Somewhat uncomfortable

Johnny Xbox plays Monopoly:

Online Gamer Plays Monopoly - Watch more Funny Videos

IUN webcast - January 16, 2010

This week:  Jailbreak Source, Division 9, the Spitter, no dev console for BC2, Aliens vs. Predator, Modern Warfail 2, Games Radar's "Anti-Awards," and more.

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First-person Tetris

It will make you sick in 20 seconds, max.

(But you'll do it anyway.)

Yep ... it gets worse

Did I say "super soldier" before?  Call this one the "hyper soldier." Or the "pwn star." Or just call him "the game-breaker."

Remember how everybody hated the grenade launcher from MW1? Infinity Ward heard your cries of exasperation, and balanced the sh*t out of it. In MW2, you can select a perk ("danger close") that increases the blast radius and the damage of all your explodey things. That includes your thrown grenades, your noob tube grenades, your claymores (available via yet another perk), and ... AND ... all the explosive ordnance fired out of the aerial vehicle sh*t you "earn" through killstreaks.

But that's not the end of it. No, sir. In the same kit, you can also select a perk called "one man army," which lets you change your class any time - and as often as you like - within a round. The bitch? You can switch to the same class you were just using, and doing so replenishes your claymores and tube grenades. You'll never run out of them.

Watch this guy go 103 and 3 in half a round of domination:

This new kit hasn't come into widespread use yet, but just wait. Among the various gaming news sites I read every day, there have been one or two "WTF?" pieces on Call of Duty: Even More Modern Warfare almost every day this week. Maybe all the sheep will finally start to realize that Infinity Ward's execution has fallen far short of Activision's marketing hype.

Or maybe the lambs will just keep getting slaughtered.

Bucking the trend

Valve has invited the Team Fortress 2 modding community to submit custom models and avatars for review. If the submission is approved (both on technical and style grounds), Valve will enable it in-game. It seems that the custom content will work even in stock servers.

The best part: you can submit custom models for the existing weapons. So if you wanted to replace the Scout's baseball bat, for example, you could in theory submit a medieval torture device, a prosthetic arm, or Plucky's Cane.™ The weapon will retain all the statistics of its predecessor item, however; no super weapons allowed.

Check out the TF2 Contribute page for more information.

Ye shall not be charged...

...call it "Goldberged."

MW2: exploiting the exploitable

It really is hard to argue with a billion dollars in sales, but if there's another recurring theme with Modern Warfare 2, it's this: to love the game is to hate its players.

Following on the early trend of glitch exploiters - the javelin suicide bombers, the infinite care package mongoloids, and the hiders in what should be solid objects - a second wave of griefers have begun relieving themselves in MW2's swimming pool. The aforementioned slash-and-stab super soldier is one species, of course, and now we've discovered another: the nuke booster. Geek.com provides the profile:

[B]asically players on opposite sides can team up, use tactical insertions to spawn in out-of-the-way places (near one another) and then one repeatedly kills the other until they have their nuke.

The thing about the nuke: it ends the round for everybody. When it's hard enough to find a game setup that interests you (in terms of ping, map, gametype, etc.), a round aborted by an exploit might cause some frustration.

The use of such exploits is garden-variety unsportsmanlike conduct, which has infected every online multiplayer game ever made. In MW2's case, however, you have to view that type of behavior alongside the douchebaggery-by-design: the noob tube, the akimbo shotguns, the martyrdom "deathstreak" award, et al., all of which work exactly as the developer intended.

Most of the common complaints about the game (and its predecessor) relate directly to all the silly, unbalancing novelties introduced with the perk mechanics. It's a system that's ripe for exploitation, and there's no way to stop it from overwhelming the fundamental "move, aim, and fire" aspects of a shooter.

Well, there is a way. Custom rule sets on player-administered dedicated servers would have gone a long way toward making the online experience tolerable for a range of different tastes. (Note to IW's Jason West: this is why gamers form the "insular communities" you hate so much.) There would be no cause to describe any intentional feature as a "gamebreaker" - a word increasingly associated with MW2 - because individual server admins could just prohibit its use.

Instead, players got IWnet: a social sandbox that allows you to play the game with everyone and everything in it ... or not at all.

And people went out and bought it in droves.

Splinter Cell: Conviction delayed

As reported at Gamasutra, Ubisoft announced today that it is pushing the release of Splinter Cell: Conviction into April 2010.

The game was originally scheduled for release on November 16, 2007, but that version was reportedly scrapped in favor of a total revamp.  After issuing a new street date of Fall 2009, Ubisoft delayed the game again - to February 23, 2010 - ostensibly for "minor tweaks [and] balancing."

Ubisoft also revised its projected income for this fiscal year (ending in March 2010) from $101.6 million to a loss of about $72.5 million. That's a hell of a swing, and it could explain Conviction's delay: since FY 2009 is going to be a bust either way, having Conviction's profits on the books for 2010 makes more sense.

Eurogamer previews BioShock 2

There's not much in the way of new information, but Mr. Donlan provides some reassuring color commentary:

The studio's gift for disquieting juxtaposition helps, too: any game that shoves you into a blood-soaked street fight against waves of women in pearls and sensible calf-length skirts while "How Much is that Doggy in the Window?" plays in the background must be doing something right.

We've good reason to expect that the world of Rapture will be every bit the lead character it was in the first BioShock. As it should be.

Read the full preview here. 

Red Dead Trepidation

From Joystiq:

When we recently spoke with our trusted sources from Rockstar San Diego, in addition to yesterday's information regarding the Midnight Club franchise, we were also told about the allegedly troubled state of Red Dead Redemption. One source said that the game "was a complete disaster for most of 2009 and previous ... it has since turned around a little bit, but there are huge problems with it still." Unsurprisingly, the issues with the game are repeatedly claimed to be the result of mismanagement -- along the same lines as what was mentioned in the recent "Rockstar spouse" letter.

"Red Dead [Redemption] has been in production for six years (mainly because of horrible management/lack of direction due to fear of disrespecting Rockstar NY) and it will never get the money back in sales it cost to create for those six years," claimed another source.

Don't expect Red Dead Redemption to make its end of April 2010 release target.