Pascal writes "After delivering some classic first impressions of the PSP last Tuesday, including some interesting loading time tests, the happy thugs at Lik Sang have now respected their tradition by opening up the PlayStation Portable. If you ever wanted to know how Sony puts such a powerful hardware inside such a small casing, there is a huge picture gallery of the guts over at Lik-Sang.com"

geekboy_x writes "The gang at Blizzard has released a UI customization tool for World of Warcraft. It basically breaks the meta-interface into individual XML descriptions that you can change, add, or omit to your (corrupted decaying undead) heart's content. Note that you should have pretty good chops in both XML and Lua, and if you break it, you bought it." The best known UI project out there for WoW right now is Cosmos, which adds a few extra hotkey bars, a clock, a quest manager, and a nice buff/debuff timer.

An anonymous reader writes "This morning, Jeff Minter officially announced the end of development on his game "Unity", which was to be published by Lionhead Studios. The post included a press release which claimed that Minter "would not be able to finish Unity in an acceptable time frame". Minter is well known as the mad genius behind Llamasoft and creator of such games as Attack of the Mutant Camels, Llamatron, and Tempest 2000. Unity was to be an "abstract shooter" based on Minter's research into lightsynths and interactive graphic musical accompaniment. Did the fact that the GameCube is nearing the end of its lifecycle contribute to the cancellation of the game, or are trippy music/shooters (ala REZ) just too weird to attain mainstream success?"

Kotaku has a piece up today mentioning a style of video game editorializing called The New Games Journalism. This piece links to several others. State Wiki has a piece from early this year on what New Games Journalism is, and an examination of its goals. An example of the style is available on the Eve Online site in the PC Gamer article All About Eve. (large pdf) A seminal work referenced when discussing the style is Bow, Nigger, a sharply written and gripping piece about a duel in Jedi Outcast. From the editorial: "For one thing, my screen name has nothing to do with my ethnicity and for another, it's only a game and the fascist doing the typing is probably hundreds of miles away and far beyond anything you could call an actual influence on my life. But still... It's not very nice is it?"

IRex writes "EverQuest 2 is a great game with less than great documentation. There are literally dozens of commands hidden where nobody but the most persistent sleuth will find them. With that in mind TenTonHammer has posted a list of Things you wish you knew earlier in EverQuest 2 compiled and edited with permission from a list originally created by Sere of the Blackburrow server." From the list: " If you see a "lair" object in the world such as a rats nest, snakes nest, sabertooth tent, etc... with the appropriate type of mob around it, this is probably a dynamic adventure camp. If you kill everything in the camp, the next time it spawns it may spawn harder creatures, named monsters, etc..." Editor's Note: Story opinions do not necessarily represent those of Slashdot editors.

cyrus_zuo writes "In an effort to bring more exposure to the many fine titles entered into the Independent Games Festival (IGF) this year DIY Games teamed up with Game Tunnel to bring you a brief look at all 81 games entered into the 2005 IGF. An article on each site covers one half of the games, giving you a chance to look at each title and to make your own decision as to which games deserve to be finalists at this coming year's IGF."

yali writes "A new study shows that Game Boys are better than tranquilizers for calming children before surgery. Kids allowed to bring Game Boys into the OR showed no change in anxiety (compared to a small increase with tranquilizers, and a big increase in a control condition.) Kind of puts a different spin on analogies between games and drugs."

SetupWeasel writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is reporting that 400,000 additional DSs will be shipped to the US by year's end. This will bring the US total to 1.4 million by the end of 2004." There's also a story running on Gamesindustry.biz regarding DS sales being in line with the sales of the Gameboy Advance.

ClintonRNixon writes "A new open-source tabletop RPG has been released, The Shadow of Yesterday. People have been putting RPGs online for free for years, and Wizards of the Coast has their Open Game License, but this is the first time a game has been written and published using only open-source tools, and is published under a Creative Commons license. To make the online version, vi and Python Docutils were used; the published game was laid out using Scribus, The Gimp, and OpenOffice."

as writes "TransGaming Technologies, a developer of software portability products that allow game developers and publishers to develop games for one system and deploy them across multiple platforms, has released version 4.2 of their Wine fork Cedega on 7 December 2004. The new version of Cedega 4.2 offers support for Valve's bleeding edge action shooter Half-Life 2. linuX-gamers.net has tested Half-Life 2 with Cedega 4.2 and has written a short review of the game under Linux."

