PAX is upon us again, so the site will be on hiatus until we’re back next week. To make up for the lull, we’ll bring back daily PAX10 interviews and whatever news and previews we can find.

See you next week!

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Microsoft will be hitting you where it hurts starting November 1, because Gold Xbox Live membership prices are getting hiked. Monthly subscribers can expect to pay $2 more ($24 annually), tri-monthly will rise by $5 ($20 annually) , and yearly subscribers will get a $10 price hike.

As you might expect, there’s been no small outcry about the rising prices. Microsoft failed to time the announcement to coincide with some feature addition, which has led many to speculate that they’re gouging for profit rather than offsetting costs.

This pricing change comes after years of free feature additions to Xbox Live service. Microsoft has been mum about the motivation for the sudden change. In the meantime, you can still renew your subscription at modern pricing. That should stave off the pain for another year.

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Hot on the heels of incendiary remarks from THQ and Penny Arcade, Best Buy has decided to break into the used games business. The retail chain will exchange $20 gift cards for games on a rotating list starting August 29, just in time for the release of Metroid: Other M. Best Buy plans to pilot the program at 600 stores with eventual plans to expand that base.

This news comes in the aftermath of publisher THQ’s decision to deny online features to used game buyers in Smackdown vs. Raw 2011. Creative director Cory Ledesma had this to say about the decision, “I don’t think we really care whether used game buyers are upset because new game buyers get everything. So if used game buyers are upset they don’t get the online feature set I don’t really have much sympathy for them.” Used game owners can purchase the missing functionality, but the message is clear.

Popular Gaming webcomic Penny Arcade stirred up gamer ire about used games with a newspost likening used games to piracy (from the publisher’s perspective). Said Jerry Holkins, “The idea that THQ is somehow “disrespecting customers” with this kind of rhetoric misunderstands the situation as completely as it is possible to do so. In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of theirs. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can’t figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.” The continuing argument can still be seen at twitter hashtag #PAgamesdialog.

So good luck to Best Buy as they try to sell honey to angry bees.

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Apparently Portal just made the Syllabus at Wabash College. Michael Abbott over at The Brainy Gamer is a professor at the sesquicentennial college. He managed to convince a multidisciplinary committee of faculty to play the game long enough to see it as a storytelling medium.

His idea:

This tension between backstage machination and onstage performance is precisely what Portal depicts so perfectly – and, no small detail, so interactively. Goffman would have found a perfect test subject in GLaDOS. Bingo! Assign students Goffman’s Presentation of Self and follow it up with a collective playthrough of Portal.

Technology limitations stymied early plans to deploy the game on an individual basis–it’s hard to guarantee that your students will have a video card capable of rendering 3D graphics. However, the collective playthrough will serve as a dry run to prove the game’s educational chops.

Portal was the breakout puzzle game included in Valve’s Orange Box. It followed heroine Chell’s escape bid from the Aperture Science experimental facility and the demented AI who controlled it. Players used teleportation portals to circumvent hazards and solve complex spatial puzzles.

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Ok, so I was scrounging through Koji Igarashi’s trash (in a totally journalistic capacity) when I happened across the following pages. I only managed to scan a handful before their informative radiance broke the scanner, but I’ll post more once I work around that bottleneck.

Who knows, maybe if I’m suddenly inspired (or I find a bored graphic designer willing to work for site credit), I’ll bind these and the ingame pages into an honest-to-intellectual-property-theft manual.

Tags:   castlevania · harmony of despair · konami · manualNo Comments.

The lightening bolt symbolizes being awesome.

That’s not to say that RSPoD alters media, but rather that it has entered a new medium. Developer Hothead Games recently dropped the Penny Arcade Adventures game to refocus on DeathSpank. It looked for a while like we’d never see closure for the Startling Developments Detective Agency. However, Penny Arcade co-creator Jerry Holkins is taking pen to paper for exactly that purpose.

Books are usually consigned to adaptations and extended cannon when it comes to video games, so it should be fun to see the synapse between interactive and passive media. Every Tuesday (more or less), you can catch the latest chapter behind this eldrich link.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness follows the adventures of the Startling Developments Detective Agency. The 1920′s men of action take fists and tommy guns to Elder Gods, usually with hilarious results.

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I’m not terribly mindful about my generational membership, but I’m pretty sure that being 30 makes me an apathetic gen X. I say this by way of explanation for why I find it embarrassing to admit that I have a blogging hero. Jeremy Parish is an editor at 1up and maintains gamespite.net (and bakespite.net, though it’s more foodie-oriented). He produces more words in a day than I do in a week, and I aspire to his standards for quality. So I’m a bit worried by the fact that I completely disagree with his position on the role of money in game reviews. Still, If I don’t hold my ground on this one, I may as well hang up one of my favorite review tools.

Tags:   cash reviews · gamespite.net · money1 Comment

Hey all, Adam’s still coming out of the anesthesia, so your feature piece will have to wait until he’s doing a bit better. Don’t worry: it was a routine procedure and went fine.

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Irrational Games (formerly 2K Boston) just announced their latest project:

The Bioshock developer made much ado about the project’s secrecy when it was named Icarus. So if anything comes as a surprise, it’s the obvious sequel. However, it’s worth remembering that Bioshock 2 actually came from developer 2K Marin, which makes three years since Irrational worked on Bioshock, and five years before the game’s projected release in 2012.

President Ken Levine was quick to reassure gamers that the sequel was no retread. Said Levine, “At Irrational Games, we believe that in order to fulfill expectations, you have to defy expectations,” which is probably why they call it Irrational. Regardless, the new game promises a more open world, a defined protagonist, and a new emphasis on jingoism rather than objectivism.

Tags:   bioshock: infinite · irrational gamesNo Comments.

Now in video form, just in case you don’t feel like reading the whole thing:

I, for one, remain intrigued. Goodness knows that MMORPGS could use a kick in the pants.

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