Games

Update (Monday, 2:43 PM): This story has been modified to reflect correspondence from Microsoft this morning.

If you can see past the extremely odd prose style of this Ars Technica piece Friday by Ben Kuchera, there's actually some potentially very interesting news there: Microsoft may be ready to truly reach out to the mass market with its Xbox 360.

According to Kuchera, Microsoft may well be readying a new round of price cuts for the Xbox 360.

Remember, just prior to E3, Microsoft lowered the price of the 20GB Xbox 360 from $349 to $299.

Now, writes Kuchera, … Read more

Nintendo on Tuesday filed lawsuits in Japan against five companies it said are allowing the illegal downloading of games from the Internet and the subsequent playing of those games on the company's hit DS handheld device.

The video game giant filed its suit along with 54 game development companies, all in the hopes of stopping the defendants--which it did not name in a press release--from enabling the downloading.

Nintendo "filed a legal action with the Tokyo District Court regarding game copying devices such as the 'R4 Revolution for DS' seeking to stop the importing and selling of those … Read more

Over at Venture Beat this morning, Dean Takahashi has a piece about what appears to be a fairly well developed in-game advertising program that has been under stealth development at Google.

"Sources close to the matter said the company has developed an in-game advertising technology that allows it to insert video ads into games," Takahashi wrote. "In demos of the technology, a game character can introduce a video ad, saying something like, 'And now, a word from our sponsor,' before showing a short video at the end of a sequence in a game."

He also wrote … Read more

If you've every wanted to live forever, legendary game designer Richard Garriott--also known in the video game community as "Lord British"--may give you the chance.

That's because Garriott, who has paid well into eight figures for the chance to go to space, is planning to take the DNA of several of his games' players with him for eternal stellar posterity.

The mission, known as "Operation Immortality," will launch this October when Garriott will fly aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station, taking with him a time capsule that will include … Read more

Shares of video game giant Electronic Arts were down 3.27 percent in after-hours trading in the wake of the company's worse than expected first quarter.

On Tuesday, EA reported that it had lost $95 million, or 30 cents a share, during Q1 on net revenues of $804 million. During the same period a year ago, it lost $132 million, or $0.42 a share, on net revenues of $395 million.

The company's adjusted losses came out to 42 cents a share in Q1. Thomson Financial's poll of analysts had predicted the company would post adjusted losses … Read more

After more than three years of anticipation, Spore is almost finished.

Electronic Arts' evolution game, from legendary designer Will Wright's Maxis studio, is about a week from going "gold," I was told Tuesday by Thomas Vu, a producer on the game who gave me a demo Tuesday morning. Going gold, of course, means the game is about to be sent to manufacturing. EA has said that Spore will launch September 7.

As you probably know, Spore is designed to task players with evolving through a series of stages, from the initial cell stage, to creature creation, to a tribal stage, then onto civilization, and then out into space.

Over the last few years, I've had a number of opportunities to see the game in its various stages of development, and let me tell you: It's looking good. What was a fairly rudimentary system back in 2005 when I first saw it at E3 in Los Angeles is now a polished, slick game that looks just about ready for prime time. Its interfaces all seem to work, there were no obvious bugs and it just seemed like a game that is doing what it's supposed to.

"Thank goodness," is what EA must be thinking. Spore has been the industry's most-anticipated title for at least a couple of years. When I first wrote about it, during E3 in 2005, in one of the very first extensive interviews with Wright about the game, I penned these words: "Next year, Electronic Arts will release Wright's next attempted masterpiece, Spore."

Clearly, Maxis didn't release the game in 2006, nor did it come out in 2007, when it was also planned for launch. There have been all kinds of reasons for the delays, but whatever happened in the past, the game is definitely looking good and I think I would be willing to put some money on EA making its September 7 deadline. … Read more

If you're a big Xbox Live fan and don't feel like waiting until this fall for the big redesign of the service that Microsoft has promised, there's apparently a way to play with a leaked version of it now.

That's the word from a blog called XHavok87, which this weekend posted an entry--complete with video--showing how to do it.

According to the blog, the so-called "Xbox Experience" dashboard, which is due out in the fall and was unveiled by Microsoft at its big-budget press conference at E3 in Los Angeles earlier this month, has … Read more

As planes packed with video game industry people start heading out of Los Angeles in droves after this week's E3 convention, the question is, What really transpired during the confab?

If one thing was clear, it was that the industry largely played it safe this week. Sure, there were a few big announcements--perhaps led by Microsoft's announcement of its planned revamping of the Xbox Live architecture--but for the most part, this was a pretty uneventful E3, an unsurprising reality given that we're a couple of years into the "next-generation" of consoles already and the … Read more

On Monday morning in Los Angeles, attendees at Microsoft's E3 press conference heard Xbox head Don Mattrick "declare" that that video game console would win the so-called next-generation console war.

But if the latest sales data put out by NPD mean anything, Microsoft's road to victory could be a little harder. That's because, according to Nintendo, the Wii in June surpassed the Xbox 360 to become the best-selling next-generation console in the United States.

According to Nintendo, NPD's numbers show that during June, the Wii hit 10.9 million units sold in the U.… Read more