Welcome to Press Start! The column where I jot down five things that caught my eye in the world of gaming this week. Poor edited!, check. Zero revisions!, check. Cobbled together on a couple of wings, a prayer, and ridiculous amounts of caffeine in the early hours of the morning.

I encourage all dorks and dinks and nerds and nincompoopto contribute what they dug this week.

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#1:  Grand Theft Auto Gives You Extra Points For Killing Kids!
Oh fuck son! I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto wrong for nearly ten fucking years. Longer than that if you take into account the first two top-down games. Yeah! Yeah, yeah! All these years I’ve been playing and I’ve never been aware that you get more points for killing children and old fuckers.

This nonsense stems out of a tragedy that went down last Thursday in Brazil. Wellington Menezes de Oliveira “opened up fire at a school in Rio de Janeiro killing 12 pupils and injuring 13 others, aged between 12- and 14-years-old.” Not cool, at all.

Quite obviously.

Unfortunately spinsters vomit up bullshit, seizing any opportunity to massage their own importance glands through hyperbole and sensationalism. Two days later in O Globo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil, ran an article which didn’t have time for things like fact checking. It claimed that Oliveira played games like Counterstrike and Grand Theft Auto where “you score more points for killing women, children and old people.”

News to me! Fucking news to me.

Remember kids, no tragedy is ever so saddening you can’t use it to churn up slop, or pen the same old tired media nonsense.

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#2) Creator of the Video Game Cartridge Passes Away.
Jerry Lawson. His name was Jerry Lawson! Lawson was the creator of the video game cartridge, and this week the good sir went and tripped the light fantastic. It never even occurred to my dumb ass that the cartridge was something forged by man. I always fancied it some sort of platonic ideal, derived from the Other Realm, where unicorns and Justice can cavort about together.

No sir, we made it. Well, Lawson and his group of pioneers over at Fairchild Semiconductor. With that cartridge, he no doubt helped craft the childhood of many a million of dorks. Like you and me. Sitting here, in this gaming column, communicating via news born out of an industry of cartridges.

More than just what they housed, the physical cartridge was a staple of my childhood. Good god damn how many times did I go blue in my face blowing in them. Stacking those sons a bitches up. Flipping them to friends at lunch.

The cartridge. Staple of a childhood baked in dorkey, roasted in the fires of nerdiness.

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#3) Sony and Geohot Settle Out of Court.
It’s finally fucking over. Geohot, the dorkiest wanna-be hard ass in the gaming community settled with Sony out of court this week. You may remember Geohot as the dude who outed the PlayStation 3’s root key. Then he wrote an awful rap telling Sony to come and get him. They obliged, sending their lawyers, Death Stars, and various underlings after his ass.

At that point, he may have fled to South America, or gone there for Spring Break. Depending on whose story you believe.

All of that is over now, as the Totally Believing In Something Kid no longer wants to deal with a court battle with An Enormous Corporation State. Go figure! How quickly one’s ideology wilts in the face of a armada of litigation or whatever other more appropriate legal word I should be using.

Well, that’s that.

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Listen man! When you’re riding high, you’re willing to run the fucking gaunlet! Geohot stunted back when he first released the PS3 rootkey and Sony was pissed off. He wasn’t going to accept anything aside from some apology from Sony. However, Sony has subsequently released the robo-ninjas, Geohot fled to South America, and now he’s singing a different tune.

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I am by no means a PlayStation admirer. So if you think I’m wanking on this article because of fanboy preference, ain’t true son. Ain’t true at all. What am I a fan of is Corporation Cock Measuring, Console Clashes, and Dudes Talking Shit. I own every system, I go where my favorite titles migrate, and truthfully? I’m a bit of an Xbox fanboy.

Still though. Sony PlayStation CEO Jack Tretton came out recently in Fortune spitting diamond Word Bullets at Nintendo and Microsoft, and I dug roughly 30% of what he was saying.

Let’s take a look!

