MikeT writes "FileFront is reporting that Nintendo's GameCube underperformed in 2004 and this holiday season by almost half! While Nintendo's spokespeople remain mum, the reporter from FileFront claims that Nintendo's beloved console's numbers are dwindling, quoting industry professionals and reputed sales figures. Clip: "The early word hardly looks promising. Market information group NPD Funworld put GameCube console sales at 350,000 for November 2004, far behind Xbox's 708,000 and PS2's 694,000."" We ran a related story recently discussing the possibility of UK retailers dumping the system.

jowens writes "SecurityFocus reports that players sharing house designs through Electronic Arts' Sims 2 Exchange are finding their game behaving oddly: espresso machines mysteriously satisfy all the Sims needs, Sims are suddenly comfortable with open relationships, and the social worker no longer cares how they treat their children. It turns out hacks were spreading invisibly with Sims 2 lots, infecting thousands of downloadable homes, and catching Electronic Arts by surprise. The hackers, who never intended their hacks to be viruses, have even written their own AV scanner to find and control the outbreak."

An anonymous reader writes "Xbox head-honcho Robbie Bach has written up a State of the Xbox in which he gloats about the continuing success of the console but fails to say a word about its evolution." From the article: "You may have seen the October Game Developers Magazine, which announced its top 20 Publishers of the Year. Microsoft Game Studios was named the number two publisher, just behind EA, based on revenue as well as use of third-party developers, average critical response to titles, percentage of original intellectual properties (IPs), and developer opinion."

Retalin writes "It looks like RunUO, the largest Ultima Online Emulator around has decided to opensource their project. It's caused quite a stir in their 40,000+ userbase." From the announcement post: "The RunUO team has collectively decided that we will be open sourcing RunUO's core to the public. At this point for the most part, the core is done and the only things remaining are game layer features. We have totally rewritten the networking piece of RunUO and Factions are pretty stable. We have completed a lot of the Ninja additions to UO and are ready to release the core code to the world."

captain writes "According to PSP411, Sony C.E. President and CEO Ken Kutaragi announced today at CES 2005 that the PSP will have a North American launch in March, followed by Europe around the same time. In Japan, the near-PS2 quality portable gaming device sold only about 500k units on account of GPU shortages. While the price and exact date aren't entirely clear, the USD equivalent of the Japanese sale price is a little under $200USD. Some are speculating that the price could be even lower to contest Nintendo DS's long-held portable gaming throne even further." Some good writeups about the announcement at Gamespot and 1up.com.

Brad writes "The 2005 GameTrailers Awards were announced yesterday. The GameTrailers Awards are the first and only awards show to honor excellence in Video Game Media. Thousands of game trailers, cinematics and gameplay movies are released each year, but this is the first time that they will be honored in an awards show format. The GameTrailers Awards will be broadcast in two parts: The Nominees show, which began broadcast on January 5th; and the Winners Show, which will be broadcast on January 19th."

Sam Machkovech writes "My buddy Paul Kix of The Dallas Observer did some digging to uncover the life of Matt Leto (aka Zyos), whose track record places him in the top rankings of worldwide Halo & Halo 2 competitions. Professional gaming leagues are nothing new to those who know about the CPL, but this story shines a light at console-focused leagues like the MLG that may very well get the mainstream crowd interested in gaming as a viable sport, along with gamers like Zyos who buck negative stereotypes associated with hardcore gamers -- 'perhaps surprising, Leto's not a nerd. He's an athlete' -- while still kicking virtual ass. Show this article to your parents/spouses next time they harass you about your habit."

Arnaud writes "A rumor saying Vivendi Universal Games could help Ubisoft against Electronic arts began to spread on the web yesterday. This information has been denied by Vivendi: "In view of the rumors reported in the press, Vivendi Universal denies that any negotiations are taking place concerning the takeover of Ubisoft." The amazing thing is how widely reported this rumour was, to the point where the real story was drowned out by the rumour.

Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.

genrader writes "Voodoo Extreme is reporting that Interplay has had judicial liquidation take place. If you've been reading the gaming news, a lot has been going on with Interplay financially, it seems all this finally caught up to them. Interplay has formerly published very well known games like Icewind Dale, the Baldur's Gate series, and Descent. Farewell, Interplay." Update: 01/06 02:57 GMT by H : This affects just the company in France; sorry for the confusion.

GamesIndustry.biz iz reporting that in a show of European solidarity publisher Infogrames may assist Ubisoft (with the blessings of the French Government) if EA attempts a hostile takeover of the Prince of Persia developer. From the article: "Speaking to news agency Reuters, Bonnell expressed his hope that Ubisoft will remain independent - and rubbished EA's claim that its recent purchase of almost 20 per cent of the firm's stock was merely an investment." Further details on Greg Costikyan's Blog. All this is follow up to year-end shenanigans from EA.

