Still playing This is Football 2005? What? You Are?

Seriously?

Well, you’re apparently the only one. Said footie title and others are going offline forever. June 30th will be the final day these games will see multi-player action online. Notable drop outs include Twisted Metal Black Online and Everybody’s (i.e., Hot Shots) Golf. Two handheld PSP titles are included in this money saving venture including Lemmings (which hasn’t been out that long for those paying attention), and sub-par World Tour Soccer 2.

Hardcore gamers will mourn the loss of music title Amplitude, a cult classic. Shooter fans can cry at the loss of Syphon Filter: Omega Strain. You can view the full list and cry on your own time at Sony’s UK help site.

It’s scary to think that anything could match up to Halo 3’s marketing push. You could pre-order Halo at 7-11. How much bigger can you get?

According to Microsoft, not much, but they can match it. The push for the Xbox 360 version of the game will be backed by a massive ad campaign. Why is Microsoft doing this? Simple. They spent $50 million dollars to secure exclusive content for the game. They need to make that number back somehow.

It’s certainly a rarity, if not a first, for a company to get behind a third party, non-exclusive title. Can you imagine Sony hyping up, say, Kane and Lynch like this? The content for Rockstar’s behemoth had better be spectacular for all the money Microsoft is putting behind it. If not, this could be another financial blunder along the lines of buying Rare or the now infamous three red lights debacle.

Gaming is popular in China. If you follow the industry, you knew that. What you probably didn’t know is that you apparently need a training center to become a pro gamer. Let’s face it, pushing buttons AND moving analog sticks is hard work.

The idea is that they’ll be able to scout potential talent and further hone the skills of those players once drafted. In addition to a training facility, there will be a 1,000 seat stadium built along with it.

On the serious side, how do you train someone in a video game? Take Halo 3. You know where the weapons are on each level, you have a general idea of typical action hot zones, and the rest is up to you. Either you can snipe people on the run without a scope or you can’t. You play a lot, you hopefully get better. Do you need someone hanging over your shoulder to help you play Halo?

So, you have a buddy who lives in the UK. You live in the US. Both of you plunk down the proper currency to indulge in EA’s Army of Two. Both of you agree on a long night of co-op play, since the game is built upon the mechanic.

Sorry to say, that’s not going to work.

It turns out the PS3 version suffers from the same issue, but regardless, this is a first on the Xbox Live service. EA’s response was that this was implemented to reduce server loads.

If you remember a while back, it’s things like this that made the eventual deal to get EA on board with Xbox Live a shaky proposition. Previously, they shut down a staggering amount of servers for older titles, something that is not an issue with any other developer due to the set up of Xbox Live.

For a paid service, it’s unacceptable. With the PS3 being free, developers could do anything they want and no one could complain. Microsoft should be implementing better quality control in these situations, though knowing the online history between the two companies, there’s probably nothing they could do.

Prototype looks to be a fun, open world romp in a futuristic setting. As a single player experience, it looks to be coming together nicely. However, no longer does it look like the multi-player functionality will be… it won’t have any.

To meet the release date, the developer has dropped the co-op play from the title. There are hints that this could be a future download post-release. So, here starts the conspiracy theory: Are they cutting it to snag an extra $10 from people after they purchased the game and labeling it as DLC? A TeamXbox interview with producer Tim Bennison goes into depth about the deletion of the multi-player. He goes onto to claim it’s been a single player experience from the start, and this keeps the game in focus.

For the one person still unaware, Jack Thompson is a Miami lawyer who has fought for years to prevent the sale of various video games. Some he doesn’t want sold to minors, some he wanted pulled from shelves in their entirety. He has appeared on TV too many times to mention, claiming Counter Strike, Halo, and other popular shooters were the cause of various tragedies around the country (even when the evidence to suggest a link doesn’t exist). Due to his crude, crass, and never particularly polite nature, he ended up on trial with the Florida Bar Association looking to revoke his license.