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When diversions are king, video games shall be amongst those running the pack. Making sure that everyone has the appropriate tattoos. Knowing the gang symbols. The terminology. Ruling the roost, if you will. This is Press Start!, the column where I spout off five things that happened in the world of gaming in a given week. My lists are dumb. Like yours, they are rife with personal preference, ideological tendencies, and since it’s me – juvenile bullshit.

I encourage all aboard to share their own musings.

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#1: Apple App Store Gets App That ‘Cures Homosexuality’, For Like A Second.
God damn, I have to give it to Apple. I knew from the multifarious apps found on Apple’s store were fucking powerful. I knew there were a lot of apps that could do a lot of things. Find a yummy restaurant for my belly! Find movie tickets. Play Angry Birds! Read a book! However, I wasn’t aware there was an app that could cure my raging hard-on for Chris Hemsworth in chainmail.

That’s where  Exodus International steps in! They released an app that claimed to cure gayness. It was a bit of an odd mood, since the fascist pigs at Apple have pulled some less polarizing applications. Wasn’t there one that cost like a zillion dollars? The Douche App? It did nothing aside from signify you could spend a lot of money?

Anyways, a day and one enormous 152,433 online signature later, they pulled the son of a bitch.

Go figure.

I’m actually okay with the existence of the app, if it wasn’t such an odd choice in lieu of what they have pulled. I am of the opinion that if a bunch of closed-minded assholes rubbing their genitals against a withering old tome want to try and make some money off their own ignorance, let them try.

Besides, it doesn’t work. I downloaded the app – mind you, I didn’t actually use it. However, if it worked, how would they trick the sinners into using it?! It must have unactivated capabilities, right? What I did do was stick my iPhone in my crotch and had my friend call me repeatedly with the phone on vibrate while I stared at Chris Evans’ pecs in the Captain America trailer. Still felt the love. Don’t tell my girlfriend.

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#2: New Movie ‘The FP’ Where Dance-Dance Meets Post-Apocalypse  Gang Wars.
In the future, we will all be divided amongst post-apocalypse gangs. When diversions are king, our lives will be dedicated to maintaining our reps and our various crews. The flick ‘The FP’ which screened at SXSW last week perfectly captures our forthcoming sociocultural  metamorphosis. Also, the movie is fucking madness.

Gangs fight it out in fatal games of DDR, titties, and absurd montages. The trailer is what happens when you cross 1980’s bro movies with video game slop-culture. In a completely conscious, and planning manner.

God bless.

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#3: Triforce Johnson Waits In Line For Nintendo 3DS. Gets Thrown Out. Returns.
Isaiah-Triforce Johnson is either the man, or a fucking mental patient. For some reason, I feel like the two categories bleed together so simply swimmingly when it comes to geek culture. Triforce, who had the phrase legally added to his first fucking name, is a man with a plan. The plan in question is to be the first motherfucker in Manhattan to get a Nintendo 3DS. He’s taken to this plan by waiting in line inside the foyer of the Union Square Best Buy in the Big Apple.

Earlier this week, Best Buy had security throw the dude out.

But that doesn’t stop a motherfucker, does it? He returned, and has apparently smoothed the entire thing over. “There was a Chris Brown launch party the night I came out” he said, so “Best Buy needed that space for the line. It kinda looked bad, but it was just a misunderstanding.”

Godspeed Triforce, you’re almost fucking there.

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Ah, Geohot. Fuck you, kid. You thought you were so ballin’ cracking the PS3 and giving out its root key. So confident you put up a painful YouTube diss track talking shit about Sony. Clearly you’re now feeling the heat that I predicted. The law, and more importantly, the robot ninjas are on your tail. And you’ve fled, fled to South America.

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Prepare thyself for the newest iteration of Press Start! The column where I puke up the top five things in the gaming world that caught my eye this week. It’s a democratic column, I want your input. Hit the comments box with your findings. True Believers! Gaming scientists!

