Former Valve executive Jason Holtman has joined Microsoft, according to GamesIndustry International. Holtman was in charge of Steam for eight years, helping to turn it into the digital distribution platform juggernaut that it is today. Holtman was the point man for developers looking to get their games on the platform, and is credited with convincing big third-party publishers like Activision and Electronic Arts to hawk their PC wares there.

Markus 'Notch' Persson, creator of Minecraft and co-founder of Mojang, decided to take to his blog today to respond to an editorial by games journalist John Callaham entitled "Notch: Don't be a hypocrite about Minecraft and Windows 8" over at Neowin.

Mojang co-founder and Minecraft creator Markus Persson continues to voice disdain for Windows 8 because of its walled garden approach to gaming by instituting a closed marketplace for software. Persson took to Twitter today to complain about Microsoft after the platform holder asked his company to submit Minecraft for certification under Windows 8. Instead of cooperating with them, he took to Twitter with the following message:

Motorola Mobility has won an injunction against Microsoft in Germany prohibiting the sale of products in the country including Windows 7 and the Xbox 360. The injunction is the latest punch thrown in a bitter patent lawsuit between Motorola and Microsoft

Nintendo has won a patent infringement lawsuit filed by IA Labs that claimed the Wii Fit Balance Board infringed on one of its patents. IA Labs had sued Nintendo claiming that its Balance Board used with Wii Fit and other Wii software infringed on its rowing machine device (which attaches to a PC). The lawsuit was found to have no merit and was dismissed by a US District Court judge.

How long would you wait for your favorite video game to be released? Four hours? Eight hours? How about 29 hours? That's how long one man waited in Singapore to get his hands on his copy of Gears of War 3 on Monday. Nanyang Polytechnic student William Ten sat at the Funan DigitalLife Mall on Monday so he could be the first gamer in Singapore to own the latest game from Epic Games and Microsoft. Despite the wait the 22-year-old was in good spirits and good health thanks to his family members who made sure he was okay. The local launch event drew more than 1000 fans.

The tribunal has spoken! Or they soon will. Riot Games has put together a justice system for its popular online strategy RPG game League of Legends. The new Tribunal feature on the game's website lets the game's community review cases of "feeding," verbal harassment, and other in-game shenanigans and then punish players who go too far. The only catch is that in order to use the system you have to be over level 30 and haven't been banned.

Over 1,500 libraries are participating in the American Library Association’s (ALA) third annual National Gaming Day, which takes place on November 13.

The organization is billing the event as “the largest simultaneous national video game tournament ever held,” as it will allow participants to play against competitors in other libraries around North America. This year's tournament games are Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Rock Band.

During last year’s event, over 31,000 people played games at over 600 libraries in the U.S. and Canada.

Librarians, it was stated, follow the ESRB rating system and also do “extensive research” into games before allowing kids to play them. Featuring new media, like games, allows libraries to expand their reach, while meeting community expectations.

Microsoft has been a strong proponent of digital rights management - especially in its windows operating system - but a recent report on PC World reveals an exploit that uses the very protections the company put in place against users. The exploit involves the msnetobj.dll library, an ActiveX Network Object. The msnetobj.dll library "is intended to prevent the owner of a computer from saving or viewing certain files except under limited circumstances, and to prevent the computer's owner from disabling" the library, according to BoingBoing.

Hackers have figured out that the library is useful for attacking computers. Apparently, the file is susceptible to three different attacks - denial of service, buffer overflow, and integer overflow. These attacks can be triggered when the user is lured to a malicious website set up to exploit the file's weakness. Once in, the site can then allow a hacker to run malicious software on the target machine.

Microsoft says that it has not done a very good job of supporting the PC games sector, telling MCV that it needs to "step up" on Windows gaming. In a bid to offer "leadership" in the space, it plans to deliver three marquee titles: Fable III, Age of Empires Online and Microsoft Flight.

“There’s been a fair bit of criticism aimed at Microsoft that we were spending a lot of our focus on console, and we need to be putting resources behind PC as well,” Microsoft Games Studios’ general manager Dave Luehmann told MCV in an interview.

“Other companies should look to Microsoft for leadership, but I’m not sure they do. It is our job to lead the way on PC. And in some ways we are doing that and in other ways we are not. So we need to step up.”

