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We in the gaming world typically don't need to pay attention to the Macworld Expo for news, since it's been pretty well-known that gaming on the Mac sucks. One of the "hottest" games on the Mac right now is Age of Empires III, which came out something like 400 years ago.

Macs use Intel chips now, and the market share is expanding day by day. There's no reason for the gaming market to be so bleak on the Mac, and it looks like perhaps things are starting to make a turn.

Today, Activision announced that uber-hit Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare will be coming to the Mac via game-porting specialists Aspyr. Yesterday it was revealed via EA that Spore is being developed for the Mac, and is even available on display at Macworld.

I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro but I have to hang onto a Windows box for the sake of the few PC games worth playing that come out every year or so. If the PC and Mac gaming markets were a little more symmetrical, I'd be ecstatic for one, but I think it would be good for gaming and great for Apple.

Go into an Apple store and the only games you'll see on those machines are such fare as Finding Nemo and some new age analog of Reader Rabbit. Aren't Macs supposed to be for the young, hipster, media-savvy crowd? Shoddy ports coming out months late doesn't strike me as very hip or savvy.

This could be a product of Microsoft's buddy-buddy status with the publishers. They've dumped millions on this "Games for Windows" concept, and pushed DirectX on the developers like smack on a pre-teen. It could also be a product of legacy. Games started out on computers, and although this tricked-out "gaming rig" trend is a recent phenom, PCs have always been seen as gaming vehicles.

They're also beginning to be seen as antiquated, and Apple is moving in as the younger alternative. If they'd like one hell of a boost in that direction, a decent library of video games would do that. 

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If 2007 taught gaming journalists anything it was that much has changed since the days of yore - no longer are we paying $30-50 for quality titles that challenge, engage, and entertain us as gamers. Instead we are forking out boatloads of cash for matching accessories, consoles we can't locate without ebay, games that require patches to actually operate, and new, disappointing sagas without endings.

In the hopes of promoting change for 2008, then, here is GameBump's "most wanted" list written by avid gamers and directed toward the gaming industry. If you've been playing through 2007's offerings and wondering if you're the only one who's been confused about the latest industry trends - don't worry; you're not.

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Is our children learning? I think the answer is no.

Like most people with even a fraction of an education, I enjoyed the level in Call of Duty 4 taking place in post-meltdown Chernobyl because of the accurate and realistic portrayal of the barren, radioactive landscape.

Chernobyl is a city in Russia where a nuclear power plant exploded in 1986. It was one of the largest disasters of the modern era. Hundreds of square miles are still radioactive over 20 years later, thousands of people died from the radioactivity from the waste seeping from the nuclear reactor. It's estimated that over 500,000 people have been seriously affected. Mutations, radiation poisoning, deformed offspring.

I didn't know that anybody didn't know that. Even if you don't know about it because of its significance in human tragedy or engineering failure, you know about it because everybody else knows about it. Almost everybody.

Recently, someone posted some photos from Chernobyl to compare them to Call of Duty 4 screenshots. Then, as is the most proper thing to do, someone put the photos on YouTube with a Linkin Park song over it to post it in this nextgenboards thread. The reactions, and the replies, have destroyed a special part of the inside of my brain.

People have no idea what Chernobyl is.

Here's one early reply:


Alright, that doesn't count as a logical sentiment or thought, so maybe it's just "first post" syndrome. Lets keep reading...


Awesome. The only connection to one of man's greatest disasters is that it would remind you of a video game level.


Yes. I too would go there to be like Dam. Though, I don't think the worst part is that it's radioactive; I think that's the only part.

The next reply:


Don't let your heads explode just yet, he is quickly educated:


*boom*

I love to think that video games are helping to educate our youngsters, (everything I know about guns I learned from gaming...) but this is taking it a little far. It's Chernobyl for crying out loud. What are our public schools doing? Do people know that the events surrounding previous Call of Duty games (World War II) actually happened, too? Perhaps The Daily Show would have to do a bit about Chernobyl before today's youth would become aware of it.

Granted, this might not represent an accurate sample of our population, but not a single person in that forum seemed to have any idea that Chernobyl is a real place with a real meltdown. I think perhaps a few hours every day browsing Wikipedia articles should be mandatory.

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While gamers and gaming journalists everywhere are currently in an uproar regarding GameSpot's firing of Jeff Gerstmann over a poor review score for Eidos Interactive's Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (you can check out our own review here), what's interesting is that Eidos itself has refrained from commenting on the K&L fiasco.

