Support children charities...support OneBigGame

Joe:
Basically OneBigGame is asking game developers to make games and browser games for them. They plan to sell these games or maybe subscription to a website with many web games on it and donate (ALL) revenue to children charities. I signed up for the newsletter and you should too if you are a gamer or a browser gamer.

http://www.onebiggame.org/newsletter.aspx

Part of article from GameDaily:

Today, OneBigGame announced the beneficiaries of the profits raised by the non-profit gaming publisher. Save the Children and Starlight Children's Foundation will receive all revenue from the company. Each of the charities will be receiving an even share of OneBigGame's profits.

"Our intention from day one was for the funds to go to several children's charities," stated Martin de Ronde, founder and Chairman of OneBigGame.org. "In Save the Children and Starlight, we've found two highly regarded and reliable partners that for decades have helped children structurally resolve the problems they face, which is completely in line with our mission objective. With these two partners, we are certain that funds are well spent."

http://www.onebiggame.org/

Circuit City is no more... :-(

Circuit City filed bankruptcy last year and close a large number of their stores. Since then, they have been trying to come back from this by getting another company to bail them out by buying and refinancing their debt. Looks like now they given up hope. Last week, Circuit City announced that they would be closing all the remaining stores (about 567). If you remember, the store Comp USA had to do the same thing but they moved to an online website. Circuit City is not going to do the same but just fade away it seems. They are liquidating their stock with deals to sell everything out of store. I went to browse the first wave of these deals Saturday at the Hamburg shopping center in Lexington, KY and nothing is cheap enough yet to buy up. The worst thing about this, other than Best Buys not having any non-online competition is that there will be an estimated 30,000 jobs lost. In this current economy this is very bad!

Joe Davis

Wii Dominates Christmas...Will PS3 and XBOX Lower prices?

Ok, looks like the Wii out sold the PS3 and XBOX360 by a very large margin. This is the first time in about 17 years that a Nintendo system was on top in sales. This was back in the NES days. Anywho, they have predicted that the PS3 will drop from $399 to $299 and that Microsoft will follow suit with a price cut for the XBOX360. This was predicted from Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter in his NPD preview report.

I think it would be very wise for Sony to drop the price of a PS3 by $100 because then you have an awsome game system and Blue Ray player for only $299. That's only $100 more than just buying a Blue Ray player.

-GingerJoe

Gears of War 2 Update coming soon!!!

Mark Rein of Epic posted a blog about an upcoming Gears of War 2 update. Sounds like it fixes exploits and bugs but also adds new achievements. What is interesting to me is added achievements. I thought that a game was only allowed 1000 points of achievements. This got me to Google it up and I found from a Wiki (don't you love Wikis?):

On February 1, 2007, Microsoft announced on their Gamerscore Blog some new policies that developers must follow related to Gamerscore and Achievements in future releases.^[19] All games must have 1,000 Gamerscore points in the base game - the title can ship with fewer than 1,000 points, but anything added later must be free. Game developers also now have the option of adding up to 250 points via downloadable content (for a total of 1,250 points) - this content can be either free or paid. Xbox Live Arcade titles may add up to 50 points via downloadable content (for a total of 250 points). In special cases, Microsoft has allowed games to exceed this Gamerscore limit, with Halo 3 having a total of 1750 achievments points.

Well, I was proved wrong. Anywho, lets get back to the meat of this post. Here is part of Mark Reins' blog:

As I mentioned before the break we’ve been working on a major title update for Gears of War 2. This update will address bugs and exploits as well as add some new achievements related to downloadable content. We don’t have an exact date for it but all indicators are it will go live within January. If that changes we’ll let you know.

Full blog is here.

Joe

Hasbro games coming to XBOX Live Arcade

EA today announced that they will be bringing various Hasbro properties to Xbox Live Arcade during 2009. Titles such as Scrabble, Boggle, Battleship, Yahtzee, Connect Four, and Sorry! will all release under the Hasbro Family Game Night banner. All of the games will feature alternative game modes and online play.

My thoughts:
Sounds like more family fun for the Xbox Live Arcade. UNO released around the launch time of the XBOX360 is still one of the top selling Live Arcade title after several years. I am stoked about playing Battleship online with friends.