A brand new selection of Gears of War merchandise has been revealed today, undoubtedly set to slot into the series' fans "most-wanted" lists rather highly. Expected for release this fourth quarter in the UK, the Gears of War - Delta Squad Box Set is just what many UK Gears of Wars fans have been waiting for.


Gears of War sold over three million copies in just Electronic Theatre Imageten weeks and was the fastest-selling videogame of 2006. The success of the game has led to the development of the Gears of War franchise, including the 2008 sequel Gears of War 2 and a whole host of Downloadable Content (DLC), and adaptations to books, comics, and a feature film suggested to be on the way.

Originally available as two separate series in North America, each comprising of two action figures, the Gears of War - Delta Squad Box Set consists of four characters; Marcus, Dom, Baird, and Cole. In addition, the Gears of War - Delta Squad Box Set contains exclusive weapons and accessories only available in this set. Though no firm release date has yet been set, it has been suggested that the Gears of War - Delta Squad Box Set will arrive in time for the busy fourth quarter retail period. A Recommended Retail Price (RRP) of £34.99 has already been announced.

The Gears of War - Delta Squad Box Set is not the first set of action figures based on the Gears of War franchise to be released in the UK, but is undoubtedly the most detailed. Electronic Theatre will keep you updated on all the latest development with the Gears of War franchise.

News-Source: electronictheatre.co.uk

For any one out there that might still have some doubts about the Cloud Service and what it will be able to do here is a bit of video that shows that not only will it work but once the servers are in place it will run very smooth.


As you can see in this IGN video there is no dout it can hold up to a single player even with the server being about 300 mile away from this guys laptop, with this video and the facts that show online play to be the way we are going you would be nuts to think this wont be a big thing before long.

Video Source: ign.com

It may have been a little while since the OnLive concept hit the news feeds but i would be willing to bet no one has fully forgot it, seems the closed beta has started but from the report below it seems we all might have a chance to still get in on it.


Steve Perlman blogs: It’s been a very busy and productive few months for OnLive. We’ve been focused on evolving the OnLive technology, installing lots of servers in our data centers and tuning the OnLive® Game Service based on feedback from our internal Beta testers.

And, I’m very excited to say that we are now opening the OnLive Beta to outside gamers who signed up on our website. It’s not too late to sign up if you haven’t already. We are very much looking forward to hearing from gamers all about their experience with the OnLive Service.

But first, let me tell you a little bit about OnLive Beta and how we are rolling it out.

One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can.

When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we’ll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration. The results of the Performance Test will then feed back up to OnLive, and if you are a fit for a test group at some point during Beta, we’ll let you install the OnLive plug-in into your browser. Then, we’ll ask you to spend some time playing…um, I mean…testing games OnLive.

As testers interact with the service and play games, OnLive will be constantly logging technical data, and then afterward, we’ll ask testers to give us feedback about their personal experiences with OnLive. This feedback will help us continue to evolve the features and experience of the OnLive Service, so it’s really important we get lots of feedback to bring the gaming community the best videogame platform and service possible.

Another important goal of the Beta is to shake out bugs so we can fix them. So, it’s very important that you let us know what bugs you run into.

Beta is an AWESOME milestone for OnLive, capping many years of work. We’re really looking forward to hearing what you think.

News-Source: blog.onlive.com

This has got to be the most unreal bag of crap i have ever seen, you might recall way back in the day when the world was playing GTA: San Andreas that the puritans found out about the hot coffee mod and went mad with the idea there kids could see this in a game and not on TV like God intended and now that no one cares its finally over.

EDGE reports: Take-Two has settled the class action lawsuit brought against the publisher by investors over the infamous 'Hot Coffee' modification contained in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The Hot Coffee controversy centered on the discovery of a sex minigame in GTA: San Andreas, which was disabled but left within the game's code. The Hot Coffee modification enabled users to access the minigame in the PC version of the title, and console hacking tools enabled the minigame to be played in the console versions.

San Andreas was subsequently re-rated as Adults Only and pulled from some retailers’ shelves. An updated version of the title with the minigame removed was later released, but investors alleged that their stakes in Take-Two had been damaged by the scandal.

