According to Kotaku, South Korea has opened the gates to the first ever interactive theme park called Live Park. It allows visitors to experience the virtual world with interactive games and other forms of interactive entertainment. Think of video games meets Six Flags meets Minority Report (minus the Tom Cruise acting), and you would likely get Live Park.

The park, which was the brainchild of Start-up D'strict, boasts sixty-five attractions, took about two years to complete, and can hold up to around three thousand visitors at once. Each park visitor will be outfitted with special wristbands to enable them to interact with the Microsoft Kinect-powered displays that will recognize their voices and faces.

Live Park is expected to expand outside South Korea to North America in the near future.

SOURCE:
http://kotaku.com/5879114/its-a-giant-kinect+powered-theme-park/gallery/1 

When someone on the Legend of Grimrock's commented and asked about clickable on-screen arrow navigation for the upcoming Indie dungeon crawling game, developers said they had no plans to make said feature. When they found out that the comment came from a gamer with limited movement, they changed their plans and made it possible for people like the commenter (who goes by the handle name of HarpoonIPA), who uses a mouth stick for typing and gaming.

Legend of Grimrock is an old-school dungeon exploration game from developer company Almost Human (who have done titles like Dungeon Hack and the Wizardry series). These types of games are tile based and require simple movements to work with. In its older days, in order to move you clicked on an arrow on the screen, these days you can use the WASD keys on your keyboard, which meant the use of the arrow icons to be nearly useless until now.

So HarpoonIPA explained why he asked about the arrow icon usage in the game, the developers added them to the game immediately. This simple gesture has captured the hearts of countless people and gained a lot of popularity for the company itself. When asked about this small change, developer Petri Hakkinen stated the following:

"It was no big deal to implement it, so we thought why not do it...I mean, even if it would affect only the life of a single person, it is still totally worth it."

Hopefully Almost Human's kindness gained them popularity for their Legend of Grimrock game when it releases on Windows, Mac, and iOS later this year.

SOURCE:
http://kotaku.com/5879927/developer-makes-disabled-gamers-wish-come-true-with-an-arrow-click 

With the recent announcement and trailer for Resident Evil 6 during Capcom's big 15th anniversary event in Japan, fans thought that would be all the details they would be getting for now. However, Capcom delivered even more information about the game beyond the trailer. It seems Leon will be joined by a new female protagonist named Helena Harper, while Chris Redfield's partner remains unknown at this time.

In addition, the trailer had a huge snarling beast which has been given the name of "Javo,". According to the new bits of information, Javo will have "an even greater impact than the zombies." and will be something of the game's Nemesis. There is a third main protagonist, but he hasn't been named. Some believe it's Hunk from the past RE games, but it could be someone else. To find more of this information, check out this article on Joystiq.

SOURCE:
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/19/resident-evil-6-re-revealed-by-capcom-arriving-november-20-on-3/
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/20/new-resident-evil-6-details-freshly-imported-from-japan/

As more news about Kim Dotcom and his company's (Megaupload) continues to get in trouble with the US government, more information about Kim Dotcom continues to circulate throughout the media. People are finding more and more facts and information about the Megaupload CEO. Interesting enough, Kim is still ranked first for the XBox 360's rankings for Modern Warfare 3 according to sources from Kotaku.

Though Modern Warfare 3 was one of 2011's most pirated games (despite the fact it was only out for 45 days in 2011), Kim Dotcom bought the game legitimately. If he had used a pirated game, he would be unable to play online and rack up his 150,000+ kills from his six hour gaming sessions (as you can see in the video in the Kotaku link). As of recently, his XBox Live Gamertag, MEGARACER, is still currently first with 180,980 kills and has a score of 9.05 million.

UPDATE: As of 1-24-12, according to the sources from Kotaku, Kim Dotcom has now lost his first place ranking on Modern Warfare 3 by a gamer who goes by the name of Arazos.

SOURCES:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/23/megaupload-founder-kim-dotcom-denies-piracy-charges/
http://kotaku.com/5878245/jailed-megaupload-king-is-still-the-world-no-1-in-modern-warfare-3
http://kotaku.com/5878723/jailed-megaupload-founder-loses-his-call-of-duty-crown

Shiro Suzuki, a famed actor and broadcaster in Japan, loves to play Resident Evil games a lot. Kotaku and many other sources found out that he was a gamer when he told them that he discovered gaming over fifteen years ago. However after all those years, the Resident Evil series (or Biohazard as the Japanese call it) continues to be his favorite to this day.

At the recent Resident Evil event, celebrating the game's anniversary, Shiro Suzuki spoke about his love of the series but also his love for video games.

"I owe making it to 74 years old to Resident Evil..I want other elderly people to play video games. It betters you as a human being."

Shiro Suzuki proves that he is an avid gamer and not just a casual that has picked up controller and started playing as he has been known to score 178,270 points in Resident Evil 4's unlockable Mercenaries Mode as you can find out in this Daily Motion video. Not Bad, not bad at all. Especially for a broadcaster in his seventies.

Dang, and he's even a better Wesker player than I am.

SOURCE:
http://kotaku.com/5778232/elderly-japanese-newscaster-will-own-you-in-resident-evil
http://kotaku.com/5878362/elderly-man-thanks-resident-evil-for-his-longevity
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3wvdf_shiro-suzuki-is-considerably-good-a_videogames

With the recent announcement and trailer for Resident Evil 6 during Capcom's big 15th anniversary event in Japan, fans thought that would be all the details they would be getting for now. However, Capcom delivered even more information about the game beyond the trailer. It seems Leon will be joined by a new female protagonist named Helena Harper, while Chris Redfield's partner remains unknown at this time.

