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Officially announced on the Bungie website (now with Luke Smith action), Halo 3 will be in stores on September 25th of this year. The multiplayer Beta for the game begins today; if you're looking for some answers they have an extensive online guide available for curious minds. MTV's Stephen Totilo had a chance to have some good chats with the developers, and he points out three things every Beta player should do, as well as a proposal for an unusual alternate scoring system for bad players. GameDaily has just a few more details, including some information on the tie-in Zune device Microsoft is offering to enflame fanboy passions.

Officially announced on the Bungie website (now with Luke Smith action), Halo 3 will be in stores on September 25th of this year. The multiplayer Beta for the game begins today; if you're looking for some answers they have an extensive online guide available for curious minds. MTV's Stephen Totilo had a chance to have some good chats with the developers, and he points out three things every Beta player should do, as well as a proposal for an unusual alternate scoring system for bad players. GameDaily has just a few more details, including some information on the tie-in Zune device Microsoft is offering to enflame fanboy passions.

MTV's Stephen Totilo went to GDC last week and came back with a bag full of interesting interviews for faithful gamers. Speaking with Miyamoto early in the week, they had the chance to talk about Miis in the land of Hyrule, and playing Mario one-handed. Totilo also confirmed that the content-less keynote was due to a stock-related ban on future information. Bad timing, all around. At the end of last week, he had a chance to catch up with Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins (Tycho). They chatted about the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness, and the duo's high aspirations for the game: "If you're asking me whether or not I hope we make a good game, then yes, we are trying our best to make a game that is not annoying, that is not a pain in the ass, that can be played through in a reasonable time and is enjoyable from the beginning to the end."

Since the days of the arcades, the Area 51 games have been brainless bughunts: find the aliens, shoot the aliens. When game designer Harvey Smith was hired a few years ago to work on the next iteration of the franchise, he began to despair at the lackluster story elements in the game. As he put it: "Area 51 just bored the sh-- out of me, and I was like, 'How can we make this interesting?'" As MTV News reports, frustrations with politics both in the United States and abroad led to a solution that required months of convincing executives to see implemented. Blacksite: Area 51 will feature a new and more poignant story, as the aliens become poor American citizens put in harm's way. "Wait, what if they are terrorists we helped create? What if the people supporting us in our fight against the terrorists aren't completely clean either? What if they're sending us after them now, but what if 10 years ago it was safe for them to create them?' ... So what we have in 'BlackSite' is a delta-force assassination squad hunting down and killing members of an Army training program. So on American soil, Americans are fighting Americans, basically." The game is intended to be enjoyed regardless of subject matter, but Smith hopes that gamers will accept a title that even touches on some of the issues that popular television shows deal with on a regular basis. What do you think about this? Is there room for politics in gaming, or do you just want to shoot stuff?

Will Wright and his team at EA put together a presentation for the DICE Summit, giving folks more details on the much-anticipated Spore . Gamespot reports on the talk, which sounds like it must have been highly entertaining to view. The entire presentation centered around the development process for the game, which has been a platform for smart people to talk about making games since Wright first announced the project. Designers from the team talk about making the space ship creator flexible ("It's pretty satisfying to fly around in your X-Wing and blow up The Enterprise."), and Wright mentioned their habit to run a batch process creating thousands of planets every night. Stephen Totilo at MTV also discusses the talk, and fleshes out a few more details from the event. Looking this over, what do you think? Still excited for Spore, or has it been in development too long?

Stephen Totilo, at MTV Games, has hit a gaming wall. At the newly un-flashed Multiplayer site he talks about the bane of gamers everywhere, what developer Jamie Fristrom calls a 'shelf-level event': a gaming wall that makes it hard if not impossible to complete a game. While a lot of gamers can overcome difficulties to reach the end credits, there are some frustrations that can suck all the fun out of play. He cites the bosses from Final Fantasy X and Super Paper Mario as dealbreakers. I personally am playing through God of War again, and the incredibly frustrating spear trap in the 'Paths of Madness' section of the game never fails to provoke hysterics. Have you run into any such obstacles lately? What game obstacles have caused you toss away a controller in frustration and swear off a game entirely?

In interviews with game developers this week, the tone seems to be that innovative, original thought is no longer welcome in the games industry. That definitely seems to be the tone behind IGN's interview with Okami producer Atsushi Inaba, and MTV's interview with Bioshock's Ken Levine (distracting flash site). Atsushi, speaking about the art style in his critically acclaimed but poorly selling adventure game, had this to say about originality in games: "You use the word 'difficult', but I think that it is becoming almost 'impossible' for an original game to succeed financially. This can't be blamed on anyone but it's a simple fact that an original game doesn't appeal to the majority of gamers." Meanwhile Levine, talking mostly about the level of art he's trying to create with the title, had this to say about some of his fellow designers: "Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Aliens' or variations of that. There's great things in that, but you need some variety." While most of the rest of his comments are somewhat mild, he reiterates throughout that they're trying to do something that gamers may not "give a crap" about. What do you think? Has the industry gotten to the point where retreads are all that will sell, or is there still room in the marketplace for original ideas?

