If you had trouble accessing the Web sites 
for the MPAA and RIAA earlier today, you’ve got 4chan to blame.
The infamous Internet imageboard (and hangout of film piracy advocates) launched a coordinated DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on the industry sites Monday – allegedly in a retaliatory move for the trades’ moves to squash filesharing Websites.
A slew of entertainment industry orgs have joined together 
to file a brief with the Supreme Court in support of the vidgame biz’s efforts to overturn California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent vidgames to minors.
The biz’s concern is that the law restricting the sale of vidgames because of their content could have far-reaching First Amendment implications. The issue at stake in the challenge to the law isn’t whether publishers can make violent games, but whether states can impose sales restrictions on those titles — effectively declaring them to be on the same level as pornography and therefore able to legally limit their sale to adults.
Stick Stunt Biker is an over-the-top racing game
that makes motocross look like a ride around a parking lot. The game features impossible jumps and bone-shattering crashes in a cartoon manner that is actually a lot of fun, at least for a while. It’s not an easy game, but the frustration of failure is mitigated by the cringe-inducing experience of seeing the stick figure racer tumble to the ground. The app might use a realistic physics engine to portray those crashes, but there’s nothing close to real about the rest of the game. It’s fun initially, but after a while, the repeated crashes get old and the varying tracks don’t really incentivize you to keep playing. Ultimately, Stick Stunt Biker is a fun diversion, but nothing that will top your list of favorite apps.
So now it’s official: Microsoft’s first-person behemoth Halo: 
Reach is the year’s biggest entertainment event,generating $200 million in sales in just 24 hours in the United States alone.
That’s two-thirds of what Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 took in from the North American and U.K. markets in its first day last year, but it’s still a number that’s nothing to sneeze at. The one-day take already eclipses the three-day opening weekends of “Iron Man 2,” “Toy Story 3” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
[As Sony’s PlayStation Move launches this weekend, Gamasutra editor-at-large Chris Morris gathers his thoughts about the debut of the PS3’s motion control device, and the intuitiveness and needle-threading it requires to satisfy all parties.]
A little over a week ago, my wife fell asleep early when we were watching TV. I knew if I played Halo: Reach, it would likely get too loud, wake her up and I’d be in the doghouse for the rest of the weekend, so I figured this would be a good time to do some testing with the new motion control device for the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation Move.
I had just set things up and was turning the system on when she woke up. She looked over at me, got a confused look on her face and asked, “Are you holding a vibrator?”
Windows Mobile 7 might be the most
radical (and promising) operating system from the company’s mobile division in years, but the road to retail isn’t going to be perfectly smooth.
Verizon, which was famously burned by Microsoft with the Kin earlier this year, has announced it will not carry phones using the service at launch – or at all this year. It will be some unnamed date in 2011 before the company begins supporting the OS.
When a 2009 holiday price war erupted between
two of the largest online retailers, GameStop found itself caught in the middle.
Amazon and Wal-Mart kicked off last December by slashing prices on 25 of the year’s most popular video games—with the average discount ranging from 15 percent to 20 percent. That caught GameStop by surprise—and ultimately contributed to the company reporting flat earnings for the nine-week period.
Zombie Infection HD tries to follow the path 
set by classic zombie survival games like Resident Evil 4, but it falls far short. The graphics are middling, at best. The story is ridiculous. And the zombies really aren’t that scary. The game also features some sloppy programming — like when zombies crawl through the middle of a roof, instead of up the side of a building. The controls aren’t intuitive and don’t react fast enough for a game in this genre. For 99 cents, it might be worth it for fans of zombie films. For anything more, though, it’s not worth it for anyone.
Face2Face does a good job of compiling a user’s varied 
social networking sites, but it goes a step too far by allowing friends of friends to know users’ general location. A privacy setting in the app’s upper right hand corner can make users invisible to people they’re not already connected with, but it’s not blatantly obvious and will likely be overlooked by many users. It’s reassuring that the app only gives general proximity, but that could still hit a little too close to some people’s comfort zones. While you can make yourself invisible to the world at large or specific individuals, you’ll have to regularly check the app to know if that’s necessary.
Power users of social networks might love the chance to meet friends and make new ones, but parents might want teens to sit this one out.
Learning how to string together letters to form 
words is tricky — and ABC Maze is a good tool to help kids learn to do so. The biggest challenge for some players will be having the motor skills to use the internal gyroscope to make the ball go where they want it to. While none of the mazes is punishing, some are harder than others. The game offers visual and audible rewards when a puzzle is solved, which encourages kids to keep playing. $1.99 is a bit steep for the app, though. It’s definitely wise to download the lite version and see if your child will enjoy it first.
Read more at Common Sense Media
Chris Morris: Journalist 