We’re on vacation this week but trying to keep you informed and entertained with a round-up of our favorite Multiplayer content.

We like doing things in pieces here at Multiplayer. We like series. To wit:

What’s a college woman to do when she needs to make a Halloween costume based on “Halo” hero Master Chief? We ran a series on that.

What’s up with all these new-gen games that feature heroes named “Nathan”? We did a series on that too.

How did developers of “Dead Rising,” “Gears of War,” “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” “Double Dragon” (XBLA) , “Rock Band” and “Call of Duty 4” concoct the Xbox 360 Achievements for their games? You guessed it: we did a series.

Who came up with the mini-games in “Ratchet & Clank Future,” “KOTOR,” and “BioShock“? And what were they thinking? Series.

What can N’Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo say when they decide to critically analyze “Halo 3,” “BioShock,” “Metroid Prime 3,” short-session games, “Manhunt 2,” “Portal” and “The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass“? A lot. And we’ve run a series of series on that.

And that’s it for our series of year-end wrap-up posts. We’ll be back on January 2.

Happy new year!

We’re on vacation this week but trying to keep you informed and entertained with a round-up of our favorite Multiplayer content.

MTV News covered plenty of gaming goings-on this year. And not just the obvious stuff like E3, “Halo 3” and the creation of new Wii mini-game collections.

We did all that, of course.

But..

• We also talked to video gamers in Baghdad about keeping up with games like “Metal Gear Solid” while living in a war-torn city.

• We found pro wrestlers who do moves based on video games (and some who dress up in Nintendo Game Boy tights).

• We broke a lot of stories related to the fallout surrounding the fascinating “Donkey Kong” rivalry documentary King of Kong (coming to DVD in January).

• We even investigated how video game designers decide what happens to the virtual dead bodies of the enemies you kill in most action games.

We did plenty more. But that’s not a bad variety, huh?

More Multiplayer highlights coming tomorrow!

We’re on vacation this week but trying to keep you informed and entertained with a round-up of our favorite Multiplayer content.

MTV Multiplayer blogger Tracey John had been wanting to interview women in the gaming industry for quite some time.

As 2007 drew to a close she found five with whom she could conduct frank interviews about the highs and lows of being female in a predominantly male industry.

We’re indexing those conversations in one place. Lots of mixed opinions in these Q&As and some interesting feedback in the comments sections.

• Women Working In Games: G4’s Morgan Webb Talks ‘X-Play’ And Being A Pin-Up

• Women Working In Games: Game Girl Advance’s Jane Pinckard Talks Lara Croft, Male vs. Female Gamers

• Women Working In Games: ‘Assassin’s Creed’’s Elspeth Tory On Jade Raymond And Entering The Boys’ Club

• Women Working In Games: Brenda Brathwaite On Maternity Leave, Making The ‘Playboy’ Game And Hope For The Future

• Women Working In Games: Sega PR’s Tali Fischer On Progress, Sweatpants, And Naked Women At The VGAs

• Women Working In Games: Pinckard, Brathwaite Respond To Reader Comments

More Multiplayer highlights coming tomorrow!

We’re on vacation this week but trying to keep you informed and entertained with a round-up of our favorite Multiplayer content.Okay. Maybe a season-ending cliff-hanger about myself wasn’t the brightest idea. But all fall we tried to help the greater gaming populace learn how to pronounce hard-to-pronounce video game words.

If you want to know exactly how to say…

“Ubisoft”

“Ninja Gaiden”

“Crecente”

“N’Gai”

“Lara Croft”

“Kratos”

“Uwe Boll”

“Reggie Fils-Aime”

“Totilo”

…. then check out the index for MTV Multiplayer’s Pronunciation Guide.

And bear in mind, these are the experts telling you these things. Are you going to call Reggie and Uwe liars?

More Multiplayer highlights coming tomorrow!

We’re on vacation this week but trying to keep you informed and entertained with a round-up of our favorite Multiplayer content.

For starters, here are some of the most popular posts we published.

People read these posts, sent them around, and just came short of trying to buy the film rights from us to turn them into major motion pictures.

Here are some favorites:

• Two months after we published the post, hundreds (often thousands) of people still read this post I did about the “Still Alive” song in “Portal.” And they keep adding suggestions in the comments section about The Greatest Video Game Songs of all time.

• We took pictures of Shigeru Miyamoto, Gilbert Arenas and eight other people who were either playing a video game or just pretending to. And then we challenged the population of Earth to guess who was for reals. The quiz and the answers live on.

• I managed to find a fresh angle to the “Manhunt 2″ year-long hysteria, an angle that came from -gasp - playing the game. Well, actually playing the AO and M rated versions of the game (he said, showing off). How does a game change when it no longer gives you more points or other incentives for doing things like, say, killing someone more brutally? Lots of people had reactions to this.

• I laugh at those of you who tell me long headlines are a bad idea. When you’ve got a Jonathan Blow interview beneath that headline — an amazing one that everyone seems to have read — then your post will probably do okay. You know what? Even if you read this one already, read it again.

More Multiplayer highlights coming tomorrow!

At the end of the year, video game bloggers go to Georgia.

I confirmed this yesterday. As a result, I will be going to Georgia as well, to wish my in-laws a Merry Christmas.

The rest of the Multiplayer team will also be off (perhaps not all to Georgia), but the site will see a few more updates before the end of the year. The new posts will highlight some of our favorite pieces of the year.

We’ll be back in full force on January 2, by which time I may have left my wife to marry “Patapon.” It’s making quite a good impression. Or will this just be a short-term fling?

As for what we did at this blog this week:

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Earlier this week, Harmonix Senior Designer Dan Teasdale answered our burning questions about “Rock Band.”