Via Stephen Totilo's Second Player blog, his most recent post at MTV concerns dead bodies in videogames. This rather morbid topic may seem like a small concern, but it's a big deal for the people making the games. From the article: "Dead bodies have been vanishing in games for decades because of technical difficulties. Old 2-D games -- like just about anything on the original Atari, Sega and Nintendo systems -- could only display a limited number of character graphics, or sprites, on a TV screen at one time. Letting a zapped enemy lie prone on the playing field caused problems, limiting the amount of new things, like new on-rushing enemies, that could be drawn onto the screen. 'You would end up sacrificing one of your precious moving objects to display an essentially useless dead body,' [game designer Ralph] Barbagallo said." With the advent of the newest generation of consoles, Totilo explains, we now have the luxury of corpses as far as the eye can see.

The increasingly excellent games coverage from MTV continues, with Stephen Totilo's conversation with an Iraqi gamer (Flash site, video in upper left-hand corner). Wisam, the 23 year old gamer Totilo speaks with, shares a few stories with the reporter about his life in Iraq. He gained some notoriety on the web after sitting for an interview with the 'Alive in Baghdad' blog, but at the moment he's only interested in games and having something to do. A recent graduate of his city's English department, current circumstances in the city makes it hard for him to find meaningful work. From the article: "The American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime changed Wisam's taste in games. He and his gamer friends used to enjoy first-person shooters like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. Then a real war started around him. 'We hate the attacking, the gunfire in games,' Wisam said. 'We started to hate it.' In fact, there's only one game with guns he can still tolerate. 'Grand Theft Auto is the exception. Because Grand Theft Auto is like us.'"

The excellent Stephen Totilo runs down memorable moments from this year in games, from the perspective of MTV Multiplayer. (Flash site, make sure and stop the ad quickly to avoid brainburn.) From the article: "On a rain-soaked Wednesday afternoon we drove south from Austin to Buda and got a look at the Rooster Teeth digs. One of the guys, the heavily tattooed Geoff Fink, sat Sway down at a bank of Xbox 360s and recording equipment to explain how the 'Halo' machinima gets made. Sway got the details, but we couldn't wrap the interview without asking Fink about a detail we highlighted in our old Rooster Teeth story -- the foot thing. Sway noticed that Fink had nine Xbox 360 controllers at the recording station and enough systems to allow them to be used at the same time -- but Rooster Teeth doesn't have nine gamer/actors to wield them. They solve this problem by wielding multiple controllers at once, some with their hands and some with their feet. We needed a demonstration and got one, captured on film."

The increasingly enjoyable games coverage continues on the MTV site, despite the horrible flash interface. Stephen Totitilo sat down for a chat with Sony's Phil Harrison, and comes away with some interesting perspectives on the year. Mr. Harrison discusses Sony's outlook on their launch, the overall role of games in world culture, and the topic of game content as it relates to 'appropriateness'. Specifically, he dealt with the 'controversy' over Rockstar's well-received title Bully. From the article: "Harrison called it a 'storm in a teacup' stirred by politicians and media, embarking on a familiar argument that games aren't really just for kids. In this case, movies and books had delved into similar subject matter and seldom faced such protest. Did that give Harrison, someone with nearly unparalleled power to greenlight video games, any pause about the material he thinks he can offer gamers? 'It has absolutely not changed my approach,' he said. 'I fervently believe that the biggest challenge we face is that our industry is referred to as video games, and games are supposed to be fun,' he said, adding that games shouldn't have to only focus on light topics. 'Games should deal with fear, should deal with comedy and with death. They should deal with peril, with drug offenses.'"

Via Eurogamer (which offers a highlight reel of the article), a long piece at MTV Games where Stephen Totilo sits down for a chat with Nintendo of America's Reggie Fils-Aime. Unlike some other question-dodging executives, Reggie shares some interesting details. We have release dates (WarioWare in January, Mario Party in March, Mario Galaxy sometime after March), confirmation that they'll try to bring GoldenEye to the Virtual Console, a few details about the first online game for the Wii (Pokemon Battle Revolution), and word that there would be several Wii-related announcements in January. From the article: "For Fils-Aime, some of the projects he'd love to see happen in the U.S. can only be executed by his bosses in Japan. As a result, part of his job is to lobby for what he thinks American gamers want. 'The piece that I am more and more involved in is really looking longer-term and making sure the full range of games are being brought to the Americas. Making sure we have core gamer games like 'Metroid,' like 'Galaxy.' Making sure we have our types of market-extension games not only for Wii but for DS. Where's our analogous cooking game? Where's our analogous 'Brain Age 2' for DS?'"

