PS3 to shrink graphics chip to 65nm

Sony boss Kaz Hirai has indicated in a series of slides from an internal corporate strategy meeting at Sony that the company is planning to update the PlayStation 3 graphics chip later this year.

The plan is, according to Kotaku, for Sony to update the PlayStation 3's graphics chip to a new 65nm model by Q4 this year.

The new graphics chip will be smaller, cooler and cheaper to produce than the current model, so Sony is understandably keen to make the move as soon as possible as the PlayStation 3 is still seen by many as prohibitively expensive compared to the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360.

Acrobat suffers security flaw

If you've been prompted to install an Adobe Reader update in the last couple of days, I'd go ahead: it's to fix a rather nasty security bug.

A vulnerability report was made public yesterday concerning Adobe's popular Reader product – specifically, the implementation of Javascript with Acrobat-created documents. The issue is present in all versions of Adobe Reader prior to 8.1.2 Security Update 1 as well as the commercial Acrobat packages used to create PDF files. The bug, discovered by the Information Security team at John Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, can result in a program crash with the potential to execute arbitrary code. It's a bad one, in other words.

EA: New rating systems could slow releases

EA's UK Boss Keith Ramsdale has voiced concerns that the new rating systems proposed within the Byron report could have serious consequences for publishers and cause delays in UK releases of several games.

At the moment a PEGI rating system is employed for most games in the UK, but only games rated 15 or 18 are passed on to the government-backed BBFC. The BBFC has the authority to ban any games it examines, but is obviously only exposed to a small selection of games. The PEGI system is completely voluntary too, though major chains may refuse to carry games which are unrated.

David Cage: Emotions are hard to tackle in games

David Cage, the lead designer and director behind Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy, to US readers) gave a talk in France recently and outlined what he thinks the biggest barrier is for games in the future; emotion.

Gamasutra were on hand at the Museum of Science and Industry in France to report on Cage's talk about emotions and how these are tackled in games.

"The more subtle, social emotions such as love, empathy, joy, sadness, jealousy, anger, and shame are frequently addressed in literature and cinema, Cage pointed out, but are rarely successfully tackled by games,

Maxdata files for Insolvency

Maxdata, maker of Belinea TFT and CRT monitors, as well as servers, desktops and notebooks, has filed for insolvency in Essen, Germany.

Company management claim that "the high pressure of the competition and the immense fall in prices in the IT industry," have been eroding Maxdata's market position for sometime, and have chosen to file for insolvency due to the the threat of pending illiquidity.

This news comes after an unsuccessful restructuring program for the company which was attempted in 2006, which seems to have been a case of too little too late for Maxdata, as the turnaround couldn't be achieved in 2007, or so far in 2008.

Hacking eyeballs - the Fulgurator

Have you ever wanted to perform a Ghost in the Shell-style backhack on someone? Well, a artist in Berlin may have got closer to that dream than you ever thought possible.

The MAKE: Blog broke the news on Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck's 'Image Fulgurator' yesterday. Built from an old SLR camera, a sensor, a flash, and a telephoto lens, the Fulgurator has but a single aim: to mess with peoples' heads.

The Witcher Enhanced Edition dated

CD Projekt Red's The Witcher will finally be getting the release it deserves soon, with the Enhanced Edition of the game now fully detailed and dated in an official release from the designer.

The game, which we thought was well put together but with a few fundamental errors in terms of accessibility and translation, is being fully patched up and polished for the release of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. The new game will feature a completely redone set of English text, diminished load times and a more stable build.

Sony working on PlayStation Phone?

Sony is once-again rumoured to be launching a new gaming-focused phone under the PlayStation brand, though considering how long these rumours have been running it’s probably best to take this news with a un-healthy sized pinch of salt.

The new rumours indicate that the new PSP Phone will be incorporating elements of the PlayStation Portable. The current range of Sony Ericsson phones uses sub-brands, such as Cyber-Shot and Walkman and uses key elements of that sub-brand to market the phone, so it makes sense that Sony would seek to do a similar thing with the PlayStation brand.

Komplett shuts down UK services

Komplett, one of the largest online retailers of PC components and hardware, yesterday announced that it was closing all branches in France, Germany, the UK and Austria.

Vincent Hoogduijn, the European General Manager for Komplett gave an announcement saying that the reason for the closures was because those markets were undersized and Komplett had struggled to establish a large enough footprint in those territories. Though the company had started a campaign of expansion just two years ago, the state of the market has forced Komplett to focus efforts where it believes it can get the most growth.

