Quick links, 7th - 13th October

What with the release of The Orange Box (it rocks btw) I haven’t been paying as much attention to reality as I should have been. Here’s some of the stuff that just managed to make it through the gaming fog I’ve been surrounded by.

‘Neurotic’ is Best RTS strategy. Some Austrians have been playing with the psychology of bots and have discovered that neurotic ones do best at RTS games, beating Age of Mythology’s AI every time and faster than the aggressive, defensive, and neutral bots they developed. So If you want to win, against an AI at least, don’t take Faith No More’s advice and be aggressive, be neurotic instead.
Briton claims first gaming gold. Britain has claimed its first ever gold in the World Cyber Games, with Shaun Clark taking top spot in the Command & Conquer 3 tournament. The World Cyber Games is a week long festival with players competing across a variety of games ranging from RTS titles like C&C to hardcore FPS games and more casual affairs like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero.
Left Behind Games Gets Apocalyptic with Bloggers. Games and religion very rarely mix well, Left Behind being a prime example. Left Behind is an RTS/RPG hybrid based on the series of books by the same name and has on overtly evangelical Christian message. The publishers, Left Behind Games, have been throwing legal threats around the blogosphere because they’re not happy with the reception the game has been getting. My advice to them is this, don’t make a crap game and then expect to get away with it.
Speedball 2 on Live Arcade. With a remake in the works and XBLA providing an ideal platform for the release of the original, this news is not that much of a surprise. The best thing about this is that you can play it over XBL. This should keep us going till the remake surfaces.
Wii Firmware 3.1 Brings Keyboard Support. Now my wife quite likes the keyboard interface for the Wii, its almost like a little game in itself and while we had the Wii she managed to get quite quick at it. Nothing beats a real keyboard though and now Nintendo has updated the firmware to allow the use of a USB keyboard your surfing and webmailing ahould be much smoother.
The Anti-Gamer?. Game Almighty has an interview with notorious California State Senator Leland Yee, who seems to run his campaigns on combating the evils of violent games, some of what he says makes a lot of sense. Gasp!
Nintendo’s Got Game (Over 150 Of ‘Em). Nintendo announced their US spring line up for 2008 this week with 150 titles coming to the Wii and DS. With more publishers seeing the light and realising that the Wii has a good chance of being the outright winner in this round of the console wars they’re jumpi9ng at the chance to make games for the console.
Microsoft Considering A Virtual World, Too. Microsoft looks to be following Sony in the development of a virtual world type interface for Xbox Live, though Danile Schiappa was hedging his bets at a a recent conference, and saying that they would wait to see how Sony’s Home fares before jumping on this particular bandwagon