MTV is taking another crack at a 'Gamer's Week' this week, and they're already showing they've learned since last year. Offering programming that's about 100x more respectful than anything at G4 (thank you Stephen Totilo), Gamer's Week 2.0 (really obnoxious Flash) will offer up many segments all week long on the next-gen consoles, upcoming and popular released games, and even some games industry esoterica. From the GameSetWatch article: "Tuesday, 11/14 — The spotlight falls on video game classics on Sucker Free as it features special Pro-Gamers, like Triforce from Empire Arcadia, the first fully realized urban gaming clan seeking prize money in organized competitions and arcade hustling, Dana Platt from 'VOA: Valkyries of Arcadia' and David 'Walshy' Walsh from Kianeto gaming clothing, and a look back at Tetris, Grand Theft Auto 3, Pacman and Super Mario Bros."

Via Joystiq, an article on MTV Games' Overdrive site on commentary tracks in next-generation gaming. The piece looks at the history of game commentary (all the way back on the N64), and discusses what it will take for us to see more of this in future games. From the article: "What will it take to get more game makers to spill like this? The most significant obstacle is time. Movie directors have the luxury of recording commentary for DVDs that arrive months after their film is completed and released in theaters. Game makers, if they want to include commentary with their title, need to record it in the 11th hour of a game's development, right at crunch time. Insomniac Games has included a behind-the-scenes interactive 'museum' in two of the company's four 'Ratchet and Clank' games, but has never provided an audio commentary." Warning: the article is on a flash site, and I'd advise pausing the ad box in the upper right hand corner before the music starts.

MTV Games has a run-down on a blog that relates what it is like behind a videogame store counter. The blog, DayintheLifeofVideogames relates the best and worst moments from their unique perspective on the games industry. From the article: "So pity the game store employee anxious to sell apples to people shopping for oranges. 'I die a little bit inside each time,' Post said. 'I think people are afraid to take a chance.' He gets just that close to getting people to buy the good stuff, but he said that if people haven't seen a TV commercial for a game, it's very hard to sell them on it. And cheer Post and Whitman for their acts of retail kindness, like warning customers buying EA's recent 'NFL Head Coach' that it doesn't actually let people play football. 'I warned two people, and both of them said, 'I'm glad you told me. I don't want it now,' ' Post said. 'You want to make the sale, but you don't want the guy to go home and say, 'That guy doesn't even know what he's talking about.'" It would be against the scriptures not to mention the most holy of holy books at this juncture. Yay, though I walk through the shadow of the non-believers, always do I keep the Acts of Gord in my mind.

Wowzer writes "MTV's Overdrive game site show G-Hole got a preview of Guitar Hero II for the PS2. MTV wasn't supposed to share the song names they saw, though, and they were quick to remove the new song names from the video. Lucky for us all 38 Guitar Hero II songs were captured at VideoGamesBlogger. From the article: 'Opening Licks: Strutter — Kiss, Mother — Danzig, Monkey Wrench — Foo Fighters, Shout At The Devil — Motley Crue, Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight — Spinal Tap.'" The article points out that between the songs listed here and previously announced tracks, there are only two songs as yet unrevealed.

Stephen Totilo, over at MTV Games, has up an article talking with David Chase, the creator of hit HBO show The Sopranos. Mr. Chase believes firmly in the creative and dramatic potential of television, but isn't so sure that videogames can mean all that much. Despite the new 'Sopranos' game, you'll never see the TV show bleed into gaming, or vice versa. In his mind, games have very specific goals. From the article: "'Games have a function,' he said. 'It's a physical function. The character has to go from here to there, has to shoot that, has to drive this, has to knock that down, has to jump up here. ... That's how a game works. So cooking dinner, going to Lamaze class, there's no way to figure that into a game at this point. Maybe somebody else can do it and maybe somebody will, but that wasn't really what this game was about. It was supposed to be a story about a kid who wants to be a gangster -- a punk who wants to be a gangster -- and so that's what we did.'"

MTV's games site has a piece looking at what it means to be a summer intern at EA. The article explores the experiences of three interns who did far more than fetching coffee. From the article: "Gwynne Olson-Wheeler ... showed some of her intern work in a cubicle that wasn't hers -- she was spending her final weeks of the summer working on a different floor, on EA's under-wraps 'Simpsons' game. Meeting with her there would give away too many secrets. So instead she zapped some graphics work she did earlier in the season for 'Sims 2 Pets' onto her iPod and plugged into a computer at a less-sensitive area. The room where she set up was darkened by dropped blinds, most of them dotted with spent ammunition from the floor's many Nerf gun battles. On the walls, signs addressed the staff of another under-wraps EA game: 'Welcome Sims 3 team.'"

