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Filial Duo Says Games Hurt, Studying Helps, Academic Performance

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Here's a shocker. A revolutionary report, compiled by a father-son team on a college campus, has found that video games hurt grades, while studying improves them.

Hrm.

Does this mean Candystand hurts professional performance? How much does this actually scale?

by Angela Natividad    Sep-21-07   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     

GM Promotes Better Eating While You Hurl Food at Strangers

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This game is awesome. Banking on the knowledge that most of us have enjoyed the fantasy of a good food fight but have had little opportunity to act on it, mono has created The Good Food Fight for General Mills' Eat Better America.

Gamers get to choose between three healthy dishes, based on splat factor, hurlability and stainage. Then they get to select a trash-talking, food-slewing chef.

We were disappointed at first because after choosing a chef, the site loaded a recipe page. So we thought we'd write the game off - then all of a sudden this crazy chef in a kimono comes leaping out of the frame throwing food at us and saying all kinds of wild things.

It was amazing. It was like playing a game of Street Fighter and finding our little characters come to life to harass us. It was like Animator vs. Animation, except with a tiny person and not a sociopathic stick figure.

Anyway, we lost the game, and in a manner most demeaning we were told to go clean ourselves up. Bummer. But in a good way.

by Angela Natividad    Sep-19-07   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Games, Good, Online

AtomFilms Gives us Chance to Murder Our Own Creativity

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Remember Animator vs. Animation? Of course you do. Well, now there's a game.

You're the animator, a task that sounds more savory than it actually is. It's surprisingly hard to kill the little bastard. But maybe because that's less because he's clever and more because the "paint" functionalities just don't lend themselves well to ensuring a speedy and certain death.

We suffered from Game Over twice before running out of the room and screaming. The neighbors are not pleased.

by Angela Natividad    Sep-17-07   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Games

Like to Gamble for a Cause? Then By All Means...

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If you've ever lost a street-side game of Three Card Monty, you probably don't want to play the Great Car Cover-Up.

The object of the game is to examine three covered vehicles from all angles. One car is a convertible, one will turn heads and the other is a dud. Text your choice of car to a certain number for a small fee.

This is part of Glue's effort to promote the RAC's £5 Car Data Check. The cars will be revealed on October 17th, and all profits go to a charity called Brake.

by Angela Natividad    Sep-14-07   Comments (1)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Games, Online, Promotions

Microsoft Cuckolds the Search Beast with Games of Chicken

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Because Microsoft can't drive users to its search engine by merit (recall the Ms. Dewey effort), it's been dangling bait over internet users with various mind games and search-oriented word puzzles.

One such game is Chicktionary, where you try to build as many words as you can with a given set of scrambled letters. Once you engage an ad banner, you're driven to Live Search Club, where your engagement with the game is counted as ongoing use of Live Search.

This is how: each time you use the scrambled letters to make a word, successful words are counted as queries in the search engine, which then brings you its definition.

This and similar games have brought inordinately good tidings to the Microsoft search camp.

Clever.

by Angela Natividad    Sep-11-07   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Games, Good, Online

Young Bond: Somehow Less Appealing than Older, Wiser Bond

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We do love a game with a snappy title like Avenue of Death. Put together by UK-based TAMBA, the object of the game is to guide Young Bond through a series of death traps. The game is a promotion for Hurricane Gold, a Young Bond book that's just recently come out.

Enter your score on the leaderboard and you could win "an exclusive piece of original Young Bond artwork, signed by Charlie Higson and Kev Walker."

After a quick run-through, we decided there's really nothing Bondian about the game at all. If anything, it brings Prince of Persia to mind. And when we fed our little hero to the big snake, he just stood there until the snake woke up and ate him. Then he screamed like a girl.

by Angela Natividad    Sep-11-07   Comments (2)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Games, Online, Promotions

KFC Makes Hunger Strike Game, and That's All We Can Say About It

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We're a little confused about this new game, dubbed Hunger Strike, for KFC. At first we thought it was like Pac-Man, but there don't appear to be any enemies to either run from or eat. Then we thought maybe it might be more esoteric, like this game, but no; the graphics don't really do anything, and the music is frozen in a hellish loop.

We just know we keep losing, and we don't understand why, so now we feel resentful toward chicken.

by Angela Natividad    Sep- 7-07   Comments (5)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Bad, Brands, Games, Online

Classmates.com Circulates Yet Another New Banner, Creeps Sluggishly Toward IPO

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We'd have thought there were only a handful of ways you could manipulate a high school yearbook photo (color? grayscale? mustache?), but Classmates.com is remarkably good at coming up with new ones.

First it tickled our love of schoolyard gossip by replacing its bespectacled standby with a Farrah look-alike, then it gave us a puzzle to play with, and now you can mess around with the actual features of the photos.

Word on the street is Classmates.com is headed toward an IPO soon. What took so long? At this point the company's business model is about as vintage as its ads. Doesn't Facebook fully satisfy our compulsive need to gawk at, and shit-talk about, our former peers?

by Angela Natividad    Aug-30-07   Comments ()    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Games, Online

BAT-Test Shatters Long Held Belief that We Are, in Fact, Superhuman

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This is almost too engaging. To promote the premiere of Bionic Woman, take your BAT.

The BAT-test is where you can have a bionic assessment made on your super-extremities. The examinations are simple but actually pretty hard, and they can all be solved via keyboard.

Apparently Adrants is only 39 percent bionic. We're bummed.

Well, even if you can't be all powerful, you can at least watch Jaime Sommers try balancing life and paramilitary affairs on NBC's series premiere, which hits TVs on September 26th at 9/8c.

by Angela Natividad    Aug-22-07   Comments (1)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Best, Games, Online, Promotions

Apartments.com Goes CGM. Win $20,000 for a Video of Your Crap

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Sometimes we wonder if this ongoing effort by brands to throw together CGM contests is actually part of a large-scale game of industry Hot Potato we just don't know about. Like "How Many Cheap Videos Can We Leach Out of Consumers Before We Start Getting More Backlashes than Exhibitionist Pillow-Fights?"

Anyway, Apartments.com is launching a contest called Possession Obsession. If you send them a video of stuff you collect, you could win (drumroll, please) $20,000.

more »

by Angela Natividad    Aug-22-07   Comments (1)    Bookmark and Share     
Topic: Bad, Games, Online, Promotions

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