Nearly nine years after the game's release on Nintendo's GameCube, an Easter Egg that unlocks a verbally abusive asshole mode in Wave Race: Blue Storm has been discovered.

The code, publicized by NeoGAF forum-goer RaoulDuke, changes the normally enthusiastic and informative pit crew voices heard in the jet skiing game into that of a total prick's. Instead of delivering helpful messages, the jerkier pit crew voice will call you "pathetic," delivering deadpan insults like "You don't have an inferiority complex. You're just inferior." or sarcastically coo "Oooh, a turbo!" when you gain a power up.

Some other choice barbs include "You must have a sixth sense, because there's no sign of the other five." and "Your wins are like diamonds—very rare." Seriously, the guy's a total dick.

Here's how it's done. Fire up your GameCube (or Wii, presumably) and suffer some emotional abuse for yourself.

* Go to Options and Audio Settings.
* There's a waveform display at the bottom that changes if you press the Z Button-tap Z until the waveform looks like vertically rising fog.
* On the D-Pad, press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, A, X, Z. You'll hear an audio cue if you did it right.
* Back out to the front end.
* Start a race. Pick the first guy.
* The pit crew voice will now be some dude who basically insults you the entire time. Also, the turbo becomes a little girl's voice saying "meow meow"

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Nov. 2 in Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, regarding a California law against selling or renting violent games to kids.

Court watcher SCOTUSblog posted the schedule on Monday. The games case is one of seven from which new Justice Elena Kagan has not recused herself; her previous work as U.S. solicitor general has required her to step down from six of the cases in the upcoming term.

This is the last stop for the 2005 law, ruled unconstitutional in a federal district court in August 2007, and at the appellate level in February 2009. The law wants to levy fines against retailers who rent or sell to minors video games depicting "especially heinous, cruel or depraved" violence, such as torture.

Federal courts have thrown out the law, finding no evidence establishing that games "are any more harmful than violent television, movies, internet sites or other speech-related exposures." That's part of the requirement for the constitutional validity of such a content restriction, which necessarily infringes on First Amendment protections of free speech. Laws restricting the sale of pornography are an example.

You can read up on California's argument why its law is valid; it argues, among other things, that there's a double standard in protecting kids from sexual imagery but not violence.

While this will be the final decision on this law (decisions and orders come some months after oral arguments) it will, of course, bear huge ramifications for more than just California. State lawmakers have regularly tested the waters, losing every time such laws hit the courts. The governor of Utah, a deeply conservative state, last year vetoed a violent-games bill and cited its likely failure in the federal courts, and the expense of litigating it,

Bill Slavicsek and Mike Mearls – co-designers of the Castle Ravenloft co-operative board game from Wizards of the Coast, have teamed up with Peter Lee to create another co-op game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Here's a description of Wrath of Ashardalon from the publisher:

"A heavy shadow falls across the land, cast by a dark spire that belches smoke and oozes fiery lava. A cave mouth leads to a maze of tunnels and chambers, and deep within this monster-infested labyrinth lurks the most terrifying creature of all: a red dragon!"

Designed for 1–5 players, this boardgame features multiple scenarios, challenging quests, and cooperative game play.

Wrath of Ashardalon includes 42 plastic hero and monster miniatures, 13 sheets of dungeon tiles, and 200 encounter cards and treasure cards.

Genghis Khan was not a nice person. Yes, he made the occasional pie for his wife and read to his grandsons most evenings, but he also undertook military campaigns that led to the slaughter of thousands across Asia. Eight hundred years after his death, his name still evokes images of carnage and brutal takeovers.

In Christwart Conrad's Khan, the players represent generals in the Mongol Empire who have been commanded to conquer new territories and drive out their current rulers, hunting them down to remove them from the area – albeit in a bloodless process involving the removal of a meeple from the game board. Let's call it a "ruler extraction," m'kay? After all, what's important in the end is not how much ruler ichor you have coating your fierce hands, but rather how much territory you've added to the Empire. To see how we do that, let's start with an image of the set-up game board:



Khan – display

Eight pastel and rainbow-colored rulers are placed on the game board, and five neutral black yurts are placed next to each ruler's area near the top of the board. (If you don't like the word "yurt," stop reading now as you'll be yurted out of your mind very quickly in this preview.) Each player has an open display of special cards, yurts in their own color and a hand of four ruler cards. Thirty-eight bridges and conquer tiles in various shapes are placed next to the game board.

