Napalm Riot

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As temperatures begin to rise it's time to start planning the ultimate summer vacation to THE must-attend gaming event of the year - QuakeCon 2008. That's right! The world's greatest gaming festival and party will take place July 31 - August 3, 2008 in Dallas, TX at the Hilton Anatole Hotel. As always, this event is FREE to all attendees thanks to the incredible support of the QuakeCon volunteer staff, id Software, and the event sponsors and exhibitors.

QuakeCon will once again host North Ame . . . Read more

Atari founder and Pong co-creator Nolan Bushnell has blamed the increase in violence for gaming becoming a male dominated area and its change from a casual activity to hardcore.

"I like to talk about [how] 1983 was sort of the break point where games went from casual to hardcore," said Bushnell to MTV.

"They got violent. They went long form. The violence lost the women and the long form lost the casual gamer. I actually sort of stuck to my roots, and the console game market moved away."
. . . Read more

You can tell a lot from a gamer’s hardware. And in the gaming world, nobody knows more about the platforms on which PC gamers run their games than the Steam game distribution network. In 2000, Half-Life was one of the best-rated, best-selling games of all time. Created by Valve, it was distributed through traditional retail channels. When it came time to release the sequel, however, Valve went direct. Using the Steam platform — Steam’s desktop software handles game registration, purchasing . . . Read more

A second-generation self-tuning Robot Guitar was recently announced by Gibson Guitar Corp. (Nashville, Tenn.). Two new models are available--a Les Paul Studio Ltd. and an SG Special Ltd.--both offering a new locking input jack. The first-generation Robot Guitar was superseded by the new second-generation models earlier this month. The new instruments, which sport a metallic purple finish, are now sold out, but EE Times has learned that a new metallic green finish will be announced by Gibson soon . . . Read more

Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages.

On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Although image search . . . Read more

On Monday, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced the launch of Blu-ray player’s fourth generation, which is expected to be made available for sale sometime this summer, and Blu-ray home theater’s second generation.

According to Dongsoo Jun, chief of Digital AV Business Division at Samsung Electronics, the overall Blu-ray market should record an average annual increase of at least 80% by the year 2012; this would mean 51 million units sold each year. Whether or not these expectations will . . . Read more

It may be a bit of a mouthful, but one, Michael Chettleburgh, is getting his name in the news at the moment. I expect it's because of GTA IV, but that's not the important aspect.

He doesn't believe that games like GTA, possibly the most contraversial game series in recent history (And quite possibly in the history of gaming to date), cause younger people to join gangs. He actually has some interesting articles floating around, that're worth a read if you find the time.

“If you actuall . . . Read more

Video game publisher Mastiff awarded 16 lucky gamers each a $15 gift certificate for pizza during the first two weeks of its Major League Eating: The Game "Food of the Week" contest. This week Mastiff will be giving away eight more $15 gift certificates-this time for burgers-to gamers who have registered at www.MLEGAME.com. Believe us, you can get a pretty damn good burger for $15.

Full Story: http://www.mcvuk.com/pres…-Pizza-to-Starving-Gamers

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