But we also wanted to know how the team came up with the Achievements for the game. Continuing our series of finding out where Achievements come from, Teasdale answers our questions about “Rock Band”’s range of Achievements, including how they differ from “Guitar Hero II“’s Achievements and the possibility of Achievement-laden downloadable content.

But for Teasdale, personally, he said he’d like to see a new kind of Achievement:

“I’d love it if there was some form of additional Achievement-like system in the future that was more like a badge of honor or a way for people to see your play style… Imagine if you could view someone’s Gamercard and see that they’d beaten me in a “Meet the Developer” tournament, or chosen to team up with the Scryers in “World of Warcraft,” or even was an “Early Adopter” and played a certain game in the first week of release. You can’t do these with Achievements, since you could never get 100%, but with a badge of honor system as well as Achievements, things could be much more flexible.”

More material like that follows in what may well be our last “Rock Band” post of 2007!

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In the tradition of the Multiplayer contributors thinking a little bit out side the box with the way they use video game controllers I have conducted an experiment.I have followed in the steps of our fearless leader, Mr. Totilo, (playing “Wii Fit” while sitting) as well as our resident rocker-chick, Tracey, (taking on “Rock Band” all by her lonesome) and gone ahead and tried to explore “Zapper Compatibility.”The Zapper’s been catching a little bit of (well-deserved) flack since it was released a few weeks ago, mainly because it is simply a piece of plastic that houses your Wii controller. That’s it.

As a consumer (as well as a Nintendo fanboy), I find it slightly offensive that games are being marketed as Zapper compatible, implying that games needs the Zapper to work. They don’t. Some games may play a little bit better inside of the little plastic shell, but it’s not a necessity. To test my theory, I tried to find out if a game that we have all come to know and love, “Wii Sports” is actually “Zapper Compatible.” (Watch the results above).

I also gave one of the Wii’s biggest games of the year a try using the Zapper, with intergalactically bad results. But that video just isn’t quite ready for public consumption yet. Stay tuned.

Today has been a joyful day at work, not the least of which is because I received a nice Christmas greeting from Sony.

This was my second Christmas card from Sony.

And it was really just a nice wrapper to cover a preview disc of “Patapon,” the PSP rhythm-war game I wrote about last week.

The disc will certainly get some play during my holiday break. But first, it is motivating me to post, because it reminds me of something I’ve wanted to ask all of you:

*Multiplayer readers, do you often play video games with the sound off?

Is that an absurd question?

Hear me out…

(And also keep reading if you want to see the nifty interior of the “Patapon” card)

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I made some people angry this year. Let’s reflect on that.

When the year nears its end and the holidays loom, everyone starts publishing year-end overviews. Top Games. Big News Stories. Etcetera. I thought it would be interesting to look back on the things I wrote on the Multiplayer blog that generated the most heat.

In other words: these are the things that made people call me an idiot. Were the people right?

What follows are selective quotes from the most controversial stuff from the Multiplayer blog. Most of this involves posts in which I gave my opinion. It seems people didn’t yell at me for my reporting. Thanks for that!

Onward…

I had said: It sure does look like Nintendo may stop making games that can only be played by one person.

A Multiplayer reader said: “So now it’s Nintendo’s fault that games are leaning towards multiplayer? WTF? Where is your scathing article on Microsoft and their forcing of online gaming and micropayments down gamer’s throats? I know that there are a lot of Wiiphobes out there, but all of this biased anti-nintendo garbage that gets pumped out everyday by the gaming media needs to stop.”

Read more…

Last week, I posted a series of interviews with five different women working in and around the gaming industry.

We heard from female journalists, developers and even a publicist, about what it’s like to work in a field dominated by men. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a woman? Did they ever feel treated differently because of their gender? They each had unique perspectives and shared personal experiences from the workplace.

We received a huge response from readers, along with some very good questions. With that, we decided to pose a few of your questions to Game Girl Advance’s Jane Pinckard and “Sex in Video Games” author Brenda Brathwaite via e-mail. In my original phone interview with Pinckard, she spoke about empowering women to overcome sexism within the games industry. However, one commenter had this to say:

“Let’s say you’ve got someone who’s championing the cause of women in a specific industry, and she’s all about empowering women, and against their denigration. Sounds great, right? Then you look back at her own history, and find that she’s done some of the exploitative things to herself on her own, like writing an article about how she used a gaming peripheral as a sexual aid, and posting pictures of herself doing so.”

Read on to find out what the commenter is talking about, and see Pinckard’s and Brathwaite’s responses to your burning questions…

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Here it is: the last “What We’re NOT Playing” of 2007.

But don’t be sad, dear reader. There’s a whole new year of games ahead in 2008 that we here at MTV Multiplayer will be avoiding for reasons both completely logical and insane.

In this final end-of-the-year edition, we talk about games that we haven’t played throughout the whole year. Guess which publisher took a hit from our resident Xbox 360 Achievement whore Jason Cipriano this year:

JasonCipriano: Sadly all my games come from the same publisher - this year I was not playing “God of War 2,” “Heavenly Sword” and “Ratchet and Clank”
JasonCipriano: and I totally wanted to get to them all
StephenTotilo: Oh, let me now introduce our special guest for this week’s installment, Phil Harrison. Take it away Phil…
TraceyJohn: Phil’s not coming. Cip hurt his feelings.
StephenTotilo: Cip, I think you scared Phil off.
JasonCipriano: hey, if Phil wants to clear up my schedule, and sit me down with a couple copies of those games I’d love to go through them

Read on to find out why he avoided those hot Sony titles, why we think the PSP had a lackluster year, and why we’re so afraid of clocks in our games…

[Photo Credit: Joe Raedle/ Getty Images]

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