves, which is a timesaver.

It's early yet, but frankly what I've seen so far seems like the worst of several worlds to me: Bigger, less convenient, and almost certainly much more costly than a DS or PSP, less versatile or user-friendly than a laptop computer, pointless overkill for the sort of mobile games people play on cellphones. I also can't imagine playing a game that involved any significant input from a QWERTY keyboard on a keyboard that size. Maybe it'll do better on the Japanese market, where handhelds and wi-fi based multiplayer games are much bigger business than they are in the US.

Alternately, if the Jungle is able to play some of the big MMO names like World of Warcraft- it's still not clear at this point- Panasonic may be able to tap in to the ultra-hardcore MMORPG player/addict/Morlock market. Necessity is pitiless and unyielding, and even the most obsessively devoted MMO player has hitherto been forced to occasionally face those nightmarish interregna- trips to the bathroom, funerals of immediate family members, house fires- when he simply must step away from the computer, precious dopamine draining from his limbic system's burnt-out reward pathways with every moment. The potential appeal of a portable MMO-focused system like the Jungle is obvious, though I'm not sure how much disposable income that particular demographic has.

The most appalling eruption of foul language since Hitler said "damn" in the original Bionic Commando!

This is supposed to be a blog about gaming in general and not the Mafia II Offensive Content Gazette, but a journalist goes where the news is: the Guinness Book of World Records has provisionally certified Mafia II as the game with the most instances of a well-known swear word. This is a family blog, so for decency's sake I'll just say it's the one that starts with F and rhymes with "fuck."

Mafia II dethrones previous record holder House of the Dead: Overkill, a fluffy, Disneyesque romp for the Nintendo Wii that used the word a mere 189 times. Prior to House of the Dead's release, the record had been held for a stunning 16 years by Sierra Entertainment's critically acclaimed but commercially disastrous movie-tie in point-and-click adventure game Glengarry Glen Ross: The Quest to Sell Some Fucking Real Estate. Sadly, the game was doomed commercially by a gaming marketplace not yet ready for the game's mature content, the greater popularity of rival series such as King's Quest and Gabriel Knight, and the limited audience for games about middle-aged guys sitting in a room and yelling at each other about their unsuccessful careers in the real estate industry.

A spokesman for Guinness said:

"The number associated with the record is liable to change in the next few weeks, as 2K have promised to supply us with a copy of the game's full script under NDA so we can count the number of f-bombs ourselves and update the record with a complete figure."

This really has me wondering what working at the Guinness Book of World Records office is like.

Can anyone be assigned curse-counting duty, or is there somebody at Guinness who focuses on this sort of record? And if the latter, what's he like? Is he a seemingly normal man with a nice home in the suburbs and a family who thinks he works in the sporting records department? Is he some sort of shadowy, morally ambiguous black ops figure, tolerated as a necessary evil and yet feared and shunned by the very Guinness staffers he protects for making the sort of grim moral compromises that the naive, soft-handed civilians who spend their days compiling aerospace speed records or measuring the world's largest structure made entirely of popsicle sticks could never face? Is there some insane, subhuman, unspeakably foul-mouthed Gollum-like figure confined to a dark, filth-encrusted pit where he subsists on carrion, whatever live rodents he catches, and the gnawed bones of other Guinness employees who stood too close to the pit? Inquiring minds want to know.

Analyst's report: Open-world crime genre projected to have offended members of every ethnic group on the planet no later than 2015

The Italian-American advocacy group UNICO publicly condemned the recent release of Mafia II and it's developer and publisher, 2K games and Take-Two Interactive, for what UNICO has called the game's racist portrayal of Italians and organized crime. UNICO president Andre DeMino issued a statement in which he said:

Why would [Take-Two] foist a game on their targeted audience of young people wherein they will indoctrinate a new generation into directly associating Italians and Italian Americans with violent, murderous organized crime, to the exclusion of all of the other 'mafias' run by other ethnic and racial groups...Take-Two is directly, blatantly and unfairly discriminating and demeaning one group to the exclusion of all others. We are demanding they halt release of the game and cleanse it of all references to Italians and Italian Americans.