EA Sports to bundle peripherals with games

Electronic Arts executive David McCarthy has revealed plans for EA Sports to create specialised peripherals to go along with several new games coming out within the next year.

McCarthy, who revealed the plans in an interview with Gamasutra in Paris, did not reveal plans for any specific games or platforms however, but said that the plans were in place for some future games on the EA Sports label.

He compared the intention of the move was similar to

No disc-swapping in Forza 3?

Last week the rumour started going around that the next game in the Forza series would spill over on to three discs, but sources from the game's development team seem to be indicating that this may not be the case.

Angry Pixel has apparently tracked down some un-named sources within the company and have confirmed that the game will not require any disc-swapping as the company believes that this would have a negative effect on the gameplay.

Latest TOP500 released

The latest TOP500 list – a collection of the fastest supercomputers in the world – has been released by its creators, and there's some big wins for certain manufacturers.

The list, published this week on the TOP500 site, gives the number one spot to IBM's Roadrunner, built for the United States Department of Energy and hitting a staggering 1.026 petaflops/s – the first supercomputer to break the petaflop milestone. According to IBM, the key to this remarkable achievement was the use of Cell Broadband Engine processors – the same chips that are used in Sony's PlayStation 3 console.

UN discusses electronics disposal

Most of us like to keep ourselves in touch on the go, and usually use the shiniest handset we can con our network providers into handing out – but do we ever thing about where the old handsets go when they die?

The United Nations is sufficiently concerned about the high device churn rate amongst gadget-obsessed mobile 'phone users to make it a headline issue for its five-day conference, the ninth meeting of the Conference to the Parties of the Basel Convention, to be held in Indonesia this week. Mobile 'phone site MobileCrunch quotes the agenda for the convention as raising the subject of "

Bioware to develop for PSP, Wii?

Bioware, the developer behind the likes of NWN, KOTOR and other more complex strings of initials, has announced an intent to develop for platforms such as the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo Wii.

In an interview with Gamasutra, Mark Darrah said that the company is looking develop a wider portfolio. Mark himself is project lead for Bioware's first game on the Nintendo DS, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Study: 82 percent of gamers don't mind in-game ads

In-game adverts are a controversial topic, or so you might think. After all, not everyone wants to see individual bullets which are sponsored by the Early Learning Center, do they?

Well, according to a new study reported over at GI.biz, it actually isn't as simple as that. According to the result of a survey commissioned by in-game advertiser IGA Worldwide around 82 percent of gamers actually respond well to in-game advertisements.

BBC finds oldest digital music recording

If you'd like to see the precursor to WinAmp, check out what the BBC has found mouldering away in its archive: the oldest known recording of computer generated music.

According to an article which hit the BBC site on Tuesday archivists working for the Beeb have uncovered recordings made in 1951 featuring a Ferranti Mark 1 – the commercialised successor to the 'Manchester Baby' – playing a range of medleys. Well, two and a bit:

Ubisoft revives Driver, starts new title

Ubisoft has been revealed to be working on a new game in the Driver series, with work already underway at the Reflections studio in Newcastle.

Perceptive readers will have noted the the careful wording there - 'has been revealed to be working' - because although this news is based on footage from a visit the BBC paid to the studio, Ubisoft spokespeople claim to have no knowledge of the game according to Eurogamer.

Mod of the Month May Winner

Whose cuisine reigns supreme?" Well, we're not really sure either, but we do know who came out on top for our Mod of the Month competition for May of 2008!

You could probably look to the image and immediately recognize the victor, but that wouldn't really be fair. After all, part of the fun is getting to see the name up in lights. This month's winner (by quite a large margin, despite many votes and several good mods) is the Tiny HTPC by ichessblumen, a fantastically designed little home theatre creation.

Nvidia has 9800 GTX+ : 55nm G92

If you were thinking Nvidia had no answer to the AMD HD 4850 and was only launching the 260 GTX and 280 GTX, you might want to think again. Nvidia dropped into our offices today to give us a sneak peek at the new 55nm G92 part it has been working on - the 9800 GTX+ (plus). Older 9800 GTX, 8800 GTS 512 and 8800 GT parts were made using a 65nm G92 core, which was evolved from the original G80 part that launched in November 2006 - but this card doesn't have that weakness.

Bug mars Firefox 3.0 launch

Although the Firefox 3.0 Download Day went with a bang, with over eight million downloads counted within the all-important twenty-four hour period, a shadow has been cast over the latest version of the popular open source browser already: a critical security flaw brought over from Firefox 2.0.x which remains unfixed.

