pete314 wrote to say that "Electronic Arts had broken its WWDC promise to launch games for OS X on the same day as the Windows version." Thankfully, the company has come through, with four new titles now available for order: Battlefield 2142, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Need for Speed Carbon, and Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars . Thanks to mr100percent for the update.

Lord Aramil of Dreadwood writes "Blogger and Dragon magazine writer Jonathan Drain is tracking the latest developments on the new D&D edition. Highlights include: Thirty levels instead of twenty, no more XP costs for magic items creation, flexible talent trees replacing feats and prestige classes, a new racial bonuses system that obsoletes ECL, and an end to rubbish skills like Forgery and Use Rope. A quote from the blog: 'Unlike 3.5, all the changes this time around sound like they're definitely for the better... If nothing else, at least they have the opportunity to get rid of Mialee.'"

Wowzer writes to mention that MTV is planning to invest over $500 million in video games over the next two years. In addition to incorporating games into all new programming plans, MTV is also seeking "ways to link their upcoming game Rock Band to its traditional cable networks and Web properties. But they are fearful of alienating players by cramming TV and other content into the game."

bigstrat2003 writes "For the past day, Wizards of the Coast has had a countdown to "4dventure" on their web site. The countdown ran out at 6:30 eastern time today (and the web site promptly crashed), but stories are already appearing on the rest of the web. Wizards also has had their 4th edition forums up for a couple of days."

Jamie found another MIT Technology review story, this time about Chess, Supercomputing, Garry Kasparov, and trying to make sense of just what exactly it all meant when a computer finally beat a grand master. An interesting piece that touches on what it means to play chess, the difference between humanity and machinery and how super computers don't care when they are losing. Worth your time.

An anonymous reader writes "Cory Banks at Gamers With Jobs has an interesting look at Irrational Games becoming '2K Boston'/'2K Australia' on the eve of the Bioshock release. It's not just about 2K and Irrational, publishers re-naming independents to generic studio names has obviously been going on for a long time. 'Rockstar Games is often credited with the Grand Theft Auto series, but the games were developed by Scottish developer DMA Designs, who were bought by Rockstar in 2002, shortly after GTA III came out, and quickly renamed Rockstar North to build up the brand recognition associated with the mega-blockbuster. Rockstar isn't even a development company at all, but a collection of development studios owned by Take-Two, sharing one brand name. The general public hardly knows the difference.'"

David Greenspan writes "Video games are no longer exclusive to a consumer market. Business Week has an article on the new trend of big business willing to pay millions for custom-made games. The casual market has inspired folks in business to realize the broad appeal of games, and some of the possibilities inherent to the medium. As a result, business games are now big business. From the article: 'To reach the billion-dollar mark, the market will have to overcome the common wisdom that games are inherently not serious. A serious games market will also require game developers to shift from the traditional business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business one. Today when major studios and publishers are approached by companies interested in commissioning, say, an employee-training game based on a successful commercial title, more often than not those studios and publishers decline. Even if the interested company is offering $5 million, it's not worth the gamemakers' time to divert engineers from a commercial title likely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.'"

drxenos writes "I don't know how many of you are fans of old-school text adventures (interactive fiction), but Will Crowther's original Fortran source code has been located in a backup of Don Woods's old student account. For fans like me, this is like finding the Holy Grail."

Chris Kohler and Chris Baker of Wired had the deeply unfortunate task of watching Uwe Boll's latest affront to cinema and gaming: Postal. Kohler has a rundown on the exceedingly strange movie and its premiere. "Boll seems out to shock his audience into stunned disbelief rather than actually entertain them. Early in the movie, we get a long, leisurely shot of a fully nude Foley scratching his reproductive organs. I don't want to sound like I personally was offended or shocked by anything. In fact, the only time I laughed was during the movie's opening sequence, a comedy skit in the cockpit of one of the September 11 airplanes (they're fighting over the number of virgins they get in Paradise). It was legitimately well-paced and funny. But it was followed by 90 minutes of flat jokes." Baker has a much more in-depth look at Boll and the film's background ... if that's something you really want to hear about.

Opposable Thumbs has the gist of a report indicating that in-game ads really are successful at increasing consumer interest in a product. "In a study that began in 2004 and included 600 gamers, gaming-advertisement firm Massive Inc.--a subsidiary of Microsoft--found that in-game advertising increased average brand familiarity as much as 64 percent. The study included two groups: a control group and a test group. Both played Need for Speed: Carbon, but only the test group was exposed to ads from Massive Inc. The study showed a 69 percent increase in automotive purchase consideration between the test and control groups made up of men between 18 and 24. The respondents also indicated that 'quick service restaurant' brands were 'cool' because they were advertised in games ('cool' is left undefined)."

The CA games bill struck down last week to cheers is currently in a holding pattern as Governor Schwarzenegger works on an appeal. His decision to fight the judiciary is coming under fire from several sources. The ESA has mounted a campaign against the initiative through its Videogame Voters Network. Even the media is objecting, with an opinion in the LA Times telling the governor not to bother. "Having made a career off fantasy violence, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an odd advocate for the regulation of violent video games. After all, his face (and, sometimes, his voice) helps to sell a number of electronic kill-fests. Yet there he was last week, pledging to appeal a federal judge's decision against a state law banning the sale of such games to minors."

