Next weekend at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, NY many companies are getting together for the DigitalLife Technology Conference. It's billed as a CES-like show with demos and products for the average consumer. VUG, EA, Activision, and others will be displaying their wares on the exhibit floor, and Blue Man group is slated to perform during the Keynote.

Merlynnus writes "Today, Tom's Hardware has announced that they're tired of being jerked around by the video card manufacturers and are going to publish reviews on their own schedule rather than one dictated by ATI or NVidia. From the site: "Reviews of cards with pre-launch buggy drivers and yet-to-come updates do no service to the user. We explain why we will no longer play that game."

Richard Goodness writes "AllRPG.com is featuring several editorials on the Legend of Zelda series. The Zelda Extravaganza covers such topics as the rumors of the Triforce in Ocarina of Time, nostalgia for the original gold cartridge, and attempts at an overall chronology of the series."

An anonymous reader writes "CNN is carrying a story about Team USA's win at the World Cyber Games. Amid fanfare fit for actual world-class athletes, five Americans with really quick fingers took home the gold medal in the popular "Counter Strike" competition of the World Cyber Games championships, capping five days of intense gaming by the world's elite." The US team came away with two golds and a bronze, third overall. Congrats also to South Korea, second overall, and the Netherlands who came in first in the medal tally. The BBC also has coverage of the event's results.

edpin writes "University of Colorado at Boulder students hacked the 30,000-plus-member Internet Chess Club as part of research funded by the National Science Foundation. With guidance from University of Colorado at Boulder computer security researcher John Black, two students reverse-engineered the service to up their ranks and steal passwords." Update: 10/10 23:05 GMT by T : Reader Bryan Rapp points out that this story duplicates the one posted last month -- sorry about that.

Thanks to Wizards.com for the information on next week's Worldwide D&D Game Day, celebrating the game's 30th Anniversary. "Saturday, October 16, 2004, participating game stores will present two adventures well stocked with hapless monsters to slay. Bring some friends to adventure with or meet some new gaming buddies at the event. The mini adventure, Lair or the Mad Alchemist, provides a great introduction to D&D, while The Forgotten Forge offers the thrill of a full-scale adventure set in the exciting new world of Eberron." If you're interested, here's a handy list of participating stores.

pdawerks writes "Heard through the grapevine: Apparently Lucasarts is displeased with the way that SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) has handled Star Wars' MMORPG Galaxies. The day after the JTL expansion goes live, they plan to announce the second expansion pack and the divorce between SOE and Lucasarts." This appears to be a complete rumor. However, I found corroborating rumormongering at SWG Warcry and Second Life Herald. Lucasarts has previously lessened their developer stable, casting doubt on this idea. I can't imagine Lucasarts could do a worse job with the game than SOE has, though.

bippy writes "A Miami attorney claims that a teen accused of plotting a massacre used GTA to prepare for the attack, RedAssedBaboon reports. Attorney Jack Thompson is the same guy who is trying to link the murder of Stefan Pakeerah last year to Manhunt. Pakeerah was beaten to death with a claw hammer by a friend who, Thompson claims, was inspired by Manhunt. The uproar surrounding the case led to the game being pulled from many British store shelves and Prime Minister Tony Blair looking into a link between violence and video games. It looks like Thompson has found himself a niche." Update: 10/10 19:25 GMT by T : Peter Endean writes "It might be worth noting that in fact in the case of the murder linked to Manhunt, it was the victim who owned the game."

bippy writes "Video game companies have found a way around the natural distrust we all have of advertising and it's called the blog, RedAssedBaboon reports. The article points to a recent story by the Chicago Tribune about blogs as ads, and then talks about the Beta-7 and ILoveBees campaigns. RAB argues that gaming companies are starting to understand the potential of blogs, giving them their full support but also using them to get at the gamer. It raises some interesting questions about ethics, game journalism and advertising."

ac514 writes "Parents should review their education before punishing their children. BBC wrote 'Video game skills and a good poker face online are becoming essential job qualifications in the financial markets, with recruitment drives assessing potential star traders in online gaming exams'. I knew some day these extra hours would pay off."

