What does Resident Evil, Phoenix Wright and Devil May Cry have in common? Pretty boys. Shinji Mikami of course! A warm Happy Birthday goes out to one of the gaming industry's living legends who turns 42 today!

Mikami has been in the gaming industry for more than 15 years now and is responsible for a number of games we all know and love. Aside from the ever popular video games mentioned above, he's worked on such classics as Aladdin and Goof Troop during the days of the Super Nintendo, Dino Crisis and God Hand.

After working with the Resident Evil franchise with Capcom for almost a decade (so many zombies, so little time,) he joined Studio Clover in 2004 where he worked with Hideki Kamiya to produce Devil May Cry. He later founded Seeds Inc. together with Kamiya and Atsushi Inaba which was last heard to be in the process of developing a new game.

Certainly a lifetime of achievement can't be fully captured in a scant three paragraphs but cheers to Shinji Makima and again a Happy Birthday!

Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game (the Hugo Award winner and Nebula Award winner), is a recovering game addict - or at least that's one interpretation you can give his interview over at Gaming Today. Ender's Game is being turned into a movie by Warner Brothers, and at the same time Orson Scott Card is open to the possibility of his book becoming a video game.

For those not familiar with Ender's Game, just understand that it's one of the best sci-fi books ever written (in our honest opinions). A fast-paced story about violence, evil, war, and leadership. It's required reading, or so Wikipedia claims, at the Marine Corps University at Quantico.

And if it's good enough for the US Marines, it should be good enough for you gamers out there, right? Anyway, back to the interview. Orson Scott Card talked about being addicted to gaming:

The weird thing was that even when I wasn't playing, I felt a tremendous anxiety. I had responsibilities - there were cities waiting for me to tell them what to build! Now, I'm not insane. My conscious mind knew that it was just a game, and when I wasn't running the program, nothing was happening at all. But I invested so much tension in the playing of the game that it didn't go away when I left the computer. The call of duty was still there.

The interview also tackled what goes into writing a story for video games. Card said:

Games CAN'T have the kind of storylines that movies and books have, or they wouldn't be playable. ... What makes a game work is the opposite of what makes a story work. In a story, you are seeking to find out what really happened - why people do what they do, what the results of their choices are. ... In a game, the opposite illusion must be created. Even though most games absolutely force you to follow preset paths, the gamewrights try to give you the illusion that you are making free choices (even though you are actually, in almost all games, still being channeled through certain puzzles with fixed solutions).

As for Ender's Game, it won't just be one game in Card's vision:

• The Battle Room. This pivotal set in the book can be several game modules in real life.
• Space war games. The three wars (back in Mazer's time all the way to Ender's time).
• Story-based games. Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow.
• MMORPG. This one is based on the Battle School in Ender's Game.
• The Fantasy Game. The "mind game" from the novel.
• The Hive Queen. It's like Civilization (a game franchise that Card was addicted to).
• Post-war war. Card describes this as being like Risk.

Well, Mr. Card, there are quite a few fans here at QJ.NET who would be first in line to get a game that follows the Hegemon.

 

Chris Kohler of Wired informs all of us that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has announced the debut of gaming.wikia, an open-source gaming magazine.

What's amusing about this is that like all other wiki's, you can go in and finally edit out the annoying parts of other people's articles. Admittedly, this blogger thinks that the mentioned scenario will probably happen to a lot of his posts. Other self-explanatory wikia's include Tunes.wikia, Cars.wikia, and Health.wikia.

Will this end up as the ultimate gaming resource for the gaming community? Or will this end up as a NeoGAF induced with massive amounts of alcohol?

Penny-Arcade's Skeletor strip seems oddly prophetic. Anyhow, if you want to check out the new resource, feel free to head there via our "read" link below.

In the dark, early days of the Internet, when BBS boards and gaming magazines made of combustible paper still ruled supreme, videogame myths enjoyed a healthier existence. What videogame myths you ask?

Ever heard from a friend of a friend that he had a friend was able to play Leisure Suit Larry 4? Remember the rumors of the existence of the notorious Cow Level before the release of Diablo II? Yeah folks, videogame myths - rumors that have passed from mouth to mouth and are now part of gaming lore.

Below are infamous videogame myths that immediately come to mind. The first three are old ones - and legendary ones at that. The last game is a bit more contemporary and stands as an example of how quickly videogame myths get busted nowadays.

The full article awaits after the jump! (No really, unlike most of the games about to be mentioned, this is no wild goose chase, it's really there. Just click on the" Full Article" link below.)

 

Can't wait for The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass? The release isn't budging from October of this year (for North America) so we'll have to pray that screens are enough to tide us over until then.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass takes us to the events months after the The Wind Waker since, after all, this is a direct sequel. Link, Tetra and her merry band of pirates are exploring the open seas, trying to find themselves a new land to call home. They encounter an abandoned ship in the middle of a dense fog (always a bad thing, them dense fogs) and Tetra runs into trouble while checking it out. Link follows to save her but as luck would have it, he takes an untimely dip in the sea instead. Link wakes up on a mysterious island and a fairy helps him out to start searching for Tetra.

Wikipedia lists the NA release of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass as October 15. While waiting, check out these screens (first four are for multiplayer and the rest are for single player) and tell us what you think.

   

Save Tetra! Follow the jump to more screenshots!

Just in case you're not entirely familiar with the genre, Wikipedia defines serious games (or persuasive games) to be videogames that can be used as educational technology, but are often intended for an audience outside of primary or secondary education. If you've still got most of the radio tracks from Liberty City Stories, you're probably going to remember that crazy radio commercial for that fictional edutainment-game Pastmaster. There you go. Pastmaster equals serious game.

