Through the fire and flames

If five-year-old music hit Guitar Hero is getting a bit stale, here's a great way to heat it up.

Add propane.

Fire Hero is the work of hobbyist Chris Marion, who was inspired to connect
his Guitar Hero controller to an array of propane-powered jets during a
boring day in class. The five jets correspond to the guitar's five fret
buttons, so playing along with one of the game's music tracks rewards
observers with a pyrotechnic display that'd impress even Hank Hill.

It took a week for Marion to assemble the system, which uses three
standard 20-pound propane tanks together with an unfeasible number of
fitments, valves, shut-offs, and assorted other propane accessories. The
guitar interfaces

L.A. Noire - Rockstar

The quest to improve videogame
animation is never-ending. Twenty years
ago, Jordan Mechner created rotoscoped graphics for the original Prince of
Persia by studying films of his little brother running and jumping. Half a decade ago, Half-Life 2 wowed us with
facial animations that made use of research by behavioral scientist Dr. Paul Ekman.

Today, the bar's about to be raised again, thanks to the creation of MotionScan, a new system created by Sydney-based tech company Depth Analysis, and featured in Rockstar's upcoming period crime epic L.A. Noire.

The goal of MotionScan is to remove, as much as possible, the intermediary of a human animator between the motion-capture and the final

Piggy banks: empty

The holiday season is but a memory -- and while it might be easy to take down the tree, the lights, and the stockings, tackling the credit card bill for all those goodies is likely to be a different story. What's a cash-strapped gamer to do in the meantime? Here's a few ways you can get your game on without further damaging your bank account.

Free online role-playing games

World of Warcraft might be hogging the headlines, but you don't need to fork
out its monthly fees for your dose of online gaming. Faced with
Warcraft's dominance of the market, many top online games have abandoned
their monthly fees, turning to microtransactions or graduated account
systems that'll let you pay whatever

Rock Band 3 The Rock Band franchise might be a hit with critics, but it's been a burden to parent company Viacom, who decided last month to sell off the game's developer, Harmonix.

Speculation over who would purchase the music game maestros, however, has come to quick and surprising end: they bought themselves.

And they did it for the cost of one copy of Rock Band.

The LA Times reports that Viacom sold Harmonix to Harmonix-SBE Holdings, an affiliate of investment group Columbus Nova, last month for the ludicrous price of $49.99. The upside? Viacom gets a tax benefit of $50 million for investment losses and will offload an additional $100 million in liabilities.

The other upside is that Harmonix once

Blasts from the Past

CHECK OUT THE GALLERY

Great Scott! Marty McFly and Doc Brown are at it again in a
series of new Back to the Future games, marking a 25-year leap since the duo
started their time-travelling hijinks in good old 1985. A lot's changed since
then -- including the games.

Hello? McFly?

It's been a long time coming -- some two decades or more, in fact -- but Back to the Future is finally getting the video game treatment it deserves.

In truth, the Back to the Future movies all had their video games,
released roughly concurrently with the flicks back in the NES and
Genesis eras. But it's been almost twenty years since the last one, and
the movies, riding a wave of combined geek-chic and '80s nostalgia, are
hot property again.

So what better time to take gamers back to the century-hopping world of
Marty McFly, Doctor Emmett Brown, and the iconic, flux-capacitor-packing
Delorean that's become as recognizable as any of the film's human
stars?

In production at adventure

It's gonna be good.

2011 may be young, but it's already shaping up to be a truly memorable year for gamers. Huge sequels to some of the strongest franchises around finally arrive -- and a few impressive newcomers hope to grab a piece of the pie. Here are the ones we simply can't wait to play.

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OnLive A slumbering giant appears to be stirring in the video game industry -- and that could be bad news for Microsoft and Sony.

After quietly sitting on the sidelines for the entire console war, the television industry is starting to get into the fight. Vizio
announced plans this week to integrate the OnLive game streaming service into
all of its 2011 HD TVs and Blu-ray players, as well as forthcoming smart phones
and tablets from the company.

That could prove to be a monumental shift in gaming, as it removes a big barrier for people who have been sitting on the console fence. Now, in order to play the latest triple-A games, they won't need to shell out several hundred dollars for a