The only aspect of the Nintendo 3DS that gives me a headache is its bludgeon of a price tag. That, and I think it whispered "Kali Ma" to me once and made clutching gestures toward my eyeballs while I was trying it in a store.
News Blips:
Nintendo scoffs at a newspaper report claiming the 3DS is being returned in droves after leaving "thousands with dizziness and headaches." British tabloid The Sun implicated the 3D effect of Nintendo's handheld for afflicting owners with a string of nasty calamities such as faintness, migraines, and the near-fatal "empty wallet" disease. Nintendo, of course, fired back with a statement that called shenanigans on The Sun's return rate figures. "Recent reports are incorrect," Nintendo told Eurogamer. "The number of calls and emails with queries on the Nintendo 3DS is in fact well below the rate experienced during past hardware launches. Having spoken with our retail partners, there are only a handful of people who have actually gone into stores to request a refund." However, I can confirm that the 3DS causes serious headaches: After playing Pilotwings Resort while indulging in my second bottle of Captain Morgan, I experienced a severe bout of nausea and the room started to spin. Time to return this thing!
Hacker vigilante group Anonymous launches denial-of-service attacks on Sony's official PlayStation websites. After releasing a manifesto yesterday that vowed wrath on Sony for its "wholly unforgivable" act of "victimizing your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information," members of the group claimed responsibility for a series of attacks upon the official PlayStation blog, which left the website sluggish and nearly unavailable. More alarmingly, PlayStation LifeStyle reports that a radical splinter group of Anonymous named SonyRecon is attempting to fish out personal data of Sony employees for exploitation — including a pursuit to learn the identities of Sony CEO Howard Stringer's children. I was about to raise my fist in solidarity, but after reading these new developments, I'd rather turn it into a middle finger towards Anonymous instead.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson isn't opposed to starring in a film adaptation of Call of Duty: Black Ops. "I thought we had an opportunity with Doom," Johnson explained to MTV. "Didn't work out the way we wanted it to, creatively. But yeah, if the right opportunity came along and the script is good, sure." 2005's silver screen version of Doom was a gigantic flop, but at least it provided us a rare glimpse of Karl Urban uttering more than two words of dialogue at once. Asked if there was a particular game he would like to see a film adaptation of, Johnson responded, "Black Ops, that'd be bad ass. Let's make it happen, let's do it. That, and Black Swan 2." Oh, man, think of the possibilities of a COD/Black Swan tie-in. Can you smell what The Rock is cooking? Movie magic, my friends.
Details on Max Payne 3 emerge in Edge magazine. Fan website RockstarSpy provided scanned images of Edge's preview article, which revealed a brooding, disheveled Max blasting his way through locations in Brazil eight years after the events of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Max's signature Bullet Time moves will make a return, along with destructible objects and a new cover system. No release date has been announced for Max Payne 3 yet, but as long as original voice actor James McCaffrey is in the game to lend his pithy remarks on life, I can wait.
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