-According to Wired’s Game/Life, MarioKart Wii fails to live up to excited fanboy expectations. Bummer. Apparently dumbed down for the Wii market, it lacks battle mode, which is Chris Kohler’s biggest gripe. Personally, I have lots of fond memories of losing precious balloons through my own stupidity (”I know, I’ll shoot this shell directly into the wall in front of me. It’ll be great!”), so I too will be sad to see it go. Kohler reports that racing is still fun though–as if Mario characters on motorbikes could ever be boring.

-Maybe it’s the Star Trek: Next Generation dork in me talking, but there’s something strangely sad about Will Wheaton, isn’t there? I mean, he was a veritable engineering boy wonder. Yes, yes, that was his character on a fictional show, but still. Now apparently he’s collecting LEGO figurines of himself and getting drunk. Or something. Plus he’s 35 now. 35! Okay, I know he can’t help that, but how is he supposed to fit into his little, red spandex outfit now?

Happy weekend!

As Gerard Jones pointed out, respectable adults with either reputations or children may be hesitant to add a group to their profile that implies that they get off on video games. Personally, I have neither a reputation to uphold (except the one for being dirty-minded and silly) nor a child, but if you’re going for the subtle approach, at least become a fan of the business page. It helps spread the word about the site. Or maybe it builds Heroine Sheik fan solidarity. Or maybe it adds to the ever-growing hoard that is Facebook. But I know it does something…

Ray, previously of $pread Magazine and still running her site Waking Vixen, has started up a sex blog called Naked City. Along with a few equally candid, equally tantalizing quest bloggers, she is covering everything from sexy men in kilts to fun new porn to how to make a bed designed for bondage. The site is a must read for anyone who’s interested in sex. Don’t deny it. If you’re hanging around here, we know where your mind is…

I was teaching a lesson that required students to walk up to the board one by one. However, I couldn’t figure out why they kept stopping to stare at my desk. Eventually I realized it was because I’d left out my keys. Like a proper dork, I have an Nintendo 64 controller key chain on my keys–which, sickeningly enough, matches an equally adorable like N64 Scott keeps on his. When I held it up to ask what was so fascinating, my hooligans proclaimed, “Madame, c’est vieux ça!” (the equivalent of “Wow, that’s old!”). They then proceeded to ask me what rock I’d been living under since the year 1996.

As the words “retro” and “fangirl pride” don’t make it into the French national ESL vocabulary, I let the issue go at “Si c’est vieux, moi aussi, je suis vieille” (”If it’s old, I’m old too”). Still, I was only eleven when the N64 came out, and I loved the living daylights out of that thing. Not only should these whipper snappers learn some basic math, they should have more respect for the roots of the games they play today–whether or not they played them themselves.

Wow, I feel like I should get a rocking chair and stick an handful of unwrapped lemon candies in my pocket. In my day, there was no such thing as online play, plus we walked to school uphill both ways…

As predicted, the latest installment in the GTA series is already stirring up controversy. Is it too violent? Is it corrupting our kids? Is it horribly sexist? The ability to sleep with prostitutes–and to kill them–is definitely back (though all online video clips have been removed). What I want to talk about isn’t the mind-numbingly overdone sex scandals associated with this wildly talked about game though. My question is simple: what does it mean that our new protagonist is white?

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas raised eyebrows with its black protagonist–in particular, it’s pairing of violence and race. While black characters are hardly unheard of in video games, they’re certainly rarer than their white counterparts. And given the inflammatory nature of GTA itself, the gun-wielding CJ couldn’t help but incite the question, “As a contemporary American, what does it mean to play a black male in a world based around violence?”

With Grand Theft Auto IV, however, the next major series release from Take-Two, we’re facing the opposite question. Instead of an African-American protagonist, we have Niko, a Serbian immigrant. Because of his nationality, he still comes weighted with stereotypes, but he is most certainly white. So what does it mean for us as players–or for the game’s designers–that our avatar has switched races?

Maybe it means nothing (as if anything ever meant nothing). After all, there are still black characters in GTA IV who are also involved in the world of crime. Maybe the race switched occurred just to mix things up, not to make players less racially uncomfortable–or even suspect. Readers who’ve been playing the new game, any thoughts on how it feels to play this time around?

