If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t been paying attention to our weekly podcast, The Red-Light Roundtable, you too might have missed our discussion about the best fucking flash game we’ve ever played. That game is Robot Unicorn Attack.

We had a few great games coming out last week, but for me, THE game to get was Dante’s Inferno. We caught wind of the game not being sold in the Middle East. This raises a couple of poignant questions.

1) Are they afraid of offending Muslim people because it’s a story of a guy going to hell to fight Satan?
2) Did the game developers include Muhammad in the game (Who was residing in the 8th Circle of Hell in Dante’s poem)?

With the cock-up that happened last night with the Mass Effect 2 DLC and how they were accidentally giving it away for free for a few hours, I wondered what everyone else thinks of companies fleecing us for $5 here and $10 there with DLC that is ready on the first day the game is launched…instead of packaging it with the game that we’re already spending $60 on?

Two-thousand-and-nine, a year in which many of us expected to be in the middle of Space War I, or locked into a huge battle with the Decepticons of Cybertron. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I want my fucking jetpack or flying car now! Well, at least was a great year for media. After the jump, enjoy what the editors of MediaWhore think of as their top picks of 2009.

Ok so 2009 is finally over…somebody took it out back behind the barn and put a slug in its noggin. I can’t be happier. A huge period of ‘no time’ has finally passed and I now find myself staring, mouth agape over the possibilities this this upcoming year will bring us whores, and all other slaves to the media.

Normally, we’re not the kind to make New Year’s resolutions…but this year we all thought we’d try to add a little levity to the asinine resolutions that people seem to always make.

Well since it got announced at Gamescom yesterday, I thought it would make for a pretty good MWN Discusses topic. Hit the jump for the sexy discussion.

Take-Two Interactive announced the other day that Bioshock 2 (among three of its peers) won’t be hitting until 2010. Already it’s hitting the company’s stock pretty hard. I think they’re poised to earn a ton of it back when they finally start cashing checks in the months following the glut of games that will drop in the holiday months…in that period that all of us gamers lovingly refer to as ‘the drought’. Join the discussion after the jump.

Aaaah, the good ol’ days. Look ma! I can see the pixels!!

BigPopaGamer
I think that graphics in RPG’s are overrated. Yes, they can be made to help draw you into the world and to give you beautiful panoramic shots of the world and the locations you visit, no doubt about that. But one thing I think that having fancy CGI has taken away is the ability to create these worlds in our minds. Let me give you an example.

I’m playing Suikoden 1 for the PS1 as the moment and the graphics are horrible, especially on a 47” LCD HD TV. The sprites are huge, pixels are clearly visible and all details are lost but truly, I don’t care. I could care less that there aren’t any huge, 5 minute long summons of badly drawn creatures or 1 minute spell effects. Because all of those effects I’m imagining in my mind which is better than any 3D artist could ever dream of. CGI is a great thing, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time that it has brought us to new worlds and shown us amazing things, it has become our crutch and any game that is released without the latest in graphics technology, is automatically scorned by a majority of the gaming community. Not us retrofags, but the rest.

Ryan Wilson
CGI graphics are simply a sign of how much technology has improved over the years. Yes, games that take graphics over gameplay happen a lot, but this has always been the case.

If you accept that HD graphics deter from the enjoyment of an RPG because they leave less to the imagination, then you must also believe SPRITES are a deterrent. Why have an 8-bit representation of a character when you can have a wall of text or a # represent your character (like a MUD or a Roguelike). Its not that the older game creators wanted to leave so much to the imagination, its that the technology simply wasn’t there.

I’m sorry BigPopaGamer, but many people aren’t willing to pay top dollar for a game that looks like they can find it on a much older console…and I really don’t blame them.

This week, the boys here at MWN discuss the problems we see with having all sorts of advertisements on Xbox Live and on the Xbox 360 dashboard. This all comes your way thanks to our greedy corporate overlords at Microsoft. Hit the link to jump in on the discussion already in progress.

So I read an article today over at Crispy Gamer listing out 25 games a gamer must play before death. I wanted to do my own list, but to be honest I’m lazy so I thought I would ask all of the editors to come up with 5 games each and tell me why they are a must-play. Five games and your reason for choosing them. I’ll go first.

As I flip through the stacks of email we get every morning, I’ve noticed a disturbing (to me) trend. It seems that about 20% of the new games coming out there is a special something-or-other that you can ONLY have if you pre-order your game from Gamestop or any other specific store. So I got to thinking…time for another MWN Discusses!

I always enjoy reading peoples opinions on things, since you know…that is technically the reason I started this site in the first place, but I really enjoy reading posts where there are multiple opinions covering the entire spectrum of an arguement. With that in mind, we’re debuting a new feature today titled “The Whores Discuss”.

Much like some of our older posts, I wanted the entire team to jump in on this rant and give their opinion whatever the topic is for the week. Starting with today’s topic, you can guarantee to see a whole bunch of surly bastards tell their side of the discussion without any interruption. So without any further ado, let’s get to today’s topic: Project Natal for the Xbox 360 Console.