Hot Stuff
I can hardly believe it's been two years since we first put fingers to keyboard and posted our first article. It's been an incredible two years and I would like to take a moment to thank all of those people who have helped make GayGamer what it is today.
First, our wonderful staff past and present: Toots, Super Timsy, Boy of Tomorrow, Wootini, Lazy Panda, Noun, Asterick, Sgt. Sausagepants, Dawdle, Pixel Poet, Mr. Mog, Lectric Lich, Crazy Legs, Gadget Girl, Faith Naked, Boy Blunder, SuperSpecialDavey, Tex Cub, Alexander, Pirate Prince, Jonostarsmore, Spazgadget, Chris Furniss, Li'lMikeNYC, Katin, and NYDan. All of these people have made significant contributions to GG in one way or another and helped create the fabric of this site. I hope that I have not forgotten anyone, but if I have, please forgive me. It's early and I still haven't had my coffee.
I would also like to thank our friends at many of the other blogs out there who have always been there with advice and support including Kotaku, Joystiq, Destructoid, GoNintendo, CheapAssGamer, GamerTag Radio, Xbox.com, The Girl Gamer, Towleroad and GamePro just to name a few. A big thanks also goes out to all the PR and industry folks who have gone out of their way to make us feel a part of the bigger picture.
And of course this site would be nowhere without the constant attention of Mikey and Tiny Dancer who have been with me through the good times and the bad. Without them I would have surely lost my mind by now. Well, what's left of it anyway.
And finally I would like to thank our many readers and forum members, a group that grows bigger every day. Thank you for all of your support and continued readership through the past two years. We look forward to spending many more with you.
Cheers,
Fruit Brute (aka Flynn De Marco)
The GayGamer.net Podcast #27 is here! Join Fruit Brute and Tiny Dancer as we celebrate our two year anniversary and chat the news of the week. This week we talk about the PS3 2.40 firmware, Metal Gear Solid 4, Diablo III, Chrono Trigger and much, much more!
We're always looking for reader questions to answer on the show so if you have a query for the crew that you'd like answered or would just like to suggest a topic for discussion, send it here with the subject line "Podcast Question."
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It's a Yankee Doodle day here in the U.S. That's right, it's the fourth of July! And to honor the holiday, the GayGamer staff is taking a well deserved day off. Our own Dawdle will be here tomorrow to fill you in on all the weekend news and the of course we will be back Monday morning to feed you your daily dose of game news. Have a wonderful holiday!
As a Mac user, I've always been a little jealous of all the games PC owners get to play. Macs may be more reliable and have a more intuitive interface, but as far as gaming, they kind of suck. But now Ubisoft has announced a partnership with TransGaming that will release several of their titles on the Mac.
"To expand our business position and serve the growing Mac gaming community, additional key titles will follow later this year, including several day-and-date releases this Fall," said Jay Cohen, senior vice president of publishing at Ubisoft.
Yeah, unfortunately, the first titles released under this agreement are going to be Catz, Dogz and CSI: Hard Evidenz... sorry, Evidence. Yeah, thanks, but I'll hold out for something a little less... casual, maybe. But it's a good start, and I appreciate the effort!
Ubisoft Titles Coming To Mac [gamesindustry.biz]
While reviews have been fair-to-middling, Activision's portable music box Guitar Hero: On Tour sold over 300,000 copies in North America in its first week alone, which makes it the largest North American launch for the Nintendo DS in Activision's history.
In fact, it's the largest DS release by Activision by a factor of eight:
"Guitar Hero is one of the most successful entertainment properties and continues to push the boundaries of innovation with Guitar Hero: On Tour," said Mike Griffith, President and Chief Executive Officer, Activision Publishing, Inc. "The game's breakthrough peripheral brings the Guitar Hero experience to the 41 million DS users in North America and Europe, where they can play anywhere, anytime."
I know the controls are impossible for some, that 25 tracks isn't exactly an endless musical wonderland, and that the quality of the music is less than ideal - but for an ambitious low-fi little brother to the ambitious, hi-fi console Guitar Hero games, I think On Tour does an amazing job.
Personally I find it comfortable to play lying down, either prone or supine, playing it much like I'd read a book. So for sheer laziness points, it's fun to rock out without standing up. I give this game mega points for risk-taking and ingenuity, even if it won't ever be the same as wielding a real fake guitar.
Make the jump for the official word.
On Tuesday, July 1st, the Independent Games Festival officially opened their doors for submissions for next year's festival that will be happening next March. Submissions will be taken from now until November, so all you independent game makers out there need to start cracking that whip and letting us see just what you are made of inside (I hear it's a mixture of sugar and spice along with snakes, snails and puppy dog tails). At the beginning of next year they'll select some finalists, and those people will be contending for over $50k in prizes and a $20k grand prize. As usually they have both a student and a main competition categories so that the guys just starting out don't have to go up against some of the industry vets.
Speaking of Industry vets, one of the new judges this year is Kyle Gabler, one of the co-creators of World of Goo and one of the nominations for our New Next Now Best Upcoming Gay Gaming Industry Professional Award (try saying that ten times fast) LoGo had last month. So he'll be judging entries along with a slew of other judges such as N'Gai Croal, Chris Kohler, and Stephen Totilo. Along with new judges, they've also added a new Innovation Award to the show. This new award is "intended to honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development, allowing more esoteric 'art games' to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles." Seems like they are trying to help encourage games like Passage and The Marriage to make an appearance in the festival too.