On a turn, a player first reveals the top ruler card from the deck. The ruler depicted on this card moves in the direction indicated, stopping at the first empty space he encounters. If the first three

Two major Dungeons & Dragons franchises will meet for the first time when R.A. Salvatore’s Gauntlgrym releases on October 5, 2010. The first book in a new trilogy, Gauntlgrym introduces Salvatore’s signature character, Drizzt Do’Urden, to the renowned city of Neverwinter – from the hugely popular D&D video game franchise Neverwinter Nights.

The release of this first book in the Neverwinter trilogy lays the groundwork for a multi-platform event. Atari, one of the world's most recognized videogame publishers, and Cryptic Studios, the acclaimed developers behind City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online and Star Trek Online, today announced the development of Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter for PC, a new online-centric roleplaying game based on Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons global property and the beloved city of Neverwinter. The PC game is scheduled to release in Q4 2011. Also in the works for 2011, Wizards will be releasing a Neverwinter RPG and board game to coincide with the PC game and book trilogy.

Picking up where The Ghost King left off, Gauntlgrym will appeal to long-time fans wondering how their beloved hero Drizzt will go on after the Spellplague hit him on such a personal level. And as the debut novel in a fresh series, readers encountering Drizzt for the first time will find an easy jumping-in point.

Book Tour
Neverwinter, and its author, will be on tour this fall to celebrate the release of Gauntlgrym. Salvatore will travel the United States and Canada to meet fans and sign copies of his books. Tour stops include:

• Philadelphia, PA: Tues., October 5 at Free Library of Philadelphia, 7:30 pm
• Chicago, IL: Wed., October 6 at DePaul U, 12 pm and Chicago Comics, 7 pm
• Toronto, ON: Thurs., October 7 at World’s

May 24, 2010, Renton, Wash. — Wizards of the Coast today announced that they have signed a deal with Valve Corporation to bring Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers, a digital extension of the worldwide Magic: The Gathering franchise, to PC users via the Steam® platform.

Already one of the most downloaded games on Xbox LIVE® Arcade, PC gamers will now be able to experience the thrill and competition of playing Magic: The Gathering in digital form, complete with 3D graphics and animations, new ways to play and a user-friendly interface. Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers brings the traditional action gamers love to a new generation, complete with a digital revamp.

Duels of the Planeswalkers players will enjoy the benefits of the Steamworks' features included in all PC versions, such as auto-updating, Steam Achievements, Leaderboards, downloadable content, ability to access from any computer, multiplayer matchmaking and more.

Pre-Sale for Duels of the Planeswalkers on Steam will begin on June 1, 2010 and will combine the core game and Expansion Pack 1 for $9.99.

About Duels of the Planeswalkers
Duels of the Planeswalkers brings the Magic: The Gathering trading card game to the digital space with crisp 3D graphics and animations, robust PVE and PVP game play and an intuitive user interface, giving new players and Magic fans alike an attractive and innovative way to play.

Players can battle real life opponents or play through an extensive single-player campaign. With rich single and multiplayer game play scenarios, Duels of the Planeswalkers offers an unrivaled depth in which each game is different from the last. For additional information on Duels of the Planeswalkers, please visit: http://www.duelsoftheplaneswalkers.com.

Having been out in the wild for almost a month now, Blizzard has decided that changes are in order for Starcraft II, and will soon be making a number of balance tweaks for the game's first major update.

Patch 1.1, due sometime next month, will make a number of alterations to the game's balance, including:

- Reducing the effectiveness of a "Zealot rush" when playing as/against the Protoss
- Reducing the effectiveness of Terran Reapers against the Zerg
- The power of the Terran Siege Tank will be reduced when in siege mode
- Terran Battlecruisers will be less powerful against ground units
- The Zerg Ultralisks have lost their "ram" attack, as it was proving in many instances to be less powerful than its regular attack.