In particular, the company's blatant graphical lie about the game's review scores, which we noticed were preview quotes paired with star rankings that didn't exist (GameSpy was recorded as having given the title a five star rating when the actual review issued three stars; similarily, Game Informer was recorded as issuing a five star rating when it scored the title a 7/10, which is funny because Game Informer doesn't even use a star system).

While Eidos Interactive has remained quiet on the issue, the company's PR trolls have been hard at work handling the damage control on various Kane & Lynch "fan" sites, including this one, which contains a post in which an "Eidos Official" comments that, indeed, those cheeky five stars weren't meant to be viewed as scores because obviously it's common practice to issue star ratings for game previews. Here's the full quote:


In the words of our own Aaron Dunlap, who broke the original story, "Silly us for thinking that a star near a review had something to do with reviews giving stars."

What's infuriating about this "graphical misrepresentation" of game scores that don't exist is that Eidos would "forget" to remove the intentionally misleading star graphics and then explain away the fans' negative reaction to being outright lied to as simple Eidos bashing - "bashing" Eidos apparently being the hip thing to do.

What's even more hilarious is that while the stars have since been removed from the official site's splash introduction, the site still parades preview quotes around as though they were the official "review" word on the title.

In other Eidos news, the game's official Eidos forum has been unlocked and is now available for posting. At one point an Eidos admin actually responds to a fan's statement that "they [the stars] are MEANT to be misinterpreted so that people will be misled into thinking K&L is a better game than it is and [buy] it" with:


Read: it is peachy to outright lie about your game's review scores if you can get away with labeling them as "design decisions". Thanks for the heads up, Eidos.

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There's no doubt about it - Super Mario Galaxy is the finest Mario game in years. It's easily the best out of the current three 3D Mario platformers, evolving beyond the genre-defining nature of Super Mario 64 and the uh...water-spurting innovations of Super Mario Sunshine. However, the game pays tribute to more than just Mario's 3D outings.

The first time a third Mario game was the best of its series happened way back in 1988, with the release of Super Mario Bros. 3. Yes, 1988 - it's not often known that the game was originally released that year in Japan. Americans likely had to wait due to Nintendo not wanting to cannabalize sales of the then newly-localized Super Mario Bros. 2, released the same year. After the seminal preview in 1989's abysmally cheesy cult film The Wizard, Mario 3 finally hit US stores in February 1990. It was worth the wait. Featuring huge stages and innovations, like the ability to fly, Super Mario Bros. 3 was all a pre-pubescent mind could hope for - and more.

My memories of Mario 3 fresh in my mind due to the Mario high I achieved from Galaxy, I decided to revisit this nearly two-decade old title to see just how well it held up. While the game has seen resuscitation on the Wii's Virtual Console, I already had my Super NES hooked up so I settled for my old Super Mario All-Stars cart - you know, the one with Super NES enhanced ports of Marios 1-3 and the suicide-inducing Lost Levels. Once I found the cart in a bin amidst the gutter trash of my Super NES collection (the Beethoven movie game? seriously?) I popped it in my 16-year-old console and flipped the switch. Nothing happened. I calmly removed the cartridge and gave its pin connectors the long and hard blow usually reserved for NES carts. Worked like magic. I selected SMB 3 with haste, my only lament being that I didn't have the original SMB 3 Nintendo Power Strategy Guide at my side like I would have if I were still that fat nine-year-old kid.

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor.

On Monday, April 16th, the deadliest shooting in American history took place at Virginia Tech. In the handful of days since this tragedy, people across the nation and world are trying to make sense of it, to rationalize it, to recover from it, or to forget it. A few people, though, are missing no opportunity to exploit human suffering and death to increase their exposure or legitimize their own self-satisfying crusades.

Personally, since I heard about the shooting on Monday I've had my head between my legs in hopes that if I ignored the bad things in the world they'd go away. This was all going well enough, until a few voices rose above the blur of blame-this-blame-that talking heads and dragged me to the surface.

People have been blaming video games for the world's problems for years now, so it's become hard to care or even notice when the latest demagogue wiggles his way into the spotlight long enough to do so. This situation, however, is different. This shooting has affected almost everyone in the country in some way, and people are actually looking for answers; so when Jack Thompson and Phil McGraw spout off their ill-conceived garbage about video games being at blame for a psychopath's murder of over 30 students and faculty members, people might just listen.

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor.

