In the latest blog posted on the SC2 Battlenet site Blizzard have finally acknowledged that they are aware of the cheating plague infesting SC2.

Blizzard Entertainment has always taken cheating in any form in Blizzard games very seriously, and that’s no different for StarCraft II. If a StarCraft II player is found to be cheating or using hacks or modifications in any form, then as outlined in our end user license agreement, that player can be permanently banned from the game. This means that the player will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net to play StarCraft II with his or her account.

It’s a little ambiguous, when caught, if they just ban Starcraft 2 from your account, or your entire account… Although here’s hoping for the latter.

Maybe I’ll have a little less paranoia now…

Source: SC2 Battlenet

A small but nonetheless awesome tidbit came out of the Lucasarts b0oth at E3 today, they confirmed that the upcoming Monkey Island 2: Special Edition will be seeing a release on both the iPad and iPhone platforms.

Even better is that they have removed the need to drag a cursor around, instead it’s simply point and touch to play.

Read on after the jump.

No release date is set yet, but it will come sometime after the Xbox / Steam release. A full preview of Monkey Island 2: Special Edition will be published in the coming days.

Announced yesterday, when the Xbox Slim was debuted on the show floor, was that Microsoft have finally fixed the Red Ring of Death. Yes, that’s right… After 5 years of plaguing the community, they have solved the issue behind the red lights.

Read on after the jump, for Microsoft ingenious solution.

The solution? The Removal of the red LEDs, since as we all know the red LEDs were the primary cause of this fatal issues. In the new console tech specification Microsoft noted that, now, only green lights exist around the power button.

Also for those who may be interested, the Slim removes support for external HDDs and memory

Read the full specs here.

Live tweet coverage coming at 5:00PM PST:

Mogworld, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw first attempt at writing a novel has finally received an official release date, August 2nd. Could this be the first time Yathzee will have to face the critics?

Check out the full blurb after the jump.

In a world full to bursting with would-be heroes, Jim couldn’t be less interested in saving the day. His fireballs fizzle. He’s awfully grumpy. Plus, he’s been dead for about sixty years. When a renegade necromancer wrenches him from eternal slumber and into a world gone terribly, bizarrely wrong, all Jim wants is to find a way to die properly, once and for all.
On his side, he’s got a few shambling corpses, an inept thief, and a powerful death wish. But he’s up against tough odds: angry mobs of adventurers, a body falling apart at the seams and a team of programmers racing a deadline to hammer out the last few bugs in their AI.
Mogworld is the debut novel from video-game icon Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation). Mogworld is a comic fantasy novel in the tradition of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, with a video-game twist: the main character is a minor character in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

I’ll be waiting for the comic to be released with narration from Yathzee.

Source: Amazon

What do you get when you cross TF2 with Law Abiding Citizen? Without a doubt the best (non-official) Team Fortress 2 Machinima I have ever seen.

If only the movie that the trailer is based on was as good.

I proudly present my biggest animating/compositing project I ever did and now it is partially about TF2. Let’s say, it is for the upcoming engineer update.
You probably have heard of or seen the “Law abiding citizen” movie (better if not). So what if our tf2 heroes were included in the cast?
Just imagine: the war is over, everybody has their own lives, engineer sits at home…

TrueOneMoreUser

It might be time to finally finish up my Machinima.

To be honest, I really haven’t the slightest idea what you are meant to do in 4FOURTHS. From the trailer, it looks like a chaotic mess of weirdness. Yet it somehow takes the ‘best trailer I’ve seen in a long time‘ award.

See for yourself after the jump.

The official description is…

4FOURTHS is a 4 player co-op game set in a distant future

So ‘yay‘ for co-op, but for the rest of the game it still looks pretty puzzling in what exactly you do. You can visit the official site here.

After 3 years in development, the popular DoTA clone Heroes of Newerth (HoN) is finally entering into open beta.

Sadly, the HoN community is one of the most venomous and anti-noob friendly environments I have ever played in, hence it’ll be interesting to see how the community reacts to a sudden influx of newbies.

With the release of 0.3.0 we are preparing for Open Beta which will begin Wednesday, March 31 @ 4:00pm PST. We will continue to work on the client and improve all the additions to the game. We also have an awesome new hero on the way! We haven’t released ANY information about it, however I’m sure you will see some stuff leaked soon.

That being said, the incentives we have been giving to pre purchase the game will be coming to an end when we begin Open Beta. That means if you want the Golden Shield, Golden Name, and the ability to Taunt (SMACKDOWN), you should pre purchase NOW!

We appreciate everyone’s support and we hope to continue to provide a great game and service with Heroes of Newerth into Open Beta, Retail, and for years to come. Thank you!

Taken from the Official Announcement.

I’ve been playing HoN regularly for the past 6 months, so if you’re joining the open beta, track me down and I’ll give you some epic pwnage. I suggest that we use Heroes of Newerth for a Gamer Limit community game night while it’s in open beta.