Unfortunately, Mafia II is set in the years following World War II, decades before the Mafia began the groundbreaking series of affirmative action programs that have made the ranks of today's Mafia such a diverse, United Colors of Benetton-esque smorgasbord of Men of Respect of every race, color, and creed. Take-Two is apparently going for an authentic historical atmosphere, so making a game where the main characters are 1940's/50's American mafioso named Abdullah "The Dolphin" ibn Yusuf, Ragnar "Berserker" Gustafsson, and Nine-Finger Johnny Krishnamurti creates some suspension of disbelief issues.

I could sympathize with DeMino more if the pervasive pattern he alludes to actually existed in modern games, but I see no convincing proof that it does. There are too many Eastern Europeans and Japanese and African-Americans and Generic White Guys of No Particular Ethnic Background in crime-related games for the claim that Italians are being systematically singled out to be plausible.

It could be a lot worse. Pretty much any time a character who shares my principal ethnic background shows up in a video game, they're a freaking NAZI. Or a soldier fighting for Nazi Germany. Or a Neo-Nazi. Or an exiled former Nazi. Or a thinly veiled stand-in for a Nazi. Or some sort of monstrous Nazi cyborg hell-beast spawned by unnatural Nazi superscience and/or blasphemous Nazi occult lore.

As the old proverb goes, "I was sad because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet." Or, in this case, "I was sad that I was a tough-talking 50s gangster, until I met Undead Mecha-Hitler." Words to live by.

Furious edge-of-your-seat bus route scheduling ACTION!

Paradox Interactive has announced that it will be publishing developer Colossal Order's game Cities in Motion, billed as the "ultimate public transport simulator." Player's are put in charge of running a mass transit company with scenarios based on the cities Vienna, Helsinki, Berlin, and Amsterdam and a time frame spanning 1920 to 2020. This sort of thing is right up my alley, and I definitely like what I see so far.



The subject matter may be mundane to some, but I'm a a lifelong resident of Illinois. When you live in a state where the two consecutive governors preceding the current office holder are now both convicted felons, several streets in yout area have had half of their lanes closed for "repairs" since President Taft was in the White House, and every news story that references roads invariably includes some combination of the words "scandal," "extortion," "bribe," "racketeering," "federal grand jury," and/or "will neither confirm or deny allegations of ordering Chicago Outfit assassins to conceal the alderman's severed head in the Governor's Mansion," the very concept of well-run transport infrastructure is strange and exotic.

This sort of game is probably the biggest reason I remain interested in PC games despite generally preferring consoles. The reactions of gamers to this sort of niche strategy game tend be split them into into two pretty sharply defined camps, in my experience: Those who find the prospect of spending hour after hour designing subway systems in a simulated 1950s Finland utterly fascinating, like yours truly, and those who have already started to nod off from sheer boredom just reading the words "designing subway systems" and would be in danger of slipping into a coma if they suffered extended exposure to the actual game.

Sadly, as has been demonstrarted by the commercial failure of games like 2009 multiplatform title Call of Duty: Postwar Highway Reconstruction and the PS3's critically acclaimed but financially disastrous recent entry to the Shin Megami Tensei series, Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Transport Workers Union of America, one of these groups is not large enough to provide the sort of sales needed to support console development costs. So it's definitely nice to have the PC for niche titles like this.

So many disgustingly inappropriate Wiimote jokes I could make, so little time

Publisher Microforum is releasing a "massage simulator" game called Enjoy your massage! for the Nintendo Wii. (Idiosyncratic capitalization theirs, not mine. I can't say I'm fond of using full imperative sentences, complete with punctuation, as titles. Maybe they're going for a "stern German female masseuse bellowing commands" sort of tone.) Microforum promises that:

Enjoy your massage! has been created with the cooperation of a team of psychologists: a special mix of slow breath-rhythmical animations and harmonic sound relaxes the player and enhances his emotional involvement.

So "emotional involvement" is what the kids call it nowadays, apparently.


It's a natural progression, really. The Wii has achieved its stunning success by appealing to a hitherto untapped market for casual and family-oriented games, so apparently developers for the system are again seeking out new markets by trying to win over the lucrative "sweaty, clammy-skinned perverts who can't quite work up the courage to take that copy of Chained Heat up to the counter at the video store, age 18-35" demographic.

So, if you've ever wanted to use the power of the Wii's motion controls to simulate the experience of rubbing people, you'll have your chance starting on August 9th. Also, seek help. Or social contact. Or some back issues of Hustler, or the underwear section of a Sears catalog, or something, for God's sake.