MTV Games has a great article looking at how developers are refining Wii controls, now that they've had most of a year to work on them. The game cited is the Wii version of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance; the Wiimote is used to represent Thor's Hammer, Spidey's webshooters, and Wolverine's claws, among other things. From the article: "'Now in some cases people will do something that's not going to work right, and in that case they're probably going to have to adjust the way they do it,' said Chrzanowski, a black Wii development controller in hand. 'But that's a rare case.' He wasn't talking idly. He said a system developed by a Vicarious colleague, Jesse Raymond, a few weeks ago has been crunching the data of dozens of players who have tested the game on the Wii, analyzing the results of requests for players to do 10 swipes in a row or 10 stabs in a row, recognizing which moves the current version of the game fails to recognize as the intended gesture, tweaking the code, checking the pool of data from the gesture trials again for any new misunderstandings, repeat and recode, again and again."

Joystiq sat down with Epic designer Cliff Bleszinski and talked about the much anticipated Gears of War, the news that Epic is in talks with Nintendo to do games for their new console, and his impressions of Sony's showing at E3. From the article: "We're currently talking with Nintendo. It's not really my department to pontificate on other people's system and comments that the wonderful Mark Rein will make occasionally to upset the fans. Again, I reserve judgment of the Wii until I get hands on with it. I was very judgmental about the DS until I actually got to play hands-on with it and I love Trauma Center and stuff like that. You know what, Nintendo is zigging while everyone else is zagging and they'll be just for it. I give them props for doing something different." For more on Gears, MTV Overdrive has the 'Road to E3' special they aired on MTV2 last week available for viewing. IE is the preferred viewer, of course.

oneils writes "Chris Morris of CNN.com outlines some interesting gameplay impressions of Nintendo's Wii. He explains that the new controller works well with first person shooter games like Metroid Prime, but, currently, falls short in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Morris' impression is that this setback can be rectified by 'optimization.'" From the article: "Imagine holding your TV remote control by its ends and pretending it's a steering wheel. Substitute the Wii controller and you've got an idea of how to control 'Excite Truck'. Driving's pretty easy. The real fun comes when you hit a hill and go sailing into the air. The object is to land with all four wheels on the ground. To do that you'll have to tilt the controller back and forth away from you to stabilize the truck. It's frenetic and fast-paced - and seemed to be everyone's favorite game. I agreed." Several readers also wrote in to mention that Resident Evil will be coming to the Wii. No word on if it's RE5, or a spin-off/remake. Lots of related links below, please Read More. Update: 05/10 20:41 GMT by Z : Joystiq has pictures of a Zapper attachment for the Wiimote.

Via Joystiq, an MTV Games story about a MMOG that attempts to encompass Africa in a game. From the article: "Less reserved, Adam Ghetti, the teenage creative director at Rapid Reality, the company actually creating the game, said he hopes the game will right some wrongs. 'The white American board developers of the large MMO development companies out there right now don't honestly have the right background and knowledge on the continent of Africa and its lore, mythology and rich history, and quite honestly neither did I,' said Ghetti, who is white. 'They just don't teach it over here.' The game is designed, in part, to change that."

RemovableBait writes "Microsoft's Xbox 360 has sold over 600,000 units so far and is on track to sell over 4.5 million consoles by the end of the business year. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft could have sold many more as 'video game publishers and retailers have said shipments during the key holiday season fell short of expectations'. If Microsoft's predictions are correct, this could pose a major threat to Sony's well-established PlayStation line of consoles." Relatedly, Saige writes "The Live Arcade on the original Xbox was ignored by just about everyone who owned that console. However, the updated version on the Xbox 360 is getting a totally different reception, spearheaded by the popular Geometry Wars, an old-school style 2-D shooter in the vein of Robotron: 2084 that has eye candy deserving of a next-gen title - all for $5. The demo has been downloaded 200,000 times."

Next Generation is running a piece looking into the five biggest mistakes made in the gaming industry this year. On the other side of the coin, via GameSetWatch, an MTV News look at the finest moments in gaming in 2005. From the NextGen article: "And what did it turn out to be, this so-called Revolution? A GameCube in overdrive with a controller than can tell where you are and what you're doing with your hands. That was worth it, wasn't it? Not only that, but Nintendo has stated up front that they will not be competing with the likes of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Rather, they'll focus on gameplay. Graphics won't matter if you just focus on gameplay. If you believe in Nintendo, clap your hands! C'mon everybody! Clap louder!" I link to em'. I don't say I agree with them.