According to CNet News, the bug was discovered by a contributor to TippingPoint's controversial bugs-for-cash programme Zero-Day Initiative. Reported to Mozilla approximately five hours after Firefox 3.0 enjoyed its official launch, the bug is described by TippingPoint as allowing an attacker "

France to disconnect pirates

It's not just Virgin Media who is looking to implement a three-strikes policy against naughty file sharers: now the French government wants to join the party.

BetaNews broke the news (via Reuters) that the Cultural Minister of France Christine Albanel has introduced a bill which threatens file sharers with disconnection from the Internet. Via the foundation of an anti-piracy organisation to be called HADOPI, or Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des droits sur Internet

Trojan modifies routers' DNS

If you're still running your broadband router on its default settings, now would be a very good time to change.

CNet, citing an entry on SecureComputing's TrustedSource blog made last week, has highlighted a new variant of the DNSChanger trojan designed to target routers and change the addresses used for DNS resolution.

The Domain Name Service, or DNS, is the system by which plain-text names like bit-tech.net

Tecmo sued by every single employee

Things are looking bad for Tecmo, the company behind the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden games. Not only did the highly regarded developer Tomonobu Itagaki slag off his own games before leaving and suing the company, but now it seems all the other developers at the company are doing the same.

According to Kotaku, on June 16th two Tecmo employees filed a law suit with the Tokyo District Court in a complaint over unpaid wages, demanding 8.3 million yen (around £40,000) in payment.

Team Fortress 2 update arrives on Thursday

If you still haven't got round to unlocking all the new achievements for the Medic class in Valve's Team Fortress 2 then you may want to get your skates on before you get drowned under another shed-load of achievements heading your way this Thursday - Valve has just dated the next update for the game.

The new update for Team Fortress 2 will hit servers this Thursday and will focus on the flame-throwing Pyro class, but will include content essentially along the same lines as that added for the Medic in the last update.

Wii update removes homebrew capabilities

Nintendo has just released the new Menu Update 3.3 pack for the Wii. That's not something we'd normally report on, except that the primary function of this update has been to remove the capacity of Nintendo's motion-sensing console to launch homebrew applications and games.

Previously Wii homebrew was something that bedroom developers and code junkies had long tried to make a reality and had only been able to do so by exploiting a bug in the save game code for Nintendo's

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 detailed

Details have been leaked of the new and upcoming sequel to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and comic fans will be happy to hear the skinny on the upcoming game for PC, PSP, DS, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360.

Most startling of all is the fact that the game will be set during the Civil War storyline, which is one of the biggest comic events of the last decade.

The story for Civil War sees the superheroes of the Marvel universe being divided into two factions after a superhero-fueled accident leaves 700 innocent civilians dead and public opinion begins turning against the costumed vigilantes as a result. As the Government begins to force superheroes to register their powers and become licensed law enforcers the heroes are quickly divided - the Pro-registration heroes led by Tony '

iD Gaming Academy Presents Camp Fatal1ty

Some of us will no doubt have spent our summers of youth away at summer camp, a place where you learnt how to abseil, ride quad bikes and had that first summer romance with a girl from Surrey called Amanda - or was that just me?

However, for those teens who shiver with the thought of outdoor activity, and would rather spend the summer fragging n00bs than paddling canoes, iD Gaming Academy has announced Camp Fatal1ty, a summer camp where you'll learn to play UT3 like a pro, with the help of noted professional gamer, Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel.

Halo Wars details emerge

Halo Wars has become a bit of an in-joke recently and rumours that the game has become vapourware have been circulating since time out of mind - but it looks like the Halo-inspired RTS may not have gone the way of Duke Nukem Forever after all as a few new details about the game have slipped out in the last day or two.

In a recent copy of GamePro magazine a load of new screenshots and details have been dumped on the masses, including information about an online co-op mode for the Xbox 360 RTS.

Rumour: Ironside not to voice Sam Fisher

This is still very much a rumour at the moment, so take it with a pinch of salt, but the trustworthily named SarcasticGamer is currently running the story that Sam Fisher will not be voiced by Michael Ironside in the next Splinter Cell game.

Which would make sense.

The last anybody really saw of the latest game in the series, Splinter Cell: Conviction, was at Ubidays 2007 and since then the game has been strangely absent from the public eye. True, the next title in the Clancy franchise might have just gone undercover - but the word is that the game has been completely redesigned after some design problems.

