Because Nintendo’s Wii proved to be far and away the most wildly successful console (based on sales) in recent memory through pioneering the game form of motion control, Microsoft Xbox introduced its own expansion to their machine called the Kinect in June at the E3 convention. They also demonstrated many of the new XBox Kinect games. Set to ship out in November, Kinect continues and builds upon the tradition of what Nintendo introduced four years ago. Kinect brings entertainment and games alive in entirely new ways, without the use of a controller. The XBox Kinect updates have been stealing all of the gaming news headlines since June, and there have been some interesting new developments and announcements regarding the machine expansion even in recent days and weeks.

One of the rumors surrounding Kinect was a disappointing word on the street regarding some of the many features that it was supposed to offer at its official launch in November. Among the most impressive offerings of this new Kinect was to be the exciting feature of Voice Connect. Gamers were promised that they would be able to interact directly with their Kinect expanded Xboxes using only their voices. Now, the word came out that Microsoft’s latest creation will in fact not be capable of this at the launch. Another feature that it is rumored will not make the initial launch deadline is the voice chat software, called Video Kinect. This was similarly premiered and promised at the E3 press conference back in June. The supposition regarding these two technologies was that they will be integrated at some point after Kinect’s initial release. Fortunately for all of those readers excited about Kinect and its imminently arriving launch, Microsoft came out later the same day and announced that at least part of the rumors were false. They confirmed that their voice control technology Voice Connect will be featured on the day of the Kinect launch, saying that voice control technology proves to be a thrilling component of the Xbox 360 Kinect experience without controls, and it will be a part of the system in the November launch. They did not comment on the availability of Video Kinect at the time of launch.

In other updates, Microsoft has chosen PDP to be the official licensee of the Kinect stands and mounting platforms. PDP unveiled their various methods of supporting the Kinect console. They will offer TV and wall mounts, a floor stand, and also a cable extension for those who want to place the Kinect on top of an entertainment center. These choices will offer helpful versatility in where to put the Kinect unit once it is purchased.

Perhaps the most significant announcement concerning the Xbox 360 and Kinect came just this week on August 24th. The Vice President for Microsoft’s European Interactive Entertainment division claimed that Microsoft is planning to keep selling the Xbox 360 for another five years as a result of the introduction of Kinect. If this really proves to be the case, then it will lengthen the Xbox 360’s total lifespan to ten years. Competitors are taking note. Sony has given out that it plans to focus on its Playstation Move competing product for the next five years as well. This shakes up the traditional next generation game system cycle. In the past, the big three game makers, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, have released their new game machines every four to five years. With the Xbox Kinect coming out instead of a new machine, and Sony also focusing on its motion sensing expansion, this is set to change, at least for now. Even Nintendo has hinted that it will wait for a thirty percent penetration of new 3D televisions before it releases its next generation game machine, which they intend to be a 3D game system.

An Indian firm is aiming to be a global player in the video games market.

Ronnie Screwvala, chairman of media & entertainment company, UTV Group, said that his firm had invested £75m (5.5bn rupees) in three game titles.

The first of these – a action game called El Shaddai, inspired by the Book of Enoch – is due for release later this year.

But Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst with Screen Digest, said that it was a “tough market” to launch new brands.

Mr Screwvala told BBC News that UTV was expanding into the global games market, as it was the next logical step for the firm.

“In India, we are already the number one movie studio in the country and we have five genre specific television channels too,” he said.

“We were looking where we could drive content and the creation of intellectual property (IP) content, because that is where we believe maximum wealth can be derived.

“And that is where games came up. We looked at the geography, there were limitations where India is concerned – except for mobile platforms – and so we needed to expand our market.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

India has yet to get into the cultural habit of video gaming”

End Quote Ronnie Screwvala

Mr Screwvala said that his firm made a number of acquisitions two years ago, buying up an Indian development studio specialising in mobile gaming, UK developer Ignition and has set up a separate development studio in Gainesville, Florida.

The firm has three console titles currently in development and is now looking to secure a distributor before the games are released.

Mr Harding-Rolls said that releasing new IP into a mature market was not without risk.