MTV Games is reporting on the financial pinch next-gen gamers will feel now that the 360 is out. $60 games are drawing frustrations from both sides of the gaming industry. From the article: "Many developers and publishers say the reason for the price hike is simple: Next-gen games, because of graphics, coding, voice acting, cinema scenes and everything else gamers expect, cost more to make. 'As a studio we can certainly speak to the amount of man hours and increase in staffing for next-generation content,' said Cord Smith, the producer of February 2006 car-combat title 'Full Auto.' 'As a gamer, it seems like it costs a lot to enter this new generation.'"

MTV's Game News service has a report on a an anti-gaming college club started by a group of disgruntled gamer SOs. From the article: "Jaci and Jake, who both attend Kansas State University, are a modern couple dealing with a modern issue. One of them is a gamer; the other is not. Theirs is not an unusual plight. For decades gamers and non-gamers in love have struggled to find harmony. At Kansas State the frustration is rampant. Like most college campuses, it is a place where the release of Halo 2 last year was the best of times and the worst of times. And while there is such a thing as couples in which both people are into games -- and while there are sometimes boyfriends who are the non-gamers -- the most frequent complaint involves game-crazy guys leaving their girlfriends out in the Xbox-free cold."

J. Charles Holt writes "Electronic Arts has announced that they're going to start releasing themes to popular computer games on online sources such as iTunes." From the article: "Those who doubt the hit potential of video game theme songs probably haven't seen Billboard's Hot Ringtones chart lately, where Koji Kondo has sat right near the top for 55 weeks. Who's Koji Kondo? He composed the theme for 'Super Mario Bros.,' which ranks this week right between the Black Eyed Peas and Bow Wow featuring Ciara."

MTV Games, in a report on the Katamari sequel, reports that game creator Keita Takahashi wasn't slightly interested in making a sequel. From the article: "Suddenly celebrated for his originality, Takahashi would soon have to tackle the possibly contradictory idea of doing a sequel. He told his bosses at Namco several times that he wouldn't do one. 'But it came to a point where the company was willing to release a sequel without me,' he said. He discovered that the company's planned sequel seemed more like a re-release, primarily swapping Christmas graphics into the original game. 'That went against everything I wanted to do with Katamari,' he said. So he agreed to get involved. "

MTV Games is reporting that the latest live event in the Matrix Online has permenantly changed the topology of The Matrix: Morpheus is dead. From the article: "Morpheus' demise was not without controversy. In the days leading up to it, the developers' live team, who orchestrate the game's big monthly story-advancing moments, carried out a Wachowski-Chadwick plot that had Morpheus, in the words of some users, 'turning terrorist.' According to storyline, Morpheus wanted to reclaim the body of the fallen Neo, which was being held by the Matrix's machine overlords. Morpheus tried to pressure cooperation by planting bombs throughout the Matrix infrastructure."

Via Kotaku, the news that MTV Games has launched. The site already has a few features up, including a (juvenile) look at the next Tomb Raider title. At the moment, the site appears to be almost entirely a rebranding of Gamespot content, right down to the news feed.

Via Kotaku, the news that MTV Games has launched. The site already has a few features up, including a (juvenile) look at the next Tomb Raider title. At the moment, the site appears to be almost entirely a rebranding of Gamespot content, right down to the news feed.

Via Kotaku, the news that MTV Games has launched. The site already has a few features up, including a (juvenile) look at the next Tomb Raider title. At the moment, the site appears to be almost entirely a rebranding of Gamespot content, right down to the news feed.

Via Kotaku, the news that MTV Games has launched. The site already has a few features up, including a (juvenile) look at the next Tomb Raider title. At the moment, the site appears to be almost entirely a rebranding of Gamespot content, right down to the news feed.

An anonymous reader submits "Three of the Big Four music labels have reached licensing agreements to provide their music to the soon-to-launch Peer Impact network, a peer-to-peer service that enables legal music file-sharing."

Thanks to Gamasutra for the heads up about a political music video starring video game characters that is to start airing on MTV today. The newest "Choose or Lose" video will feature characters from popular video games such as The Sims and BloodRayne and is intended to encourage youth voters to show up at the polls. The video will air for the first time on MTV today on TRL, and afterwards can be seen on the MTV Choose or Lose site. This follows closely on the heels of MTV2's Video Mods series, which uses video game footage for the visuals in music videos.

Thanks to Gamasutra for the heads up about a political music video starring video game characters that is to start airing on MTV today. The newest "Choose or Lose" video will feature characters from popular video games such as The Sims and BloodRayne and is intended to encourage youth voters to show up at the polls. The video will air for the first time on MTV today on TRL, and afterwards can be seen on the MTV Choose or Lose site. This follows closely on the heels of MTV2's Video Mods series, which uses video game footage for the visuals in music videos.

