Feel just a little bit more like James Bond, thanks to Brookstone!

The next time you’re through an airport with an extra $250 in tow, why not pick yourself up a pair of WiFi-enabled cufflinks.

That’s right: they’re silver cufflinks with little WiFi USB access points hidden in them. Or, well, included in them; they’re not really hidden per se.

But still!

Zynga is losing up to $150 per new paying customer.

I wish I could say I feel bad for them, but I really don’t like Zynga.

Marketing costs, in case you’re wondering, appear to be what’s doing them in. They’re spending more to show off their wares than they are pulling in with new purchasers of same. Gee, darn, eh?

Related: What’s a maker of imitation games to do when the chips are down and money is going out the door? How about online gambling?

Speaking of Zynga’s penchant for building clones of other successful games in the social, mobile, and casual spaces…

So has everyone heard of Bioshock Infinite’s “1999 mode”?

A new post on the Bioshock Infinite blog describes the new mode. “With every choice you make, there are irreversible implications,” the post says. “If your choices guide you down a path not suited to your play style, you will suffer for it.”

Bioshock’s distant cousin, System Shock 2 was released in 1999, and the new difficulty mode promises strict resource limits that may prove familiar to long-time Shock fans. Combat specialisation will be an important factor, too. Irrational say that “you’ll need to develop them efficiently and effectively throughout the story; any weapon will be useless to you unless you have that specialization.”

The post also says that your health will be “set to an entirely different baseline.” Unlike some hardcore modes, your progress won’t be wiped on death, however. Ken Levine says “there are game saves, and you’re gonna f***cking need them.”

I take it you’ve all heard about the MegaUpload shutdown?

Who needs SOPA and PIPA? It would seem that extant laws are quite suited to taking file-sharing websites offline as is!

I’m of two minds about the takedown, personally. One one hand, MegaUpload was a visually offensive monstrosity that I never quite felt save grabbing files from, no matter how convenient it was that the service was there. On the other hand, I’m not exactly a huge piracy fan, am I…and I am well aware that there was lots of pirated material being hosted through the site. There was also lots of legitimate material, and I’m not trying to say that the takedown was the right thing to do…but neither am I saying that the authorities involved lacked for a case according to extant laws.

End of an era: Kodak goes bankrupt.

I…okay, here, I have no words. As an amateur photographer, I recognized Kodak as an icon of the photography industry (although, as a digital photographer shooting on a Canon system, I haven’t actually had a use for Kodak products since the last millenium).

Ubisoft has one of the ugliest, most restrictive DRM schemes going…

…but I’m sure we’re all relieved to know that the “vast majority” of their customers never experience DRM-related problems.

Because that is reassuring, and stuff.

Life on Venus?

That is evidently what at least one Russian scientist is claiming, based on evidence (pictures, mostly) sent back by the short-lived probe the Russians sent to that planet back in 1982.

What can social gameplay offer to different player types?

Gamasutra looks at results from a recent “player motivation factors” survey conducted by Relentless Software and Vertical Slice. For those of you wondering what Richard Garriott is probably thinking about on a fairly constant basis in regard to his upcoming “Ultimate RPG”, this is a decent article to read through.

Origin is EA-exclusive no more!

Eleven new publishers and some number of non-EA games have been added to Electronic Arts’ digital distribution service.

My question is: can I import keys for non-EA games available through Origin from other digital distribution services? I only ask because every EA game I purchased through Impulse could be added to my Origin account simply by providing the game’s registration key. It would be cool if I could do that with any non-EA games I own which Origin has for sale.

Australia may add an R18+ game rating this year!

You know, so games like Syndicate (the new one) can be sold there.

Apple might have just set the new standard in EULA “dick moves”.

And yes, I know that’s a tall damn statement, but let me explain.

You see, with Apple’s newly-launched iBooks Author application, you have two choices as an author looking to distribute your new work that you’ve just completed with it. You can distribute it through any other digital bookselling service beside’s Apple’s…but you can only do so by offering the work for free. If you want to charge for your work, you have to use Apple’s iBooks storefront…exclusively. You can’t later start selling your work through another service, once it’s hit the iBookstore.

Ars Technica smells a possible antitrust suit. I’m inclined to agree.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown video interview!

GameInformer sits down with the legendary Sid Meier to talk about the upcoming remake of the tactical sci-fi game.