“When you get past a certain stage in a consoles lifecycle, the titles that work tend to be sequels and reworking of existing contents,” he said.

This is due, in part, to brands being established in the minds of gamers.

“If you’re coming fresh to the market, you are not going to get the benefit of that, because by the time they look to release potential sequels there could be a new console,” he added.
New consoles

Screen Digest thinks that there will be a new XBox and Wii by 2013 and 2014 for a new PlayStation, although they said that estimate would be “at the earliest”.

“There’s less money being spent on games compared to last year, but games are still selling and its a substantial market, albeit declined slightly year on year,” said Mr Harding Rolls.

source/full story: bbc

Adun Toridas !

En Taro Adun !

Somebody called for an exterminator ?

Three phrases along with many others were on every passionate gamer’s lips for years. Starcraft was one of the best real time strategies ever, played by million of people in different countries. It was a big success and it seems that Starcraft 2 is following the same pattern.

After 12 years of waiting and 7 years of development, gamers from all over the world were hit with a fabulous news : Starcraft II : Wings of Liberty has gone on sale. The second part of this game follows the same principal idea as the one launched in 1998, where player has the possibility to command a group of humans trying to defeat the Protoss and Zergs, two different races with a single analogy : they are both from other planets.

First Starcraft was sold in over 9 million copies worldwide with 3 major add-ons after sales and became the best RTS computer game ever launched. It was a natural move that developers to stick with the famous three races as in the Stacraft : telepathic aliens Protoss, the insects Zerg and humanoid Terrans that posses the technology to steal and modify weapons and equipment other two races have.

Small changes have been made to the way units are upgraded and also the developers improved the way the races interact with the environment. Before the launch of Starcraft II, no reviews were available which is an awkward situation while almost each and every game before the launch has a media and online coverage.

System requirements for this RTS tend to force gamers that posses old computers to buy new ones, while a minimum Athlon XP with more than 2200+ GHz (or Pentium IV with over 2.6GHz) equipped with a video card above Geforce 9300 or Ati Radeon X300-600. Also, a broadband Internet connection for online features must be available.

Will the Starcraft II have the same popularity among players ? Time will tell us, however Starcraft II became the game with the longest time before a sequel.

Whenever somebody hears the word « computer games » the picture that comes in his mind is a 12-16 years old boy obsessed with noisy and coloured video games, spending lots of hours in front of his computer or Xbox.

However, not all gamers are like that. Lately, we hear complaints from youngsters that literally do not have room in front of their computers because of their, well, mothers playing Mahjong, Zuma or other video game that attract women more than men. The demographics of games’ players have changed lately, and it seems that now 50% of Britain’s video games players are women.

Although they recognise their attraction to more peaceful games that promote collaboration rather than competitions (like Facebook’s Farmville), the numbers of women playing violent games seems to also increase daily. From Need for Speed to FPS games, women kinda play its all. We might think that they are using games as great methods for relaxation, when stress comes into play, however this would be available for a 15-30 minutes round of gaming, thus there are both women and men spending tens of hours in front of a catchy game.

Contrary to men, women do not like to admit they like playing video games, though the ones that  admit it say it is only a distressful method for 10-30 minutes/day. 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, the amount of time spent in front of a video games is not really that important, what is important though is that the ratio of women playing computer games increases day by day, and, as we were saying above, it reached somewhere around 50% of UK’s gamers. That is a really impressive percentage, right ?

Channel 4 is preparing to launch an adventure game with a spice of political thriller theme of trust on July 28th, this year. The Curfew is written by a Marvel writer – Kieron Gillen – and designed by the well-known agency LittleLoud and it is a browser-based game for teens aging 14-19 years old. It combines a challenging gameplay with a political intrigue and is set to make the gamers asking themselves « who can I trust ? »

The game takes place in 2027, not too far away, in an authoritarian security state, with a concept inspired by today’s political decisions. The Curfew’s primary target is young people and tries to play an educational role while it presents the freedoms teens enjoy nowaday in a mirror with the potential dangers in they do not protect themselves. It’s a game for right questions, political involvement and fight for freedom.