Embedded Geek writes "With the 2004 Nebula Awards being awarded this weekend, the Hugo nominations have been announced. As usual, the field is packed with lots of deserving entries, although I'm sure everyone has a favorite that was missed. I was particularly interested in the Short Form Drama, though, with Joss Wheadon getting three nominations for canceled shows (two Firefly, one Buffy) and Gollum's Acceptance Speech at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards getting a nod. Also of interest are the Retro Hugos, an effort to look back and recognize SF published before anyone thought to hand out awards for it. Retro nominees include such greats as Childhood's End, Fahrenheit 451, and Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 th Century (no, really!). You have until 31 July, 2004 to join Noreascon Four and vote for your favorites!"

An anonymous reader writes "DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, a remix of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles White Album has become a online music sensation, even getting reviewed in Rolling Stone though only 3,000 CDs were ever made. Now EMI, which controls the Beatles copyright, is trying to shut the album down. They've sent cease and desist letters to Danger Mouse, a handful of record stores, and websites that have hosted the songs. Wired News is reporting on the backlash that has ensued, led by anti-music industry group Downhill Battle, who insists that the major record labels are stifling creativity."

gessel writes "Have you ever used the word "ironic?" Do you know what it really means? If not, is that ironic? Was Seinfeld's "irony" really the cause of the utter collapse of civil society as we knew it? How ironic was it for the CEO of MTV to declare irony a victim of 9/11? The Guardian is running a brilliant article that clears the confusion around a culturally critical and chronically misused word."

kalel666 writes "Apple has a big event planned for Thursday in Cupertino with hundreds of representatives from smaller indie music labels."

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamesindustry.biz report that Argonaut's flagship title, Malice, has been cancelled by publisher Vivendi Universal. This 3D platform title was one of the first ever demonstrated for the Xbox, during Bill Gates' 2001 unveiling of the console, and had more recently added a PS2 version, plus Gwen Stefani of No Doubt's voice for the lead character. The former Starfox developer "..does hope to find a new deal for the game [Malice]", so we may still see it eventually. Also in Argonaut's disappointing news was the fact that their 3D beat-em-up Orchid has been cancelled by Namco - though Namco are still publishing their quirky I-Ninja action title.

jwlidtnet writes "According to MTV, Dr. Dre has lost a lawsuit filed over a presumably-uncleared sample on his last album (Dre still hopes to appeal). This is certainly not the first time that something like this has happened: in the mid-nineties, British band The Verve were forced to pay all royalties from their song Bittersweet Symphony (*and* alter song credits) after Allen Klein--who owns the rights to the 1960's Stones catalogue--discovered that the song used a sample from an orchestral recording of "The Last Time." Thing is, though, that many groups believe that such lawsuits shouldn't occur except in the most blatant circumstances; among these groups, Musicians Against the Copyrighting of Samples and the group Negativland are perhaps the most outspoken. Should samples be protected by copyright, or should artists/musicians have the right to manipulate the old into the new?"

jwlidtnet writes "According to MTV, Dr. Dre has lost a lawsuit filed over a presumably-uncleared sample on his last album (Dre still hopes to appeal). This is certainly not the first time that something like this has happened: in the mid-nineties, British band The Verve were forced to pay all royalties from their song Bittersweet Symphony (*and* alter song credits) after Allen Klein--who owns the rights to the 1960's Stones catalogue--discovered that the song used a sample from an orchestral recording of "The Last Time." Thing is, though, that many groups believe that such lawsuits shouldn't occur except in the most blatant circumstances; among these groups, Musicians Against the Copyrighting of Samples and the group Negativland are perhaps the most outspoken. Should samples be protected by copyright, or should artists/musicians have the right to manipulate the old into the new?"

sharph writes "A band called Boomkat, made up of Kellin Manning and his sister Taryn, use the Playstation game MTV Music Generator to sketch out songs before re-recording them. Here's a NY Times article about it (Yeah, free reg. required.) Their first single, "The Wreckoning", got to No. 24 on the US pop charts. Interesting read."

Joey Patterson writes "Looks like the story of Napster founder Shawn Fanning is headed to the small screen. CNET News.com reports that Fanning has signed a deal with MTV to turn his life story into a movie, which will focus on his personal saga during Napster's rise and fall. There's no word yet on who the cast will be (although Fanning may play himself), but Alex Winter (who played Bill in the "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" movies) will write (and possibly direct) the film."

abouttime writes "What happens when your webmasters and the show scheduling people don't communicate? This page on the mtv site is where the winners of the awards are known before the show even airs tonight... Way to go MTV....." I wonder if it will be pulled by the time the story goes up....oh and in case you can't figure it out, spoiler alert...

