News for nerds writes "The BBC has news about the next-generation game consoles, with comments from various third parties. According to Rory Armes, studio general manager of EA in Europe, they have already received the development kits from Microsoft, but not yet from Sony and Nintendo. He assumes Sony's PlayStation 3 will have a little more under the hood and be more cost-efficient than Microsoft's Xbox 2. Gerhard Florin, head of EA in Europe, remarks 'PS3 will provide graphics indistinguishable from movies.' Spider-Man 2 or Toy Story 2, that's the problem."

Gamegossip has the word that IDW Publishing, the same folks who do the Silent Hill and Metal Gear comics, will be releasing a Castlevania comic book in March. The comic is to be entitled Castlevania: The Belmont Legacy 01. From the article: "It is 1576, and the legend of the Belmont family's vampire-hunting prowess still echoes through the Romanian countryside. While Christopher Belmont celebrates his nuptials, dark forces conspire to raise Count Dracula from his unholy slumber. With this ancient evil unleashed once more, young Belmont must to prove he is worthy of the Belmont legacy."

A while back we mentioned that Missouri pulled violent games from prisons on the basis that hardened criminals shouldn't be practicing their sharpshooting technique. Now, the new governor has removed all video games from the MO prison system. From the AP story: "Blunt, a Republican who took office two weeks ago, called video games 'a luxury that inmates should not be allowed to enjoy.'"

A story we have reported on frequently in the last few months comes to an end as Digital Illusions accepts EA's bid for buyout. From the article at GameGossip: "Corresponding to 32.0% of outstanding capital and votes, in addition to a further acquisition of 898,264 shares and the 18.9% already held by the company, Electronic Arts now holds a total of 6,044,720 shares, a controlling interest representing 59.8% of the outstanding capital and votes in DICE."

domanova writes "The BBC has an article up about the difficulties games companies will face in the next round of the console war. I don't play games, and my programming is in a different world, but the last lines of the article struck a cord. "Mr Hasson said games developers were beginning to realise that they had to be more business-like. 'There are still some developers who were involved in games from the bedroom coding days. Some of them are still making games for peer group approval - that has to stop.'"

Xev writes "HEXUS.net are showing a review of a new product called 3DEdit. This uses the DirectX 9 3D rendering engine; 3D transitions; DirectX 9 Shader-based filters, in order to give you a powerful home DV editing suite. This proves a lot more value to me as a Video editor than a card which just lets me play the latest games. Perhaps there is more use for these cards even at a consumer level?"

RosethornKB writes "KillerBetties.com has an interview with Sundog of Radio Free Zion, an internet broadcast whose purpose is to entertain players of The Matrix Online and will broadcast live events when the game goes live. From the article: "Rosethorn: How will you manage multiple server coverage? Sundog: We are trying to develop enough of a following in beta to allow us to support a different stream for each server, with its own DJs and coverage. So far, the community has been wonderfully supportive of what we are trying to do and hopefully that will translate into the right numbers to allow us to expand that much when the game goes fully live this spring.""

heptapod writes "New Scientist is reporting that UK researchers have created a computer that can learn rock, paper, scissors by observing humans. CogVis uses visual information to recognize events and objects in addition to learning by observing."

The Make Something Unreal Finalists have been whittled down to the last and the Contest Winners have been announced. The grand prize (A full Unreal engine license and $50,000) for a mod goes to Red Orchestra, Russians vs. Germans in The Great Patriotic War. First place for an UT movie goes to Journey, and is well worth the download time.

Last week, Tycho mentioned a set of questions they'd sent in the direction of the folks at Blizzard regarding the downtime World of Warcraft has been experiencing. Today Blizzard responds to their questions. Tycho agreed to the interview being reposted below the cut, so read on if you'd like Blizzard's response in the face of player frustration.

