The New York Times (registration required) has an analysis of several surgeons at Beth Israel Medical Center who utilize video games to improve their operating room hand-eye coordination. From the article: "The complex manual dexterity required to be a stellar video gamer and minimally invasive surgeon are strikingly similar, said Dr. Rosser, chief of minimally invasive surgery and director of the hospital's Advanced Medical Technology Institute."

A good week for MMOG gamers, as Star Wars Galaxies Patch 13.0 goes into effect, revamping the Galactic Civil War and making way for the Combat Upgrade. World of Warcraft players, likewise, should be happy to learn about future game developments in upcoming patches. There are a lot of folks in that last category, as Blizzard stated this week that they've sold more than 800,000 copies of WoW, making Warcraft the largest U.S. based MMOG. If you're interested in learning more about MMOG stats, SirBruce's mmogchart.com has recently been updated with new information. Speaking of learning, registration will begin soon for the academically inclined Games+Learning+Society conference to be held in Madison, Wisconsin. If the concept intrigues you there are only 200 passes to go around, so you'd best sign up early. Gamespot's weekly Rumor Control article certainly intrigues, and this week states that Half-Life 2's Alyx is likely to be a playable character in an upcoming expansion to the hit game. A female protagonist would be a nice change of pace. Women in games in general are a good thing, and GameGirlAdvance has a lengthy survey for women gamers and women in the games industry to fill out.

webmind writes "As some may know there is an open source firmware for the Archos jukebox and the iriver h1x0 harddisk mp3 players called Rockbox. now for the iriver version there is also a gnuboy port.. no more lugging around loads of gameboy cardridges, just upload and play."

karvind writes "Folks at Tomshardware> are running a review of ATI's new FireGL V5000. The card's X700 processor, code named R410GL, is based on a 110-nanometer process and the card sports eight pixel pipelines, six geometry engines, 128 MB of GDDR3 memory, dual DVI connectors for multi-display applications and dual link support for 9 megapixels displays. Anandtech also posted a review."

CanarDuck writes "Telltale games is a company founded last year by a trio of former Lucasarts employees. They have announced that they will develop a game based on Jeff Smith's popular comic series Bone. There is an interview at Adventuregamers discussing the title, and the fact that it will be a point and click adventure game."

Gamespot has the word that Nintendo will be allowing Japanese gamers a full taste of the DS' wireless capabilities. DS owners will be able to download content at kiosks in selected stores across Japan. From the article: "[Downlaoded] demos will remain on the DS units 'until power is turned off.' The one exception is some additional music for Jam with the Band. 'After turning off power, the [Jam with the Band] data remains,'"

Blue Ray writes "Both News Corp and Eidos have openly rubbished claims the the Murdoch behemoth will soon be absorbing the British publisher, corroborating a snippet in the Guardian's market forces column. In an article on SPOnG.com, News Corp stated "we've never held any kind of talks with Eidos", while an Eidos executive told the website "We read this and were astounded. We had no contact from the journalist who wrote the story and we are still laughing about what we read.""

TerraNova has the story that MUD1 co-designer Richard Bartle has been awarded the annual First Penguin Award. The award is given for exhibiting "the courage and bravery of a developer who is the first to test the proverbial waters, in the face of uncertainty of success or failure. Receiving a 'penguin' serves as an inspiration and lesson to the community."

Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of enjoying the "Dear Friends" concert of Final Fantasy music in Rosemont, Illinois. Composer Nobuo Uematsu is well known among game players for the intricate melodies that create the backdrop for most of the Final Fantasy titles. Even the older titles, 8-bit compositions though they were, made for evocative soundscapes. When taken into the hands of a skilled orchestra Uematsu's works are incredibly stirring pieces of music. Read on for my impressions from the start of the first U.S. concert series composed entirely of video game music. Update: 02/25 21:08 GMT by Z : Coincidentally, GamesIndustry.biz has an interview with Nobuo Uematsu available for perusal today.

smack-pot writes "March 2005 issue of Wired Magazine features The 2005 Wired Rave Awards announcements. The 15 categories include Films, Business, Science, Architecture, Medicine, Games etc. Some of the winners are Brad Bird for The Incredibles, Danger Mouse for The Grey Album, Burt Rutan for SpaceShipOne, and Pete Parsons for Halo 2."