Tsar writes: "MTV Networks is putting their imprimatur on a line of entertainment-oriented PC's to be available early this year. Targeting the college-age crowd, they'll have TV &amp radio tuners, DVD players, remote controls, and 'MTV-specific content.' CNN has this article on CNN's SCI-TECH page, but the original story was posted last Thursday on IDG.net. There's also news of MTV's impending digital music player, which uses DataPlay's 500MB matchbook-sized discs with built-in digital rights denial^H^H^H^H^H^Hmanagement."

ramakant writes: "It looks like George Lucas has really sold out this time. If you thought Jar-Jar Binks was bad, MTV.com is running a story that a few members of 'NSYNC will be making cameos in Episode II. I think the target demographic for these films has changed a little since the original trilogy. Oh well, at least LOTR rocked." The MTV article says that NSYNC asked for the part; an article in a UK tabloid says Lucas asked them.

ramakant writes: "It looks like George Lucas has really sold out this time. If you thought Jar-Jar Binks was bad, MTV.com is running a story that a few members of 'NSYNC will be making cameos in Episode II. I think the target demographic for these films has changed a little since the original trilogy. Oh well, at least LOTR rocked." The MTV article says that NSYNC asked for the part; an article in a UK tabloid says Lucas asked them.

Top-down cool. A huge glob of capital hovers on the 43rd floor of a skyscraper somewhere in America, telling you and me what we should think is hip this week. Welcome to the whole damn world. Fortunately or otherwise, our cool-chasing is built into our genes, and it can exist with or without money driving it. Maybe the grassroots can't destroy our money-driven musical culture, but I bet there's a way a natural culture can thrive alongside the one we're force-fed. (This is the last of three features on pop music; you may want to read part one and part two for background.)

The capital doesn't have any opinions, of course. It just perpetuates itself. It's potential energy; when it's spent on the mass media, it drags youth culture in its wake, and through some miracle perpetual motion machine, that energy is recaptured in the sale of T-shirts, CDs, movie tickets, Gap vests, makeup, and shoes.

There's an indefinable quality about this kind of "cool" I'm talking about. I can't really put my finger on what I mean, but the closest I can get is: looking up to someone because you perceive their opinions regarding dynamic cultural subjects you care about to have value.

If your peer group looks anything like mine, recognizing the importance of, say, RSS a couple of years ago would have set you apart as someone whose vision could be trusted by your peers. And local peer group is all that matters for cool.

On the other hand, if your local environment buys into the top-down idea of what cool is, bands-and-brands, you're kind of screwed if you invest your mental effort in evaluating networking hardware. Ninety percent of high school is realizing that catching up with the global cool is something you don't have the resources for, and instead finding a local cool that works for you. You heard it here first.

So how does someone become, in this narrow definition, cool? The key is that it involves dynamic culture. Trends come and go, and come back again. Being with the trend, or (better) just slightly ahead of it, scores big. I'm guessing the cool people who first wore flared pants a few years ago, two weeks before we suddenly all decided it was mainstream, are now watched by their peers to see what other trends they're going to predict.

On the other hand, in 1992, wearing bell bottoms (I'm sorry, it's the same damn thing) would have had the opposite effect on your social status. Fads rise and fall, and we need to buy low and sell high. I plead guilty to still liking Fatboy Slim, which I'm sure would have been very chic three years ago -- now it means I have no taste, apparently.

Corporations spend millions on getting in and out at the right times. They speculate on the meme market, buying a trend small and selling it back to us for real dollars when it's big. MTV is day-trading our culture.

Did you think you were the one who discovered (fill in the name of something you thought was cool)? Chances are, some executive paid for research three months prior, and upped the hip of some TV show or commercial by letting you see it. Sorry, but your discoveries have all filtered through money.

I'd really like to denigrate the cool-chasing impulse, and that's easy to do when it's a driving force in someone else's peer group or the characters on Daria (episode 505, "The Story of D"). But it's part of being human. We all like to play this game a little, some of us a little too much maybe.

It does affect us all our lives, starting when we're little kids "acting out" to draw focus and attention (few things are less cool than being ignored). It ends shortly after we arrange to have our ashes shot onto Mars, thereby becoming more cool after we're dead.

And it runs parallel to economic considerations. Money is a good way to motivate someone, and it has the advantage of working on complete strangers. But the peer-group drive was motivating human beings to spot trends tens of thousands of years before money was invented.

("People are saying the tribe over the hill is doing throwing spears this year. We should make some throwing spears too." Our vacuous impulse toward fashion and fitting-in is probably a spinoff from a survival instinct. I want to align with the one who can find roots and berries; that's pretty damn cool if my tribe is on the brink of starvation, and we'll all trust the root-finder a lot more when we're eating better. Berries, Spice Girls, same thing.)

The trust system works for music. I don't browse record stores anymore; they're 99% junk (to my ear) and I don't have time or energy to sift through it all. Instead I ask friends what they're into. Which friends? Cool friends.

How do I know they're cool? My brain keeps a ledger. One of the interesting ideas that sociobiology brings us, as it struggles to shed its ugly reputation from the 1970s, is that human beings are hardwired with the capability to keep track of about 150 other human beings. Perhaps that's the size of a typical village on the African savannah, 50,000 years ago.

