News Blips: Redeeming Pirates, Signing with Kinect, Scary Assassin's Creed Toys, and More

Forget hunting for bargains and preowned games -- amass an armada of pirates and watch those prices plummet!

News Blips:

Amanita Design cuts the price of its sleeper hit Machinarium to $5 in order to give pirates "a chance to redeem themselves." Although the 2009 adventure title is free of any woeful digital-rights management systems, Amanita founder Jakub Dvorský stated in a blog post that "only 5 to 15 percent of Machinarium players actually paid for the game." While the discount is available to everyone, the so-called "Pirate Amnesty" initiative is specifically targeted at (you guessed it) pirates. This is definitely an unconventional tactic in the unending war against piracy, but I don't see how slashing the price of a game will curtail further thefts. Thoughts?

Microsoft's patent for its Kinect peripheral reveals support for American Sign Language (ASL). Suitably proficient gamers can input letters, words, and entire phrases via ASL gesturing, opening up possibilities for low-key translation systems and converting speech to text. If this image from the patent is any indication, we'll also have a jolly old time twiddling our virtual mustaches. [GoRumors]

The Collector's Edition of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood contains some truly peculiar items. Among the standard gamut of a soundtrack disc, art book, and making-of videos, the sizeable box harbors a "hard copy strategy map" of Rome and a creepily twisted version of a jack-in-the-box -- take your pick from a beaked plague doctor and an even creepier harlequin (available via GameStop preorder). Either Ubisoft is taking the Renaissance Italy motif too far, or I just stumbled into a Tom Holland film. [1UP]

A 250GB Kinect bundle appears on the packaging for a 4GB bundle. While Microsoft hasn't released any official word, an image lifted from the Australian packaging of the motion-control device reveals the inclusion of a larger hard drive, a glossy finish, and a headset. Since Australia is home to some of the deadliest creatures on the planet (like the aptly named "Deathstalker"), I would only open the box after a thorough decontamination process. [Joystiq]

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Tags: News Blips, Machinarium, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

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Lucas Goudie

August 10, 2010

People who pirate indie games disgust me. I've pirated big budget titles like Mw2 or SC2 before, but thats sort of mitigated by the fact that they make billions of dollars. When I see figures like 80-85% of players pirating an indie game it makes want to hut something.

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Randy Snow

August 11, 2010

The only way I advocate piracy is on games two gens back or more when finding a physical copy gets harder. Not to say I pirate all games that far back. To me owning a real physical copy is the best way. But what gets me is people will pirate current games, and thus developers look at this and take note of how many people are doing it. Then release some sort of DRM to combat piracy. Gamers then cry, and pirate the game even more. This usually leads to one of three things.

The company giving in. “Rare”
The company keeping the DRM policy, or changing it up.
The company dropping the platform “this case the PC” and working on consoles.

This then leads to PC gamers in this case crying about ports, and being left behind on titles. But I guess this is more due to gamers having entitlement issues.

Now enough about that.

Onto the AC:B collectors edition. While I’ll pick it up, I’m a bit sad that we don’t get the codex version found in PAL areas. Mainly because I enjoy video game art, and the lore of the AC universe.