Take-Two will pay $20.1 million to settle the lawsuit, with $15.2 million covered by the company’s insurance carriers. The publisher said that it fully accrued for its portion of the settlement costs over several quarters ended April 30, 2009.

"We are pleased to have reached this settlement, which represents another important step forward for the company," said Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick.

XBOX-Hq Game Database: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
News-Source: next-gen.biz

I must say i love a good study on anything game related and thats just what we got right here, it might just be me but it would seem that after all the time and effort put in to this study that no one has made a single point that shows there is a link.


A study conducted by researchers at the University of Adelaide has linked regular video game play to gambling addiction.

Australia's ABC News reports on comments by Paul Delfabbro of the University's school of psychology. Delfabbro's team studied more than 2,500 Australian teens and found that more than half admitted to gambling within the preceding 12 months. Delfabbro commented on his findings:

" If you look at those young people who are classified as pathological gamblers you will find that they do have a higher frequency of involvement with many different types of videogame. They're much more likely to play games on Xboxes and similar consoles. They are also more likely to play arcade games...

Some young people who don't have a lot of structured activities in their life... what they'll often do is spend very large amounts of time playing videogames or often be more likely to be the ones who go off to street venues to play arcade games.

Those sort of young people who've had this need for more sort of unstructured activities probably also drift into gambling a bit more because it's another activity which you can do if you're out on the street."

However, University of Sydney psychology professor Alex Blaszczynski said that the evidence gathered by Delfabbro does not support a causal link between video game play and compulsive gambling:

"Does an interest in gambling lead to people becoming involved in video games or do video games lead to people becoming involved in gambling? Or is there a third factor which accounts for both gambling and videogames?

There’s also the possibility that some people with certain characteristics would then tend to engage in both video and technology type gaming activity and gambling as well. And that may well be linked to things like risk taking or impulsivity or other factors."

The University of Adelaide research will appear in next month's Journal of Gambling Studies.

So in the long run i must say as a whole this study was a FAIL!

News-Source: gamepolitics.com

You and i both know there are a lot of world war 2 games out there and until now how many for sure was just a guessing game, here we have a new report by 1up that will fill in any and all missing info about the war game that have come out since the dawn of consoles.

1UP reports: "Another WWII shooter" has long since passed beyond the point of being mere cliché; to becoming something almost entirely meaningless -- so common there's little point in even pointing it out. The sun came up in the East today, the ocean is kind of wet, and we stormed the beach at Normandy for the five hundredth time this week. It's not until we remember, based on the minimal attention we paid in history class, that there were a crapload of other wars fought over the last century or so that it starts to feel a little odd that the second World War gets such disproportionate representation in gaming. In fact, performing a casual census of game releases since 1980 and checking them against 20th century American conflicts is more than a little startling:


The obvious question is, "Why?" Part of the answer lies in the dates the games were released, which reveals a huge spike in WWII titles around the late '90s. While games were always heavily weighted toward WWII before that point, over two-thirds of the titles on the list were released after 1998, and almost all of them have been first-person shooters. It's true that more games of all kinds were being published by then than in the industry's younger days, but the number of titles set in other wars actually decreases at that point. Perhaps more tellingly, a large percentage of the games on the list represent only a few franchises:


But none of this actually explains why. The obvious answer would seem to be, "Because they're popular." As long as a certain kind of game sells well, it'll be followed by sequels and imitators, and WWII shooters sell very, very well. But why would they be so much more popular than shooters set in, say, World War I or Vietnam?

At least some of that has to be a practical consideration. No war has actually been much fun for the people involved, but there are certain elements that make for a fun game. In the case of the first World War, gamers probably wouldn't have a particularly good time spending hours sitting in a ditch waiting for either someone to take off their head the instant they look up, or for their entire team to be wiped out by poison gas. Think of it as a version of Team Fortress in which Sniper is the only class and everyone randomly dies for no reason occasionally. In fact, nearly every WWI game ever made has been either a strategy game or a flight sim. Nobody actually seems to have much interest in dying in a trench.