Game technology developers Havok and Epic both plan to introduce the newest iterations of their systems at this year's GDC. Havok will be revealing the newest version of their middleware, while Epic Systems will be showing the Unreal Engine version 3 along with their new scripting tools and AI behaviors. From the article: "...seamless world support allows the creation of virtually unending environments through background management of game levels and assets. Even titles not requiring open world support will benefit from these memory management techniques on next-generation console platforms."

Swedish company Funcom has signed a deal with Massive, Inc to stream advertising into public areas of Rubi-Ka, the online world within Anarchy Online. Gamespot has the story. The ads are likely a direct result of the recent subscription free business model that the company has adopted for new players. From the article: "As consumers spends less time watching television and more time playing games (as indicated by numerous studies, including one from Nielsen), the game industry is turning its attention to understanding the potential to drive additional revenue from in-game advertising." Are all massive games going to be moving in this direction, or the direction that Guild Wars will take?

Anonymous Coward writes " Microsoft today announced that Hironobu Sakaguchi, video game legend and president of Mistwalker game studio, has joined with Microsoft(R) Game Studios to develop role-playing game (RPG) video games exclusively for the next- generation Xbox(R) video game platform. Sakaguchi is best known as the creator of the "Final Fantasy" franchise, which has sold more than 60 million units worldwide, and was executive vice president in charge of game development at Square Enix Co. Ltd. until February 2001."

MasterPlaid writes "A group of anonymous cowards (eningeers) has apparently constructed a four-story mural of scenes from the NES Super Mario games. The best part is, they did the whole thing out of Post-It Notes, recreating the wondeful pixellated goodness we expect from Super Mario. The idea for this mural seems to have originated in the Strong Bad email of the same name."

Gamasutra.com (news now registration free) has word that MMOG developer Webzen has received a friendly letter from Nintendo discussing the similarities screenshots of their upcoming game have with The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. The developer states that this is a coincidence resulting from the cell shades style of their game, and the particular hair and clothes show in published media. From the article: "a spokesperson from developer Webzen claims that the hero of the game does not have any fixed image, and is created by the player to be their avatar in the game world." Heads up courtesy your friendly neighborhood simoniker.

Voodoo Extreme has the story that talented development house Troika Games has closed its doors as a result of lack of funding for future projects. Rumours of their closure have circled for the last week or so, but today's announcement makes the closure official. Troika is best known for its table-top RPG adaptations, such as The Temple of Elemental Evil and games based on Vampire: The Masquerade. From the announcement: "We want to thank all of our fans for their support these past seven years, it has really meant a lot to us that there were people out there who enjoyed our games enough to create fan-sites and follow our progress as a company. But we especially want to thank all of our employees - we had the pleasure of working with the some of the most dedicated, hard working, creative people in the industry, and we really appreciate all that they did for Troika."

altodarknight writes "Ubisoft annouced today that they are developing the new America's Army game: 'America's Army: Rise of a Soldier'. Working with the US Army, it will be released summer 2005 on XBox and PS2. The only question is, will it be free like past AA games?"

An anonymous reader writes "Jobo AG originally fielded its $550 Giga Vu Pro as a tool for digital photography buffs, but this small embedded computer, running a Linux 2.4 kernel, has much broader potential, according to an article at LinuxDevices.com. A free software development kit for the device is now available at sourceforge.net, along with instructions for loading software into flash memory, a tutorial on turning the device into a Doom game console, and a contributions page for those willing to share their new apps."

GamesIndustry.biz has confirmed that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will be closing a deal with the United Kingdom publisher Eidos in the near future. This move has been seen by some as inevitable, as games become more popular and profitable. From the article: "Rumours that a deal was close to being struck initially stemmed from a number of tell-tale signs at the firm's offices - specifically a hiring freeze across the company, and reports that development studios have been told to prepare presentations on each of their projects for the new owners."

New site Xbox2News.com (via Evil Avatar) has up an interview with Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and recent AIAS inductee. During the course of the interview, he is asked what he sees as the future course for Nintendo. His answer? "My magic eight ball says they will be acquired by Microsoft within five years." Tycho has commentary on the man's forcasting abilities in today's post.