An anonymous reader writes "GameStop has confirmed rumors that it is planning to jump into the tablet market with a device dedicated to gaming. '[GameStop President Tony Bartel said] this week that Android was capable of running what he called a "GameStop-certified gaming platform" and that GameStop would be self-branding existing tablet hardware built by an unspecified third-party manufacturer. ... GameStop will sell its gaming tablet alongside consoles and handheld gaming devices from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and others, he said.' There's no release date yet, but the device is currently being tested by consumers. It will apparently ship with its own wireless controller."

Jeremy Erwin writes "A columnist for Slate asks why there aren't any civilians in today's military shooting games. Quoting: 'Mostly, they don't want to face the consequences of players' bad behavior. In an interview with the website Rock Paper Shotgun, Battlefield 3's executive producer Patrick Bach explained that he doesn't "want to see videos on the Internet where people shoot civilians. That's something I will sanitize by removing that feature from the game." Bach believes that video games are serious business but that players' irreverence is holding back the form. "If you put the player in front of a choice where they can do good things or bad things, they will do bad things, go [to the] dark side because people think it's cool to be naughty, they won't be caught," he said.'" (Note that there are civilians in Battlefield 3, you just can't kill them, accidentally or otherwise. Despite this, the author's point stands: "By removing civilians from the picture, developers like Bach are trying to reap the benefits of a real-life setting without grappling with the reality of collateral damage.")

mikejuk writes with a bit from I Programmer on what sounds like an intriguing new game: "If you're bored with games where you run around shooting soldiers or monsters, how about a game where you shoot enemies to win computer code snippets that you can then use to shape the reality around you? It's good to play and good enough to win both the Editor's Choice and Kid's Choice at this year's Bay Area Maker Faire." The linked story has a video demo, too.

First time accepted submitter RGDfleet writes with news snipped from Gamer Gaia, based on a report in GameSpot UK: "For around three months now EA's Origin store, previously known as the EA Store, has been providing digital copies of just about any EA title post-2009. In fact, Origin has been exclusively EA ever since its inception and has featured no games from other publishers. On top of this the service has restricted access of EA titles on competitor providers such as Steam, Battlefield 3 perhaps being the leading example. This week however, EA CFO Eric Brown confirmed that they intend to start bringing third party content to Origin."

PktLoss writes "I'm interested in building an arcade machine, following the footsteps of Cmdr Taco among many others. Not being all that interested in piracy, I need to find somewhere to buy games. StarROMs used to be the kind of thing I was looking for, though with an incredibly short catalog. The MAME people have a few available for free (non-commercial), but this isn't going to sate my needs. There's an entire cottage industry supporting this goal. People are ready to sell me plans, kits, buttons, joy sticks, glass marquees, and entire machines. That's fantastic, but where can I get the games? I refuse to believe that this entire industry is built on piracy."

Sometimes it seems like the U.S. government's relationship to commercial video games is mostly adversarial, as when public officials vilify or move to censor games (even when the results are mixed). An anonymous reader writes with a reminder that the business side of the games business has a much cozier government link, as reflected in this excerpt from the New York Times: "Because video game makers straddle the lines between software development, the entertainment industry and online retailing, they can combine tax breaks in ways that companies like Netflix and Adobe cannot. Video game developers receive such a rich assortment of incentives that even oil companies have questioned why the government should subsidize such a mature and profitable industry whose main contribution is to create amusing and sometimes antisocial entertainment." Since filling out even a simple return can be rather game-like, maybe they're just doing what they do best.

A few days ago, the Opposable Thumbs blog ran a piece titled, "In gaming, everything is amazing, but no one is happy." The thrust of the article is that discussion about modern games focuses almost entirely on flaws, which are often blown out of proportion. "Every game is too short, although we never finish the games we play. Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length. The same people who claim every game was 80 hours and a masterpiece 10 years ago are 10 years away from saying that today was the golden time, once they have the distance needed to scrub the bad games from memory." Today, gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun offers counterpoint, saying that video games need active criticism for the industry to improve. "Everything is amazing, and sometimes people are happy. That’s how it will always be. And we should probably make the most of it, and then strive to make it better."

crookedvulture writes "Graphics hardware reviews have long used frames per second to measure performance. The thing is, an awful lot of frames are generated in a single second. Calculating the FPS can mask brief moments of perceptible stuttering that only a closer inspection of individual frame times can quantify. This article explores the subject in much greater detail. Along the way, it also effectively illustrates the 'micro-stuttering' attributed to multi-GPU solutions like SLI and CrossFire. AMD and Nvidia both concede that stuttering is a real problem for modern graphics hardware, and benchmarking methods may need to change to properly take it into account."

akutz writes "I recently sold a 2011 Mac mini on Craigslist because after using it to rip my Blu-ray collection, I tried to use it as an emulation station connected to my TV. However, emulators like Dolphin, BSNES, etc. would cause the Mac mini's fans to spin up like turbine engines — much too loud for my liking. I ask, therefore: What hardware would you recommend for building a passively cooled mini-system that will serve as a media center's emulation station?"

