The Nintendo DSi was released in Japan on Saturday, and the initial production run of 200,000 units has already sold out. 1Up has done some comparisons to the DS, and they have a video feature tour of the new hardware (which, predictably, has already been hacked). The image editing software is reported to be rather bare-bones, and the browsing is slow, but both features could likely be used with games in interesting ways. Nintendo will be launching a series of WarioWare games to demonstrate the DSi's capabilities. The DSi will likely reach North America next summer.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese government will collect a 20% personal income tax on any profits obtained through the redistribution of virtual currency. The legislation is intended to curtail speculation in virtual markets, which can be quite profitable. Quoting: "The announcement, which was distributed to local tax bureaus, specifically takes aim at those who buy virtual currency from gamers and surfers and sell it to others at a mark-up. Taxation officials are granted the right to determine the original price of online virtual currency if the individual fails to provide proof of an original price, it says. The policy would cover China's legions of online gamers, who can use online virtual currency to buy better equipment and new powers for their online warriors. But it also affects millions of others who use virtual currencies on instant-messaging services and Web portals."

Valve announced yesterday that their extension of Steam, called Steam Cloud, will launch later this week with the Left 4 Dead demo. Steam Cloud is "a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC." We discussed an early announcement for it back in May. Valve adds that "Steam Cloud will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets."

Joystiq's Law of the Game column uses the recently released LittleBigPlanet to address the question of intellectual property rights for user-created content within and for games. At this point, Sony's ToS claims a great deal of control over users' work, unlike Second Life's, which is much more permissive. GiantBomb has a related story pointing out creations within LittleBigPlanet that are copies of other games, and how they could lead to legal troubles for Sony if they aren't quick about taking them down.

Gamasutra has a summary written by Dan Kline of Crystal Dynamics for this year's Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) Conference held at Stanford University. They discussed why AI capabilities have not scaled with CPU speed, balancing MMO economies and game mechanics, procedural dialogue, and many other topics. Kline also wrote in more detail about the conference at his blog. "... Rabin put forth his own challenge for the future: Despite all this, why is AI still allowed to suck? Because, in his view, sharp AI is just not required for many games, and game designers frequently don't get what AI can do. That was his challenge for this AIIDE — to show others the potential, and necessity, of game AI, to find the problems that designers are trying to tackle, and solve them."

An anonymous reader writes "This year's GenCon Charity Auction raised over $17,000 which they intended to donate to Gary Gygax's favorite charity, Christian Children's Fund. However, the charity refused the donation when they learned of its connection to Dungeons & Dragons." It seems to me all they would need to do is cast remove curse or dispel evil and the money would be fine to use.

the4thdimension writes "CNN is running a story this morning that explains new research showing a correlation between video games and aggression in children. The study monitored groups of US and Japanese children, asking them to rate their violent behavior over a period of several months while they played video games in their free time. The study concludes that it has 'pretty good evidence' that there is a link between video games and childhood aggression." Stories like this make me want to smash things.

theodp writes "Cross Halo with an exercise bike, and you get Expresso Fitness' S3, which lets you blow away dragons by squeezing handlebar-mounted triggers as you pedal hard through the Chinese countryside. Portfolio notes that a new generation of Wii-like workouts is hitting gyms and homes, with companies like GameRunner incorporating treadmills into First Person Shooters and Kickstart offering mini steppers and cycles for popular game systems."

Valve has announced that their upcoming horror game Left 4 Dead will have a demo available for play on November 11th. They've also released an impressive four-minute cinematic to show off the game's theme. Left 4 Dead is set to launch on November 18th, and if pre-order numbers are any indication, it will be even more popular than the Orange Box. CVG put together a short survival guide for dealing with those troublesome Infected, and Firing Squad did an interview with Turtle Rock Studios' Michael Booth, in which he mentioned that they want to be able to track stats through Steam so players are able to build a "reputation."

Dr. Zowie writes "The 10th annual Nethack Tournament just started over at nethack.devnull.net, so put on your Hawaiian shirt, grab an expensive camera, and head for the dungeon. The tourney runs through the month of November each year, with volunteer game servers dotted around the world. Fewer than 1% of contestants actually finish the game by retrieving the Amulet of Yendor and ascending to demigodhood, but take heart: there are many prizes for intermediate goals, and prizes for team effort. For those too young to remember games older than Halo, Nethack is the apotheosis of the Roguelike genre of role-playing games, rendered in ASCII. Gameplay is phenomenally complex, and the game is somewhat sadistic; there are no 'checkpoints,' so if you manage to kill yourself somewhere in the dungeon you must start over from the beginning. The dungeons are quasi-randomly generated, so every game is different."

KKnDz0r writes "Australian technology and gaming site 'Atomic' raises an interesting question about the dangers of MMOs that go bust. Are they part of a new breed of games that render themselves completely useless and without value if the parent company goes belly-up? It certainly seems that way in some cases, with Fury and now Hellgate: London both going to software heaven, leaving a player base holding relatively useless client software." While it's certainly not an issue for the large, continuously successful MMOs, we've lately seen a huge influx of companies trying to grab a slice of the MMO pie, some of which will inevitably fail. It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so?

