why you'll want to play Batman's gritty upcoming adventure

Batman Fans Will Go Bat-Crazy ..
Kevin Conroy possesses the kind of voice that could probably part the Red Sea. It's only fitting that his acting prowess from Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and five seasons of the Justice League series would bring the Caped Crusader to life in Arkham Asylum, and it's good to have him back. That deep, baritone pitch has been something that Christian Bale likely weeped at his inability to mimic, although it probably doesn't help that Conroy's normal civilian speech sounds like the voice of God with a touch of Clint Eastwood (also God).

On the other end of the spectrum, Mark Hamill, who is arguably more famous for voice acting than his lightsaber skills, is providing the voice of the Joker. It doesn't get much better than that. Unlike goofy incarnations of Batman's less threatening foes, Mark Hamill makes the Joker sound straight up psychotic. How psychotic? Expose some small children to Batman: The Animated Series, and it's 90 percent certain that they'll develop a sudden, volatile fear of clowns.
Play with Insanely Cool Bat Tools like Explosive Jelly and Razor-Sharp Batarangs
Even if they don't always get the combat right (cough, Batman: Dark Tomorrow), most Batman games don't skimp on those wonderful toys. Arkham Asylum's no slouch either, as you've got everything from grappling hooks, mid-flight-controlled Batarangs and explosive Bat-Jelly that can pretty much turn anything into rubble. Heck, even the Joker's packing some heat, and by heat we mean face-searing, skin-melting acid. Oh, and he has a gun. Just in case the acid wasn't painful enough.

Microsoft has revamped its slow-selling Zune digital player

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, is joined by J Allard, the company's corporate vice president for design and development.

How many development?? for customer satisfaction or business ...or both.

Microsoft has revamped its slow-selling Zune digital music player and created a MySpace-style social-networking site in its drive to compete with Apple's market-leading iPod player.

In large part, the Microsoft moves announced Tuesday - the introduction of a smaller, sleeker version of the Zune player and the planned Zune social Web site - reflect an attempt to build scale for a brand that so far has achieved only niche status.

Microsoft said it had sold about 1.2 million units of the original device in the last year.

"For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got," Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said in an interview Tuesday. "The satisfaction for the device was superhigh. The satisfaction on the software actually is where we'd expect to see a huge uptick this year. It was just so-so on the software side."

Microsoft said it had re-engineered the Zune hardware and software and the associated digital music store to make them all easier to use."I'm sure a year from now we'll do even better," Gates said. "But I'm blown away by what they've been able to do in a year."

Many of the changes are stylistic. The company reworked the device's navigation button and dropped one of its signature colors, brown, from the list of options. The Zune will be available in black, pink, green and red.

But one of the most striking changes had to do with Microsoft's effort to enhance what had been perhaps the most talked-about feature on the original device: the ability to share music files and other media wirelessly with other Zune owners.

Far too few people, however, purchased the player for such sharing to become commonplace, and the function held little appeal because it was crippled by usage rules negotiated with the music industry. Shared songs expired within a few days, even if the recipient did not play them. And a file acquired from one Zune user could not be shared with a third user.

Under the new rules, Microsoft said, shared songs would have no expiration date, and it would be repeatedly possible to pass along songs sent from one device to another. But a shared file can be played only three times on each Zune.

Partly to warm up the initially tepid response, the company is creating a social-networking site, Zune Social, to encourage the sharing of samples of songs online, even for fans who do not own a Zune player. Members of the network will also be able to use a small application on their computers to display which songs they have been listening to, and that information can be posted on certain Web sites outside the network or sent by e-mail to friends.

Various social networking sites, like Facebook, already offer sharing of samples of songs.

"The whole idea behind Zune is much broader than the devices themselves," said J Allard, the Microsoft vice president who oversees design and development for consumer products like the Zune and the Xbox 360 game consoles.

"The conditioned thought is around a portable device being the center point of the experience, when in fact it's not. It really is about how do we start taking Zune beyond that device."

He said the social networking would appeal to Zune owners and people who had not bought the device.

Van Baker, an analyst at the research firm Gartner, said the Zune revisions amounted to "a much-needed line extension" for the brand.