The key characters of this game are Aisha, a hardworking Iraqi immigrant in UK, Leah the dissident – an enemy of the current system -, Saul, a 40-year-old ex-cop working in security and Lucas, a bored young boy, antisocial and rebellious. The Curfew presents those four characters captured by the curfew in a hostel, searching for how they end-up captured and sharing their stories one to each other.

The Curfew is compound of four episodes, each episode being based on each character’s story. The gamer is a young political agitator that obtains a disc containing information that could damage the government if released and searching for a trusted party to hand-over that disk. During the game the player will listen to those characters’ stories and in the end, right before the police entering through the door, he must give the disk to the character he trusts upon his stories.

Although this is an imaginary game, curfews actually exist in UK, spreaded in over 1,000 towns. There, anyone under 16-years-old found on the streets after 9pm can be sent home by the police. The games comes as a response to latest civil liberties and freedoms that have been outlawed.

Microsoft’s virtual human Milo was first presented in 2009 at L.A. E3 Expo and it was designed for use with Xbox 360’s Kinect. Milo was created by an UK games designer, Peter Molyneux, and can react to different body movements or people emotion.

Although it is just a virtual character, its creator says that wanted to develop Milo and make it seem alive and feel real. With the upcoming Kinect controller, things change. This controller uses sensors, microphones and camerat to exactly interpret users’ intentions.

This year at Technology, Entertainment and Design Global conference in Oxford (TED), Milo was shown for a second time to the audience, this time exploring a garden and learning how to skim stones. Peter said that Lionhead studios is the firm that developed the AI for Milo and this technology exploits psychological spots for Milo to seem real to any person « using » it. The virtual human can interpret different command by the use of voice recognition software, moreover, the software that makes Milo seem so real even allows players to be in charge with facial elements like blushing for example.

The software is so advanced that any action that a player performs on Milo affects its later life and development in the game. Milo’s show-off was just a demo of what this virtual human can do while Microsoft has not setup a release date for it. The incredible fact about Milo is that he can learn, assimilate very well the information and even become smarter in time.

We should however wait and see when and if Milo will be released to the crowds, but people at Microsoft already see it as a big technology hit. Time will tell.

Over the last 20 years, an increasing number of children and teens suffered from ADHD, recent numbers showing up to 10% of UK’s children facing this issue.
A recent study has revealed that children who spend more than two hours every day watching TV shows or playing video games double their chances of suffering from attention problems related to Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or simply said, ADHD.

The study also says that due to a lot of time spent in front of fast-moving images children have problems when it comes to focus on class hours, while their brains becomes to “dependent” to those images provided by TV and computers. This translates in bad results at school and behavior deterioration.

A well-known researcher, Professor Douglas Gentile said that when watching TV and playing video games the brain is getting not only used to flickering lights, noise and sudden camera changes but it does not react anymore as before to slower factors like a teacher writing on a blackboard, a silent class and so on. Children loose their attention even without them being conscious about it, while their brain still waits for more “intrigued” action, thus the action provided on TV and PC.

This study was made on 1,500 children with ages between 7 to 10 and on US college students. It seems that it does not take too much time to suffer from this condition, one year with 2 hours daily playing video games can be enough to become a major factor of ADHD.

Children playing video games and spending a lot of time need not worry their parents. Games like Nintendo wii, psp and play station 3 have captured the imagination and interest of most children, but parents can take solace from the fact that their child may emerge as one promising gamer and earn a lot of money on the professional game circuit.

One nation that has always shown a lot of interest in such gaming activity is South Korea. Better disposable incomes and internet penetration has ensured that many of its children are getting access to the latest gaming software and electronic gadgets. Video gaming is very popular in this country and has the capacity of attracting more than 100,000 spectators to watch a game and that is indeed something phenomenal. Some of their more popular video game stars have big fan followings and that is a measure of the tremendous popularity this activity enjoys in this country.

The United States has also got its share of cyber-athletes if one may call them, who make good amounts of money playing these games. The brightest and most followed star is Johnathan Wendel. He is also known to his millions of fans as fatal 1ty, which is the screen name and by which he is also known to many million fans across the world.

