Posts by Glass_Joe

In my recently reviewed Shank , I talked about how the title was a throwback to a genre neglected in the modern gameosphere. The once lively and marketable side-scrolling beat-em-up seemed to have died with 8-bit/16-bit consoles and the arcades, left to only shame itself with pitiful modern iterations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, which produce a knee-jerk reaction like when the New Kids on the Block came back to tour.

Two years in the making, Castle Crashers finally arrives on the PSN. Following the games release on Xbox Live, it went on to win accolades far and wide for its beautifully vivid animations and the coma of awesomeness it put players into, walking away with Game of the Year awards from many publications. Why the distance in between the separate releases is anyone’s guess. The fact of the matter it is here, and man oh man is it nostalgic bliss for all your senses.

Unique to this title is the depth brought forth by a role-playing element which allows players to level up with XP, increase their stats, and gather unique loot spread across the world. It’s Legend of Zelda meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game, the two of whom hit it off in a cheap, dimly lit hotel room and made Castle Crashers.

Players travel across a world map and must collect certain items to unlock passage to inaccessible locales to complete all 20 missions and save …

I am so glad Ancient Dragon was here to defend those who serve and have served in the military.
My dad,my uncle, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great grandfather all served in the military. I am so glad that the government banned the game from being sold on the base. I think that this level should be banned altogether, but it is freedom of speech so it is allowed even though it is sickly warped, morbid, vile and Anti-Earth. Letting people play as the Taliban might give them the wrong impression. I keep seeing references to grand theft auto and how it didn't cause any problems. I know that a major fact has been ignored by gamers that GTA was the cause of at least one Real Life issue that I remember reading about off the top of my head. Three cops died because of an 18 year old who killed real cops after playing the Grand Theft Auto game. A long time ago when GTA was new a friend said this is a cool game. I put it in my system turned it on and as fast as I turned the game on I turned it off. I highly discourage the company from releasing this anti-american, anti-british, anti-earth level and if they do I highly question their judgment. You can give me negative ratings all you want. I know what is right and what isn't and this is not right!!
When I say anti-earth, I am NOT …

Exactly, my friend. This was why everyone was scoffing at the lawsuit when this news broke. How are they going to gain any ground when it's all essentially under the public license? Wherever there's a boatload of money to be made, there are lawsuits to follow, so I guess we shouldn't really be surprised anymore. They will almost certainly get nowhere and will just crawl back into their hole with lawyer fees through the roof.

Xbox Live is a breeding ground for hateful, inflammatory remarks of all genders, races, creeds, and sexualities, where aimless insecurities are flung around like rocks at street signs. Who would have thought that it would be Microsoft doing the discriminating for once?

A 26-year-old gamer from Fort Gay, West Virginia was banned momentarily from his monthly membership when Microsoft enforcement officials deemed his profile inappropriate. His crime? Listing himself as a proud resident of "fort gay WV."

"At first I thought, 'Wow, somebody's thinking I live in the gayest town in West Virginia or something.' I was mad. ... It makes me feel like they hate gay people," said Josh Moore, an unemployed factory worker.

When Moore contacted Xbox Live to explain how wrongful a decision they had made, the agent seemed impervious and unwavering to the fact that Fort Gay was called home by roughly 800 citizens. Even offering a zip code didn’t deter the iron fist of the voice over the phone, who told him if he chose to reference Fort Gay in his profile again, they would cancel his membership.

The incident gained the attention of Mayor David Thompson, who tried his hand at amending the situation and was met with the same fate, being told that the word “gay” was inappropriate no matter what the context.

"It was so inappropriate for them, they wouldn't even say the word," Thompson told the Associated Press. "They said, 'that word.' It's beyond me. That's the …

If there are two things I enjoy in life, it’s mob movies and shooting people in video games, so naturally, I was excited to playMafia 2, the recently released mobster offering from 2K Games. This excitement was soon shot down like Spider in Goodfellas.

You play as Vito, the generically named Italian immigrant trying to escape a childhood of poverty and crime. Fresh off a tour of duty in World War 2, you arrive home to your old friend Joe offering you small-time jobs for local made men and are blinded my the lifestyle it will allow you to lead. This is right before you are blinded by all the glaring problems of this game.

Underwhelming graphics are as dated as the era they try to detail, with an ambitious story lost in the shoddy design of a game seemingly archaic when compared to other next-gen titles. With its grainy textures, lagging frame rates, terrible lip syncing, and broken character animations, it legitimately feels like a Playstation title at times. It is just a very uninspiring, flavorless experience, a dish that tastes like Vinnie’s motha’s pasta fazool. Oh, hey!

Car handling is slow and wretched, albeit probably realistic to the time, but why not spare some expense at authenticity’s sake to provide something enjoyable for the player considering they’re spending 80% of your game behind the wheel of some putt-putt vehicle fresh off the Ford assembly line?

