Friday Linkaroud--Items of Interest

(c. Gettyimages)

"Good, Bad: I'm the Guy With the Gun": Ash is coming to the App Store S-Mart in a new Army of Darkness game from Backflip Studios.

Snakes & Lattes: I'm not sure if I wrote about this place already, but even if I did it's worth a second post. Snakes & Lattes is a boardgame cafe in Toronto. No, they don't have free Wi-Fi, but they have about 1,500 boardgames for the use of their customers. Wish I had one around the corner.

Maybe Cliffy B. Lost a Bet?: One of the semi-interesting news items this week was the collapse of the 3-month-old MMO APB (All Points Bulletin), which sucked its development house, Scotland's Realtime Worlds, down with it. APB failed for the most sound of reasons: it wasn't particularly interesting. Now the rumor is that Epic Games is buying the rights to APB. Maybe hugely successful companies need to inject a little FAIL into their corporate bloodstream now and again, just keep them on their toes.

This Was Probably Inevitable: And since I'm smart enough not to open a debate on the Israeli/Palestinian issue on my gaming blog, I'll just post a link and move along. 

"And Then the Captain of the HMS OpenFeint Saw Apple's Game Center Up Ahead and Yelled "ICEBERG!": Alas, too late. In a move that was surprisingly to absolutely no one, the suddenly-redundant OpenFeint has opened shop for Android devices. Apple's new Game Center community features are not yet up to speed with OpenFeint's, but they will be, thus making OpenFeint's future on Apple devices extremely sketchy.

Kegerator Not Included: Although this one looks cheaply made, I have to say the idea of a "Pub in a Box" set of classic English pub games is an idea whose time has come. (What, no dartboard?)

Propaganda!: The artists at Irrational Games have outdone themselves creating imaginary propaganda posters for BioShock Infinite, currently slated for 2012. They did their work well: I had to pause and work through the meaning they were trying to convey, alternately offended and impressed. It's rather nauseating to see symbols like George Washington, lady liberty, the Boy Scouts, and the cross used as grotesque nationalistic/racist propaganda. However, they seem to be a logical aspect of BSI's story, which posits a floating cloud city created by America  in the 19th century, which subsequently devolves into civil war. Irrational is walking a fine line here, but they've shown themselves up to the task of deftly handling complex and controversial ideas in the past.

News From 1910: I'd much rather live in a world where the top 3 news stories were these rather than these. I suspect that Mrs. Joseph Thomas was cut to the quick to read that her dainty Bridge luncheon, served at card tables, was only entertaining "informally." Also, why was the Domino Club meeting "unusually pleasant?" Did the last meeting culminate in a knife fight after Mrs. Daniel played Chickie Twos?

"Look, Larry... Have you ever heard of Vietnam?": Battlefield Bad Company 2: Vietnam is only being released as downloadble content. Hey, it worked for Battlefield: 1943.

Seize Your Tweets: The Twitterstream Digest compiled by Seize Your Turn provides an excellent compilation of the gaming news and blog activity.

Chess News for the week.