NeoGaf user Lakitu found Mass Effect 3 artwork on the EA store, and the poor box cover was singed deep down into its soul with a phrase that makes me want to vomit. “Better with Kinect Sensor.”

No!

No, no, no!

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Pigs! If oogling Catwoman from afar in Batman: Arkham City wasn’t good enough for you, now you’ve hit the jackpot. Selina Kyle isn’t just going to be a latex-clad foil and sexual dynamo for the players to drool over. No sir! She’s going to be a fully playable character. A manipulable fetish object for everyone to enjoy. This was revealed today in an impressively sexist trailer complete with gratuitous shots of ass, glistening lips, and a “warrior pose” which has Kyle arching her back, pushing out her tits, and posing for your enjoyment.

Female empo-meow-erment, lol, get it? Awful, I know.

Hit the jump for the reveal trailer.

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With the passing of Macho Man last week, it’s good to see that another childhood icon of mine is carrying on. Ye old leather-skinned Hulk Hogan, whose ticker somehow refuses to quit. Hogan isn’t just still among the living, he’s also still the master of whoring his own Existence turned Brand. Thanks to him and the geniuses at  Majesco, we’ll be getting a Hulk Hogan game for the Kinect.

Now the peripheral makes perfect sense.

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While it’s news to me, apparently there was a scam going around Xbox Live last month. Some dude was phishing in Modern Warfare 2, and when he was caught Microsoft didn’t drop the hammer on him. They had him cozy up to their sweaty, stinking, but bizarrely comforting side.

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Welcome to Press Start! The column where I jot down five things that caught my eye in the world of gaming this week. Poor edited!, check. Zero revisions!, check. Cobbled together on a couple of wings, a prayer, and ridiculous amounts of caffeine in the early hours of the morning.

I encourage all dorks and dinks and nerds and nincompoopto contribute what they dug this week.

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#1:  Grand Theft Auto Gives You Extra Points For Killing Kids!
Oh fuck son! I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto wrong for nearly ten fucking years. Longer than that if you take into account the first two top-down games. Yeah! Yeah, yeah! All these years I’ve been playing and I’ve never been aware that you get more points for killing children and old fuckers.

This nonsense stems out of a tragedy that went down last Thursday in Brazil. Wellington Menezes de Oliveira “opened up fire at a school in Rio de Janeiro killing 12 pupils and injuring 13 others, aged between 12- and 14-years-old.” Not cool, at all.

Quite obviously.

Unfortunately spinsters vomit up bullshit, seizing any opportunity to massage their own importance glands through hyperbole and sensationalism. Two days later in O Globo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil, ran an article which didn’t have time for things like fact checking. It claimed that Oliveira played games like Counterstrike and Grand Theft Auto where “you score more points for killing women, children and old people.”

News to me! Fucking news to me.

Remember kids, no tragedy is ever so saddening you can’t use it to churn up slop, or pen the same old tired media nonsense.

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#2) Creator of the Video Game Cartridge Passes Away.
Jerry Lawson. His name was Jerry Lawson! Lawson was the creator of the video game cartridge, and this week the good sir went and tripped the light fantastic. It never even occurred to my dumb ass that the cartridge was something forged by man. I always fancied it some sort of platonic ideal, derived from the Other Realm, where unicorns and Justice can cavort about together.

No sir, we made it. Well, Lawson and his group of pioneers over at Fairchild Semiconductor. With that cartridge, he no doubt helped craft the childhood of many a million of dorks. Like you and me. Sitting here, in this gaming column, communicating via news born out of an industry of cartridges.

More than just what they housed, the physical cartridge was a staple of my childhood. Good god damn how many times did I go blue in my face blowing in them. Stacking those sons a bitches up. Flipping them to friends at lunch.

The cartridge. Staple of a childhood baked in dorkey, roasted in the fires of nerdiness.

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#3) Sony and Geohot Settle Out of Court.
It’s finally fucking over. Geohot, the dorkiest wanna-be hard ass in the gaming community settled with Sony out of court this week. You may remember Geohot as the dude who outed the PlayStation 3’s root key. Then he wrote an awful rap telling Sony to come and get him. They obliged, sending their lawyers, Death Stars, and various underlings after his ass.

At that point, he may have fled to South America, or gone there for Spring Break. Depending on whose story you believe.

All of that is over now, as the Totally Believing In Something Kid no longer wants to deal with a court battle with An Enormous Corporation State. Go figure! How quickly one’s ideology wilts in the face of a armada of litigation or whatever other more appropriate legal word I should be using.

Well, that’s that.

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Some good lads have gone and built a Kinect ‘Hulk’ mod. They did so by hooking up “Flash running w/ Molehill (hardware acceleration) up to the Kinect and Box2d.” That means absolutely nothing to me though. I just know it tints then green and lets them smash generated buildings and shit.