dasmurf asks: "Many users have discussed this possibility. Now that Steam has pioneered the biggest online game delivery system to date, is it as simple as that? Read my concerns about the Steam Subscriber Agreement. Has anyone else read this agreement? Should Valve change it? If you love Valve's games but you've never religiously kept an eye on your credit card statement, maybe this will give you more reason. ;)"

BlueMoon writes "After almost 2 years of silence a new version of OpenXDK (the open source, free and legal development kit for the Microsoft Xbox) has been released. It has now a complete libc replacement, multimedia support (video, joysticks and event handling) using the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) and it migrated to a GCC-based toolchain. To demonstrate the capabilities of the framework, the SDL port of Doom is able to be compiled and executed."

An Anonymous Reader wrote to tell us about Walter Kim of the Ludonauts. He has an interesting argument about game design: "many videogame developers, particularly the Western ones, approach their craft with far too much of a hard-headed pragmatism, a nuts and bolts mentality about development that has, consciously or unconsciously, extended itself to design. What you end up with are a bunch of games that, while they may exhibit a great deal of cleverness on the level of individual level design, are stitched together with about as much finesse as duct tape."

prakslash writes "Some 700 players from 72 countries are competing for $400,000 in prizes at the World Cyber Games 2004 in San Francisco. The 5-day tournament is being held for the first time outside of S.Korea. The players, some of who are national champions in their own countries, will be battling against each other in games like Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Need for Speed, FIFA 2004 and Halo."

WWWWolf writes "Ultima VII is quite well emulated using Exult. Exult folks have added quite a few handy additions to the game, but nothing they have done quite matches their newest feature: Exult in 3D. There is talk about support for actual 3D models in future. Being an alpha-quality work at the moment, the source is not available, but there's a load of screenshots and a Linux binary to try."

Several tidbits of info for you today regarding developments in Online Worlds. Lineage II is going to be adding a gambling component. Players will be able to place bets on monster races or purchase lottery tickets. MMORPG.com has a story discussing the fact that the excellent crafting based game A Tale in the Desert now has a Mac Client. Players on Windows, Linux, and Mac can now experience the Second Telling. Anarchy Online is now available for free download. Prospective players can download the client and have 14 days to experience the game before they have to decide to take up the monthly fee or not. Starting next week FilePlanet will be giving away 20,000 Beta Slots for The Matrix Online. Speaking of Betas, the Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs Beta application is now available. Congratulations also to Mythic Entertainment and DAoC, who is celebrating it's 3rd Anniversary this week. The Blizzard site has up a new Q&A about World of Warcraft. It sounds like some features of the game are going to slip to post-launch. Combined with the rapidly approaching Open Beta this would seem to confirm that the game will be launching within a month or two.

RichM writes "After the ridiculous lawsuit by Infinium Labs against [H]ardOCP, companies appear to be queuing up to put the boot in. Next up, we have the Futuremark Corporation who apparently objected to the opinion that 3DMark2005 "sucked". The Vice President of Marketing for Futuremark exchanged a series of emails with Kyle Bennett, [H]ardOCP Editor, who dutifully posted the entire conversation to the front page of the site."

The Big N's media event went off well, and people have finally had a chance to experience the playability and feel of the DS system. Penny Arcade has commentary from Gabe and Tycho, and Gamespot gives it a look as well. Quoth Tycho: "The final analysis: I am overjoyed that Nintendo isn't completely nuts, which was my fear initially. This is a pretty cool little machine. But the opening salvo is a little soft in the genres I prize most, and there's no stand-out title that forces my hand on the system."

Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its article regarding new PSP news, including statements by Sony CTO Masa Chatani that "our plan to sell the PSP within the year is secure". He also revealed some new features of the PSP, such as a "home page" type screen, while being quite quiet on the battery issue. Commentators still seem to find it unlikely that the PSP will be out before 2005.

Thanks to the BBC for a follow-up to an earlier story. Following Peter Molyneux's apology to the Fable community last week, the BBC spoke with the game designer about his decision. "[I] owed a duty to fans to explain why some features did not make it into the finished product."