This is something that came to pass over the weekend. Sadly, I wasn’t near a computer so I had to wait in order to post this. I haven’t seen very much on this floating around the internet, but it is extremely important for our medium. Yes, the National Endowment for the Arts now recognizes interactive entertainment as an art form. What does this mean? Well, on the practical level, it means that developers can apply for grants for noncommercial projects from the Federal Government. But also it marks another step in the validation of interactive entertainment as something that really matters. With this, all those people who are against games will have lost ground in the eyes of the law, which is a good things. Of course, it won’t halt their efforts completely, but its’s good to see the artistic value intrinsic to our medium being made more explicit.

Read an article on the matter (and where I got this information) here (via Icrontic.com). You know, it might not be such a bad idea to write an article on art games sometime…

From IGN’s review:

Sword & Sworcery is a must-have game for your iPad. I understand that it’s not necessarily for everybody; I don’t begrudge anybody who tries and determines they’d rather just play a traditional game instead, but it’s still something that should be tried nonetheless. The unity of sight, sound, and touch is something special, and it’s something that makes perfect sense on a device like the iPad. Please make it a hit. Because I wouldn’t mind seeing this EP become a full-fledged album.

Expect a review of the iPhone version on Gameshack next month when the game comes to Apple’s other portable powerhouse. Current iPad owners need not wait a minute longer.

The launch of DiabloIII will basically want to make us quit our  jobs here at GameShack and hibernate in our batcaves for the preceding 3-6 months. I think this game may be as addicting as most MMORPG games, being very close in playing style, and now with Blizzard adding the ability of online partying and guilding. There has been some speculation regarding whether or not they will charge for online play. In any case, DiabloIII owners will definitely have much to dwell on once the game is officially released. For all us conspiracy theorists’ out there, check out this post: Hellforge-GameRiot-DiabloIII-Release Date. Some DiablioII junkies have discovered a magical error, in which their game crashes, and displays a hex code that mysteriously translates into DiabloIII 09/09/09. I could probably state pretty confidently that may have been the anticipated release date YEARS ago when DiabloII was in development, as there is a lot of doubt that the game will be released that soon.

At this exact time last year, one can  remember the news dropping that Diablo 3 was announced – Or it was announced that it was coming up – Or it was announced that Diablo 3 would be released one day in the next 5 years. Now, a year later, we are at the EXACT same spot as last year. “We” being Diablo and Blizzard fans who are on the verge of freaking out if SC2 or D3 does not come out in the next 3 months. The part that really blows our whistles is that NOTHING has changed since a year ago. Many of us have seen the trailer for the game with the pretty sweet in-game footage. We’ve been closely monitoring Blizzard’s website every week and there have been NO new updates except nerdy stories about fighting goblins and wallpapers.

The truth is, or what we fear the truth is, is that Blizzard is still making some serious loot with WoW and even Warcraft III Frozen Throne and the DOTA mod. If they release SC 2 and Diablo 3 right now, it will take away thousands if not hundreds of thousands of players from the Warcraft world. They are truly trying to milk the game for all it is worth, which is great, but please do not dangle the two new releases in front of us as if you are constantly updating and tweaking the games! If you are, please show us some Diablo 3 updates. Or at least release the SC2 beta testing that was supposed to be going on all summer. We currently have multiple accounts signed up for the beta test from Battle.net so we shall see!

Of all the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games that have yet to hit the PC, it is evident that no other games have reached the longevity and popularity of StarCraft. Although Command and Conquer and WarCraft have remained resonant in the RTS community, StarCraft has been viewed as a cut above the rest. Some may attribute this to the added ‘geekyness’ of battling it out in space, using new technologies, and adding more emphasized gameplay tactics and graphics – all things that would make us gamers happier.

With its release set before the end of this year, we will just have to wait and see how this game and series will play out. Some things we can count on is for sure is StarCraft’s arrival to spur huge sales for Blizzard, increase web-traffic for StarCraft based gaming communities, an emergence of StarCraft LAN parties, and maybe even a Protoss Halloween costume or two!

Check out some of these high-res screen-shots below. These were taken directly from Blizzard’s website. We have to say that the game looks pretty impressive thus far, and definitely displays a much bigger improvment over the original StarCraft when it comes to graphics, gameplay, and content.

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