"Is it enough to get somebody to move away from Apple to Microsoft? I don't think so," he said, "but it should help Microsoft against some of the other alternatives."

Midnight mania - Halo Nation

24hoursnewsunder a dusty ol' Atari 2600 console, you know what happens at 12:01 a.m. this Tuesday. At more than 10,000 shops across North America, salespeople will face a late-night onslaught of twitchy-thumbed gamers for a moment of commercial frenzy – the release of Halo 3.

The final instalment in the hugely successful Halo video game series launches Sept. 25 for the Xbox 360. More than 500 retailers in Canada will open at midnight for the launch of Halo 3, which already has one million preorders in North America – making it the fastest-selling preordered game in history.

IGN's GamerMetrics analyst Nick Williams predicts Halo 3, made by Microsoft's Bungie Studios, will sell more than 4 million copies in the U.S. alone in the next two months.

This is a franchise with such tremendous buzz, consumer tech bible Wired magazine – which has Halo's protagonist Master Chief on its cover this month – is calling it "a cultural touchstone, a Star Wars for the thumbstick generation."

"It's a game series you could really rally behind because they're easy to get into, yet difficult to master," says Jeff Gerstmann, editorial director for GameSpot.com, an online video game magazine. "Plus they have a good story, a likeable main character and multiplayer gaming over the Internet."

Sharma McCarthy, a 31-year-old project manager for a Toronto telecommunications company, says his passion for the series derives from its "super-involved story."

"No other game plays like it, in terms of look and feel. Bungie has an amazing level of detail."

For the uninitiated, Halo 3 continues Master Chief's fight against relentless alien races bent on destruction, concluding the story arc that began with 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo 3 offers new features including a four-player co-operative mode (letting gamers run through the single-player campaign with up to three friends, either on the same TV or over the Xbox Live online service); the ability to record game highlights; and new multiplayer maps.

"We know we have a pop-culture phenomenon on our hands here," says Ryan Bidan, product manager of games at Microsoft Canada.

"But despite its epic story and scope, our goal with Halo 3 is to make the game as accessible to as many people."

The Halo games have spawned comic books, novels, action figures, live-action short films and an undisclosed project involving the Academy Award-winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson.

To ensure the continued commercial success of this billion-dollar franchise, Microsoft has spent an estimated $10 million on its marketing campaign, says BrandWeek magazine, including TV spots during Monday Night Football, summer concert sponsorships and promotional deals inked with PepsiCo, 7-Eleven, Burger King, Pontiac, NASCAR and others.

Developed at Kirkland, Wash.,-based Bungie Studios, Halo 3 was created by 120 full-time employees – double the number that developed Halo 2 – as well as an "army" of part-time contractors, says Microsoft.

To tweak the multiplayer component of Halo 3, Microsoft held a widely publicized beta test this past spring, allowing more than 820,000 gamers to join online multiplayer matches for free.

Mike Zak, a B.C.-born designer at Bungie, says the pressure from the outside world to produce a game that lives up to the hype is nothing compared to what the team puts upon itself.

"We're our own worst critics," says Zak. "We're fortunate our fans are so appreciative but, truthfully, the real pressure comes from within our walls to create the best possible interactive entertainment experience possible. We're anxious to hear if we delivered."

The video game industry is facing a lot of "sequelitis" this coming season, says Gerstmann, with Guitar Hero 3 and the fourth Grand Theft Auto, which shouldn't make fans of the originals nervous.

"(Games) are one of the few forms of entertainment where the sequels are usually better than the originals."

That's what McCarthy is hoping he'll get on Tuesday – and he's not taking any chances.

"I have bought a couple of preorders ($70 apiece) to make sure I'm not that guy who doesn't get one. "On Monday night, me and my friends are having a farewell to Halo 2 party where we'll be playing it one last time. I've been online every day downloading podcasts, watching videos, reading articles, I even made my own Halo 3 T-shirts ... My friends are even more nuts than me ... (one) stocked up a wine fridge with Red Bull and PowerBars and we're all going online in the middle of the night (after picking up the Halo 3 preorder), and promised not to go to sleep until we all finished campaign in co-op mode."