World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade intro cinematic: The sheeping mage and murlocs are a nice touch.

“I finally downloaded Second Life the other day. Oh dear.” Greg Howson at The Guardian seems to have had the same reaction to Second Life as me. I just don’t get it. I’ve played World of Warcraft, and at least that seems to have a purpose… even if it is just effectively collecting harder and harder to obtain artifacts. Can someone enlighten me as to why this thing is so popular?

Looks like Sony is trying to put to bed the old adage of “there’s no such thing as bad press” with their recent, and ill-advised, alliwantforxmasisapsp.com guerilla ad campaign. What happened to the Sony of old? Didn’t they used to be good? Maybe not.

UPDATE: Sony deleted the video from YouTube but, in case you missed it and want to bask in its sheer awfulness, it’s been reposted by another member. How kind.

So you think your PC gaming keyboard has enough buttons? Think again!

An Apple video game console? ‘A distinct possibility’, apparently.

Wii: First Thoughts: Not mine, it’s not out over here until next week (and besides, I haven’t pre-ordered one and don’t have any money anyway…), but Kottke gives the lowdown. I normally link to geeky gadget blogs for this kind of stuff but, as the Wii is a “family-oriented console” I thought it’d be nice to have a more human opinion for a change.

Sam & Max Episode 2: Situation: Comedy: New screenshots and a gameplay video (involving Sam & Max as TV Chefs) are up on the Telltale Games site. It already looks like the series is getting more surreal, which can only be a good thing. “Ta-da! You’ve successfully perverted the laws of God and man.”

The new, long awaited, Sam and Max game was released last night and I had a quick go. Those that fondly remember Steve Purcell’s dog and lagomorph crime fighting duo from the 1993 point and click Lucasarts adventure classic Sam and Max Hit the Road won’t be disappointed. I was rather apprehensive about their transition from pixelly 2D to 3D but Telltale have managed to capture the essence of the original very well.

It’s easier to pick out the problems, so I’ll do that first. Firstly, I have a 1920×1200 LCD monitor which doesn’t support 1280×960. The problem is that if the game detects you don’t have 1280×960 it won’t let you scroll past it to select 1600×1200! There’s an interim fix on the forum (add a custom 1280×960 resolution using the nVidia control panel) but hopefully it’ll get fixed in a patch soon. There’s another little bug where sometimes the game lets the cursor leave the game screen area and it’ll escape to the Windows desktop, but I think this may be because I’m not running full screen yet.

The voices, while no match to the original, aren’t too far off and I quickly got used to them; Max’s voice does seems to slip a bit from time to time though. Also, the camera often seems to adopt odd positions — I often found characters facing away from you while talking to each other; after I noticed it once I just kept noticing it!

The point and click interface is very similar to Hit the Road though it have been simplified somewhat. There’s no right click to change the type of action; it’s just one click to use/walk/look at, etc. which may just be a case of getting used to. You also don’t seem to be able to combine objects in your inventory, and the biggest omission is the ability to “use Max”. In the original game you could use Max as an item, often with hilarious consequences. It’s a shame they’ve chosen to drop that.

Talking of using stuff, what happened to the fun cursors? The new one looks far too operating system-y. Come on, let’s have Sam’s hand, uh, paw back!

Lastly, I haven’t played it for long but the game seems a bit too easy. One of the first puzzles involves finding some Swiss cheese for the rat that’s stolen Sam and Max’s phone. The cheese Sam has isn’t Swiss cheese… but he has a gun (and no other inventory). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the solution to that!

That aside, it’s made me chuckle quite a bit so far and so I look forward to playing it through to the end and I’ll be back then to let you know what I thought.

In the mean time, go buy a copy for yourself — or, at the least, give the free demo a try!

A superb BBC documentary on the history behind one of the world’s most played video games.

“This is the story behind the fiendishly addictive game, a tale of high stakes, intimidation and legal feuds set against the backdrop of Cold War tensions between East and West.”

Sony admits to buying grey goods from Lik-Sang “but only for investigatory purposes.” and “Sony denies that its actions had anything to do with the closure of the Lik-Sang website.”