Vigile writes "Nintendo has never been known to be very aggressive with its gaming console hardware and with today's release (in the U.S.) of the Wii U we are seeing a continuation of that business model. PC Perspective spent several hours last night taking apart a brand new console to reveal a very simplistic board and platform design topped off with the single multi-chip module that holds the IBM PowerPC CPU and the AMD GPU. The system includes 2GB of GDDR3 memory from Samsung and Foxconn/Hon-Hai built wireless controllers for WiFi and streaming video the gamepad. Even though this system is five years newer, many analysts estimate the processing power of Nintendo's Wii U to be just ahead of what you have in the Xbox 360 today."

YokimaSun writes "Nintendo has today fired the first salvo in the next-gen console wars with the U.S. release of their Wii U console, which is massively more powerful than the Nintendo Wii and also the PS3/Xbox 360 (so they claim). Yet again Nintendo has done a world first and released a gamepad which is also a tablet and should provide us with games that stretch the boundaries even more. Wii games are compatible with the console, as is the Wii remote. The Wii U comes in 2 SKUs: a 32GB Deluxe package, and an 8GB Basics pack. The games lineup is a strong one, with games such as New Super Mario Bros U, Arkham City Armoured Edition, Assassins Creed 3, Call of Duty Black Ops 2, Sonic AllStars Racing, Nintendo Land, Tank Tank Tank, ScribbleNauts Unlimited, Epic Mickey 2 The Power of Two, ESPN Sports Connection, DarkSiders 2, Rabbids Land, Mass Effect 3, Ninja Gaiden 3 Razors Edge, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Wipeout 3 and Just Dance 4 all available on launch day."

Penurious Penguin writes that "a hopeful article at The Verge persuasively suggests that through Valve, Linux could soon become a formidable contender in the gaming arena, capable of holding its own against such giants as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii. With 50 million users, a growing Linux team, a caboodle of interesting experiments ('Steam Box' hardware baselines, etc.) and a strong conviction that more-open platforms are the way, Valve may actually see it through."

Zocalo writes "Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' attempt to reboot the Space Sim genre, hit a major funding milestone earlier today, exceeding the previous record of $4,163,208 secured by the game Project Eternity and more than doubling the initial funding target set by the producer of the Wing Commander series. With Stretch Goals now being passed every few hours bringing new features to the planned game, and David Braben announcing a new installment of the classic Elite using a similar funding model at Kickstarter could this be a wake-up call for the big game publishers to take another look at the genre? There are still two days left for Star Citizen funding as well, so if you feel like taking part, you can chip in either at the main RSI site or on Kickstarter."

New submitter skade88 writes "With the Linux Steam beta giving Ubuntu and its large userbase all the love, other Linux gamers understandably want to be let in on the fun. For the beta, Valve has provided Steam as a Debian package. Many hungry Linux gamers have reported that they have Steam running on their favorite distro, but that still leaves the legal debate. What is the legal threshold needed to get Steam in the repos of your preferred flavor of Linux? Will Valve's one-size-fits-every-OS license be flexible to work on Linux or will it delay the dream of a viable gaming world for Linux? We are so close to bridging the last major hurdle in finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop: Gaming. Lets hope the FOSS community and Valve can play together so we all win."

mikejuk writes "The Kinect is well supported by a good and evolving SDK on the desktop, but until now using it in a browser wasn't easy. Now Microsoft Research has a free JavaScript API, Kinected Browser, that lets you integrate the Kinect with HTML. The bad news is that it only works on Windows 7 and 8 and in desktop mode only. In addition the browser has to be IE9 or IE 10. The good news is that more programmers know how to do HTML5 graphics than know how to work with DirectX or .NET. As a result this could lead to another burst of innovative Kinect applications."

An anonymous reader writes with this bit of trademark absurdity from geek.com: "Ravensburger is a German gaming company that specializes in jigsaw puzzles, but has also expanded into other areas such as children's books and games. The company owns the trademark to a board game called 'Memory' and has demanded Apple stop offering apps that have the word 'memory' in their title or as a keyword associated with an app. It may seem ludicrous such a common word can be trademarked, but apparently this is a valid claim as Apple is now serving notices to app developers. The choice an infringing app developer has is to either rename their app or remove it from the App Store."