The deal reported last week on Slashdot has come to fruition: Take Two interactive and MLB have signed an exclusivity deal. Worthplaying has the news. "The innovative seven-year arrangement will dramatically limit the number of baseball video game manufacturers and ensure aggressive marketing and promotion of baseball video games, while promoting competition in the marketplace to drive innovation in baseball product development. Beginning in 2006, Take2 will have exclusive rights among third-party publishers to develop and market simulation, arcade and manager-style baseball video games..."

In more next-gen console news, ComputerandVideoGames.com has rumourmongering info on the new Nintendo console. Interesting bits like gyroscope sensing controllers and an online service make for intriguing ideas, but no details yet on what's going to make this console a revolution. From the article: "And what's revolutionary about Revolution? The inside source claims that talking about that "would get him into too much trouble" ... He is quoted as saying: "if you think too hard you'll never guess what it is. It's nothing 'new', technically speaking. It's just something that hasn't really been applied to videogames yet."

GamesIndustry.biz has news of EA's Xbox 2 plans for 2005, adding additional weight to the likelyhood of a new console by the end of the year. Oddly, the story states that the games in the works for the new console will also be developed for the current iteration of the Xbox. This may partially confirm the lack of backwards compatibility discussed previously on Slashdot and seems to pit Microsoft's new console against the old one for sales dollars.

Pluvius writes "A couple of high-school students in the Washington city of Puyallup wanted to raise money for the tsunami disaster in South Asia, and figured that the best way to do so was to hold a tournament using Bungie's hit XBox title Halo 2. Their school district disagreed, citing an anti-violence policy. Even though all of the parents of the children who would've taken part in the tournament signed waivers acknowledging the game's violence, Puyallup School District felt that due to school shootings across the country, 'anything we do that even looks like we're endorsing violence is not appropriate.'"

roadies writes "Early adopters are sure to import the latest handheld system from overseas. We're not talking about the Sony PSP here fanboys. We are referring to the Pocket Famicom. The pocket famicom has a 2.5" screen. Plug it into a TV and you can play your classics without having dig out your old Nintendo console. It supports standard 60-pin Famicom games, but with a $10 adapter it will play your 72-pin NES games."

News for nerds writes "Following the news of Sony slashing its profit forecast due to the underperforming AV & PC divisions, Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) known by the PlayStation brand, admitted he and other Sony employees have been frustrated for years with management's reluctance to introduce products like Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, mainly because Sony had music and movie units that were worried about content rights. The PSP by SCEI is one of the first Sony products that support non-proprietary standards such as MP3 or H.264, and now SCEI considers opening up the UMD disc format employed in the PSP."

Gamemethod writes "We've highlighted ten of our most anticipated games for 2005 spanning each major platform from PlayStation 2 to Nintendo DS to PC. While our feature by no means intends to be comprehensive or to denote that we're not looking forward to other games, these ten titles stand out as the most impressive of what 2005 has to offer. There are exclusive galleries of Gran Turismo 4 and Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth as well as a lengthy developer interview with the Call of Cthulu producer."

Nuskrad writes "A demo of the long awaited Darwinia by indie game developers Introversion has been released. At the moment there is only a Win32 demo avaliable, but Mac OSX and Linux demos should be coming soon. You can grab the demo from the torrent."

GamesIndustry.biz has an interview up with Blizzard creative director Chris Metzen and VP of business operations Paul Sams, where they discuss the status of the Starcraft Ghost title. From the article: "Basically the status of that is that we've kind of gone back and reassessed certain of the elements of the game that we felt needed to be refined. I think E3 was a big influence to us - we looked at other products that were in that genre, and felt as if we were quite competitive in many ways, but maybe there were some other things that we weren't getting to where we needed to go."

Hack Jandy writes "NVIDIA will be the graphics provider for the next generation Sony Playstation 3. Xbitlabs got an interview with the corporate marketing director at NVIDIA to grab a few more tidbits concerning the next generation console. Some particular highlights; the PS3 will have a graphics engine an echelon higher than the GeForce 6xxx cards today ("most powerful GPU that we've ever created actually") and took NVIDIA over 2 years to design."