The Daily Duh: Tuesday 5/10/05

My lord there's a lot of Duh today!

Gaming Horizon, which looks alarmingly like Gamespot, which sounds alarmingly like Gamestop, which actually is EBGames, has leaked the specs on the XBox 360 and on XBox Live. Note the free XBox Live version only available on the weekends. That's clever, ennit? Note also that skill level matching isn't available in the free XBox Live. Because we all know repeated azzrapings are the best promotional device multiplayer gaming has.

Gamasutra has a feature on the rise of ARGs. Like any good piece of commentary on the study of games, it reaches no conclusions at all, particularly failing to say anything meaningful about the failure of Majestic, and rather failing to do much with whether or not the people who played ilovebees were largely Halo fans, or whether that was two totally separate audiences. Its conclusion, predictably, is that ARGs are hard to make but have great potential. So it basically says nothing at all. In an effort to use our vast readership and influence for good and to curb the verbal diarhhea that makes up so much of current games writing... or, more accurately, to just amuse ourselves, we will be tracking these wastes of words. The current record holder, with no competition yet, is Gamasutra, therefore, who wrote 1838 words and said absolutely nothing. Good job! Let's see if someone can break 2000 by E3!

Over at O'Reilly, we hear about the story of the unofficial theme song of GDC. The song can be heard over here (Warning: Direct link to an mp3). I have little to say about it, except that if this is the theme song of GDC, we're more fucked than any of us ever thought.

So, some people are apparently trying to make a decentralized open source virtual world. It's called Solipsis, and it's in the running to make a brand new mistake in the world of gaming, which is letting projects this ambitiously stupid ever move into beta instead of remaining vaporware. So congratulations, Solipsis - you've made the mistake even Dawn was smart enough not to make. We look forward to a string of hilarious disasters from you.

Finally, Nintendo has announced that The DS will have online play through Gamespy's network. This pains me. I love Nintendo. I hate Gamespy. And now I don't know what to feel. I resolve this dispute by noting that the story broke on IGN. Therefore, I will go eat chicken.

In other news, E3 is only a week away. We're gearing up for our daily "We're Not There And We Don't Want To Be" coverage. It'll be exciting. Stick with us.