In this video (with transcript) we review the newest expansion to World of Warcraft, titled Mists of Pandaria. This is the fourth expansion to Blizzard's successful MMORPG, and while the quality of the content remains high, it's becoming increasingly apparent that they're basing it on a game that's been under development for over a decade. On top of that, the MMORPG genre itself is evolving, and though World of Warcraft remains a juggernaut of the industry, juggernauts are tougher to steer, and less adaptable to players' changing demands. The question for the success of an MMORPG expansion isn't simply "does it entertain?" It is: "does it entertain, and for how long?" Mists of Pandaria succeeds on the first count — it refreshes the gameplay, dangles new carrots in front of the players, and brings much-needed improvements to older systems. But keeping players engaged for a long time will be much more difficult. Hit the link below to watch/read our review.

dotarray writes "Valve's Gabe Newell has confirmed that they are building the Source 2 engine, but haven't yet had the game to roll it out with. From the article: 'If you're not smiling yet, you'll definitely be doing so after you hear how the announcement was made. It was Gabe Newell's birthday on November 3rd, and 4Chan's /v/ (videogames) board decided to pay him a surprise visit. In addition to an enormous birthday card signed by many of /v/'s regulars, they also gave him an an actual Mann-Co crate, which he had to pay $2.50 to unlock in order to receive the gift of a combat helmet similar to the one worn by the Team Fortress 2 soldier. Irony at its best.'"

YokimaSun writes "This may be one of those projects that will get trounced on soon enough like the great Bleemcast Project, but a group of developers calling themselves the PPSSPP Project have released the first PSP Emulator for the Android OS, the emulator lets you play PSP Games with a touchscreen which was something PSP owners had wanted for years. At the moment games that are playable are Puzzle Bobble Deluxe, Puyo Pop Fever & Pinball Fantasies. The emulator has also been released for Windows and BlackBerry."

hypnosec writes with news that two security consultants have found vulnerabilities in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and the CryEngine 3 graphics engine that could harm game makers and players alike. Presenting at the Power of Community (POC2012) security conference, the researchers demonstrated how a denial-of-service attack could affect Modern Warfare 3, and how a server-level attack on CryEngine 3 allowed them to "create a remote shell on a game-player's computer." "'Once you get access to the server, which is basically the interface with the company, you can get access to all of the information on the players through the server,' Ferrante said. In general, game companies don't seem to be very focused on security but rather on performance of the game itself, Ferrante said. Adding security checks can slow down games, and if the companies don't deem the problem a very critical issue, it will usually be ignored. 'These are games that have a very large market,' Auriemma said."

An anonymous reader writes "A man has initiated a class-action suit against Blizzard over a product used to shore up Battle.net security. Benjamin Bell alleges that Blizzard's sale of Authenticators — devices that enable basic two-tier authentication — represents deceptive and unfair additional costs to their basic games. (Blizzard sells the key fob versions for $6.50, and provides a free mobile app as an alternative. Neither are mandatory.) The complaint accuses Blizzard of making $26 million in Authenticator sales. In response, Blizzard made a statement refuting some of the complaint's claims and voicing their intention to 'vigorously defend' themselves."

Hugh Pickens writes "CBS reports that seven active duty members of SEAL Team Six, best known for killing Osama bin Laden, have been disciplined for revealing secrets working as paid consultants on a video game, Medal of Honor: Warfighter. The game does not recreate the bin Laden raid, but it does portray realistic missions, such as an attack on a pirates' den in Somalia. Electronic Arts boasts that real commandos, both active duty and retired, help make its games as realistic as possible. EA says Medal of Honor Warfighter was 'written by actual U.S. Tier 1 Operators while deployed overseas,' and that it 'features a dotted line to real world events and provides players a view into globally recognized threats and situations letting them experience the action as it might have unfolded.' It is unclear what secrets members of SEAL Team Six gave away, but while serving as consultants for the game, they used classified material which had been given to them by the Navy and also violated the unwritten code that SEALs are silent warriors who shun the spotlight. 'We do not tolerate deviations from the policies that govern who we are and what we do as Sailors in the United States Navy,' says Deputy Commander of Naval Special Warfare, Rear Admiral Garry Bonelli. 'The non-judicial punishment decisions made today send a clear message throughout our Force that we are and will be held to a high standard of accountability.'"

jbrodkin writes "In this hyper-connected, networked world, many more of our devices are getting linked to the cloud, whether we want them to or not. That's sometimes good, and sometimes bad, so when a basic device like a mouse requires a user to go online and set up an account to activate all of its functionality, people are understandably going to ask why? The latest entry in the saga of 'Why the hell does this thing need to connect to the Internet?' comes from Razer, which has caused an uproar by asking users to register gaming mice on the Internet. While it's mainly for syncing settings across devices, gamers are complaining that certain functionality might not be available unless you create an online account for your mouse. Razer has responded to the controversy, but its answers aren't entirely satisfactory."