I've really enjoyed all the entries I've seen in the past and hope that some of our readers out there are planning on submitting a few of their own games to the festival. If you do submit something, please feel more than free to let us know by email and we'll see if we can alert our readers to what you've created. The starting pistol has been fired, now hop to it everyone.
Welcome to the next contest in our big GayGamer Birthday Week giveaway! Today is a big prize pack and I do mean BIG! As some of you know I recently lost a ton of weight and am now back to wearing medium t-shirts. As a result I have a ton of large and extra large t-shirt swag that I have picked up at various events. Just as fair warning, some of these have been worn (by me, but I washed them first) some have been washed but not worn and some are brand spanking new with all the creases still in them! There are a total of seventeen t-shirts including American McGee's Grimm, Pirates of the Burning Sea, 1-Up Mushroom, Twilight Princess, Halo 3, Wii and many more! As a special bonus, you will also receive a GayGamer T-shirt! All of the tees will come along with a lovely Namco computer bag and some other various bits of swag including a Civilization Revolution faceplate for your 360!
So now, to the contest...
Write a haiku with GayGamer as the subject. The rules of haiku are simple: a short poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line and five in the last line. Our own Pixel Poet provides this fine example...
an ode to fruit brute
sung upon 8-bit game tones
we beat world 2-1
This is a one day contest so all submissions must be in by midnight tonight (PST). Please email all entries to info@gaygamer.net with the subject line "Fruit Brute's XL Stash." Good luck and happy haiku-ing!
The interwebs are abuzz over the possibility of leaked song lists for Rock Band 2. First there was the discovery of this list of songs, gleaned from video footage of the new title on G4tv:
- Chop Suey - System of a Down
- Give It Away - Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Everlong - Foo Fighters
- Kids in America - Kim Wilde
- Ace of Spades - Motorhead
- Hello There - Cheap Trick
Then, website Scorehero.com posted list of songs that apparently wasn't quite ready for public consumption. But, thanks to the incestuous quality of the interwebs, the list was spread and posted all over the place before it was yanked down for Scorehero due to NDA restrictions. And no Here they are, ready for your perusal...
- "One Step Closer" by Linkin Park
- "Peace Sells" by Megadeth
- "Testify" by Rage Against The Machine
- "American Woman" by The Guess Who
- "White Wedding" by Billy Idol
- "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morrisette
- "Aqua Lung" by Jethro Tull
- "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett
- "Drain You" by Nirvana
- "Man in the Box" by Alice In Chains
- "Spoonman" by Soundgarden
- "We Got The Beat" by the Go-Gos
Looks like a pretty good line up! Of course, this is still all rumor at this point, but we'll keep our eyes peeled for any new information and bring it you you as soon as we can.
We have a winner for our PC Prize Pack contest in our big GayGamer Birthday Week Giveaway. A big congratulations goes out to Orlando P. who answered all five of our trivia questions correctly! Here are the answers:
- Who was GayGamer's first official Weekend Writer? - Lazy Panda
- How many total writers have written for GayGamer (past and present)? - 21
- How many characters are in our Top 20 Gayest Characters countdown? - 24
- How many reviews have we written about sports games?- Zero
- What game does Fruit Brute's only gamer tattoo come from and what is the tattoo? - comes from Bioshock, they are the wrist chain tattoos
Be sure to keep an eye out later today for the next contest!
As someone who has walked what I thought to be a "Rainbow Road", I can only wonder what other, strange rainbow thoroughfares await me. That's what this song is about, right?
Ah, racing the rainbow afterlife with hirsute, mustachioed men in overalls with an amazing ability to overcome gravitational forces. Wait a minute, why would I want to wait until I die for that?
For us American GayGamers, the upcoming Fourth of July means a multitude of grilling ("grillin'"), preferably burgers ("bar-gers") and hotdogs ("dawgs"), pitchers of margaritas ("rita's"), cheap beer ("beast"), and various other activities hyper-simplified in Midwestern pidgin.
So, what better way to spice up your little soiree than with some classy Super Mario Bros. influenced delicacies? Instructables features a mouthwatering 1-UP burger for you to wow guests with before the evening fireworks, and who knows, your culinary prowess may end up bringing the bang to the ball.
"1UP Mushroom" Mushroom Burger! [Instructables]
[via: GoNintendo]
A note on the Playstation blog informs us that Ps3 firmware 2.40 has been removed temporarily due to some issues with the update.
We have temporarily taken Firmware v2.40 offline. We've received a limited number of calls from consumers experiencing an issue with installing the system software update on their PS3. While our consumer services department has seen a low volume of calls on this topic, we are committed to providing the PS3 community with XMB access features delivered in the v2.40 update. We are working diligently to isolate the problem for those few consumers and to identify a solution before we put the firmware back up.
So if you're trying to update and can't, this would be why! We'll be sure to let you know as soon as we hear about it being back up.
And girls who like girls who like rumble packs!
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