Good game everyone who stopped by!  Thanks!

It’s war!!! We’ll be playing the new Wii hit, Medal Of Honor: Heroes 2 online tonight (11/30) at 9PM Eastern time. It’ll be a DeathMatch and the Game Name will be: infendo, password: infendo

So join me, Blake, and all your Infendo friends online tonight at 9PM!

PROTIP: Get your EA Nation registration figured out before 9PM if you haven’t been online with your copy of MOH:H2 yet. It can be a bear if you don’t remember your password.

Next Generation had an article up this week that asked if 2007, with its bevy of traditional, off the wall, and outright incredible videogames, was in fact the best year ever for the medium.

If we just take my own experiences as an example, then the answer is yes. Over the past 12 months (I’ll round up and include December), I’ve purchased or played more videogames than I had over the past five years combined. Granted, a majority of them were for a Nintendo platform or portable, but the point remains I was back on the saddle and thoroughly impressed with the video games industry as a whole. (more…)

I spent the last hour reading allegations that Eidos dangled a six-digit advertising deal over GameSpot’s head in order to have long-time editor Jeff Gerstmann fired for the critical tone of his now-pulled 6/10 video review of Kane and Lynch (a text-only review remains). Whatever the real story, Gerstmann is currently out of a job.

Truth be told, game makers have long since pressured gaming media to publish favorable game reviews as a higher score equates to greater sales. And while most publications will tell you otherwise (even self-serving at times), my sources confirm that several outlets have delt with the dilemma and even succumbed to filthy lucre.

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To get yourself a Wii this holiday, you should not stalk the UPS man, but you should stalk the UPS man. Get it?

So says George Harrison in an interview with Wired’s Chris Kohler today, during which he also responded to that lingering conspiracy theory about fake Wii shortages.

Game|Life:

“Typically, we’d have begun stockpiling console hardware back in August” for the holiday season, Harrison says. “But this year, we were selling all the Wii we could get, and we got all the way through the summer with basically no inventory in our warehouse.” [...] “I don’t want to say, ‘Stalk the UPS driver,’ but figure out when the shipments are arriving in the store,” he says.

UPS drivers, beware. Does any Infendo regular still not have a Wii yet?

There’s something inherently ironic about a tabloid reporting on mediums that make people dumber, but for the sake of this post I’ll continue.

Basically, U.K. tabloid The Sun is blaming videogames for England’s drop in literacy rates. The article cites a study that claimed 37% of English ten-year-olds play videogames for more than three hours a day, for more than other European children. Side note: That’s nothing; my old roommate played World of Warcraft for 16 hours straight once. The Sun also reported in the past that videogames hurt British football, so I think we know where their loyalties lie on this issue,no?

If kids game too much, they don’t read, the study says. Apparently, the researchers didn’t get a crack at Super Paper Mario.

I told Blake once I arrived in Japan I would do a guide to buying the Wii- which was still quite sought-after when I left the US. After a few months I finally waded through the necessary bureaucracy to get my own apartment and so I figured what better day to grab a Wii than “Black Friday,” the worst shopping day of the year… (more…)

Having already been sold on cheap shooter peripherals with the release of Link’s Crossbow Training, this impending $13 plastic Wii gun made by Nyko and shipping in January looks fun. It even has a pass-through port for Nunchuck movement. Sweet and cheap, as I like to say.

I love clever home brew, even if it isn’t hi-tech.

Because for some lucky blokes it is different. Loading differently anyway.

Could this be a first look at the changes Nintendo promised when it summarily ripped the NSider forums away from us over the summer? No word yet on the fate of the late, great forums (depending on who you ask, of course), but this does appear to be some kind of beta for the newly designed Nintendo.com.

Infendo likes to criticize the standard 10-point game review system for taking itself too seriously. Is a game exceptional, good, average, or poor — that’s all what we really want to know.

But Old Man Murray devised a great way to critique video games — by how long it takes before the player encounters an uninspired power-up crate or barrel.

All games contain crates, therefore all games can be judged empirically on those crates. Once we came up with that insight, the actual formula for the world’s first completely unbiased review methodology was a trivial matter of applying our many hours spent watching actors portray scientists on television to our hatred of crates. Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.

We laugh because it’s funny, and we laugh because it’s true.