An excellent piece on the UK’s Telegraph website rips Defense Secretary Liam Fox for his prattle about EA’s upcoming Medal of Honor game, while also outlining the impact Fox’s comments will have on game sales and how such attacks by “outsiders” raise the cackles hackles of gamers.

Fox totally missed the boat in his condemnation of the game as he argued for its ban in the UK, claiming that the game was “un-British,” even though British forces do not factor into the game at all.

If Fox wanted to make a reasonable argument about the game, as Nick Cowen explains, he could have chosen a different tack:

Remember that study from earlier this week which intimated that playing videogames and watching television were linked with attention problems in children? Texas A&M researcher Christopher J Ferguson and T. Atilla Ceranoglu, from Harvard Medical School, saw the research and responded with a scathing (for research anyway) rebuttal.

Ferguson, who has challenged the work of Iowa State University’s Craig Anderson before, and Ceranoglu, who uses games to assist in psychotherapy treatment, submitted their response—entitled Poor Measurement, Poor Controls and Spurious Results in Swing et al.—to Pediatrics, which also published the original research.

Are you a Mac or PC? Do you use Steam? Well the results of Valve’s annual hardware survey reveal that some Apple models outgun Windows-based PCs in a number of areas. While a majority of Windows PCs have 2GB or 3GB of memory, 53 percent of Macs sport 4GB of RAM. The survey also found that 17 percent of Windows PCs used a single CPU, while over 90 percent of Macs running Steam utilized a dual-core. As for internet connectivity, 65 percent of Mac gamers reported download speeds over 2Mbit compared to under half of Windows PCs.

But PC gamers shouldn't feel too bad because in one of the most important areas for gaming - graphics cards - Mac computers were found to be severely lacking; 32.5 percent of Macs featured decent graphics capabilities, while the top six Windows GPUs reported were all found to be capable of handling most games.

Source: Engadget

While it sounds a bit like the setting of the old television series Fantasy Island, a website has popped up today that teases the eventual launch of an “experimental videogame theme park and resort.”

While we initially pictured a virtual-reality type of offering, the Game Nation website states that “In the next 12 months, Game Nation will be deciding the best location for the Experimental Theme Park.” 

A description of the park entices, “As you pass through the gates, you leave behind all worldly stereotypes. You’re now one of millions, all equal, separated only by your skill, wit and achievements, which will be proven.”

Background art on the Game Nation website contains images of roller coasters and other rides, so the park, if ever realized, may contain typical theme park essentials in addition to an interactive element.

While Microsoft’s Project Natal Xbox 360 add-on has been rumored to have a price tag of around $200, MIT researchers have created a gesture-based computer interface that requires only a cheap pair of colored Lycra gloves (in addition to a webcam).

Billed as low-latency, Grad student Robert Wang, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory sees the most “obvious application” for the invention as videogames.

The technology, as noted on MIT’s website, is based on “a new algorithm for rapidly looking up visual data in a database.”

Colors used on the gloves were specifically chosen so that they could easily be distinguished from each other by the computer.

A quick explanation of how it works:

ABC News has a piece online which contains reactions to Nintendo’s just-announced partnership with the American Heart Association.

For starters, Nintendo did agree to pay the AHA $1.5 million dollars over three years in what was termed a “gift.” AHA President Dr. Clyde Yancy told ABC’s Health Editor Dr. Richard Besser that such corporate endeavors on the part of the AHA follow a “very deliberate process.”

 In regards to the dollars exchanging hands, Yancy stated, “Certainly resources have exchanged hands, because it takes quite a bit to launch a new initiative.” He added, “The logo’s not for sale.”

The tide of youthful anarchy will no longer besmirch and shame the UK.

A wonderful lampoon video released as part of Namco’s media blitz for the upcoming Dead to Rights: Retribution.

Good dog.


Via BrandflakesforBreakfast

While it was originally thought that it might take up to two weeks for a replacement to be named for departing South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson, it's only taken a handful of days.

South Australian Premier Mike Rann has named fellow Labor Party member John Rau (pictured) as South Australian Attorney General. A lawyer by training, Rau has served in government since 2002 and was just re-elected as a candidate for Enfield, garnering 53.0 percent of the vote. In his profile page on the ALP site, Rau is described as “married with three children,” and a “keen gardener, cook and avid reader of non-fiction.”