Kyle Orland’s Workblog

When a Washington Post story mentioned that Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung Hui played Counter-Strike in high school, we were intrigued. When the nugget disappeared from an online version of the Post story, we were even more intrigued

To clarify the situation, we caught up with Washington Post Staff Writer David Cho, who was responsible for originally reporting the factoid.

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The internet speculation machine has been gearing up of late over a recent press release announcing that Japanese middleware provider eSol has been selected to provide its "’PrUSB/Host’ USB host stack" for use in the Wii. How to interpret this inscrutable piece of techspeak? Well, the release goes on to state that PrUSB/Host provides "optional Mass Storage class driver enables using USB flash memory, other mass storage device and digital camera as the external storage."

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The only problem is, the Wii has always had this functionality, and Nintendo has always had the potential to make such a statement.

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That’s right: two systems, two games, two microphones, one performance. Which game would be more lenient on our awful singing? Continue reading to find out.

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And so it goes every few years with console videogames. It’s not enough to buy a system and enjoy the games available; we want the system we buy to win. More than that, we want our chosen system to dominate the market, utterly and completely, like the Atari 2600 and NES did way back when.

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Amid concerns that the European version of the PlayStation 3 will be less than fully backward compatible, Sony has unveiled a new web site listing old games that will work under the version 1.6 firmware, due to be released concurrently with the European launch on Thursday. Unfortunately, the site is organized in a rather user-unfriendly paged format that requires a lot of clicking around to get to the data you want. We did some extra legwork and copied the data into a couple of convenient Google Docs spreadsheets (PS1, PS2). We also crunched the numbers to see just how extensive the European PS3’s backward compatibility will be at launch.

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I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes after waking up way too early for a Sunday morning when I got a call from my 13-year-old sister, Paige (pictured to the right). "How’s it going?" I asked. "Not good," she said.

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When we saw via Game|Life that some IGN forums goers had taken steel wool to a Blu-ray disc with no apparent damage, we thought, "we can do better than that." So we gathered up some convenient implements of destruction and saw how our free copy of Talladega Nights would stand up to a ballpoint pen, a pizza cutter and a butcher’s knife (unfortunately, the disc broke down before we could rub crunchy cereal all over it.) Check out the video below, and keep watching to the end for some pyrotechnic bonus footage.

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Which is why it’s surprising to see T-shirt clad 20-somethings rubbing elbows with polo-shirt wearing grandparents in a 5,000-person strong National Symphony audience at the Vienna, Va. Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. They’re here to see Play: A Video Game Symphony, a concert that eschews the common symphonic fare of Bach, Mahler and Strauss for pieces by the likes Square’s Uematsu, Nintendo’s Kondo and Konami’s Gregson-Williams. While parts of the audience have never played a game and other parts have never heard a live symphony, they’ve all gathered together to experience another world without fully leaving the comfort of the one they know.

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I’ve always been intrigued by games of chance, but I was never under any illusions about winning money in a casino. With the probability skewed so heavily toward the house, I knew I was essentially paying for the privilege to play games of chance.

But WorldWinner.com would have you believe it’s different. Unlike casino games, where you have to be lucky to win (for the most part), WorldWinner stresses that "the outcome of each competition is determined by the player’s skill." I don’t have the chops to make a six-figure salary at a poker table, but after years of the other form of gaming, I was sure I could beat just about anyone in the right game.

Ever since Sony announced that the PlayStation 3 would be shipping with Blu-ray disc support, the next-generation movie wars have been wrapped up with the next-generation system wars. Now that both the PS3 and the Xbox 360’s HD-DVD add-on have been out for a few weeks, the first effects of that relationship are beginning to show. After crunching some numbers, the take away message is relatively simple: gamers do not care about high-definition movies. At least not yet.

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