An anonymous reader writes "A company named Thinkoptics has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Nintendo over the motion controller used with the Wii. Apparently they make a similar product named the Wavit Remote, and they've been granted patents describing its operation. 'And they've chosen the setting most likely to yield a win: the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Texas. Now, that's not to say that Wavit-maker Thinkoptics will get a win, but this particular court circuit tends to favor the patent holder over all else. The patent in question, U.S. Patent Number 7,796,116, is titled "Electronic equipment for handheld vision based absolute pointing system." Thinkoptics' primary argument in the case is that Nintendo had previous knowledge that the Wii would infringe based on the Trademark Office's rejection of certain claims in Nintendo-filed patents.'"

koinu writes "Phoronix has published benchmarks comparing 3D game performance on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 with the FreeBSD Linux ABI emulation on the 8.2 release of PC-BSD, which is a desktop variant of FreeBSD. Most results show that the emulated Linux layer on FreeBSD performs better than Linux natively. It's pretty interesting, because most people would expect that an additional abstraction layer would generally slow down the execution of binaries."

An anonymous reader writes "The free game with every graphics card deal has finally backfired for AMD and Codemasters. Due to a lack of .htaccess, 1.7 million keys for a free copy of DiRT 3 on Steam have been leaked. No word from AMD or Codemasters yet, but I'm sure Valve will block all the codes on Steam soon. One question that remains: if you used one of the codes, will Steam ban your account? There could be a few very unhappy gamers later today if that happens." The exact number of keys is in question — reports range from 250,000 to 3 million — but AMD confirmed that a leak did occur.

jmobley6030 writes with a bit in Gamer Gaia about Sony pulling out the big guns for their security infrastructure. Quoting: "Months after the great PlayStation network attack things are starting to get back to normal around the gaming world. While it doesn't seem like another hack attempt will take place anytime soon Sony is fearful that it could happen again. Sony announced today via their corporate news feed that they have hired Philip R. Reitinger, a former Homeland security official, as Chief Information Security Officer at Sony."

mikejuk writes with a light piece in I Programmer about a neat Kinect and gigantic projector hack. From the article: "If you remember Breakout — rows of blocks a the top of the screen and a paddle to bounce a ball into them to destroy a block — then you might not feel nostalgic about it. After all, it was a very limited sort of game. However, take one Kinect and one building and you have something quite different when you use it to create a Breakout game. The bricks, ball and paddle all projected onto an old building and the player moves from side-to-side to control the paddle. The player's position is being detected by a Kinect, is there no end to the fun you can have with this gadget. The really clever bit, and you might not notice it unless you look closely at the video, is that the ball bounces off real architectural features of the building — like the windows, for example."

An anonymous reader writes "A man identifying himself as 'Timofiend' has posted a detailed walkthrough of how he built an impressive case mod that fits both a PlayStation 3 and an Xbox 360 into a mid-tower computer case. He used one of the newer Slim 360 models hooked up to an ATX power supply, and one of the bulkier old PS3 units, with its standard power supply as well. After arranging the internal boards, persuading the two optical drives to fit and loading up on fans to prevent overheating, he wound up with a very cool (and functional!) blend of gaming platforms."

An anonymous reader writes "Through some clever patching, OnLive community members have found a way to run OnLive on Linux using Wine. While the fix isn't perfect, this is a giant leap for Linux users wanting to play the latest games without the need for Windows. Linux users can now play several high quality games like the new Deus Ex with very few performance issues and on lower end hardware."

winston18 writes "Sony's vice president of publisher relations has gone on record as saying that Microsoft is protecting an inferior technology with their policies regarding content on Xbox Live Arcade and multiplatform titles. The comments stem from Microsoft's admission that they reserve the right to deny titles on Xbox Live if they launch on the PlayStation Network first."

donniebaseball23 writes "Google's new games offering on Google+ has only been around a few weeks, and it's been getting mixed reactions. According to veteran game designer Ed Del Castillo, the potential is there to beat Facebook at its own game, if Google improves in the right areas, which he outlines as evolved content, player discovery and a push for HTML5. 'Overall, the quality of Google+ gaming isn't bad. It's just another Facebook with fewer games and fewer friends. It's a baby step in a time where successful companies, like Apple, are taking huge strides. The good news is that they didn't blow it. They have a good base to build on,' he said."

An anonymous reader writes "Atari Inc. has launched another round of cease-and-desist letters targeted at what remains of its fan community. Having threatened homebrewers for the Atari 2600 and 8-bit systems, as well as emulator authors for mobile platforms like Android, they're now upping the ante by menacing Atari emulator authors on the Dreamcast and sites with Asteroids in the name (though in fairness, that site apparently once hosted a version of the Asteroids game). The working theory is that the company is planning a big push into the mobile market, and is trying to eliminate everything it believes could threaten its latest attempts at reviving the brand name. However, the emulators in question appear to have no copyrighted content from Atari, so it's unclear what exactly Atari believes the infringing material to be."

Sludge writes "Graham Jans, a founder of the Vancouver Design Dojo and designer of Zombie Minesweeper, provides well-thought-out reasons why microtransactions in games are an amoral concept that can be used for good or evil, defying the typical knee-jerk reaction to Zynga-style use of microtransactions as a cynical tool designed to siphon the maximum amount of money from your wallet. Quoting: 'As well, such a thing could be a tool for benevolence. A developer could tune the length between releases to offer just a little more content for the same price, if they felt that was the right thing to do. In fact, most of the factors in microtransactions work this way. The negative reputation these systems have comes from factors that are tuned to maximize profit and abuse players for their money. But that's not an inherent trait in the system; you could just as easily use it to ensure your own bankruptcy!'"