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#1: Drunken NES: A Breathalyzer and 8-Bit Game In One.
This is one of those concoctions that fucking staggers me. It sends me into a spiralling moment of quasi-stoner amazement. Someone had to think up this brilliant piece of minutiae. Imagine this, if you can. Enterprising video game mechanical programming wizards had a dream. Their dream was simple. First, they had to make a breathalyzer  out of an original Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge. No small task! I have it on good authority many a modern day Prometheus has been felled by such a challenge.

Then, they had to craft a video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System – yes I’m typing it out to be awkward – that could interface with this creation. By blowing your disgusting Oats and Hops stink-rot-gut-breath into the cartridge, the game would then calculate the level of your drunken stupor and rate your inebriated ass in 8-Bit glory.

It’s fucking radical.

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#2: Uncharted 3’s Villainess Revealed; Wrinkled Old Hottie.
Fuck yeah I like my gaming occasionally in the form of a megaton zillion-dollar production value big blockbuster. Fuck yeah! You disagree. Oh okay! You go have fun shaving in Heavy Rain or playing Limbo and waxing intellectual about how it’s totally ambient and deconstructs the medium and blah, blah, blah. I’m fucking amplified for Uncharted 3. Boom. Can’t wait. I say deliver me from boring fetch quests! I say deliver me from conversation wheels. Just for a bit. Throw me into the comforting bosom of gaming entertainment excess.

And in relation to this excess, this week Naughty Dog revealed the villainess  behind Nathan Drake’s woes. Meet Katherine Marlowe. She’s a bit of a hottie for an older women, isn’t she? She’s voiced by Elizabeth Hurley, but she gets me tingling like Helen Mirren. Some cavernous old cleavage and wields power to boot. Is it November 1, yet?

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#3: Microsoft Sells A Shitload of Kinects; Gets Punked.
It was an up and down week for our buddy Billy Gates’ company. Though I have to say their good news far outweighs the little bit of hacking righteousness that they were subjected to. You see, when you can lay claim to having the fastest selling electronic device ever, I’m sure everything glows.

This week it was announced that the Microsoft Kinect has sold ten million units. As well, Microsoft has moved ten million Kinect games. Wrap that shit around your brain-piece for a second. Since its release on November 4, 2010 it has averaged 133,333 units sold a day. Fastest device ever. More than your Apple iPhone, iPad, iMac, iThing, iMinimalist Swag.

However, it wasn’t all fucking roses for Microsoft this week! No sir. Hackers cracked the  algorithm that generated the seemingly random numbers on the back of MS Points cards. You know, those cards you buy so you can spend the equivalent of $5 on a lightsaber for your avatar. Or so you can download that fucking shitty Dead Space 2 DLC (not that I’m bitter).

Being the benevolent hackers that they were, they used this algorithm to generate over 1 million dollars worth of points. Fantastic! It was short-lived as Microsoft said they killed all those points generated, but still, man! Lock that shit down, Microsoft! I paid good fucking money for my Mass Effect M7 t-shirt for my avatar. No fucking freebies!

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Batman: Arkham City is officially dropping on October 18. What the fuck, Eidos! You had to release Arkham City right before the teeth of the gaming season. Son of a bitch. It would have been so much nicer to drop this dime in the middle of the summer. I could have kicked back, not worried about the deluge of games coming, and slowly manipulated my controller to the sight of Selina Kyle all done up in her latex and the such. Would have been astounding.

Hit the jump for some new images of this beast.

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It was rumored, and now it’s fucking confirmed. PlayStation 3 is getting online saves. That’s right, man! Sony is totally taking all of their bullshit to the fucking cloud!

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Naughty Dog’s revealed the main  antagonistic  behind Uncharted 3, and she’s a slightly shriveled yet sexy  British  bitch by the name of Katherine Marlowe. The reveal was dropped onto the gaming public today in a trailer that also featured our boy Nathan in a sexy suit, ready for some back alley action. Read into that phrase as you will.

Hit the jump for the video.

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This artwork by Robert Simons is either official Mass Effect 3 concept art, or absolutely fucking gorgeous fan art. What do you think, is this shit legit? It seems consistent with the concept art we’ve seen in the past, and it’s rather lovely.

Hit the jump for the gallery.

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