Broken Pixels: Lifeline The guys from broken pixels do a little dirty talk in Konami’s Lifeline. Lifeline is a PS2 unique voice-controlled game where you lend operational support to the onscreen femme fatale. But after seeing this episode you realize that voice recognition in gaming has a long way to go. With Endwar almost upon us its amazing to see …

As many of you will already know, Fallout 3, created by acclaimed developers, Bethesda SoftWorks, will be hitting South African shelves this Friday. With the current line up of games this season, it has become increasingly tough to decide on which game/games to spend your money on. While Farcry 2 has been quite popular, Fable 2 has seen massive sales and popularity in most regions. So which one to chose? Fallout 3 reviews are pouring out onto the net this week and the game is pulling in a current aggregate of 93/100 on Xbox 360 and PC and 90/100 for the PS3 on Metacritic. Perfect scores (100/100) have been given by some of the major sites and magazines such as 1UP, Gamespy, GamePro, Official Xbox Magazine and EuroGamer which really surprises me considering that a lot of the seem to be unusually negative and cynical when it comes to their review scores. Scrolling down also revealed that the lowest score given for the game was an 80, meaning that even the ones who didn't really like it, still kinda liked it. Is Fallout 3 the (not completely) unexpected overall winner across all platforms of this seasons line-up? With all the rest of the Xbox 360 and PS3 exclusives yet to arrive, we can't really tell yet. What I can tell is that this game looks like it's going to be worth the money and should keep a lot of us happy for quite a long time to come.

Ok, I don't really know how to explain this one, but it's pretty awesome. The guy in this video has actually trained his parrots to play EndWar by teaching them the commands of the game. While he still needs to give them instructions on what to do, the mere fact that the game still has no problem recognising their commands is pretty amazing to say the least. It looks like the developers of EndWar have really done a great job with the system and as we all know, if they didn't, this entire game would be worth nothing.

A report has come in confirming that a new Xbox Live starter pack has been made official and is going to be arriving sometime next week for the US price of $99.00. The pack includes a 60GB HDD, a 3 month subscription to Xbox Live, a wired headset as well as an ethernet cable. A touch expensive? Maybe. With 20GB HDD's usually going for around a grand in South Africa, it may not actually be a bad deal. This all however depends on the price it will be when it hits local shelves, which also brings me onto my next point. When I say next week, I mean next week in the US as there are no indications to whether or not we will even be seeing it in South Africa, especially since we don't even have local Live support. We can only hope to see it someday soon and with all of the extra online functionality being pushed towards the casual gamer with the new dashboard update, it's about time that we start seeing some proper news about some local support.

I saw an interesting news story showing that the popular American retailer "Circuit City" is going to be offering 1600 free Xbox Live points to anyone who buys Gears of War 2 from one of their stores. Ok, I though, this doesn't really apply to us South Africans so I don't need to bother posting the news. Then it dawned on me, this is very relevant to us because I want to know why we aren't getting cool deals like this. As a South African, any of us have quite a large amount of stores to choose from when buying a new game for our favorite console or handheld. Some go to certain stores for a better price, or because they like the service and most, well, most probably just pick whichever is closest. So with gaming picking up in the country and the potential for sales being huge this Christmas season, why in the hell aren't any of them using any methods to get us to buy from them instead of their rivals. Damn it. I want 1600 free points when I go buy my Gears of War 2, or a free keyring, or pat on the back, or something. I'm sure that you do too. Most of us have our favorite stores but if there is one that is offering something like this along with the game then you know damn straight that it will be there store that I go to when the game gets released. C'mon local stores, when are you going to realise that we all want free stuff and you all want more sales, it makes sense doesn't it?

I am starting to get the feeling that Treyarch is panicking, I don’t know if it’s just from how their comments are being reported or my original worry about going back to WWII rearing it’s ugly head. But I do actually think it’s more about how their comments are being reported, example A According to Noah Heller from Treyarch “There’s …

Valve have announced that a Left 4 Dead demo will be made available on Xbox 360 and PC on November 6. Here is the catch though, if you want the demo on November 6, you will need to have pre-ordered the game. If however, you are one of the many people that couldn't be bothered about pre-ordering a game that will obviously be in steady supply, the demo will be released to everyone on November 11. The demo will include both single player and multiplayer, with the multiplayer component being reported to end on November 18, the day of the games release.

There is a new Gears of War 2 trailer out and it gives us a bit more insight into the story that will be Gears of War 2. However, I don’t like it… it seems false and yes I understand the absurdity of calling a video game trailer false but it doesn’t change the fact that it does. This isn’t …