Adding to the sense of divide are …

It’s been a long time coming.StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is here, and in similar fashion, my review of it has finally arrived. It’s tough to completely take in just everything Wings of Liberty offers in a day or a week, and treated as such, we have a review that has been almost a month in the making.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is easily one of the most anticipated sequels of our generation. StarCraft's appeal has spanned over an entire decade since its release in March 1998 and went on to become one of the highest grossing PC games of all-time. South Koreans practically put the game's box art on their flag, holding annual competitions for professional players sponsored like athletes. Will the sequel live up to the hype?

This, that, and the single-player

Pulling my loyalty away from Warcraft III and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne would be like some movie coming along not named Predator and winning my affection as the greatest action movie ever filmed. Having now had a chance to entrench myself in Wings of Liberty, I can easily say that the single-player campaign is epic like only Blizzard knows how to make, with a stellar plot and stunning cutscenes leading way into my greatest real-time strategy experience of all-time.

Players unfamiliar with the StarCraft story won't be left in the dark, as it manages to call back upon previous events throughout the course of the original title. The …

Intel announced on Thursday their agreement to purchase all of McAfee’s common stocks at $48 a share, a deal approximately worth $7.68 billion. McAfee will act as a wholly-owned subsidiary and report to Intel’s Software and Services Group. The endeavor marks what is sure to be a harmonious relationship for two of the world’s leading hardware and software companies at a time when mobile markets are booming, a sector which remains untapped from a securities standpoint.

"Our view is that everywhere we sell a microprocessor, there is an opportunity to sell security software with it," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. “With the rapid expansion of growth across a vast array of Internet-connected devices, more and more of the elements of our lives have moved online. In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences."

“The addition of McAfee products and technologies into the Intel computing portfolio brings us incredibly talented people with a track record of delivering security innovations, products and services that the industry and consumers trust to make connecting to the Internet safer and more secure,” Otellini added.

The acquisition comes on the heels of two incredibly successful years for Intel and McAfee, who both posted huge financial gains in Q2 of this year. Intel saw its profits soar to record heights, reaching $2.9 billion, a number which shadowed …

It was only a matter of time before Hollywood's depiction of "the future" started to grow strikingly similar to something one would find in Best Buy's Sunday flyer.

The Philips Fluid Smartphone was unveiled earlier today (August 18th), the first device since Doc Brown used banana peels and Miller beer in the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor to get to the future that has made me laugh. Conceptualized by Brazilian designer Dinard da Mata, the phone is as every bit as pliable as the title suggests. With the use of an organic light emitting diode (OLED) screen, the phone can wrap into a bracelet around the user's wrist, allowing you to wear its functionality like it's a trendy designer fashion.

In truth, the phone looks like one of those "Slap Wrap" slap bracelets kids used to wear in the 90s, but is sure to be about 1981025 times more expensive. There is no word yet if the Fluid will be featured in exotic tiger stripes or rainbow patterns.

Aside from a variety of photos, little is known about the endeavor outside of it simply just existing. Granted modern electronics are a constantly evolving trend, it just seems like this phone is simply vying for the "What will they think of next?" reaction rather than contemplating "What will our users want?"

The phone leaves me asking three questions myself: What type of redeemable processing power and hardware could fit in this flexible chassis?
How could said lack …

On Friday, the world’s largest online marketplace announced the launch of its U.S. exclusive eBay Bucks Rewards Program. The cashback incentive gives the consumer a 2% return on most items available for sale on the site.

"We're giving eBay's most loyal shoppers something special in return -- money to spend on eBay," said Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplaces. "eBay Bucks Rewards Program is free to join and easy to use, providing customers with even greater value when they shop the great selection and deals on eBay. With redemption rates well above industry average for comparable loyalty programs, eBay Bucks is a big hit with both buyers and sellers on eBay. It's seamless, simple and rewarding."

Once shoppers enroll in the rewards program, they can receive up to $200 for any single item and up to $500 per calendar quarter. Users are then presented with an eBay Bucks Certificate at the end of the three months, redeemable up to 30 days for eBay purchases through PayPal, the company’s payment processing sister site which now has over 87 million active accounts. Purchases not qualified under the promotion include all Classifieds, Business & Industrial Capital Equipment, Real Estate, and eBay Motors categories.

Over the course of the beta program, which was made available to a select group of customers for the past year, eBay discovered that consumers taking part in the program spent five times more on eBay purchases than average customers. When it was released …

Oracle announced Thursday evening (August 12) that they would be filing a lawsuit against Google, claiming that their Android phone software infringes upon patents and copyrights of their Java software, which they acquired when they purchased Sun Microsystems in January for $7.4 billion.