Teancum writes "Colleen Lachowicz, candidate for the State Senate District 25 of Maine, won the election yesterday against her opponent Thomas Martin. This race was notable in part because her World of Warcraft character that was mentioned earlier on Slashdot, where the Maine Republican Party turned her game playing into a significant issue. It is also notable that she was able to raise a total of $6,300 in campaign contributions from gamers who came to her defense in her successful campaign. The Maine GOP even tried to block these contributions where Lachowicz was cleared of any wrong doing and the investigation was dropped."

New submitter schirra writes "Researchers at MIT Game Lab have created a free video game that accurately simulates the effects of Einstein's relativity. 'A Slower Speed of Light' challenges players to collect objects strewn throughout a level to artificially lower the speed of light. As light speed slows to walking pace, it makes visible the unusual effects one encounters when traveling close to the speed of light, such as the Doppler effect, searchlight effect and Lorentz transformation. The effects are, in a word, trippy. The team plans to release an open-source Unity3D toolkit called OpenRelativity to allow others to include the same relativistic effects in other games." They also plan to release the source code sometime next year (despite reports that it is open source already).

leppi writes "Nvidia has announced a huge increase in Linux gaming performance for their GeForce R310 drivers after almost a year of development alongside Valve and other game developer partners. Nvidia's announcement also indicated the Steam beta for Linux should be out today. Quoting: 'Available for download at www.geforce.com, the new R310 drivers were also thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the extension of Valve's phenomenally popular Steam gaming platform that officially opened to gamers starting today. ... Comparing 304.51 driver performance of 142.7 fps versus 310.14 driver performance of 301.4 fps in beta build of Left for Dead 2. All tests run on the same system using Intel Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz with 8 GB memory, GeForce GTX 680 and Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit.'" Update: 11/06 21:00 GMT by S : Valve has gone ahead and announced the Steam for Linux Beta. They've sent invites to a number of people who filled out the application, and they'll be inviting more as the test goes along. The beta test is available for installation on Ubuntu 12.04, with support for other distros to come: "We intend to support additional popular distros in the future; we’ll prioritize development for these based on user feedback."

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC report that David Braben has launched a Kickstarter for a remake of Elite, the classic space trading game that he co-wrote in the 1980s. It has already received £122,000 in less than a day."

Mr. Jaggers writes "Chris Roberts, game designer of Wing Commander fame, has had great success with his new crowd-funded Star Citizen project — so much that the $2m base goal has been smashed with weeks to go on the Kickstarter portion of the campaign. Now Chris is floating a list of stretch goals for fans to vote on, with Linux and Mac support both listed as stretch goal candidates. Since Star Citizen is based on the popular CryENGINE 3 game engine, these stretch goals are equivalent to funding Linux and Mac ports of CryENGINE. Chris couldn't make any absolute promises yet, since he doesn't own the engine, but CryENGINE 3 already supports Android, so at least there is existing OpenGL ES support to be leveraged towards adding Linux and Mac OpenGL support. If there is enough outpouring of cross-platform support from fans in this poll, Star Citizen could turn out to be the high-profile game that brings a AAA game engine to the growing Mac and Linux gaming communities — analogous to the role played by Wasteland 2 in bringing official Linux support to the Unity 4 engine popular among so many Indie developers."

An anonymous reader writes "BBC News claims that a feature in Borderlands 2 that can only be activated in modded XBox 360s has a bug that can cause characters to be permanently deleted when they die- even if they weren't the ones who activated the feature. 'The hidden option within the game, known as "badass" or "hardcore", is turned off by default but can be enabled by those that have modified or hacked their console. [..] When a player with an unmodded console joins a Borderlands 2 multiplayer game in which there is a character running in badass mode it too gets kicked into that mode. [..] Gamers who play alongside people who have modded their console "contract" the bug which deletes their character if they die during play.'"