GameDaily reports that the PlayStation Portable has an interesting restriction: its full processor power cannot be utilized at the same time as its WiFi functionality. Therefore, games that are played online cannot make use of the chip's 333mhz processor speed. The original finding from Beyond 3D was confirmed to GameDaily by Sony. Dave Karraker, Sr. Director, Corporate Communications: "The recent firmware upgrade (3.50) that removed the restriction on the PSP's CPU speed enables developers to utilize speeds either lower or higher than the default 222MHz, up to the full 333MHz clock speed. The article is correct that increased CPU speed cannot be used with the PSP's wireless feature." Though speculation is that this is a power-saving decision, there has been no official announcement as to the root cause.

mozen writes "The BBC has an article up discussing the effects of videogames on the mind and how the media are reluctant to talk more openly about violent games. From the article: 'People who've grown up with Mario see him keeping pace, running and jumping along the building tops that streak by on a train journey. At best, it's a pleasant daydream — a happy reminder of a pastime you enjoy, and at worst, it's a mild distraction. Until, that is, you swap the games around. What if my screen dreams aren't of something so patently harmless as Puzzle Quest? What if they're of the stealth kills in Manhunt?'"

News for nerds writes "The official Sony Playstation blog posted the game server details of the upcoming online shooter game Warhawk. Interestingly the game's Ranked Dedicated servers, available in addition to user-hosted PS3 servers, are hosted in rack-mounted PS3 clusters."

An anonymous reader writes "A poster on DVDTalk and CheapAssGamer has posted the weekly ads for Circuit City, Best Buy, and Target ahead of time for the last few years. A few weeks ago he confirmed that there was an intended price break on the PS3 and stole Sony's thunder from E3. A Circuit City ad was used for confirmation. Circuit City has threatened DVDTalk and CheapAssGamer.com to give them personal information about the poster. CheapAssGamer has hired a lawyer and is going to fight. The story is similar to the Black Friday ads being posted early and FatWallet fighting back."

You may recall the recent announcement of Silicon Knights' suit against Epic over the Unreal engine. The Escapist reports that Epic is firing back, launching a countersuit against SK and claiming this is all just a ploy to renegotiate their licensing deal. "In its counter-suit, however, Epic says that Silicon Knights was aware that the Unreal Engine 3 was still under development when the licensing deal was signed, and that new features would continue to be added as part of Epic's development of Gears of War. 'SK's lawsuit is a pretense,' [Epic's Mark] Rein said in his statement. 'SK does not have any valid claims against Epic. SK filed suit in a bid to renegotiate the License Agreement, in the hope that Epic will prefer that to the burden of responding to discovery and associated adverse publicity.' Epic is seeking minimum compensatory damages in excess of $650,000, as well as other injunctive relief."

MojoKid writes "id's keynote address from this past week's Quakecon featured John Carmack revealing details of the id tech 5 engine. For more on the subject, GamesIndustry.biz has an interview with id developer Steve Nix about the project. 'I know that when we started working with Splash Damage on Enemy Territory they wanted large, detailed outdoor terrains, and they had some ideas on how to dynamically load the textures and everything, and John [Carmack] said, 'Why don't we try this new approach and make the entire terrain one massive texture, and then just load blocks of texture in dynamically that you can see at any one given time?' So John did the initial work on it, got it up and running, and it just so happened that that work was the basis for what we have in id Tech 5.'"

Gamespot reports that Halo 3 has broken the all-time record for videogame preorders in North America. There are now more than 1 million copies of the title reserved across the continent. "The figure means that the Halo 3 launch could potentially be bigger than that of Halo 2. The then-Xbox-exclusive sold 2.38 million units in the US and Canada in the 24 hours after went on sale on November 16, 2004, generating an estimated $125 million. Halo 3 preorder customers' passion for the game is such that cost is apparently no object. As part of today's announcement, Microsoft warned that, despite its premium price point, the collectible Halo 3: Legendary Edition is on track to sell out before the game launches. The bundle, which includes a miniaturized version of the Master Chief's helmet, retails for $129.99 in the US, but is already sold out at several online retailers in the UK."

deadmantyping writes "Ars Technica reports on a survey of 6,260 responses which indicates that only 40 percent of PS3 owners knew that their console included Bluray. Apparently a large portion of gamers aren't aware of the non-gaming capabilities of their systems. Ars speculates that this might help explain Nintendo's apparent dominance in the console market since their introduction of the Wii."

simoniker writes "Discussing PR and the media, former Rockstar Games PR rep Todd Zuniga discusses how the company tried to manipulate the game press as part of an in-depth article on how the two forces interact: "In part, it's a numbers game... Otherwise, it's history. Who wrote negatively about the games, and who hasn't? We never worked with [gaming website] GameSpot while I was there because 'they just didn't get it.'... Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: 'Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U'.""