Enilk Libb VII writes "Frustrated by Sony Online's lack of dedication to their game, the Planetside community has taken the initiative and started a 'Guerilla Marketing' campaign designed to attract new players to the game. Players know that Planetside is good - perhaps even a genre defining title - but that it often goes unnoticed in the gaming market, saturated as it is with FPS games. Forums dedicated to the discussion of computer games, it was decided, are the perfect places to advertise. A template was designed with links to a spectacular video of Planetside (made by a regular Planetside player), a 7-day free trial of the game itself, and a downloadable installer. A thread was started on the Planetside Forums and the players got to work. The effect of the campaign has been noticeable. Populations are growing noticeably. Due to the influx of new players, many veterans of the game have volunteered to be part of a team whose job will be to contact new players and 'buckle them in'." Now if they'd only lower the pricetag...

tivarius writes "Teamxbox is running an article to get the gaming community's opinion on having the developers of games provide feeds of stats for their games, ala Halo 2. This will allow gaming clans and other groups to keep up with their stats on their own sites." From the article: Note that many on-line PC games have had leaderboards available for a considerable number of years. Specifically, I remember several friends and myself writing Battle.net daemons that allowed us to not only play StarCraft/Brood Wars together, but also enabled us to track stats for every game that we played... that seems like eons ago, especially considering the technological progressions that have been made circa 1998." We have discussed this topic previously.

New developments this week in a few games, with Cryptic Studio's City of Heroes releasing the much anticipated Issue 3 expansion, which adds new archetypes and power sets to the game. Citing increasing costs for running the game Mythic Entertainment has raised the subscription price for Dark Age of Camelot to $14.95 a month, but with a significant discount for long-term subscriptions. Darniaq wrote in to mention that Sony Online Entertainment announced a new Massive title for the PSP at CES, Untold Legends, in what looks to be direct competition to Pocket Kingdoms. Finally, Tobold of Grimwell Online has a nice recap of MMORPGs in 2004, complete with predictions for this year.

This Friday you can get in on the Final Beta test for the hack and slash MMOG, Guild Wars. Commentary is available on Grimwell Online. From the article: " The main claim to fame of GuildWars is being the only MMORPG without a monthly fee. It will be interesting to see how that business model works out. Is it really the monthly fee that stops a MMORPG from greatness, or is it the nerdy gameplay?" Update: 01/05 22:26 GMT by H : I spoke with a representative of GuildWars; the above information is false. The beta program will be continuing as currently implemented. As well, GuildWars has not yet stated a final release date other than early 2005; that is still true, and in the meantime, development continues on the game -- and support will be continuing for the beta program.

Bill Bagel writes "Many of us have watched Infinium Labs' attempt to quash HardOCP's First Amendment right for the last year. HardOCP wrote this story on the Infinium Labs CEO, Tim Roberts, that was based on his own resume and some Google research. IL sued HardOCP, a home-based webpage business for $20M in Florida, and HardOCP fought back in a Federal Court in Texas for a declaratory judgment. HardOCP basically won when Infinium Labs finally gave up the fight citing great expenses involved in fighting the declaratory suit. The judge's order can be found here." The Cliff's Notes version can be found on WhereisPhantom.com.

An Anonymous Reader writes "Numerous players in Ultima Online are donating vitual gold to "Crazy" Joe Harden. Harden started some eBay auctions with the best of intentions, giving all the proceeds to the Red Cross for the tsunami disaster relief. Unfortunately, Ebay has decided to shut him down. Here's a quote from the article over on FileFront: "The auctions were for in-game gold in Ultima Online. What Harden did was set up places within Ultima Online where players could come and either buy 'junk,' as he called it, or simply donate gold to be auctioned off on eBay. After setting up 43 auctions, things were running smoothly until eBay pulled every single one of them off of their site." We reported on this effort yesterday.

Anonymous Coward writes "UK paper The Sun published an article about a father who purchased a recent Gameboy title from Disney for his daughter. They were horrified that the credits of the game contained the F-Word and he immediately contacted the paper. The Sun published the article without researching the fact that this was a pirate cartridge based off of the cracked version of this game released. Oops!"

Eugene Oh writes "Nominations are open for the 5th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards. Nominations will be accepted through Jan. 14, 2005. All those involved in the video game industry or the development of videogames are eligible to submit nominations at. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) will present the awards on March 9, 2005, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. The Game Developers Choice Awards categories focus on rewarding and recognizing innovation and excellence in the art of making games - regardless of genre, platform or delivery medium. Awards will be given in the following categories:Best Game, Innovation, Audio, Character Design, Game Design, Technology, Visual Arts, Writing, New Studio, Lifetime Achievement, First Penguin, Maverick, and Community Contribution."

RPGDot.com is running a series on Upcoming RPGs for the year 2005. The first part covers major releases from US developers, while the second piece concentrates on European and Russian games that haven't had as much press coverage. From the article: 2004 was widely considered to be one of the best for PC gaming in years, with a number of highly anticipated titles generally hitting the mark. From Rome: Total War to Sims 2, City of Heroes to Half Life 2, 2004 put PC gaming back in the gaming headlines for all the right reasons. Unless, that is, you were a fan of single player cRPGs."