The newest trickle of info for EA Sports MMA is this small pack of screenshots featuring fighter Bobby Lashley. The surrounding scuffle between Dana White and the fighters to be in this game is getting to be larger than the game itself and hopefully everything gets resolved peacefully.
Anyways here are the screens, as promised.
Worst Gamertag of the Day: XxD3ATHD3Al3RxX
Yo, “Death Dealer.” I hate everything about this gamertag. All the xs suck, the 3s suck, and the lowercase l in the middle of all the other caps as well as the tough-guy theme make this one of the shittiest gamertags in the gaming world.
What’s even worse is that the tag’s owner claims to be a NYPD “D-TEC.” I doubt it. A detective couldn’t possibly have such a piss-poor worn-out gamertag. This gamer is probably about 15 years old and is experiencing the voice cracks right about now.
Runner up: xxBABYKILLER34. Puketacular. More tough-boy posturing. Nothing more to say.
Best Gamertag of the Day: OfficialPizza
Fairly mild/tame, but it beat the shit out of everything else that was in my “recent encounters” list. At least it doesn’t discuss muffins.
I’m just wondering, for what is it the official pizza? NASCAR? NBA? YMCA? All fairly ridiculous and awesome at the same time. Or maybe you can spin it as one of those bizarre communist administrative positions, faily close to “Chairman Mao.” As usual, I’m making shit up. “But, gamertags always involve interpretation.” Oh, shut the fuck up.
OfficialPizza, you’re the Gamertag o’ the Day. You’ve won a free beatdown in Modern Warfare 2 from the boys at PWNorDIE.com. Hit us up to collect.
Scientific American discusses the brains it takes for Microsoft to crank out Project Natal:
Programming a game system to discern the human body’s almost limitless combinations of joint positions is a fearsome computational problem. “Every single motion of the body is an input, so you’d need to program near infinite reactions to actions,” Kipman says.
Instead of trying to preprogram actions, Microsoft decided to teach its gaming technology to recognize gestures in real time just like a human does: by extrapolating from experience. Jamie Shotton, a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge in England, devised a machine learning algorithm for that purpose. It also recognizes poses and renders them in the game space on-screen at 30 frames per second, a rate that conveys smooth movement. Essentially, Natal-enhanced Xboxes will do motion capture on the fly, without the need for the mirror-studded spandex suit of conventional motion-capture approaches.
Hit the link for more about the science going into Natal.
Binary Body Double: Microsoft Reveals the Science Behind Project Natal for Xbox 360
One of the most popular series on DS, Ace Attorney, has a new game coming out in a couple weeks and has released a demo to give gamers a taste. Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth is available on the Nintendo Channel and DS download stations at select retailers. The full game will be out on February 16th.
Ace Attorney Investigations sheds light on the other side of the judicial system with a whole new gameplay dynamic to the world of Ace Attorney. As Miles Edgeworth, users will investigate various locations, work directly with characters on the scene, find contradictions, and get to the truth by presenting decisive evidence. Miles Edgeworth can also make use of the all-new “Logic” system, in which he chooses two pieces of information out of the various pieces he has collected and “combines” them to discover new information. Ace Attorney Investigations features several lengthy, interrelated episodes that will challenge players to use their minds to solve the series of crimes that have been committed around Miles Edgeworth.
More information can be found at http://ace-attorney.com.
Super Bowl is less than a week away, and its reach has pulled gaming into the commercial fold. Electronic Arts and Visceral Studios will have a 30-second spot during the fourth quarter titled “Hell Awaits…”
“Even within the spectrum of live sports events, the Super Bowl stands apart, almost as a national holiday,” said Frank Gibeau, president at EA. “The Super Bowl is a bull’s-eye in terms of cross-over to our core demographic and the reach is outstanding. Not only does it draw 100M viewers, but most people watch the Super Bowl live, a rarity in the world of DVRs. While digital outreach to Facebook, Twitter, and online bloggers is a core part of our marketing strategy, we felt that advertising during the Super Bowl is an excellent way to introduce this new game to a massive cross-section of people who are likely already familiar with the “Divine Comedy. Inspired by a classic, but perfect for today’s action gamer. This is entertainment at its best.”
Inspired by the first part of ‘The Divine Comedy’ written by 13th Century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, EA’s Dante’s Inferno, delivers a unique visual representation of the nine circles of Hell, once only experienced in the pages of the timeless classic. Dante’s Inferno offers a fully animated experience in which players assume the role of Dante, who descends into Hell after returning home to find his beloved Beatrice murdered, with Lucifer seducing her soul into the underworld. As in the poem, players will descend through Dante’s unique nine circles of Hell: limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. Each circle will showcase distinct environments, enemies and story elements befitting of the sins committed by their inhabitants. Developed by Visceral Games, Dante’s Inferno delivers fast, fluid and responsive combat at 60 frames per second — a must-have for the action adventure genre.
More information on Dante’s Inferno can be found at http://www.dantesinferno.com.