Minecraft-themed LEGO is coming!

The proposal for the creation of Minecraft-themed LEGO sets has passed review, it would seem, meaning that the proposal is now officially on its way to becoming an actual LEGO product.

Imagine that: a whole box full of the 1×1 LEGO pieces. Thousands and thousands of them. Or, well, a hundred or so. It is LEGO, after all.

The twelve best games on PC?

Well, according to Kotaku, at least. Prepare an appropriate quantity of salt grains before watching.

Jar Jar Binks saved Star Wars?

Okay, 1UP wasn’t dumb enough to actually assert that the nasal-voiced Rastafarian Gungan was the element — the necessary change-up, the dramatic shift — that kept the Star Wars series from sliding into obscurity and the dustbin of history.

But they did just publish an article arguing that Diablo saved CRPGs. Which is basically saying the same thing, only in a way that doesn’t sound so obviously stupid.

Tomorrow, they’ll be publishing another feature expounding on the reasons why Star Trek: Nemesis saved the sci-fi franchise Gene Roddenberry created. Okay, not really…but it’d be fitting if they did. You know, in keeping with the “stupid” theme they have going now.

Windows 8 will restrict desktop customization?

That’s the inside skinny from PC Gamer, at least:

One of the very few choices we have left in this world is the ability to put a picture of family, friends or favourite frags on our desktop backgrounds, but even that facsimile of free will is being withdrawn. According to an interview over at our sister site TechRadar, customisation of Windows 8′s new Metro interface will be limited to decisions about the solid colour background.

The reason given is that a photograph wouldn’t scale and slide as the icons shift beneath your fingertips — although as the owner of an Android tablet I’m pretty happy with the way Google’s got around this issue. Android simply makes the desktop smaller than the image, so that it moves in the background as you scroll.

Thanks to iOS, though, desktop customisation is going out of fashion fast and it’s not surprising that Metro introduces more limits. Even Linux is becoming more proscriptive by the day.

It’s worth noting that iOS still allows you to use a bloody background image!

This is a conundrum: I am actually a really big fan of the Metro UI concept, but it’s still nice to have customization options available in case I feel like messing around. I’m big on workspace personalization, and that applies as much to my virtual workspaces as my actual one.

Tonight’s post brought to you by the planet Earth:

Feed the Gamer looks at this very question and comes away with the conclusion that Looking Glass — the studio that developed both Ultima Underworld games — was very, very awesome indeed.

Founded in 1990, Looking Glass was not only responsible for some of that decade’s most innovative and memorable games, but was also a place where people like Ken Levine (BioShock), Warren Spector (Deus Ex) and Seamus Blackley (Xbox) all worked under the one roof.

The product of a merger between two companies, Blue Sky Productions and Lerner Research, Looking Glass Studios was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Developing mostly for the PC, Looking Glass’ first few games were published by PC gaming giant Origin (Wing Commander, Ultima), but by 1995 the studio was developing and publishing its own titles.

…

Looking Glass’ first game (well, while its development side was still known as Blue Sky) was 1992′s Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, a first-person role-playing game that not only broke from the traditions of conventional Ultima games, but in many ways blew right past them, its immersive setting and (for the time) amazing 3D graphics making it a critical success.

The games which came next read like a “greatest hits collection” of PC gaming in the 1990s…

Eidos — massively in debt at the time — shut Looking Glass down in the year 2000, a rather ignoble end for such a talented development house. One could almost argue that such was the curse that afflicted all developers who published Ultima titles, I suppose. But in their short span, the did produce some genre-defining — and genre-shattering — games, which frankly still hold up very well today.

Matthew Jason Weise, writing at Eludamos (The Journal for Computer Game Culture), looks at Irrational Games’ hit title Bioshock from a “critical historical perspective” (thanks for the link, Sergorn!), and notes that the game owes much to the two major franchises for which Looking Glass Studios is remembered: System Shock and Ultima Underworld.

How’s this for an opener?

According to Bioshock’s creators at Irrational Games, Bioshock is the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. Yet System Shock 2 did not originate all the conventions Bioshock employs. Nor did the original System Shock. To truly understand where Bioshock comes from one has to go all the way back to System Shock’s predecessor, Ultima Underworld, released by Looking Glass Studios. Though Looking Glass made games using the first person perspective during the same time period as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and Half-Life it never made games that could accurately be called first-person shooters. Looking Glass had its own trajectory of first-person game design independent from first-person shooters. Their games experimented with story, character, and immersion in ways first-person shooters did not. Bioshock would not be the game it is without Looking Glass’s innovations.

