In other news, Microsoft is late to the party AGAIN. (I know it’s a lame analogy. At least I didn’t say “LAN party.”)
The HD DVD player for the XBox 360 is “officially” $50. Not recommended unless you have the shelf-space to buy one of every “limited edition”, made in China toy and keep it in [...]

Good rumors from the Destination Playstation conference. Per some sources at the retailer show, alongside the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue launch on April 15th will be a redesign of the Playstation Store.
The new Playstation Store is rumored to look a lot like the SingStore (that’s it in the picture) and have an improved navigation system. [...]

Ray Kurzweil, the famed futurist and author of a tall stack of smart books, just predicted that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence by 2029. Who knows what game systems will be out then, but it would be awesome to have AI challenging even elite gamers to a tough fight.
In-game AI has a bad reputation [...]

Blu-Ray wins. Toshiba officially announced they will discontinue production of new HD DVD hardware.
The killing blow was probably Warner’s well-timed (or poorly-timed, depending on which side of the battle you were cheering for) pre-CES announcement that it was dropping publication of the HD DVD format. A big studio switching formats like that likely motivated the [...]

Grab the Rock Band Special Edition bundle for $20 less than normal at Target this week. The Sunday sale flyer list both the PS3 and XBox 360 versions for just $149.
On sort-of-sale are the the 40GB PS3, which comes with a $40 Target gift card, and a stack of popular PS3 and XBox 360 shooters, [...]

Between January 31st and today Super Smash Bros Brawl has sold 1.08 million copies in Japan. That’s the fastest-selling Wii game ever in Japan. Over 5 weeks faster than Wii Fit, sold separately from the console there, made it to the platinum sales mark.
We can hardly wait until March 9th, and it doesn’t seem like [...]

The Australian copies of Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for Wii were missing support for 32-player battles as noted on the box, the game’s site, advertisements, etc. Now EA has finally admitted their mistake and removed any mention of multiplayer from their website. Via IGN, they’ve also announced refunds to anyone who purchased the game [...]

EA has started a new game division, named Blueprint. Plans are for Blueprint to launch both existing EA brands and new concepts from small developers into major social networks like Facebook. The division is already hooking up with mega-talent agency Creative Artists Agency for talent and funding. In stealth-mode since September, their first title takes [...]

The Writers’ Strike is finally over. The Writers Guild just hours ago approved a settlement with the media companies. Now they can get back to making really bad movies out of our favorite video games.
[image: 1010 Wins]

The brains behind Brain Age, Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, may be smart but he’s turned down about $11 million in royalties form Nintendo. The money is his share of the $22 million in royalties Nintendo owes Tohoku University for the technology in the 17 million copies of Brain Age (Brain Training outside of North America).
After years [...]

Only one PC game in 2007 sold over a million units (and it’s name is Warcraft). The PC game take of $911 million is a lot of money, but console games had a record year and total sales of $17.94 billion. Another comparison, the #10 console game sold twice as many units as the #2 [...]

The latest Bungie podcast chats with Christian Allen, their new Lead Designer, about his background in the game industry.
Why should you care though? Because he drops a hint about the next Bungie title being something completely new than Halo or anything they’ve done before. It sounds a lot like he’s leading up to it [...]

I’ll never understand why the media and gaming outsiders are surprised by anything that happens in-game or by the weird game-related incidents that happen out-of-game. Especially as games get better and move toward open world exploration and open-ended invention (like scripting new events and motions in Wow or Second Life) people are going to do [...]