DUKE NUKEM 3D Available for Free!

After the bad taste Duke Em Forever left in gamers’ mouths.  It’s time to go back to the source.  It’s time to experience Duke Nukem 3D … again … for free!

Learn how after the jump!

Video: CLONE WARS – Season 4!

Thrilling new trailer for the upcoming season of Clone Wars!  It premieres this Friday; September 16, 2011 on the Cartoon Network.

Toys: Cthulhu Cutie!

When you imagine the source of the next cute toy phenom, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.  But the people at Dreamland Toyworks pictured the fun and irony in such a creation, launching a whole series of “My Little Cthulhu” toys.  One of them is pictured above.    To see the rest of the line click here.  Sure, this is being done with tongue planted firmly in cheek.  But so were “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and look how that ended up.

Kirkman Says: Cool Stuff Ahead For Season 2 of “Walking Dead”!

In an interview with Collider, Robert Kirkman creator the “Walking Dead” comic, has this to say about what’s coming up on the season two of the small screen adaptation:

[Y]ou can’t even see the bar because it’s been raised so much. There is all kinds of crazy stuff that is coming up. I’m really excited. I mean, you get 8 guys that like zombies that know they are doing a T.V. show like The Walking Dead, and they know that you can get away with the kind of things that we got away with on the first season. It really becomes just an effort to just find that thing that AMC is going to make us change. So we all sitting there going, “Oh, they are going to make us change that!” So there is a lot of cool stuff coming up.

We can’t wait.

New TRON: LEGACY CD on the Way!

Bleeding Cool spotted an interesting listing on Amazon:

According to the listing, Tron: Legacy Reconfigured [above] will feature “various” artists. This may just be placeholder info, though, and my hunch is that this will actually be a remix album of some kind, something that will see Daft Punk revisit and rework their compositions with freedom, liberated from having to match the on-screen mood and action.

We loved this Daft Punk score.   So this sounds like something right up our alley.  We bet it will be up your alley as well.  We hope BC are right in their prediction.

Art: Mysterious “Alien” Concept Art Leaked from Paramount!

This piece of concept art leaked from Paramount.  But no one seems to know what film it’s for.  And the image quality is too low to read the legend in the lower right hand corner.  However, this hasn’t stopped most from speculating, some of the films suggested include Super 8 (mostly debunked), Star Trek 2, When Worlds Collide (huh?!? there shouldn’t be any monsters in that), or Cloverfield 2.

What do you think?  Share your thoughts in the comment section.

Violent Video Games Make You Smarter

Or at least that’s what one recent study seems to suggest.  Here’s the skinny from Bloomberg:

The researchers tested 18- to 25-year-olds who weren’t regular video-game players. One group spent 50 hours playing the “The Sims 2,” a slow-paced strategy game published by Electronic Arts Inc. The other group took on “Call of Duty 2,” a combat game sold by Activision Blizzard Inc., or “Unreal Tournament,” a shooter game developed by Epic Games. The subjects then performed timed computer tasks, according to the report published today in the journal Current Biology.

In the problem-solving exercise, the action-game players made decisions 25 percent faster than the strategy group, while answering the same number of questions correctly. The findings suggest that games simulating stressful events or battles could be a training tool for speeding reactions in real-world situations, according to researchers at the University of Rochester in New York led by Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist.

“It’s not the case that the action game players are trigger-happy and less accurate: They are just as accurate and also faster,” Bavelier said in a statement. “Action game players make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference.”

Makes sense in a way.  So next time your parents tell you to stop playing that “Call of Duty” just say …  “I’m just trying to make myself smarter.”  See them try to argue with that one.

Audio: Kim Stanley Robinson Predicts a Coming Utopia

In his Guest of Honor speech at this year’s Worldcon (Aussiecon), Kim Stanley Robinson offered his take on utopia.  It was a speech full of intriguing ideas and fun musings.

Sometimes he’s a bit too optimistic:

The powers of human science and ingenuity are such that even despite this strangely dangerous situation we’re in I have full confidence that people will for their own sakes and for their children’s sakes, will get a grip and, even if it’s 51 per cent, even if it’s a hung parliament with a lot of dealings to pull a few more people into the fold, that’s all you need.

Sometimes convincing:

The more visions we have of a future where things are going right in some large sense, the more we believe in our hearts that we’re headed that way as a consensus culture.

Often quite funny:

Economics is the astrology of our time.

Always worth your time.  And he does it all in the form of an interview with himself.

So if you want to listen to the whole thing.  (And you should.)  You just a click on the play button below.

Video: PRINCE OF PERSIA Trailer

Here’s a brand new trailer for a Prince of Persia: Sands of Time based on the video game of the same name:

It definately looks like the game.  And if you don’t believe us, check out this:

ALAN WAKE Gets a Release Date … Finally!

Some people were starting to believe that Alan Wake might become this century’s Duke Nukem Forever, as news of the potential release of this game kept failing to materialize.  But the wait is over.  This psychological horror game will hit store shelves in the U.S. on May 18, 2010 and in Europe on May 21, 2010.

Not sure what we’re talking about?  Check out these trailers: