Video Games

It's a new style of pimping. Instead of selling their bodies, or busting their backs digging ditches, some Chinese prisoners are forced to play World of Warcraft and pass the winnings on to cruel prison guards.

Back when they were signing and selling licensed comics, Tokyopop put out some World of Warcraft manga-sized graphic novels. Unlike other material lost in the diaspora of the company (which is officially closing down next week) these comics are still owned by Blizzard, and are being released digitally by Cryptozoic, the newish entertainment company headed up by Cory Jones, formerly of Blizzard, and John Nee, formerly of DC. Two Warcraft GNs and one Starcraft GN are available on Cryptozoic's app for free for right now.

It's international Women's Day, yo. To celebrate, let's watch this video of Judi Dench (M) interrogating Daniel Craig (uh, James Bond) who appears in drag. "We're equals, aren't we, 007?" asks Dame Dench. Let's also look at the day in nerd gender relations. There was much tweeting yesterday about the new TCJ.com and the number of lady contributors. Melinda Beasi at Manga Bookshelf sums up the whole thing, and the comments have it out and then everyone sat down and ate a hearty lunch.

No surprise at these licenses: Telltale Games, the innovative downloadable video game company, has signed on to produce games for both THE WALKING DEAD and FABLES, joining BACK TO THE FUTURE and JURASSIC PARK on their slate.

Hard to believe it's been a decade since this, one of the very earliest of internerd memes. Someone set us up the bomb. Then this was piquant and fresh. Now it's Tosh.0. Luckily the internet is being used for more useful things, like toppling dictators. UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, the original flash was made by BadCRC of Tribalwar.com.

Despite the fact that popular apps on iPhones can read our private data and sell them to the highest bidder, we just can't get enough of such time-voids as Angry Birds. And now we can look upon them in Lego form and feel even more sated.

Cross-over everywhere: cartoonists Karl Kerschl and Cameron Stewart talk about how they created a comic that expands the universe of the wildly popular video game, Assassin's Creed. In keeping with all the transmedia stuff you're always hearing about, they were given quite a bit of latitude to create their own characters and give the spin-off their own spin. ASSASSIN'S CREED: THE FALL will run three issues and be published by Ubisoft.

You hardly need us to tell you this, but there is a special Halloween-themed, 45-level bonus Angry Birds game that just went on sale for $.99. Angry Birds is an obsession around Stately Beat Manor, and paired with our other obsession, Halloween, it means that we'll be posting even LESS soon, if that is possible.

A story in The Hollywood Reporter suggests that China is looking to get bigger in the international animation/comics field: Leading the charge is the city of Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province in southwest China. Since...

Late last night Twitter flared with anger over a post entitled How to hire an artist by a designer of Flash-based computer games. Although we usually don't quote things so extensively, it seems that running enough of an excerpt to get the whole story is important here (plus is may be taken down). This is what the author, Christopher Gregorio, has to say about selecting an artist for a game project:

Sony Online Entertainment has a lot going on for this November's launch of the DC Universe Online game, including a fan event featuring Jim Lee and Marv Wolfman and a block party at SOE's hq. VIP Beta keys will be available at all the events, as well.

The Beat is contractually not allowed to pay attention to video games, but the E3 convention just wrapped up and we'll just direct you to iFanboy's E3 2010 Comic Game News Roundup which...