"In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," Oracle spokeswoman Karen Tillman said in an official statement.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleges that Google “willfully and deliberately” infringed upon seven Java patents and has even gone so far as to hire former Sun Java engineers to help with the development of the Dalvik Java Virtual Machine, the backbone of the Android OS. Even though the Android OS depends on Java to run, it is anything but a carbon copy.

"From a developer's perspective, Dalvik looks like a Java Virtual Machine, but strictly speaking, Dalvik is not a JVM. Dalvik executes dex bytecode, not Java bytecode. And there are differences in the structure of Dalvik class files as compared to Java class files. Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, building an Android application is really an exercise in building a peculiar sort of Java application,"PCWorld’s Rick Grehan previously reported when the Android was originally released in 2008.

Google released the following statement Friday (August 13) afternoon: “We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open-source Java community with this …

And while your parents may have told you to never take hugs and candy from strangers, I'm working on changing that by getting to know you.

My name is Tom Hodgson , and I'm honored to be one of the news contributors here at DaniWeb .

I love a lot of things:writing (obviously) music (NIN, TOOL, Pantera, Sigur Ros, and on and on) Crown Royal quoting lines fromPredator and Aliens poker MMA the Goosebumps "Choose Your Own Adventure" series collecting Pogs The Jersey Shore Breaking Bad The Dark Knight collecting Full House memorabilia late night Legends of the Hidden Temple Dunkeroos and Gushers being a HUGE nerd (currently playing Starcraft 2 and taking any and all comers at Modern Warfare 2. Yes, I play with people better than you. No, you won't beat us. ;)) I also hate a lot of things: movies that involve four middle aged promiscuous women, dance-offs, or plots about teen vampires "lulz" eating Combos to find a pretzel with no filling pizza without cheese men drinking Smirnoff Ice the fact someone wrote and producedStep Up 3D any musician on a "Now That's What I Call Music" album, which ironically, isn't what I call music mongoloid drivers brushing my teeth the guys to your right graphic tees that accentuate barb wire tattoos on biceps people in the WIC program going through express checkout people who type "Your retarded" Now I feel you should …

Forget all that stuff your parents taught you about not talking to strangers. One lucky user brought Twitter to its 20 billionth tweet over the weekend, an award as prestigious as being swept away in the confetti and balloons of being the 10,000th grocery market shopper.

The momentous tweet was made by user “GGGGGGo_Lets_Go”, a Japanese graphic designer on Saturday, July 31st. When translated, his post said, "So that means the barrage might come back later all at once." Riveting stuff.

Status updates of 140 characters known as “tweets” have broadcasted banalities worldwide since Twitter’s inception in 2006. The service, dubbed by some as the “SMS of the internet”, went on to take the World Wide Web by storm, with currently over 190 million users tweeting at a rate of 65 million times a day. That’s a lot of noise.

This milestone comes roughly five months after the service reached its 10 billionth tweet and just two months since its 15 billionth. At the current rate, the micro-blog is seeing 10 times the tweeting of its first four years of service combined.

“What are the chances? Maybe I'm going to die. Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke," user “GGGGGGo_Lets_Go” said in another Twitter message just moments later.

It seems only statistically fitting that a Japanese user would be the one ringing in the 20 billionth tweet. Roughly 12% of all tweets originate from the country, due partly …

If you’re one of the outstanding users yet to make the pilgrimage to Gmail from your dilapidated Hotmail account, you may have been one of the lucky ones (like myself this morning) rewarded recently with a handful of e-sunshine for your continued loyalty.

The once affluent e-mail service received a facelift back in June that would make even Heidi Montag proud. Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4, the latest generation of its e-mail client, was introduced to address issues users had with lacking file and media sharing privileges, but less than 2% of its users actually received the new services before the end of the month. Enter July, which has seen a drastic turnaround in rollouts, passing the 100 million user mark yesterday. Currently, 28% of the 360 million global Hotmail subscribers are able to utilize the new features, with a gradual 100% completion being estimated before the year’s end.

For those of you with accounts already in the green, there won’t be much new info for you to graze about here. For those of you yet to receive a golden ticket, here is what you can look forward to when the doors open to the e-chocolate factory:Photos and videos can now be viewed directly from your e-mail, preventing the need open a separate browser window download a photo to view them.

The “Sweep menu”, located on your header of options, helps users manipulate multiple e-mails in one fell swoop. The “Delete …

The University of Central Florida is currently knee deep in $434,000 of federal tax money programming a video game for teenage girls which acclimates them to the pressures of sexual advances in social environments.

Working with UCF’s Institute for Stimulation and Training, Dr. Anne Norris, statistician and methodologist for the College of Nursing’s Office of Research, hopes to implement her groundbreaking software into local middle schools as an aid in preventing teen pregnancies and encouraging abstinence amongst pubescent young adults.