What Gamepolitics has done is taken the transcripts from nine days of his testimony, taken out the parts of interest, and posted them online. The nine part series is incredibly interesting to read, and posters particularly love the part about the fax machine. It’s worth reading them all if you’re a gamer to see how far one man can go to destroy your pastime.

What started on DOS (and other computer platforms of the era) is no more. Madden is done on the PC. The gist in non PR terms? It didn’t sell and no one played it on the PC anyway. Peter Moore explains in PR terms:

… the PC presents some very serious business challenges to us in the sports category, particularly because so many of you all are playing your favorite sports games on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.

The comments section of that post is loaded with hatred including those who seem to think their small boycott of the console version will make a difference (note to those people: it won’t do anything). It’s admittedly sad to see that on a significant anniversary date that the original platform is shafted, but it’s hard to imagine sales were strong compared to the console versions.

The PC isn’t viewed as a hotbed for sports gamers. It’s forte is largely strategy and shooters. Can anyone blame EA for making this decision in the end? Surely those people complaining know the development cost and sales numbers, right? Right? Unless someone is willing to find this one themselves, it’s over.

The Olympic Games are popular gaming fodder. Each time the event rolls around, a developer takes advantage of the situation and drops some generic button mashing junk onto store shelves in celebration… or for a chance to increase their stock. In Nintendo’s case, we’re still a ways away from the actual Olympics. That didn’t stop the Mario and Sonic mash-up from selling a boatload of copies.

It’s overall rating of 67% on GameRankings speaks for the games overall quality, and it’s hard to disagree. The game is everything Olympic games suffer from, only instead of mashing buttons, you look moronic as you swing the controller around randomly in ways that can hardly be considered interactive. The games only bonus is a decent version of table tennis. Still, the name alone was apparently enough, even though the platforming icons first meeting was less than stellar. Sequel? You bet.

The GGL Wire is reporting that Activision plans to tap Blizzard Entertainment to bring Guitar Hero to “roughly 300,000 game rooms between China and Korea.” Clearly, Activision hopes to cash in on Blizzard’s extreme success in Asia, especially in South Korea, where StarCraft is essentially the national pastime.

Readers with especially good memories will recall Activision CEO Robert Kotick’s comment that a Guitar Hero MMO seemed like a logical move for the franchise in November of last year. Given Blizzard’s unending stranglehold on the MMO market with World of Warcraft, is Activision getting Blizzard acquainted with the Guitar Hero franchise with bigger projects planned in the future? One can only hope.

“Terrific” in this case meaning “poorly conceived and laughably ineffectual.”

The program, which UK Resistance so aptly mocks, is the brainchild of the South London police force. PROJECT GAMERZ aims to get “anyone aged between 11 and 18, who live, or attend school, in the Riverside Ward of Rotherhithe, to get involved with their local community through Video Games and eSports.” Because clearly, the way to combat youth violence is to stick a dozen at-risk teenagers in a room filled with Xbox 360s and force them to play a few competitive games of FIFA. Never mind the socio-economic problems breeding environments that feed and encourage crime and violence. No, the answer here is clearly to play more video games.

Next up, we fight hunger by giving starving nations copies of Cooking Mama.

Grand Theft Auto. MLB 2K8. BioShock.

All of those came close to having an EA logo in front them when the company took a shot and tried to buy 60% of Take Two. EA offered $26 per share which is a substantial increase over the actual value of the stock.

Take Two then sent that offer back with a blatant no attached to it. Their claims about cramping creativity are shots directly at the company, and likely resonated with gamers. The company also defended their decision to stockholders, claiming EA’s offer was an opportunistic bid with the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto IV just down the line.

Formerly called Quake Zero, the freebie version of id’s Quake announced some time ago has more details. The entire game, which is set to be played completely in-browser, will be sponsored by IGA Worldwide. They’re specialists in getting advertisements into games, and if they have the ability to make a game free, more power to them.

Quake Live will be surprisingly robust, with friends lists and matchmaking features. A Live Arcade edition of Quake Arena is also in the works, though that has no release date yet either since its announcement back in August of ‘07. Keep watching www.quakelive.com for the eventual release, or sign up for the beta which is currently the only thing on the site.