Wade McGilberry.

Yes, his name sounds a bit funny, and he is a scrawny looking fellow, but you know what? He pitched a perfect game in MLB2k10, and received $1 million dollars for it, so I don’t think he much cares what anyone thinks.

What’s even more interesting is that it was only his 4th try. He won against the NY Mets by the way (scoff).

But there is another hero in this story. His wife, who fully supported his efforts to try and win the prize suggested that he take it seriously, and stay home from work. He continued to go to work anyways, which just makes him that much more awesome.

For the full story check out the tech article at CNN.com.

What are your thoughts about pirating? I’m not going to ask you to outright admit to piracy as it is a growingly touchy subject, especially with the recent passage of a strict bill in the UK that requires ISPs to report users who infringe copyright laws, as well as block access to sites that make substantial copyright infringement possible by users.

Although this doesn’t affect the US directly, this is always been something that congress has talked about, although maybe not going as far as restricting access. Congress has been trying to get a law put together to require ISPs to retain records of customer access for prosecution purposes. Google already does this is some fashion, but since they are not an ISP they cannot directly trace torrents, but can only show a long history of people’s email and search records.

What do you think?

For the full story about the UK law check out this link.

While most gamers probably don’t use linux, I’d venture to guess there are enough to at least make this class action lawsuit worth filing. But I want to know how many people this has really affected.

What OS do you use?

Did this firmware update affect you at all?

Did you even know this happened?

Check out the full article at IGN’s website here.

Is it wrong that as soon as I read about the pokewalker, a pedometer that lets you train your pokemon, find items and other wonderful things while you aren’t playing, I immediately started wracking my brain for ingenious ways to turn my table fan into a pokewalker treadmill?

While playing Soul Silver will be nice, it is still a revamped version (with a lot of changes, granted) of the original silver version, and I’m much more looking forward to pokemon black/white. I’m hopeful that they will finally come out with a new and exciting model, maybe change some things up.

Check out this article at IGN.com about what some pokemon fans would like to see happen in black/white.

Well okay, a lot of people knew that.

Did you know Curt Schilling has a video game development company?

Did you know he hired R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane?

Needless to say, I’m very interested in seeing what they come up with. As of now, there isn’t really anything to see, and very little information about the game other than what’s published on 38 Studios’ website.

“Copernicus is the codename for an unparalleled MMOG entertainment experience set in a truly evolving fantasy world that is both warmly familiar and intriguingly unique. Creative giants R. A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane, together with the design teams in Maynard and Baltimore, are crafting a story of epic conflict and heroic individual journeys in which the players’ actions will impact the fate of the world. This storyline rests upon a solid design core that incorporates the best play and social experiences available to players at launch. Driven by the creative talents of Salvatore and McFarlane and enriched through an array of products that will allow broad and deep exploration of the vast universe of Copernicus, 38 Studios is combining the ages-old art of the story with 21st century interactive entertainment.”

Sounds generic, but with talent like that on staff, you have to think they can come up with something that’s at the very least worth a free trial.

Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long.

See Massively.com’s collection of posts about 38 Studios.

If you missed the first one GO BUY IT RIGHT NOW.

You don’t even have to be a Batman superfan to appreciate how great this game (soon to be series) is. Here’s my recommendations:

1. Play it in the dark

2. Play it carefully

3. Play it completely (it’s easy to get 100% completion if you try)

4. Play it with as few long breaks as possible

What really makes the experience of the first game awesome is allowing yourself to be immersed in the game. Do that, and you’ll have an amazing time playing this game.

Check out IGN’s blogpost on AA2.

Chances are, they are right.

What can we do with gestures? Just about anything we can program into a device to recognize. It would be like a power glove, but eventually without the cumbersome glove, and with greater performance. Touch thumb and index to perform a certain move, touch and hold a finger to the palm to make your character move in a certain direction. The greatest advantage is to cut down on reaction time, decrease the time it takes to remember what button to push, and make gaming techniques a natural gesture.

