Life By You looks promising, Armored Core 6 is kicking all sorts of butt, and NBA 2K24 gets more and more predatory and dismaying.
The news this week includes:
Let us know what you think.
Jonah returns from PAX Unplugged 2022, while T.J. defends the maligned Castillo Protocol. Aside from the news, the Gaming Flashback is the Klei Entertainment’s stealth 2D platformer Mark of the Ninja.
The rest of the news includes:
Let us know what you think.
One of the greatest things Nintendo has done was allowing the DS to be unlocked for regions. This allowed gamers around the world to share their favorite games from all cultures and countries with just a click of the “buy” button at an online store.
The DSi loses this great freedom by locking it down to a region. “Nintendo DS software is region free so you can play any DS software on DSi from any region. You can also browse the internet on your DSi wherever you are in the world and exchange your photos with friends from around the world,” says Nintendo (CVG).
Much like the US Entertainment Industries need to lock down everything and contribute to global piracy, Nintendo follows suit with their hand-helds, tis a sad day indeed. Of course Nintendo reasons it all away by yelling parental controls and making it easier for regions to access their own content.
“DSi is region locked because DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region. Also because we are including parental control functionality for Nintendo DSi and each region has its unique age limit.”
Specifically tailored for each region is a nice way of saying that each region has to pay the penalty of not being “first” (second, or third) to get some cool new features. Although Nintendo could put emphasis on the region the gamer lives in with complete access out of those bounds if they wanted, they’ve chosen to use this as a crutch to lock users out of content.
Users will get their content, of course. It just means more home brews, software hacks, hardware hacks and workarounds for the system. If that’s what Nintendo is trying to inspire, then they’ve done their job right.
However, wouldn’t it be great if they could just come out and say “we don’t want certain people accessing specific content until we say you can.”
For those that are Facebook junkies, playing their hearts out of Scrabulous, you’re going to be hit with some reality: it’s not real scrabble. Hasbro has attempted to pull the Scrabulous game off of Facebook because they’re not licensing it from the owner, but it’s still there. Is Hasbro’s “real” Scrabble going to sway addicted Scrabulous players?
Now, Hasbro is launching the real Scrabble game on pogo.com and on Facebook for social networking purposes. Our own Casual Gamer Chick, Jennifer, will be reviewing the upcoming Facebook app later this week (once we get her to sign up for Facebook!)
This will be Hasbro’s first go at social networking, given their trying to beat out Scrabulous, it’s going to be a tough battle, let’s see how they do!