Long-time fans of the Ultima series won’t find much in the way of new information about Ultima Underworld, and those who keep informed about where new studios draw inspiration from probably won’t find much in the essay as a whole that is novel. That said, it’s a very good look at the historical progression from Ultima Underworld to System Shock to Bioshock, and the legacy and inspiration that those earlier titles gave to Irrational’s (actually quite awesome) hit game.

Okay, on the surface, the team’s latest screenshot doesn’t look particularly “wow, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen since amazing was amazing!”…it’s just the Avatar in front of a lady sitting on a bench. Until, that is, you realize that the lady in question is Janaa, and the bench she’s sitting on is in Moonglow, on Mariah’s balcony.

Iceblade explains why this is about as awesome as finding BioShock on sale for $2:

What is significant about this is that I actually placed new objects into the game world, gave them the correct properties and flags to function, and created a completely new trigger sequence to call Jaana’s activity sequence. So now whenever I approach Mariah’s house, a trigger gets called to activate Jaana’s “To Yew” teleport activity sequence, which takes her to the teleport target I placed at Mariah’s house. Another aspect in this image that you should note is that Jaana is sitting. She actually did this automatically, and in fact, we found that at times she would go inside the house and sit on a bench there. We know that this occurred because this activity sequence we used also included an “activate activity sequence” command that pointed back to Jaana’s “Loiter” activity sequence (a simple, one command sequence). So apparently, loitering is a very comprehensive activity, which is great as this just makes our job easier.

I suppose you might be wondering why I was working on getting Jaana to Moonglow. Well unlike Jaana, Mariah doesn’t have any empty activity sequences I could use, and we currently don’t have the tools to add new activity sequences or commands. Also, the court at Yew is very packed in and the high concentration of additional triggers makes testing rather difficult — and there was a lot of testing needed to get this working properly. Luckily, it shouldn’t take me long to take what I did at Mariah’s and repeat it for the Court of Yew. I will admit here that Jaana will be reincorporated and ready to go within a few weeks (depending on how busy I’ll be). Mariah, however, will slow down a new patch drastically unless of course a Delphi/Pascal coder joins the team.

So…any Delphi/Pascal coders out there, please…as in pleasepleaseplease…get in touch with the Forgotten World team! Seriously! Thy deeds and accomplishments will be the stuff of legend!

No, I’m not talking about playing The Secret of Monkey Island on your iPhone during another boring math lecture. I’m talking about games forming a part of a course curriculum…in this case, Valve‘s Portal being assigned as “required reading” (so to speak) for incoming freshmen at Wabash College:

Wabash’s incoming freshmen are now assigned the classic first-person puzzler ‘Portal’ as required “reading.” Professor Michael Abbot pushed to have the game added to the curriculum for “Enduring Questions,” a required seminar for all new students that acclimates them to critical readings and discussions in a college environment.

The game is being used specifically as a companion piece to Erving Goffman‘s ‘Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.’ After reading the landmark sociology tome, students will play through ‘Portal’ as an interactive illustration of the struggle over perception at the heart of ‘Presentation.’ Using a video game to augment the interpretation of a traditional text seems like an ideal way to ease both students and educators into the act of “reading” video games. In a blog post, Abbot says he considered including a game as a stand-alone assignment (as apparently ‘Bioshock‘ was on the short list of candidates, too), but, in the end, decided to go with ‘Portal’ and ‘Presentation’ because they make “a good first impression.”

Granted, computer games have had a bit of a niche in education already, as some colleges and universities have added game design courses to their computer science curricula…but this usage of Portal will reach a much wider audience, a significant portion of the student body at Wabash. Given how ubiquitous games have really become in society (consider: Halo: Reach brought in $200 million in its first day of sales; that is a bigger one-day gross than any one-day gross for any movie, ever (although the stats for movies are US domestic, whereas the Reach stats are global), and would be enough — were Reach a movie — to rank 20th overall for largest worldwide opening (besting out The Dark Knight, but being in turn bested by Iron Man), it was only a matter of time before games began popping up in non-technical course curricula.

And now that day is here.