As dope as it is, I think Owen Good has it right when he describes it as more of a call back to old school Rampage than Mr. Banner. Still though, dope.

Hit the jump for the video.

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The official gameplay trailer for Arkham City dropped today, and I’m filling my Batsuit with muck. It’s all the awesomeness I expected, complimented by some sweet bullshit on the side. The portions with Batman flying through the night evading gun fire and swooping down to the ground weren’t something I was expecting, and they generated some serious torque in my crotchal region.

Hit the jump for the video.

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Only on Omega Level will you find an asshole blathering gibberish about Mass Effect 2 when a single screenshot hints at not a new game, but more DLC. But that’s what I’m doing. Fuck you! Remember that ME2 DLC, ‘Arrival’ that was hinted at in a patch or whatever? Today BioWare posted a picture on their Facebook with the overt hint, “New Mass Effect 2 screenshots have Arrived.” Hey, I get it, arrived! Like Arrival.

But still. I’m freaking out. I have an unhealthy obsession with the franchise.

Hit the jump for the picture.

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Prepare thyself for the newest iteration of Press Start! The column where I puke up the top five things in the gaming world that caught my eye this week. It’s a democratic column, I want your input. Hit the comments box with your findings. True Believers! Gaming scientists!

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#1: Drunken NES: A Breathalyzer and 8-Bit Game In One.
This is one of those concoctions that fucking staggers me. It sends me into a spiralling moment of quasi-stoner amazement. Someone had to think up this brilliant piece of minutiae. Imagine this, if you can. Enterprising video game mechanical programming wizards had a dream. Their dream was simple. First, they had to make a breathalyzer  out of an original Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge. No small task! I have it on good authority many a modern day Prometheus has been felled by such a challenge.

Then, they had to craft a video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System – yes I’m typing it out to be awkward – that could interface with this creation. By blowing your disgusting Oats and Hops stink-rot-gut-breath into the cartridge, the game would then calculate the level of your drunken stupor and rate your inebriated ass in 8-Bit glory.

It’s fucking radical.

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#2: Uncharted 3’s Villainess Revealed; Wrinkled Old Hottie.
Fuck yeah I like my gaming occasionally in the form of a megaton zillion-dollar production value big blockbuster. Fuck yeah! You disagree. Oh okay! You go have fun shaving in Heavy Rain or playing Limbo and waxing intellectual about how it’s totally ambient and deconstructs the medium and blah, blah, blah. I’m fucking amplified for Uncharted 3. Boom. Can’t wait. I say deliver me from boring fetch quests! I say deliver me from conversation wheels. Just for a bit. Throw me into the comforting bosom of gaming entertainment excess.

And in relation to this excess, this week Naughty Dog revealed the villainess  behind Nathan Drake’s woes. Meet Katherine Marlowe. She’s a bit of a hottie for an older women, isn’t she? She’s voiced by Elizabeth Hurley, but she gets me tingling like Helen Mirren. Some cavernous old cleavage and wields power to boot. Is it November 1, yet?

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#3: Microsoft Sells A Shitload of Kinects; Gets Punked.
It was an up and down week for our buddy Billy Gates’ company. Though I have to say their good news far outweighs the little bit of hacking righteousness that they were subjected to. You see, when you can lay claim to having the fastest selling electronic device ever, I’m sure everything glows.

This week it was announced that the Microsoft Kinect has sold ten million units. As well, Microsoft has moved ten million Kinect games. Wrap that shit around your brain-piece for a second. Since its release on November 4, 2010 it has averaged 133,333 units sold a day. Fastest device ever. More than your Apple iPhone, iPad, iMac, iThing, iMinimalist Swag.

However, it wasn’t all fucking roses for Microsoft this week! No sir. Hackers cracked the  algorithm that generated the seemingly random numbers on the back of MS Points cards. You know, those cards you buy so you can spend the equivalent of $5 on a lightsaber for your avatar. Or so you can download that fucking shitty Dead Space 2 DLC (not that I’m bitter).

Being the benevolent hackers that they were, they used this algorithm to generate over 1 million dollars worth of points. Fantastic! It was short-lived as Microsoft said they killed all those points generated, but still, man! Lock that shit down, Microsoft! I paid good fucking money for my Mass Effect M7 t-shirt for my avatar. No fucking freebies!

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Batman: Arkham City is officially dropping on October 18. What the fuck, Eidos! You had to release Arkham City right before the teeth of the gaming season. Son of a bitch. It would have been so much nicer to drop this dime in the middle of the summer. I could have kicked back, not worried about the deluge of games coming, and slowly manipulated my controller to the sight of Selina Kyle all done up in her latex and the such. Would have been astounding.

Hit the jump for some new images of this beast.

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