The evidence is pretty anecdotal, but each person's internal map of pecking orders and trust networks seems to grow not much beyond that size. You and I can track coolness factors for about 150 of our closest friends, no more.

But a computer can track more.

What we need is a system that can store musical (and other cultural) recommendations for 150 million of our closest friends.

Napster doesn't address this at all; though some have found new music through it, I sure haven't. The few times I've tried to chat with people sending me something from an artist I already know I like, nothing's come of it. It's been great at finding junk I already knew about from hearing on the radio, though.

But: recommendation systems. Basically the idea is to accumulate preference vectors from a large number of contributors, and then provide a way to ask, "if I like A and B, and dislike C, what else might I like?"

There have been a handful of master's theses and dissertations written on the subject. There are academic projects like GroupLens, but, like GroupLens, they're all 3-4 years old and there's no source.

The best-known recommendation system was Firefly, which actually worked pretty well. My initial experience was telling it a few musical artists I liked, and seeing it start spitting back to me other artists I already knew I liked. "You enjoy Peter Gabriel and Tori Amos? Have you heard Kate Bush?" Firefly was swallowed by Microsoft and is now apparently part of Passport (which I don't use, so I don't know what it looks like now).

But what's needed to leverage cool-tracking into a free (speech and beer) culture is an open system that will integrate with existing communities on the internet.

I've gotten to recognize a number of Slashdot users' nicknames on sight, and it might be interesting to see what you-all are listening to. My latest example is an Apocalyptica CD I bought last week based on a reader's recommendation in a comment (it hasn't arrived yet, so I can't say if Barnes & Noble's 24kbps preview did it justice). I'd click through to user pages a lot more often if I knew you-all were sharing musical preferences.

Note that none of this is necessarily tied to music trading. It might be nice if my user page listing the fact that I like Sarge had the music itself, or a preview, a click away. But the important thing is the recommendation, not the trading, and to build a network uninfluenced by money, the distribution system has to be separable. If Barnes & Noble is the only supplier, and has any control over what recommendations I get, I won't be able to trust them.

So the software really should have a distributed database of people's recommendations, one that's not ownable by any one entity. Ideally, the users of Slashdot, Kuro5hin, and Ain't It Cool News should all be able to drop their cultural likes and dislikes into the same database (hierarchical namespace based on domain name?). Queries drawing on users with taste like yours should be able to come just from one community, or from the entire database, your choice.

And -- the important point, the key to it all -- the database needs to recognize who was on top of which cool when. If I drop in Jonatha Brooke in February, and then 10,000 other people discover her in June, I need credit for being on the rising curve of the trend.

I don't know if I need a little star by my name or anything (I'm far too modest for that, oh stop, no really) but my positive rating of that artist or album should count for more if I got in early. Time is crucial in measuring trends.

And following the directed graph in the other direction, if I tell the database that I like these six CDs, it needs to be able to tell me the top ten users who plugged in their recommendations for those same CDs first -- on the theory that, if they led the curve last year, their opinions for this year will be of interest to me (and 10,000 other people).

Corporate cool-chasers pay good money on research, every day, to find this stuff out. In a voluntary contributory system, everyone could have access to the same information, for free. It would undercut corporate cool the same way GPL'd software undercuts Microsoft: when it's free, nobody will pay for it.

Writing code that can be integrated into existing internet communities is key as well. Firefly failed because nobody went there. Everything from the database to the web interface was proprietary, and its information was only on one website. But allow Slashdot to tie into your system, and you instantly add hundreds of thousands of potential users.

There's no money to be made in this, or not much compared to the $150 billion that the big six make every year by selling us trends.

But if you're a programmer looking for a way to influence musical genre for years to come -- or rather, to remove the influence of the glob of capital and allow a natural culture to flourish on its own -- this is a great way to start.

Music distribution and economics have historically been the two major influences on the evolution of its style. The internet has reached a point where that doesn't need to be true. Culture can be abstracted from economics, style from money. There are 10,000 singers and musicians working day jobs right now who don't care if they ever make a million dollars. They just want to be heard, and while the internet lets them reach a billion people, there's no way for word to spread. They might as well not exist. They might as well go back to selling 3 CDs at a time at gigs.

If that can't change, it's a damn shame. The alternative is another century of small-time musicians giving up in disgust while a wad of cash stuffs our ears with the Abercrombie and Fitch song.

The entrenched money is here for good. We'll have the RIAA and its prepackaged bands until copyright law changes drastically. We'll have (quasi-)payola in major radio markets until the radio itself goes away. We'll never get rid of the top-down cool because there's just too much money in it.

But we can have a market of our own, not based on money. We can leverage the best part of the internet, its communities, to produce a grassroots cool.