Blog Posts by Mike Smith

Normally, when you buy a video game, you get exactly what it says on the box, if
you're lucky. But Sony release LittleBigPlanet 2 (Buy | Search), out this week for the
PS3, ships with a toolkit (and exhaustive set of tutorials) that don't
just let players make their own levels -- they actually empower them to
make their own games. It's a level of flexibility above and beyond anything we've seen on console platforms so far.

Just how flexible is it? You'll see -- but before you do, here's a look at how the game looked before its recent beta test let fans really start fooling with it.

Pretty cool, right? Maybe -- but you ain't seen nothing yet.

Windows

Photos.
Media Player. Games. And yes,

LittleBigPlanet 2

Platforms: PS3

LittleBigPlanet 2's star cracks a grin

Although
it's a lovable, character-packed platform game in its own right, it's
not new release LittleBigPlanet 2's supplied levels that are making
headlines this week. Instead, it's the game's astonishing array of tools
for creating your own -- a suite of intricate gadgets and gizmos that'll let you pull its gameplay apart, reassembling it as anything
from an action-packed shooter to a Rock Band-style virtual instrument.
Limited only by your imagination, and with the ability to share your
creations with a world of other players, it's gaming's Youtube.

Which is also one of its weaknesses, according to critics. Like many complex
tools, you're going to have to

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

The recent breaking of the Playstation 3's hardware encryption by a team of hackers is an unexpected windfall for Playstation owners
seeking to run homebrewed apps and games on their machine, but it's proving disastrous for fans of 2009 best-seller Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Buy | Search).

The hackers' work, which allows savvy PS3 owners to run non-Sony-approved
code on their machines, has resulted in a wave of cheaters and hackers
targeting older Call of Duty titles, leaving them "in total shambles and unplayable," as one fan told Joystiq.com.

Some of those who happened upon hacked servers have suffered permanent
consequences, including the deletion of all their accumulated

Xbox: popular

If you found an Xbox 360 waiting underneath the tree last month, you're not the only one. Figures released this week by market research
organization NPD Group indicate December was the system's biggest month ever.

In fact, Microsoft sold so many, they're apparently running out. The
manufacturer was forced to dip into hardware reserves allocated for
January and February shipments to meet the holiday-season demand, and
even had to resort to air-freighting deliveries to sold-out retailers.
Resulting shortages could persist all the way into February, a Microsoft
spokesman told Bloomberg this week.

The stellar December numbers cap off a banner year for the Xbox 360. It's
the only console to

Minecraft: over one million served

Not every game has what it takes to rack up over a million sales.

In fact, only just over a hundred PC games have managed it in the whole history of ever, according to renowned fountain of knowledge Wikipedia. And while the vast majority of them had the benefit of little things
like a publisher, advertising and retail distribution, the newest entry
on the list, Minecraft, is in large part the work of just one man -- and
it's not even finished yet.

Minecraft, a sandbox-style building game, was propelled past the million mark this
week by, as far as anyone can tell, nothing more than word-of-mouth
marketing and good, ol'fashioned gameplay. Selling direct to consumers
at prices around

PlayStation 3: hacked

Last week, hacking  team fail0verflow threw a firecracker into the PlayStation 3 world when they announced they'd cracked the popular console's hardware encryption, allowing savvy owners to run non-approved (or
"homebrew") programs.

Now Sony's throwing firecrackers of their own. The electronics giant filed suit in a California court today accusing fail0verflow and others of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and computer fraud
legislation, among other things, and requesting the hackers turn over
their computer equipment and pay an unspecified amount in damages.

Often termed "jailbreaking," breaking console encryption is a popular tactic
among some gamers, who employ the

Angry Birds: Still angry

Rovio's Angry Birds have popped up on the iPhone, the PSP, Android, the PS3,
the PC and Mac -- but now they're coming to a platform of an altogether different sort.

Your kitchen table.

In perhaps one of the strangest announcements at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, toy maker Mattel drew a crowd -- according to the New York TImes -- by unveiling a board game based on the popular, pig-punishing mobile game.

Angry Birds: Knock On Wood, which will go on sale in May for $14.99, will see
players building structures from plastic bricks, placing green pig
targets inside them, then launching the titular avians (from real
catapults) in an effort to bring the whole shebang crashing down.

We

Warcraft: it prints money

If you've been following the six-year success story that is World of Warcraft (Buy | Search), this news won't surprise you. At all.

But it's always good to be reminded just how astonishingly popular Blizzard's genre-leading online RPG really is -- and just how many
people are ready to buy its expansion packs. Nearly five million of them, as it happens: its most recent expansion, Cataclysm, racked up 4.7 million sales over its first month of availability, a feat which sets a
new record for monthly PC game sales.

Most of those sales -- a good 3.3 million of them -- happened in its very first
day, December 7, when the expansion launched simultaneously across the
Americas, Europe, and Asia.