The US National Institute for Media and Family has released its 2007 "Christmas-shopping guide", for parents preoccupied with their kids' virtual safety. According to data cited from MediaWise, 86% of the kids aged 8 to 16 (9 children out of 10) are constantly playing games, while their parents, who have grown up with Amiga, DreamCast or Atari consoles in their hands, are also prolonging the ludicrous pleasure well into their adulthood.
The companies behind Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are merging in a deal which could shake up the global video games industry. Activision and Blizzard have said they will form "the world's most profitable games business" in a deal worth $18.8bn (£9.15bn).
US-based Activision also makes hit console games such as the Tony Hawk series and Guitar Hero. Nine million people pay a monthly subscription to play World of Warcraft.
Singapore has lifted a ban on a Microsoft Corp. video game that contains a scene showing a human woman and an alien woman kissing and caressing, a local newspaper reported on Saturday.
The Strait Times said Mass Effect would instead be sold with an M18 label, meaning it can't be bought by anybody under the age of 18.
Mass Effect is the first video game to be given a rating in the country, and follows a public outcry over the ban. It effectively fast tracks a new ratings system that was due to come into effect in January, the paper said.
Singapore has banned an Xbox video game because it contains a sex scene between a woman and a female alien, the city-state's censors said Thursday.
"Mass Effect," a futuristic space adventure published by Microsoft Corp., has been banned because of "lesbian intimacy," Chetra S., deputy director of the Board of Film Censors, in a statement.
Crytek’s hardware-hammering shooter Crysis has already been hacked by the warez community, just a few days before the game’s official release on 16 November. The game has apparently been cracked by the infamous group, Razor1911, whose former leader, Shane ‘Pitbull’ Pitman, spent 18 months in prison after an American crackdown (so to speak) on software piracy called Operation Bucaneer.
CNN aims to find out by opening an I-Report hub in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world created entirely by its residents.
There, CNN will look to those most familiar with the virtual world -- the Second Life residents themselves -- to determine what constitutes news "in-world."
Rockstar parent Take Two Interactive has released a statement concerning the recent leakage of Manhunt 2 to the internet.
Back in early September we reported that a version of Manhunt was cracked by hackers and leaked to the internet. Question was though, where did it comes from? Seems like Sony was to blame and not Rockstar.
EVE Online, the massively multi-player online Sci-Fi game, shut down for ten hours yesterday (Friday), after discovering a security breach.
In a statement posted on the site, Jón Hörðdal, chief operating officer of CCP, EVE Online's owner, said the company had "discovered an anomaly in the EVE Online Database indicating a potential exploit" at 10.25AM GMT. A couple of hours research later, the company decided that the best thing to do was to go "completely dark while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed".
Even as copies of Halo 3 have barely reached gamers' hands, reports have claimed that its developer Bungie may jump ship from Microsoft to pursue other games, and potentially other game platforms.
Some players give themselves the ability to magically see and shoot through walls. Others find a way to fly, making them nearly impossible to defeat. Cheating like this in video games has a long and even respected tradition. Games have often slyly included ways -- intentionally or not -- for sophisticated players to hack into the software and then skip levels or take on supernatural powers.