Of course this won’t only apply itself to gaming, another obvious application is to cell phone technology, where hands free is a huge market. Companies are already vigorously working on this idea as detailed in this CNN.com Tech Article.

Gesture technology has been around for awhile, but the biggest hurdle for it to become marketable, is to get people familiar and comfortable with utilizing it, a process the Wii and other motion sensing games have begun.

You’re the producers of Splinter Cell: Conviction. In the game players take on the persona of a finely tuned killing machine, with a secret agent feel.

You hire an outside marketing firm in New Zealand to take care of a promotion there.

They decide to have a guy dressed as the main character show up to a “nightspot” with a plastic gun, without warning anyone.

Here’s the question of the day:

For the full story from G4 check out this link.

Barring that you’re WoW or Everquest or some equally deeply rooted game with at least a hardcore following of dedicated players, a breakout MMO (having come out in the last 3-5 years) probably only lasts about 2 years on the market.

Sure there are a few that have made their niche in the genre, WoW of course, FFXI, Guild Wars, and Everquest, but for the most part the other 10-20 MMOs that are on the market at any given time are generally sub par at best.

But why are these games never really given a chance? Well, it’s very simple. They don’t offer any new features that we haven’t seen before at least in some aspect, and because of that, players then expect at LEAST the graphics to be polished, and that is simply so rare that you can’t even count on that.

I know many players who are constantly on the watch for the “WoWkiller” myself included, but unfortunately I don’t think we’ll see one for many years yet. The only even reasonable recent candidates have been Warhammer, and FFXIV.

Here’s the problems with those games. Warhammer was far too close to a carbon copy of WoW. Players of WoW can testify to this, and they aren’t interested in playing a game that is exactly the same, except starting over with nothing from level 1.

FFXIV, although still in alpha/beta stages, will have the same fundamental differences that made most players choose WoW over it. It will still be heavily player interaction centered (focusing on selling items to other players rather than NPC vendors, and focusing on partying rather than soloing). SE has not learned from their experiences with FFXI. If they want to be competitive with their party-centric model, they have to have the player base to back it up, and chances are they just won’t have it.

Another fundamental problem with FFXIV will be the dual nationality player community. Both Japanese and English (as well as more recently but to a lesser extent Spanish, French and German) demographics populate the same server, and while the Auto-Translate function works well to bridge some of the linguistic gap, there are some people who simply will not party with people from a different culture. It also doesn’t help that Eastern Standard Time and Japan Standard Time, are almost exactly 12 hours apart, meaning SE’s player base is never as concentrated as it would be if everyone were on the same schedule.

Another factor that will delay the emergence of a “WoWkiller” is the fact that many companies are starting to focus on Free-to-Play games that have item shops, which facilitate RMT, or Real money trading. The Pay to play market is largely seen as a lost cause in the MMO development field, but customers who don’t want to pay a monthly fee, but are willing to pay for certain in game advantages, is a growing market, especially when targeting children.

Who will we see WoW fall to? Maybe at the hands of it’s players, but not likely to the hands of another MMO. It’s hard to break a mold that everyone demands be filled.

See a 2008 article about the likelihood of a WoWkiller at Massively.com here.

The iPad.

I don’t understand it. I never will. The only thing that makes sense to me is that according to CNN.com, 3/4 of the purchases thus far have been made by members of the so-called “Apple Cult” (meaning they already own a mac etc.)

Some reviews have stated that the iPad fills a void between the iPod/iPhone and the computer. Unless that void includes being devoid of Flash, I can hardly agree with that statement. Do I own an iPad? Well… kind of. Considering that the iPad is just a really big version of an iPod or iPhone, I basically own the smaller version.

After receiving my weekly copy of Time Magazine and seeing Steve Jobs’ face smirking up at me from the cover gloating “Haha I made a tablet PC popular by making a really big version of an iPhone,” I actually threw it out.

To all my apple using readers, iApologize, but iJust don’t see the point.

(You have to speak their language, it’s a distant cousin of Pig Latin.)

For a rundown of all the reviews and statistics, check out CNN.com’s techblog.