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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

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.

Castlevania HD is the nerdy girl in a teen romantic comedy: just one makeover away from prom queen, but a pariah until it happens. There’s a fun multiplayer platformer in there, but it’s obscured by usability issues and you can miss it entirely. However, Harmony of Despair is the first cool thing to happen to the Castlevania series since Symphony of the Night, and no amount of kludge can hide that.