An anonymous reader writes "Kotaku has a story about the EA_Spouse Live Journal, which has become its own community of sorts, fostering endless rumors and gossip about EA culture. The site has more than 3,500 replies to the original diatribe post and grows daily. The latest finds include a link to an NPR story on the whole EA fiasco (the NPR reporter trolled the board for interviews) and copies of the contracts for Senior Vice President of Human Resources Rusty Rueff and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial & Administration Officer Warren Jenson. When is a T-shirt coming out?"

An anonymous reader writes "CNN/Money's Game Over column offers suggestions for what to buy the obnoxiously rich gamer on your shopping list this year. Among the items mentioned are a $300,000 motion simulator and a 5.5 yard long monitor." Re: The Monitor - Gaaaaaaaaaah...

SansTinfoilHat writes "Gamesindustry.biz reports that 'Take-Two and partner Sega will seek to return pricing to premium levels for the next-generation console versions of [the ESPN series of sports games].' It couldn't last forever." From the article: "Most notably, [the low pricing] has put immense pressure on Electronic Arts' market-leading sports range, with the giant publisher forced to drop prices on several of its key EA Sports titles in order to compete more effectively in the run up to Christmas."

multiOSfreak writes "According to this Reuters articl, two video game store employees have been arrested for modding video game consoles. From the article: 'Authorities arrested two store employees on charges of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in a device that circumvents technological protection measures, the ESA said.'" It's not clear from the article whether the modded consoles were sold without copies of the games which had been installed on their hard drives, which would seem to be the most important distinction between convenience for buyers and actually ripping off game makers. Update: 12/08 22:43 GMT by T : This thread on boing-boing includes a comment from a would-be customer who says (among other things) that store employees "were also preloading the XBox systems with tons of emulators (arcade and console) and as many ROMs as they could find."

Yesterday saw the launch of two new expansions for a pair of well-established Massive games. The titles are Thrones of Oblivion, the newest expansion for Player vs. Player game Shadowbane, and Catacombs, the newest expansion for Dark Age of Camelot. Thrones of Oblivion adds some interesting high end content, graphical enhancements, and the ability to play a Vampire as a character. Catacombs is an impressive (and much anticipated) enhancement to the Dark Age of Camelot graphics engine, and adds massive underground areas beneath the three Realms.

darkstar949 writes "There is an article on CNET News.com that reports the so called 'Halo 2' effect is threatening broadband users. Because of this some ISPs are being pressured for more reliability and low latency. Perhaps this marks a new trend for the internet as online gaming becomes more popular." From the article: "Sandvine's latest statistics showed that Xbox Live traffic quadrupled when "Halo 2" was launched on Nov. 9, and it has stayed at that level since. Sandvine claims that this will put added pressure on ISPs to improve the quality of their broadband offerings, as users will demand reliability and low latency."

OhioJoe writes "MSNBC is reporting that China has banned a soccer game that depicts Taiwan as independent. Violators are threatened with $1200 fines. From the article: "The game, 'Soccer Manager 2005', contained content that harmed China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and violated Chinese law, the Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday."

jvm writes "The former game developer Pumpkin Studios has released the source for their 3D real-time strategy game Warzone 2100 under the GNU General Public License. (Direct link to the source archive.) Previously released just for Microsoft Windows and Sony PlayStation, this source release permits this 1999 game to be ported to other platforms, such at GNU/Linux and MacOS. You can join in the developer discussion at the RealTimeStrategies Warzone 2100 Redevelopment Project forum. Note that only the source has been released; an original copy of the game is required to obtain the other parts of the game (graphics, sounds, etc.)"

An anonymous reader writes "Inside Mac Games reports that GameSpy is trying to license its way out of supporting the Mac." From the article: "The impact of GameSpy's pricing tactics could be devastating to the Mac gaming market. A number of recent games on the Mac such as Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor: Breakthrough, Neverwinter Nights, and others use GameSpy."

The sequel to the hit console/PC game Knights of the Old Republic shipped to retailers on Tuesday. KOTOR II: The Sith Lords has been surrounded by trepidation as original developer Bioware was replaced by relative newcomer, Obsidian Entertainment. Gamespot has a review available. From the review: "you might have a much tougher time settling into The Sith Lords, since chances are you'll feel like you've played this game before, only you'll swear it looked better the first time. But, on the other hand, so what? It's just as important to note that no other game since Knights of the Old Republic has managed to deliver this excellent style of role-playing. If you're a Knights of the Old Republic fan, then you should find a certain satisfaction in knowing almost exactly what you're in for going into The Sith Lords."