Earlier this week, Bethesda released Fallout 3 after a long campaign of defending and protecting the game's reputation from claims that it contained inappropriate content. Ads for the game in Washington DC's subway system were pulled after they upset some touchy travelers over the depiction of post-apocalyptic Washington landmarks. Shortly before the game's release, early trailers were removed as well. Earlier this year, the game was banned in Australia for its in-game use of morphine, causing the drug's name to be changed to Med-X. On the issue of sensitive content, Bethesda's Emil Pagliarulo wrote in Edge Magazine about the design decision to disallow the killing of children in the game. Gamasutra ran an opinion piece on the same subject, and the Washington Post discusses the role of Washington DC in Fallout 3. On the DRM front, the game does come with SecuROM, but Bethesda says it's only used for a disc check. Reviews for the game have been overwhelmingly positive so far, despite reports of bugs with the save system and occasional lock-ups.

cyrus_zuo points out the October edition of the Indie Game Round-up, where four reviewers give their opinions on ten recent independently produced games. This month, their top choice was Multiwinia, a casual, abstract take on multiplayer RTS. The second installment of the Strong Bad series also scored high, as did a side-scrolling platformer called Archibald's Adventures. "The levels are short and sweet, the graphics are cartoon-y and clear and the challenges fit in wonderfully with the paradigm of a young hero attached to a skateboard. The puzzles are all timing and creative thinking and can really be taken on by anyone of any skill level. Also, since levels can tackled in any order (you have large chunks available at a time), you can jump around if you get stuck."

Eurogamer has an in-depth look at the new Xbox Experience, which is coming on November 19th. They discuss the new interface and features, and their reaction is generally positive, citing graphical improvements, smooth file management, and better chat functionality. "The Guide is also your access point to the new Party system, where you can gather eight of your friends together in a voice-chat channel and move the group between games. You don't even have to be doing the same thing: you can just chat along regardless. And because it's a service layer, it automatically works with all your existing games. Gears of War treats it like it's always been there. Instead of inviting a player, you invite the group; instead of ending a session and having to reassemble for another, you stay together. You can open it up to friends or set it to be invite-only, and while it's one of NXE's quieter additions, it's also its most authoritative statement: this is Microsoft saying, 'We figured we might need to do something like this, so we made sure we could.'"

Gamasutra is running an article discussing the influence of games and gamers on the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The connection, while minor, is continuing to strengthen, from allowing people to register to vote through their consoles, to in-game advertising, to games about and involving the candidates. However, it may still be an uphill climb as media-sharing becomes easier. From Gamasutra: "There are reasons games have grown slowly compared to other technologies for political outreach. The most important one is also the most obvious: since 2004, online video and social networks have become the big thing, as blogs were four years ago. Instead of urging voters to 'play my game,' as Loftus and I surmised, candidates urged their constituents to 'watch my video.' Online video became the political totem of 2008, from James Kotecki's dorm room interviews to CNN's YouTube debates."

eldavojohn writes "It's a topic that a lot of game makers like Atari don't want the public hearing: game makers wrongfully accusing clearly innocent people of piracy. From the article, 'According to Michael Coyle, an intellectual property solicitor with law firm Lawdit, more and more people are being wrongly identified as file-sharers. He is pursuing 70 cases of people who claim to be wrongly accused of piracy and has spoken to hundreds of others, he told the BBC.' If only a few are coming forward after receiving extortion letters ('Pay £500 OR ELSE!'), what's the actual number of those out there being wrongfully accused?"

An anonymous reader writes "A post on the EA Support Forums from APOC, online community manager for Electronic Arts, outlines a new policy for their new forums, saying users who earn a ban based on their behavior in the forums will be locked out of all of the EA games tied to that account: 'Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned. Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since it's all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature. All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but it's what we have to do.'" Update: 10/31 12:36 GMT by T : Not so! Pandanapper writes "After a flood of complaints the EA community moderator APOC corrects his statement about how banning you from the forums bans you from your game access as well:"That said, the previous statement I made recently (that's being quoted on the blogs) was inaccurate and a mistake on my part. I had a misunderstanding with regards to our new upcoming forums and website and never meant to infer that if we ban or suspend you on the forums, you would be banned in-game as well. This is not correct, my mistake, my bad."

eldavojohn writes "Nintendo icon Shigeru Miyamoto stated in an interview that 'What I've been saying to our development teams recently is that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was not a bad game, by any means. But, still, it felt like there was something missing. And while, personally, I feel like Super Mario Galaxy was able to do some things that were very unique, at the same time, from another perspective, certain elements of it do feel somewhat conservative. This is something I've been talking to both of those teams about ... hopefully [the next Mario and Zelda] will feel newer and fresher than their most recent versions.' MTV Multiplayer also commented on Portal's mechanics and gameplay, to which Miyamoto responded, 'I think Portal was an amazing game, too.' GameSetWatch has a related article criticizing Nintendo for relying on the Wii's input devices to develop game franchises rather than improving actual gameplay."

1Up reports on a patent recently awarded to Sony for a game controller that fits together in several different ways to accommodate different types of gameplay. It also appears to make use of motion-sensing technology, much like the Wiimote. "This new controller isn't just another revision of the Sixaxis; rather, it looks like a complete overhaul of the form and function of the device, resembling a pair of ice cream cones more than Sony's ubiquitous Dual Shock. The images accompanying the patent display two Wii-like remotes with removable button faceplates, topped off with strange, bulb-like shapes. These glowing, spherical structures house LEDs and ultrasonic sound emitters, which would allow the PlayStation Eye camera to determine the controllers' positions in three-dimensional space."

eldavojohn writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that MTV's Rock Band has gained the licenses to an undetermined number of songs. Details are scant, but it would be nice to see a whole game based on just the evolution of The Beatles' music. According to Reuters, this has been in the works for months. Hopefully I can finally hide my strained vocals to so many beautiful songs within the privacy of my home instead of drunk off my ass at a bar."