All Around News 8-24-08

Microsoft is partnering up with Rock the Vote to allow gamers to register to vote on Xbox Live. Which is really great. Although I'm not sure how it will work. I haven't looked into it in detail, so I'm not sure if it will just take your Live information (like off your credit card or something), or if you will have to sit there and type all that shit in with your 360 controller. Which would be annoying. Still, good going getting the vote out to gamers. The gamer group is notoriously known for being categorized as lazy and politically unaware (or uncaring). So this is a great way to get gamers more involved in politics, and remind them that there's an important election coming up. We're a large forceful...uh, force, and we should use that more often.

And speaking of the election, Obama's VP pick has been announced (a little prematurely). He is Joe Biden, a senator from Delaware, and an outspoken critic of Obama's foreign policy experience who has plenty of said experience of his own. It should balance out the ticket rather nicely. Now all McCain needs to do is hire some young upstart (keyword "young") who's more in touch with the world than he is (not hard) to balance out his ticket.

If you've been playing the Fable 2 Pub Games, you may have noticed a small glitch that allowed you to exploit the betting system in Fortune's Tower. You may also have noticed that Lionhead patched (or is patching) the glitch so it can no longer be used.

Square-Enix, upon hearing that one of their Final Fantasy XI bosses took a high-leveled guild 18 hours to fight and they didn't even manage to defeat it (while suffering nausea, exhaustion, dehydration), scaled down their mega bosses to more manageable levels. One wonders why a company that reminds you in the game (or at least in in the book for the game) to remember your work, school, friends and family, ever managed to let such bosses slip past. Don't they play test these things?

If you're a fan of Dungeons and Dragons (check) and you have a Facebook account (double check), then you may be interested in Wizard's D&D application for the social networking site. It's a click based fantasy adventure gamed called D&D Tiny Adventures. I haven't gotten a chance to play with it myself (and I usually stay away from just about every app on Facebook anyway), because as soon as the game went up, its servers immediately crashed. In fact, it seems their servers are still down. The link above is a direct link to the app; here is a link to the game's page.

In other news, The World Ends With You is still fantastic, the Olympics are officially over (China stomped all over us with their gold medals, though I believe the legality of some of them is still in question), Infinite Undiscovery comes out in a couple of weeks, and Please Teacher and Please Twins are two of the most ridiculous and contrived shows I've ever seen.