Johnathan took to professional video gaming at the tender age of nineteen and has become an expert at these games as evident from the number of major e-sports tournaments that he has won. He has the proud distinction winning more than forty such tournaments and that is by far the most by anybody in America. This winning spree has brought him over $450,000 in cash prizes and that should be encouraging news to worried parents who are concerned about their children spending a lot of time at this activity.

This expertise at video games has enabled this star to travel to various destinations in the world in order to take part in tournaments. He has played everywhere except probably Antarctica. He has had the opportunity to even play at such exotic and historical places such as ‘Great wall of China’ as well as at the ‘Red Square’ in Moscow.

Johnathan has millions of fans who just cannot get enough of him and he is always swarmed by them wherever he goes. Thanks to his five world championship wins in five totally different game formats, he is somebody who is considered versatile and an absolute superstar in this field. Till now, the world has not seen any other gamer getting close to achieving so much in so little time. It is no wonder that he lives life king-size travelling in the best of comfort and staying at the best of hotels with all expenses taken care of.

He had perhaps his greatest victory in the year 2006 when he beat his opponent for his fifth world championship. His opponent was the then reigning champion in that particular video game format.

Morphee Interactive, a new independent developer and publisher of video games online from France, announces the launch of its first game, REN: The Celestial Tournament in November 2009 with an open beta in October.

About REN: The Celestial Tournament

REN is a card game multiplayer online playable on the browser, where you can create your avatar and get into the exciting battles against thousands of players. Creating your avatar is fully customizable with a multitude of options. You embody one of the three races that are the mysterious Yao, the terrible and mysterious Nuva Shen. Once created your avatar it will gain power as you win fights and depending on the items you equip.

The system of the original game will surprise you with the endless possibilities it offers, and this in spite of the simplicity of amazing handling. You can challenge your friends in a friendly game and so you cause to participate in many tournaments and events that allow you to win prestigious awards.

Like most major MMORPGs, REN will give you the opportunity to get together in guilds to develop strategies group and enjoy many bonuses increasing the power of your avatar in combat. You will also be possible to trade with thousands of players REN offering to buy copies of the map of your avatar or selling some equipment.

For additional information about the game and to register for the closed beta test will take place at least October 2009, go here. You can watch the trailer of the game and return regularly for new details about the universe by putting REN Online dev blog dedicated to REN.

Here are some screenshoots:

[View with PicLens]

The birth of the internet has spawned various conveniences. You can now get access to information, communicate, get entertained, make money by working online, share pictures and even videos, do your shopping and many more things that seemed impossible some years back. As the internet is finding its way into new establishments and homes, the commercial implications and advantages are getting highlighted with every new application or software making things easier and more convenient for people.

Gaming software and other gaming applications have opened up a lot of opportunity and many companies have been able to sell hardware as well as other stuff necessary for people to take part in games that can be played online. One such application that has become very popular over the years is the online bingo game and many people have found that they can have a good time playing this game online from the comfort of their home.

However, certain tips need to be kept in mind by you when playing online bingo.
They are:
a) Sites that offer good starting bonuses need not be the best sites.

b) Play at sites that are reputed and have stood the test of time. You must not sign up at a site that has just started irrespective of the bonus or incentives they offer to new members. They could turn out to be frauds and you could lose your money. You can get reviews about the sites that are good and can take that as guidance.

c) Check out whether the online bingo site in question has the right gamble certificates. These certificates indicate that the site working is audited regularly and they maintain fairness in play. You can find the evidence of such certificates on the site itself and if you do not find them, move on to another site.

d) Verify whether the site has adequate security safeguards and whether they are up to date.

e) Find out if the site has a number through which you can get customer service support. You must also be able to reach them on email for any problems related to your account. The site administrator must also be accessible in case you have problems with the customer service access. This mode of contact is extremely important and any site that does not display the number and site administration information is not worth your time or effort.

f) Sign up for online bingo sites that have a good blend of promotional offers that they keep coming up with on a regular basis. If a site is able to put up a schedule of their activities and the different games on offer, then it means that the site is an organized one and wants to help players make their own plans. Such sites also offer the flexibility to players to play for a longer time and help players to control their spending of money.