There are also some minor adjustments being made to some build and cooldown times as well, along with a golbal rollout of the US hotkey layouts, including that for left-handers; for the complete list of changes due in 1.1, check out the official site.

Yesterday, Sony Computer Entertainment Australia was granted a temporary injunction by the nation's Federal Court to block the importation and sale of the new PS3 modchips.

The injunction means that until August 31, none of the modchip's Australian distributors will be able to import, sell or otherwise offload the devices. What's more, they have to take all the stock they already have and leave them with Sony's solicitors until the August 31 deadline passes.

Sony has from now until August 31 to convince the courts that the injunction becomes a more permanent arrangement (temporary injunctions are designed to maintain the "status quo" until a matter can be settled). If they succeed, it'll mean the end of legal sales of the device in Australia, but if they fail, then once September 1 rolls around the chips will be able to go on sale.

This is an interesting development, since a 2005 Supreme Court ruling determined that the sale of modchips was legal in Australia (though Nintendo was recently successful in banning the R4). We've contacted Sony to see how they managed to get around this, and will update if we hear back.

Freshmen at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana this year will be required to read Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, the poetry of John Donne, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Valve's Portal.

Michael Abbott, the proprietor of video game blog The Brainy Gamer and a teacher at the small liberal arts college found himself part of a committee last year tasked with creating a new all-college course devoted to "engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community." The course would gather together classic and contemporary works across multiple disciplines in order to have students "confront what it means to be human and how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our world."

Being The Brainy Gamer, Abbott's mind immediately went to gaming, specifically Portal, and even more specifically to a recent essay by Daniel Johnson on Portal and its connections to Erving Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Abbott merged the ideas together and decided to propose that students read Goffman's work and then play through Portal. Now he only had to get the idea through committee.

[quote:290f2e9dcd]I pitched the idea to my colleagues on the committee (decidedly not a collection of gamers), and they agreed to try Portal and read selections from Goffman's book. After plowing through some installation issues ("What does this Steam do? Will it expose me to viruses?"), we enjoyed the first meaningful discussion about a video game I've ever had with a group of colleagues across disciplines. They got it. They made the connections, and they enjoyed the game. Most importantly, they saw how Portal could provoke thoughtful reflection and vigorous conversation on questions germane to the course.[/quote:290f2e9dcd]

So now Portal will be required "reading" at Wabash College, rolled out slowly as

Alien Swarm is a free top-down shoot-em-up video game by Valve Corporation. It is a remake of the Alien Swarm mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, and it was developed by the original team, which was hired by Valve during the course of the development process.


Gameplay
Alien Swarm is a top-down shoot-em-up set at a 60 degree angle. Four players can join a single co-operative game, the aim of which is to progress through science fiction themed levels while eliminating waves of aliens. Players can choose from 40 different weapons. The game includes persistent statistics, unlockables and achievements.

Classes
The game is class-based, with players choosing from the roles of Officer, Special Weapons, Medic, and Tech. Each class has two selectable characters with a difference in abilities.

Officer
Grants a passive bonus to damage and damage resistance to nearby allies. He has access to a class-restricted shotgun with an incendiary grenade launcher and has general all-around abilities. They are also capable of throwing extra amounts of explosive ordnance, and may find class-restricted ammo caches on the field for his Vindicator shotgun. The two playable characters are Sarge and Jaeger.

Special Weapons
Brings raw damage to the table and starts out with a customized autogun with superior parameters, high magazine capacity, and auto aiming ability. The Special Weapons gains access to a powerful minigun at a high enough level, and can pick up class-restricted ammo caches on the field. The two playable characters are Wildcat and Wolfe.

Medic
Is able to equip and deploy temporary healing beacons, and at a high enough level can use a "healing gun" to selectively heal teammates and themselves. The two playable characters are Faith and Bastille.

Tech
Carries a motion