With impending release of Blizzard’s (NASDAQ:ATVI) new expansion for World of Warcraft, Warlords of Draenor, what better way to celebrate than with a custom case mod?  Mnpctech’s pro case modder Bill Owen takes an Antec Eleven Hundred case and builds a case worthy of the Iron Horde.

The new expansion for World of Warcraft is Warlords of Draenor, and it comes out on November 13th.  There is no doubt that tonight will be a sleepless night for millions of World of Warcraft players.  In fact crowds are forming in-game at the Dark Portal waiting for the expansion to go live.  What has been a good way for players to channel their anxiety of the upcoming release?  Well tributes to the game are a good place to start, and there are few tributes to PC games better than case mods.

Antec Eleven Hundred pre-mod

Nothing says dedication in the PC enthusiast arena more than well thought out custom case mods.  This is something the average person can do to their case to make it unique and stand apart from others.  The best time to really take in case mods is at an event such as a lanparty where many people bring their custom works to display and play on.  There is a big industry catering to those who chose to create unique PCs, and one of those companies is Mnpctech.  It sells supplies, tools, and other parts to mod PCs with, and they also have a staff that are expert PC modders.  Their work has been featured in many magazines and websites around the world.

Bill Owen, the founder of Mnpctech and pro modder created a case to celebrate the new expansion.  He did so with an Antec Eleven Hundered, parts from his company, and a lot of hard work and paint.  The build log is a fun one to look at and see how the build came together.  The end result looks amazing and the case ends up looking like it was built from a blacksmith out of iron.

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Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) has recently published its third quarter 2014 financial report, and the results are bleak. The game developer’s losses are widening, amid change in consumer preference toward mobile games rather than browser-based ones.

For the quarter ended September 30th, 2014, Zynga reported a loss of $57.1 million, a stark difference from the $68,000 loss reported in the same period last year. Loss per share for Q3 2014 was $0.06 per share, widening from the $0.01 per share loss in the same period the previous year. The company actually beat analyst expectations for revenue, with $176.6 million compared to the expected $171.7 million. Quarterly revenue fell 13% compared to Q3 2013, however.

According to CEO Don Mattrick, the company has been focusing on improving its mobile bookings — sales of in-game items and mobile ad impressions. In fact, this has increased 10% sequentially in Q3 2014, and such mobile bookings make up 55% of the total across the company’s browser- and mobile-based assets. The company expects total bookings for the year to be between $695 to $725 million — a figure adjusted down from an initial estimate of $770 to $810 million.

However, Zynga is still struggling in maintaining its user base. The number of daily active users shrank 13% year-on-year to 26 million, down from 30 million in 2013 and 60 million in 2012, when the company’s share value peaked on high hopes of launching another hit game series like Farmville.

Zynga also released updates to its game titles in September, which it says has contributed to the decline in popularity, given user difficulty in adjusting to new user interfaces, as well as non-support for some older mobile devices. With this in mind, Mattrick says the company will need to “We need to  improve our execution in terms of product quality and audience growth,” he said during investor guidance.

So far, Zynga has launched a new version of Poker and Words With Friends, as well as new title NFL Showdown. The company has also introduced Looney Tunes Dash into select markets and plans a wider release during the year. Even with these efforts, however, the former hit-maker has yet to find another means to revitalize its business. While Zynga had been the star of the show on social networks in its heyday, the struggle today is finding its niche — and another hit — amid the rise of mobile devices as the best platform for reaching out to a wide audience. Analysts believe the stock is a risky proposition, given the company’s mounting losses and challenges.

Feature image credit: 360b / Shutterstock.com

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Does violence in games really have an effect on gamers after all?

A recent study at the University of Tokyo reopens this long time issue in video games, albeit with a little twist. If you’re a gamer, don’t worry. This won’t be about reflected behaviors and supposed killer instinct issues, though some of it may sound a little bit familiar.

The research’s primary objective is to find out some of the long term neurological effects of violent video games.  In order to learn more about this, the researchers sampled a small group of adult men and women, and gave them one popular, mainstream violent and one non-violent game. The sample group were instructed to play the game for one month for about 20-30 minutes each day, or within a total play time of about 16 hours during the entire experiment period.

During the experiment, the sample group were given questionnaires to answer and had their brains scanned for every week and about three months after the experiment was done. What the researchers have found out is that the sample group tended to react more to hostile expressions and situations after playing the violent video game sample. According to the brain scans, this increased sensitivity to angry emotional responses persisted for as long as three months after the experiment period.

The experiment notes that these were simply reactions to hostility and not hostile reactions themselves. Although the written questionnaires suggest that there a few emotional responses that showed anger after playing the video game, this was only limited to the male sample group, and was temporary in nature.

The researchers admit that there are still a lot of unaccounted variables involved, but they did emphasize that the experiment showed little or no correlation between the brain’s sensitivity to angry emotional responses (when it comes to video games) and to its actual tendency to trigger an angry emotional response.

The topic of violence in video games has been the source of heated debates in the past few decades. Mortal Kombat, one of the first controversial video games that dealt with this issue, eventually became the catalyst to what is now known as the ESRB rating system. Since then, the topic has been of particular interest in the field of neuroscience, with research topics usually involving the stimuli given by these kinds of interactive activities.

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We only wonder how much time NPD will spend to finally start tracking online game sales… that would be a major contributor to the actual fact sheet – as we all know, games are selling online like hotcakes, while PC retailers are lagging behind. And yet, in the “lagging behind” segment, Spore and Warhammer beat favorites in sales.
Once more, these stats are for North America only (received some comments in the past about WW rankings, had to clarify).

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