In the case of Vietnam, the difference is probably mostly psychological. First, it probably helps that WWII is a war that we "won." Second, though history is a bit more complicated than we'd like to think, it's very easy to believe that WWII may have been an example of the mythical "just war." There were good guys and bad guys. Nazis, in fact, rank above robots and zombies on the list of evil things we can guiltlessly cap in the head. Meanwhile, conflicts like Vietnam, where you don't really know exactly what you're trying to accomplish or even who the bad guys actually are until they start shooting at you, don't make for a very satisfying experience, at least in the context of a shooter. Nobody wants to play a game where you don't know who to shoot, other than "everyone, including the women and children," and winning means coming home despised, unemployable, and possibly maimed.

Most any other war has some combination of the above problems, coupled with the fact that WWII looms so large in both history and collective memory that it's sometimes hard to remember that any other wars happened.

News-Source: 1up.com

If your like me at all you might have been wondering ware the all new and flashy OnLive system was this year at E3 and why they seem to be very quit about this service all together, here with a few answers for is the team over at joystiq.com.




Even though OnLive said it wouldn't be at E3, we still got to give the streaming game service a shot. It wasn't actually on the show floor, but inside an actual home ... as in luxury downtown condo that no one actually lives in. OnLive rented the place for the experience, and the service was running over a normal at-home internet connection.


As proof, it showed off an actual Time Warner cable modem to prove that the experience was real, complete with blinking lights and bundles of cables. Update: An OnLive executive told us that speeds through the modem were peaking at four to five megabits per second, which is near the top limit of a low end cable modem usage tier, although average speeds were two to three. They were able to dial up or down what the OnLive service was using on the fly, although the cable internet connection maxed out at six mbps, which again is standard for a low-end connection.


The service worked well enough to make us suspicious that OnLive actually moved one of its servers into the back bedroom. However, we were assured that it was running off a bank of machines in Santa Clara, almost 350 miles away. We played a shooter, a racing game, and a flight simulator, and a first-person action game (we weren't allowed to disclose titles) on a big LCD television in the living room through its microconsole, and on a MacBook Pro running the service via the browser plugin. We used a prototype of their Xbox-style controller on the TV, and tried out both a mouse and keyboard combination, and a Logitech game controller on the laptop.


Of the four games, the shooter was the only one that felt slightly sluggish, and it was also the only active multiplayer game out of the bunch, pairing us with other OnLive users scattered around the country. It also was a title we weren't that familiar with, and since it's E3 week we can't just go home and try it out and see if it was the service, or if that's just how that game plays. Everything else performed very well: several of the games were extremely reliant on timing, and we were able to nail jumps and avoid obstacles fairly easily after a couple of tries.




What was very slick was the interface: multiple streaming video windows of other players playing at that moment form a tile background, and they flip and transition as you move from location to location within the GUI interface. Most of these videos are canned, since they only have a hundred or so beta users right now, but they'll eventually be all live streams. In the Arena, you can scroll across all of these and click on any of them to spectate in full-screen mode, and in some cases join their game instantly.


When you launch a game from your collection, you'll see a brief video of that title while a progress bar fills up at the bottom of the screen, but at longest that load took us no more than 10 seconds. Once you're in the game, it's just like a normal game experience. A press of the center OnLive button, or a keystroke when you're playing with a keyboard, will take you back to the OnLive "home" space, for lack of a better word. You can also press the right thumbstick down or hit alt-b on a keyboard for the 15-second "Brag Clips" we talked about earlier, which are transparently saved out into the OnLive ether instantly.


In summary, the thing works. Games load and play fairly quickly, we didn't have any hardware on-hand other than the microconsole and their controller, and no physical media like game discs or files. Although the speeds indicate almost full usage of a low-end cable modem connection, which are below normal DSL levels, so you're probably going to use cable if you plan on getting on this service. OnLive is in the process of rolling out a closed beta, and we're hoping to be a part of the open beta later this summer. Stay tuned. Or live. Either way.


News-Source: joystiq.com