It’s a hot lazy Friday and it seems like the whole Internet has the summer blehs. I blame the heat on the influx of pyros. Whatever it is, I’m not sure if the news is actually uninteresting or if I’m just too hot to care.

- Atari has gone on a legal threat spree over early reviews of the new Alone in the Dark game. Kotaku has more information. It seems a pirated copy of the game leaked, and Atari has been asking sites that published suspiciously early reviews to take them down. The fact that these reviews are roundly panning the game probably has nothing to do with it. </sarcasm> If Alone in the Dark really tanks, it looks like Atari’s future focus on casual stuff like Deer Hunter games will be signed, sealed and delivered.

- Speaking of Atari, gaming pioneer and Pong inventor Nolan Bushnell is getting a movie made about him and his company. Leonardo DiCaprio is slated to play Bushnell. How flattering!

Bushnell also talked a little about the state of current games.

“I think the Wii by Nintendo is getting games that once again are fun for people who don’t want to make a career out of figuring out how to run a 47-button controller,” said Bushnell.

Now now, let’s not exaggerate. We’re only up to 40-button controllers.

- SouthPeak has announced a sequel for their Xbox 360 game Two Worlds. My reaction to this is “Wow, seriously?” as Two Worlds is pretty high on our list of the worst games of all time, and I’ve beaten Yo! Noid.

Seriously, it’s bad . At the house, we knew we were in trouble when the character creator was so bad that we didn’t recognize our creation when he showed up on screen. The dialog was miserable. When we tried the online co-op play, the only reason we’d bought the game in the first place, it simply locked up. When we got it working, the North American servers were down, so we had to play on the European ones. You can imagine what the lag there was like. The game was physically repellent to us, even though the individual problems weren’t disastrous. It’s the rare example of something that’s actually worse than the subtraction of its parts.

That’s it for the news trawl. I’m going to go hit the Internet and see if I can’t find something more positive to write about.

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