Anyhow, here's the news: To help usher in the Serious Games Summit of this years Game Developers Conference (GDC), Square Enix's established serious games unit discussed why the company decided to delve into the serious games genre. They also previewed its serious DS game which they claim intends to teach the joy of game development.

Gamasutra reports that Ichiro Otobe, Square Enix's chief serious games strategist, believes that despite sentiment that serious games are almost seen as charities, Square Enix knows that it can also be a profitable business. Otobe  emphasized his belief by citing Japanese serious game hits like Brain Training, English Training, and Cooking Navi for the DS.

Otobe admits thought that with serious games, the challenges for developers are numerous. For example they have to contend with a target audience which consists of people who are primarily not gamers.

Square Enix also revealed that their new serious game project for the DS, tentatively titled Project GB, is set to teach players the necessary skills required for game development. The game's ten man development team is led by Tadashi Tsushima of Vagrant Story fame, and it's set to teach folks programming, graphic design, music composition, and writing for games through hands on play.

Tsushima notes that he believes that when developing for serious games, the learning process should never be sugarcoated, as if learning was something bitter that should be eased. He says that the game should instead communicate the joy of learning Otobe concludes: "Without understanding the fun of learning, you can't create a game, you can only sugarcoat. You have to access yourself what is the core-fun of what you're trying to educate, and communicate that through gaming."

Wow. What could be more natural than learning to make games through playing a game? This is an amazing concept that Square has to get right. We're hoping though that Square finds ways to bring serious games to other platforms. A lot of folks looking to get into game development as a hobby would definitely appreciate being able to download something like Project GB over XBL, PlayStation Network, or Virtual Console.

 

Founded in 1994 due to nationwide furor over violence in videogames (no GTA at the time kiddies, the big guns were Mortal Kombat and Night Trap), the Interactive Digital Software Association is set to enforce regulation of the gaming industry via a mandatory ratings system. Moreover, the IDSA served as a unified voice to represent their collective interests to the American public and government.

IDSA quickly gave birth to two things known to all gamers: the Entertainment Software Ratings Board and the Electronic Entertainment Expo. The company, which we've known as the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) since 2003,  has spent the last 13 years fending government regulation, fighting piracy, and serving as the industry's face.

However, the ESA does a little more than that - and they spend for more than just what has been mentioned. A Gamespot feature sheds light on just how much the ESA has to to spend in lobbying just to get the government to listen (or see it their way, lobbying is after all a legalized form of pseudo-bribery).

The total tally? In 2005 they spend US$ 2 million in federal lobbying efforts, and from the looks of things, they're set to exceed that in 2006. They're spending more than the Motion Picture Association of America. What's good about this is (despite the spending for online gambling and other debatable endeavors), a lot of the money goes to efforts that we all could safely call, gamer-centric.

If you want a better breakdown on how much they're spending, you can check out our "Read" link below. We warn you though, it's a bit closer to Wikipedia entry than a feature, but overall it's very informative. Makes you appreciate the ESA more for spending so much just so that GTA isn't deemed illegal to play.

Most 80s cartoons were made to help market toys and other franchise-related merchandise. We're wondering if that Saturday morning magic will work on this generation's electronic occupation.

Given, the huge buzz generated by the now in contention Ghostbusters' game (thank the gods Dan Akroyd confirmed it), it seems there are a lot of franchises from way back when that could get a great boost if it gets adapted for our gaming interests.

But how would these 80s cartoons translate into "generation now" video games? Which platforms would each game be for? How would each game play? This article will imagine what would happen if we turn 80s cartoon shows into "generation now" games.

We'll start with two 80s cartoons that share the same universe (yes 80's uber geeks, we know that Etheria and Eternia are different places, but the two series did cross multiple times) He-Man and She-Ra, and then we'll move from there.

Read the rest of the article after the Jump!

The U.S. Copyright Office has recently specified new rules on allowing cellphone owners to hack software designed to prevent them from using their phones on competing carriers.

How will this affect gaming?

Well, one will also be a bit surprised to know that folks are now also permitted to crack copy protection on abandoned software titles for "archival" purposes. Here's what the rules say about abandon ware:

Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

The rules also allow teachers to copy "snippets" from DVDs for educational compilations. Also for the blind you're now free to have third-party software read copy-protected electronic books.

Get the rest of the article after the Jump!

The results are in, and if Wikipedia is to be believed, people look for Pokemon more than they hunt down Pornography.

That's the verdict of WikiCharts, an experimental tool used to analyze the popularity of Wiki pages. According to the page itself, it's only three days old, and it does mention that there are bugs that need to be fixed before it can really be considered accurate. That's a good thing to note since, if you look at the deviations for the views per day, there's a deviation of +/- 107%. Of course, Pokemon will probably still rank higher than Porn.

What else is WikiCharts good for?

It's a pretty good indicator of what's on the mind of internet goers, even with its potential inaccuracies. For instance, the current 2nd placer is a very distant second, with the first place having almost 80,000 more page views.

What's in second place? JonBenét Ramsey. First place goes to Wikipedia's main page, which really ought to be counted out of the whole thing.

See? They still need to work out some kinks.

Other notables in the Top 100 English Wikipedia picks are:
- Pokemon (6th)
- Table of Disney Characters (16th)
- Pornography (19th, strangely enough)
- List of Sex Positions (25th)
- Grigory Perelman (32nd, and also one of the other Fields Medal winners aside from Terence Tao)
- Pyramid Head (61st, and actually beats Silent Hill itself on the list), and
- Dave Karnes (100th, helped free trapped policemen during 9/11)