In addition, the trailer had a huge snarling beast which has been given the name of "Javo,". According to the new bits of information, Javo will have "an even greater impact than the zombies." and will be something of the game's Nemesis. There is a third main protagonist, but he hasn't been named. Some believe it's Hunk from the past RE games, but it could be someone else. To find more of this information and other details, check out this article on Joystiq.

SOURCE:
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/19/resident-evil-6-re-revealed-by-capcom-arriving-november-20-on-3/
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/20/new-resident-evil-6-details-freshly-imported-from-japan/

The group of game-hacking site Artificial Aiming can't stand the anti-cheat service Punkbuster. The team is claiming actions of framing innocent BF3 users by banning them out of nowhere in defiance of the PC's Punkbuster service in order to show their disdain for it. The hackers are targeting users on servers tied to the cheat-detecting service due to the fact that servers using the service makes it easy to make massive waves of fake bans. In 2011, they hit player with a massive ban wave that took in around 150+ players. Which lead to chaos on various forms of communication. Reddit and Battlefield forums are flooded with complaints of bogus banned.

An EA spokesperson released a statement they are looking into the matter. Fortunately, this only affects PC users as Punkbuster isn't integrated onto the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 version of Battlefield 3. While PC gamers can worry a bit less as EA has released this statement:

"We are aware that some Battlefield 3 players are experiencing connection issues with PunkBuster enabled servers. This problem is limited to a small subset of players on PC and will not impact players on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. We are actively looking into the specifics of this issue and we are confident that we will have a permanent solution in place shortly. In the meantime, if a player's connectivity has been affected, we recommend that in the interim they join servers that are not running PunkBuster. There is a filter setting for this in the multiplayer server browser."

So if you're on the PC version of Battlefield 3, just make sure the multiplayer server you are going on doesn't have Punkbuster at this time until EA settles everything down.

SOURCE:
http://kotaku.com/5878798/hackers-brag-that-theyre-banning-innocent-battlefield-3-users 

So last year, sources like Kotaku reported heavily on the MW3 leaks throughout the internet. It was the biggest leak so far in video game history and brought a lot of panic in the video game news community. Unfortunately that panic was only one half of the story all together.

The other side, Modern Warfare 3's publisher Activision reacted sort of differently to the leak. From this video from marketing site Adage Eric Hirshberg (Activision's CEO) goes into great detail of how his company reacted to the news. It seems that they turned what looked like to be a catastrophe into something they could actually work with to their advantage. As you can see from the video:

"We were probably nine months away from launching Modern Warfare 3...I was actually at my physical therapist, I'd just had surgery on my lower back, and my iPhone starts doing the nnnnnn, nnnnnn thing...so I limped over to the thing and look at it, and there's been [news about] this massive leak...it wasn't cool".

He then goes on about Activision and how it used its many different wings and sections of the company to react and work it to their advantage. Interesting and bold move on Activision's part if you ask me.

SOURCE:
http://kotaku.com/5801226/the-modern-warfare-3-files-exclusive-first-details-on-the-biggest-game-of-2011
http://adage.com/article/digital/massive-leak-changed-launch-modern-warfare-iii/232153/

Today's gamers crave choices, choices on how they go and progress through the game, the choice of how their characters look, feel, and act, and many other different choices. But I remember a time when choices were non-existent. Irrational Games thought the same way too and decided that their upcoming title Bioshock Infinite, is going to do the same too with their "1999 Mode" (as stated in this Kotaku article).

In 1999, Irrational Games released System Shock 2, a game where you picked one career specialization and that's all you got. In the game, everything you did was set into stone with no ability to backtrack at all. That's how it was back then and we liked it. The same is going to happen for Bioshock Infinite.

In 1999 mode, players will pick their specialization at the beginning of the game. They'll be focused on only a certain set of skills and powers. From there on, everything in the game will be permanent. Decisions, skills, and even death, which means you have to manage your weapons, health, and power conservatively. Just like the good old days.

When asked about this mode, Ken Levine of Irrational Games stated the following:

"I'm an old school gamer. We wanted to make sure we were taking into account the play styles of gamers like me. So we went straight to the horse's mouth by asking them, on our website, a series of questions about how they play our games. 94.6 percent of respondents indicated that upgrade choices enhanced their BioShock gameplay experience; however, 56.8 percent indicated that being required to make permanent decisions about their character would have made the game even better."

So there you have it, Levine took the opinions from his followers and upped the ante when it comes to difficulty in Bioshock Infinite. With a nod towards System Shock 2, there is no doubt I'm picking up Bioshock Infinite when it's released this year.

SOURCE:
http://kotaku.com/5877468/permanent-consequences-up-bioshock-infinites-difficulty-like-its-1999

Some great news for Call of Duty fans with Android phones, according to an article on Joystiq, Call of Duty Elite is now available on the Android Market, for no cost at all. This comes immediately after the iOS launch, so no matter what kind of phone you have, you'll be ablle to check your stats, review recent matches and even update your in-game loadout from anywhere. So no matter if you're waiting in line at the movies or waiting for a friend, you can always be sure to be on up to date with the latest stats and news from Elite.

The designers of the app, Beachhead Studios, and their head of operations, Chacko Sonny, hopes for a successful launch and hopes to get a lot of feedback to improve the app for the future. So if you have this app and notice something odd or want something added, be sure to drop them a line and tell them what's needed.

SOURCE:
http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/17/psa-call-of-duty-elite-app-now-available-on-android-market/