Keep a tab on the Beta Page for any further announcements.

Last year we had our Ratchet & Clank charity gaming marathon, which almost ended in a crazed James stabbing everyone, fortunately for this event there is a dedicated team of marathon gamers.

ExtraLives are attempting to play through their top 10 N64 games over a 64 hour period, their donation goal is $2,500, and at the time of this post the marathon has been running for 8 hours and has already received 1,203.60 in donations.

We’re raising money for Free the Children, a charity that provides clean water, healthcare, food and education to children in developing nations! Click the PayPal Donate button below to donate to Free the Children!

We’re going to be playing through our top 10 Nintendo 64 games in our 64 Hours of the Nintendo 64 Marathon. Every $5 donation gets you a chance to win an N64 and our top 5 games (a ~$100 value!).

Join the stream here, and be sure to donate a dollars (maybe two if you are feeling generous).

After another three months of continued development, the second beta of the open source Theme Hospital remake has finally been unleashed on the unsuspecting interwebs.

The release contains 10 new diseases to deal with, additional diagnosis rooms, and a bundle of random tweaks and fixes. Be sure to check out the preview video after the jump.

Theme Hospital was one of the most addictive games of the 90s; if Theme Park could also be remade, I’d lick some serious testies. I’m somewhat surprised that they haven’t received a cease and desist letter yet, like so many fan remake projects seemingly do. I guess they’re still flying low on the radar.

Snag the latest beta here.

Robert Culp, the actor most gamers would associate with the HL2 antagonist Wallace Breen, died today at the of 79. Culp’s publicist has stated that he died from a fall in a Los Angeles park; no further details have been released as of yet.

Since the events of Episode 1, Culp’s death will have no significant impact on the HL universe, but no doubt walking the entrance to HL2 will never feel the same again.

R.I.P.

Link: IMDB Profile

It looks like Gamestop employees are trying new tactics in their everlasting “get people to buy an in-store warranty” campaign. According to a customer, a Gamestop employee claimed Microsoft was sending out kill bugs for Xbox 360 consoles to fry their motherboards, and the only way to protect against this was to buy an in-store warranty.

Check out the full customer rant below.

“I typically avoid shopping at GameStop and have been doing a good job abstaining from buying anything from them for the past two years. However, this past weekend I volunteered to help my friend purchase her very first Xbox 360 console. Naturally, we went to Frys to buy it. Unfortunately, they were out of the normal Elite model (Halo ODST/Forza) and only had the Final Fantasy bundle in stock. Well, there happened to be a GameStop in the same shopping center and we decided that, rather than driving around in circles, we would just pick up the system there.

Big mistake.

While they did have the correct console in stock (they always do), the next 20 minutes at the point of sale counter ended up being an excruciating exercise in badgering. The associate proceeded to ring up the console and go into his normal pitch on why we should buy the in-store warranty for 39.95. While this is typically par for the course at GameStop, he just would NOT let it go. I told my friend that the in-store warranty was not necessary and that she could send the console in to Microsoft if anything bad occurred in the future. The associate, in turn, told her that it was ABSOLUTELY necessary and that her console was definitely going to break in the next few months. He proceeded to explain that if she were buying a PS3 that the warranty would not be necessary. BUT with an Xbox, it was absolutely necessary. He also told her that it would cost her $60.00 + to mail the console to Microsoft and that their standard warranty probably would not cover the ‘red rings of death’ and other hardware failures. He then told me that he hated me for telling my friend not to get the warranty… while she was standing right there. He then proceeded with other car-salesman tactics to bully her into getting the warranty (he tried reverse psychology at one point: “I don’t care if you get it wah”)

But that’s when shit really got bat-shit crazy.

The associate then told her that Microsoft was in the habit of sending ‘kill bugs’ to consoles via the internet that would subsequently fry the motherboard. I laughed it off before he told me “It’s true. They did it to people who played Modern Warfare 2 early.” He said that their warranty would cover all of this and more.

A little background: I used to be an ASM at GameStop. I understand how points work and how corporate pressures associates to meet a certain percentage of their transactions (whether it’s reservations, subs, warranties, etc). It’s one of the reasons why I quit and boycott the store (among other reasons that you’ve probably read about on Reddit).

I spoke to my friend afterwards who stated that if I had not of been there, she would have caved and got the warranty because he made her feel so uncomfortable about it. I’m sure he makes a lot of add-on sales using this tactic. Regardless, there comes a time when “no” means no. And there also comes a time when you should not make shit up just to get a warranty sale.”

It’s certainly sounds like a good reason to buy a warranty, I wouldn’t want my Xbox turned into fried food. But seriously, I feel bad for the not-so-average gamer who gets suckered into this type of bad deal.

Republished with permission, from reddit user gamedreamz.