-Personally, I’ll be bringing voluntary pain upon myself in the coming days by heading up the Women in Games International’s annual fund raiser. In all seriousness, I’m really psyched to be getting off my butt and actually working with an awesome organization like WIGI–instead of just writing about it. Now who’d like to hand over some cash? Huh? Huh?

-And in unrelated, though downright impressive news, Wonderland reports that there are now more than 100 virtual worlds specifically oriented at players under the age of eighteen. That’s a lot of Club Penguins, people. Uncomfortable as it may, it’s also all the more reason for researchers to head into those world and observe first hand whether they really are as sexually “safe” as they’re supposed to be. Also, it’s an excuse to player Connect Four with nine-year-olds.

Happy Weekend!

Fellow sex tech writer Damon Brown, currently of Playboy, is coming out with an exciting new book this fall called Porn and Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture. Brown specializes in pop culture, so it seems his focus will be on tracing sex content through gaming history, as well as tying it to the influence of the porn industry. A quote from Playboy’s senior editor on his site implies he might also be taking the “pornography is the secret engine that drives the adoption of most modern technology” angle–an idea we’ve talked about around here many a time.

Check in again soon for a Click Me interview with Brown–about his book, his thoughts on Grand Theft Auto IV, and his vision for sex games in the future.

The site, which I featured in a Click Me last year, posts photo sets of female models–photo sets which, Zivity’s PR insists, are not porn, despite their flirty nature and, well, nudity. The way the site works is this: members buy votes for a dollar a piece so they can vote on which photo sets they like. The models and photographers then get a cut of each dollar voted.

Interesting idea, but since you can see all the photo sets without paying a cent, what’s the real incentive of buying votes? The site is still in closed beta, so it’s hard to say for sure, but it seems the economic thinking may not pan out. For exampe, at the moment the top model has 926 votes–and that’s for seven sets. Since Zivity takes 20 cents of each dollar as commission, that means the model, “Pearl,” and her photographer are splitting between them $740.80: only a little over a hundred bucks a set.

With that said, I have to admit I’m enjoying looking through the 100+ photo sets that are already up. What I like most is the variety of models. While there are plenty of busty, blond beauties, there’s also a nice selection of forms we don’t normally get to see in erotic photography. In a set titled “Breaking a Sweat,” a young woman shows off her lean, muscular body as she trains for a boxing matching. In another, a pale girl with dreadlocks, two lip rings, a polka-dotted dress rolls a collection of marbles across her bed–and her nearly flat upper half.

Of course, not all the sets are perfect. Many could use trimming (no, we don’t need to see the same picture three times from minutely different angles), and some do a better job at telling a story than others. In the overall though, all are well-light, well-framed: high quality. And the number of women I’ve seen in cabaret gear and kinky corsets is enough to make up for a whole slew of other issues…

If you’re interested, you can go to Zivity and sign up for the closed beta. I’ll also be sure to let you know when the site officially opens its doors to the public. Pretty girls with dreadlocks for all!

According to Abram, Xstream3D’s North American marketing and business representative, PC-only Virtually Jenna has been in ongoing development for the last five years. In fact, it won’t be officially finished until 2010—despite opening its doors to the paying public in 2005. Add in a two-million-dollar budget, says Abram, and that explains why his game looks better than any other sex sim on the market. It also explains why, for their $29.99 a month, players get regular updates supplementing the game’s simple, self-proclaimed goal of making girls “suck and fuck hard and wild.”

I can’t even imagine the amount of work these guys do, considering Xstream3D runs at least five versions of Virtually Jenna with different “skins”–including a three-dimensional hentai game. Serious props for range, folks!

GTA IV’s predecessor, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas not only sparked the infamous Hot Coffee debacle–in which parents, politicians, and media members alike made an absurd fuss over a hack-able sex mini game included on the game disc–it also put sex workers up in arms. The violence in San Andreas apparently got directed not only at criminals and police people, but also at prostitutes. According to the Sex Workers Outreach Program, while censorship is bad, “accruing points to players for the depiction of the rape and murder of prostitutes” is even worse. Fair enough.

While I can’t help but think Take Two won’t be dumb enough to repeat Hot Coffee, who knows what their desire for publicity will do. Then there’s the question of in-game sex workers. The GTA IV trailers show the protagonist at what looks to be a strip club. And after playing a preview, The Guardian Gamesblog called it “a game of simply breathtaking scope, filled with wit and smut and beautifully engineered violence.” But just how violently smutty will things get?