“They have an opportunity to interact with the avatars and they'll earn points for particular social skills that they develop. A boy similar in age might approach the person playing the game and ask her to make out or there might be some sexual innuendo," said Norris.

The game features a motion-capture suit, which the frightened teen's overprotective parents will force her to wear, allowing her to enter into a digital universe fraught with the sexual innuendos of budding young males, also known as 7th grade. The life-size avatar will mimic motions captured by the users suit, allowing for real-life scenarios to unfold on a screen before her very tear-filled, "I hate you mom and dad" eyes.

“It's a place to practice where there aren't any social consequences," said Norris.

While details are currently scarce regarding other aspects of the game, three levels have been announced: a darkened bleacher setting with fireworks in the background after the homecoming game, a parent’s minivan on top of …

So what inane, extremist position are you attempting to gain over him by making him sound like he's sitting around in a wife beater drinking a Natty Ice with your replies? Until the sun stops shining, there will be an endless sea of stupid people always doing stupid things, some of who will inevitably purchase firearms and do said stupid things with them. The same stupid people get behind the wheels of cars and kill families on their way to vacations because they're texting or drink and shoot off fireworks and blow their friend's eye out. He's just vying for himself and many other gun owners by saying that there are measures to take, and like the intelligent person he is, does utilize to insure his wellbeing by owning a firearm, and in the process, protecting the wellbeing of others by owning one responsibly. It's not Hollywood. Americans aren't sleeping with pistols under their pillows.

And ardav--I suggest you look at a per capita comparison between the US and Mexico.

@Biker - yeah, that'll be the macho posturing I was talking about.

Allowing, though, that you're about the deadliest superhero with watchful eyes to put a hawk's to shame, bear in mind that most people are not that, and if they try to be like you, you're going to have a lot of dead and injured non-muggers (false positives) and a lot of well-armed muggers (false negatives).

I'm part of the philosophy that it's better to own a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it.

Apple IIgs

RAM: 8 MB
CPU: 65C816 processor at 2.8 MHz
Hard drive: Dual 5 1/4" floppy drives
Graphix: a palette of 4,096 colors
Operating System: ProDos 16
Display: 9" Monitor II
Speakers: 1.0 surround sound

I enjoy this system because it helps be ford the rivers in Oregon Trail with stunning realism.

Thanks to a federal copyright law ruling on Monday by the Library of Congress, jailbreaking your iPhone doesn’t have to be kept to the underground forums like it's alcohol during a digital prohibition. The process is now completely legal under US law. Grab a glass of e-freedom! The resulting decision was part of a tri-yearly board review by the Library which discusses exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The legalization of jailbreaking comprised two of the six provisions agreed upon today by the Library. See “ DMCA Changes: Copyright Rules Made More Flexible ”.

The filing was brought forth by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who wanted handsets to be liberated from anticircumvention provisions in order to serve a greater purpose for their users who were living under a shadow of the “law's overbroad reach” with their hands tied with creative limitations.

Thanks to this victorious outcome, smartphone owners will be able to install lawfully obtained third-party apps or custom operating systems which unlock aspects of the phone otherwise shut off to an unassuming user. Also as a result of this decisions, owners will be able to install software which removes carrier limitations and circumvents restrictions, allowing universal access to network providers across all mobile fronts.

The Register of Copyrights, part of the Library of Congress, came to the following conclusion in regards to Apple’s defense:

[INDENT]“Apple is not concerned that the practice of jailbreaking will displace sales of its firmware or …

It only took Sony four years, but they’ve finally created their version of the Wii killer: a glowing magic wand lollipop known to the world as the PlayStation Move. Requiring Sony's PlayStation Eye camera to deliver the experience dubbed by some as the most advanced motion controlled gaming to date via Bluetooth technology, it is slated to take interactivity to new heights for casual and hardcore gamers alike In conjunction with its release on September 19th, Sony plans to release two Move bundles, which were announced and priced on Wednesday: the PlayStation 3 Sports Champion Move Bundle and the Playstation Move Bundle.

The PlayStation 3 Sports Champion Move Bundle comes packaged with a Playstation 3 console (hard drive size forthcoming), the Sony Eye, the PlayStation Move, DualShock controller, a PlayStation Move demo disc, andSports Champions, one of the premier launch titles for the hyped peripheral. The Sports Champions disc—aka Wii Sports’ bigger brother—contains the following games: Disc Golf, Gladiator Duel, Volleyball, Archery, Table Tennis and Bocce.

The aptly titled Playstation Move Bundle is perfect for current PS3 console owners, and for $99.99, contains the basics to get you Move-ing (ba zing!): the Move, the Eye, and the Sports Champions game. If you currently own a PS3 and the Sony Eye, players can simply purchase the Move controller itself for $49.99. Regardless of the peripheral porridge that is just right for you, it’s interesting to note that the PlayStation Move Navigational Controller—the Wii …