You probably know that the PlayStation 3 will be releasing in just a few months now, and you've probably been hearing some pretty nasty things being said about the future platform. Spin, hype, hate, and fanboy adoration are quite typical in this business, especially right around the time a big new system is set to release. In this consumer world, we like to break down simple things like colas and videogame machines into lifestyles and factions. Pepsi people hate Coke people, PC people hate Mac people, Nintendo people hate Sony people. People never seem to realize that they're putting way too much energy into drinks, computers, and game systems. So, with a clean mental palate we're going to examine some of the predictions of doom cast toward the PlayStation 3. Folks, this is Point-Counter-Counterpoint.

Point-Counter-Counterpoint works like this: we've scanned some forums and picked out 10 of the most common arguments people have made against the PS3. The anti-PS3 arguments will appear in bold, and below them will be an observation by some of our writing staff or other gaming experts.

Today we have contributing: Gaming Horizon's Editor-in-Chief Shiva Stella, Senior Writer Aaron Dunlap, and Staff Writer Evan Lahti, and a special guest contributor, Ryan Kincaid, administrator of Metal Gear Solid: The Unofficial Site (TUS).

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. It was written by Nate Francis.

Politics in the United States has always had its sordid little moments. Even leaving behind the historical missteps among earlier generations of politicos, we need look back no further than the 1990's to begin assembling an impressive catalog of silliness, incompetence and downright malfeasance from state legislatures all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue. In this age of 24/7 wall-to-wall news coverage, our national political edifices have captured our imagination, scorn and contempt like no other.

Remember me? I'm guilty. Any gamer can kick back on his beanbag, toss down a few shots of warm Coca-Cola, and immediately bring to mind any of dozens of congressional, judicial and presidential scandals. I mean, just riffing off the top of my head, we have:

• Bill Clinton perjures himself in grand jury testimony
• Oklahoma judge Don Thompson loses his job after being caught using a penis pump under his robes while court was in session
• House Speaker Tom Delay retires from the House in the midst of grand jury probes into the legality his various political activities
• Representative William Jefferson is videotaped accepting tens of thousands of dollars in bribe money; the cash is later recovered from his freezer

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor.

On Wednesday, June 14, 2006, the Committee on Energy and Commerce, a subcommittee of the US House or Representatives, held a hearing titled (why do these things need titles?), "Violent and Explicit Video Games: Informing Parents and Protecting Children."

As you may have heard, the outcome of this event was not entirely in the best interest of gaming as a whole. The gist of their conclusion, after questioning the head of the ESA, the President of the ESRB, the Director of the FTC's Consumer Protection bureau, Wal-Mart's VP of merchandising, and three game/health experts, was that violent videogames are akin to pornography in their harm for children and that the ESRB is at fault for letting something like Hot Coffee (which was a terribly isolated incident that would be nearly impossible to reproduce) defile our children.

I watched most of the hearing live, before the video feed suddenly cut out once things started getting good, and throughout the whole hour and a half of viewing I was consistently flabbergasted by the ignorance and misinformation that the Senators conducting the hearing were dealing with.

It is extremely apparent that these people, the ones wielding the power of the entire Legislative branch of our government, have little to no experience in the actual "world" of game playing. Every bit of evidence or material they used in their favor was misrepresentative, illogical, or flat-out wrong.
Congressman Stearns

Take, for example, the video clips that the Senators showed after each of the attending introduced themselves. Congressman Cliff Stearns (R. Florida) prefaced the video with something to the tune of, "this should give you an example of the type of material found videogames today." A series of clips then played, mostly from various Grand Theft Auto games, one from San Andreas where the player flew a plane into a building, another from the same game where the player stood on a street corner and shot civilians from a distance with a sniper rifle (even, gasp, police officers), and then a cutscene from Vice City where the main characters complete a drug transaction in a comically farcical way.

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This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor.

Sony released some surprising data recently. In a statement sent directly to industry media titled, "PS2 and PSP Continue to Outsell Current and New Generation," Sony gloats that the PlayStation 2 has sold more units in May than the Xbox 360 and more PSPs in May than the Nintendo DS and GameBoy Advance.

First of all, since when is Sony allowed to do this? That is, release unprovoked to the world that their systems are selling more than everybody else, neener neener neener. Granted, most of the "news" in this industry is generated by the subjects of the news anyway, but this kind of pushes it. This kind of self-congratulation really stinks of poor sportsmanship, and makes you wonder what the company is so afraid of that they'd need to come from left field with a response to some imaginary arguer.

It's like if some stranger standing behind you in a checkout line randomly proclaims, "I'm not crazy!" which both raises and confirms the notion that he probably is.

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