AMD announces support for Havok Physics

In what will no doubt add an interesting twist to the shape of today's industry, AMD has announced that it will work with Havok to optimise the Havok Physics engine on the company's full range of products.

AMD says that there are "over 100 developers and 300 leading titles already using Havok's physics engine," making it "the leading developer of game physics."

Naturally, this includes both AMD's CPUs and its ATI Radeon graphics cards and looks to be a case of two fingers at Nvidia. Indeed, Nvidia recently told

Apple announces iPhone 3G, available 11th July

After months of speculation and hype, Steve Jobs last night finally announced the iPhone 3G during his WWDC keynote speech at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The worst kept secret about the second generation iPhone is its 3G capabilities - customers have been asking for faster mobile data connections, because EDGE just doesn't cut it in this day and age. The device still supports EDGE along with GPRS and WiFi of course, and it automatically switches between these connections to obtain the fastest-possible download speeds.

Celebrate Father's Day with Codemasters

Apologies to all of you bit-tech.net readers, but there are no excuses anymore for you to forget Father's Day this year, which takes place on June 15th, after this helpful reminder from Codemasters that the dad-worshipping day is coming.

Thankfully though if you still haven't got a present sorted then Codemasters Online is ready to help you by arranging a whole host of Father's Day activities from within the Lord of the Rings Online

Robbie Bach: "PSP is a cautionary tale"

The Nintendo DS is doing amazingly well as a handheld console, that much we all know. The Sony PSP though? Not so good. The good news though is that Microsoft, the only console company without a handheld on the market, is keen to point out to sony what they're doing wrong.

Robbie Bach, President of the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft, outlined just why he thought the PSP had failed to make a splash in the market in an interview with VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi, calling the PSP a 'cautionary tale'.

Call of Duty: World at War unveiled

It isn't a huge surprise - in fact, let's face it, it's exactly what we expected - but an official follow-up to last year's Call of Duty 4 has now been unveiled. Call of Duty 5 is a go.

According to reports from the latest issue of the Official Xbox Magazine, the new game will be titled Call of Duty: World at War and will be developed by Treyarch, not Infinity Ward.

Call of Duty 5: World at War

Europe to get UT3 Xbox 360 early

Midway has confirmed that the Xbox 360 version of Unreal Tournament 3 will be arriving in Europe on the 4th of July - three days earlier than the game will be debuting in America.

Speaking to Eurogamer this morning, Midway also outlined that the Xbox 360 version will come with all the downloadable content already available on the retail disc, as well as five totally new maps and split-screen support so that human players can play locally.

VIA announces mini-ITX 2.0 form factor

VIA has announced the introduction of the mini-ITX 2.0 form factor here in Taipei and at the same time the company announced a partnership with Nvidia, which allows the pair to work together by delivering optimised PC platforms.

Richard Brown, head of marketing at VIA, said that the market is finally starting to “get” low-power platforms before stating that he took Intel’s attempts to lock down the mini-ITX form factor personally.

Turbine confirms console MMO

Turbine, the developer behind Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of The Rings Online, has announced that it will be developing a new MMO game for consoles after getting $40 million in funding from Time Warner.

"We've hired over 60 people since the beginning of the year and 40 more job postings for the project are currently waiting to be filled," said Turbine's Adam Mersky in an interview with Kotaku this morning.

THQ: "Girls don't have time for games"

THQ Wireless Director James Scalpello is a man who thinks he understands women, apparently. In a recent interview with CasualGaming.biz, the THQ executive outlined exactly why it is that he thinks girls aren't as big on gaming as boys.

"When girls play console games, they have to have gone through a whole other list of things they could have done before sitting down with them..." said James.

"Guys get home, have dinner, and play a computer game. It's much higher up the list of priorities. To put it bluntly, girls have got better things to do.

Billionaire Icahn battles Yahoo board over buyout

Following the Yahoo! board of directors decision to turn down Microsoft's $44.6 billion buyout back in May, some of Yahoo!'s higher profile investors have been left understandably annoyed. None more so than high profile billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who has been quite open in his plans to oust the current Yahoo! board in a proxy battle, replacing them with Microsoft-friendly directors, and hopefully sealing a merger between the two internet giants.

Gigabyte TPM Explained

There has been a lot of FUD about TPM devises previously, but we're going to try and iron out some of the crap misconceptions from what it actually does.

First of all - it will NOT lock down your PC, it will NOT lock your hardware to your software, it will NOT record any personal data and it will NOT limit the software/hardware use to "authorised devises/applications" only. (At least, in this instance; Gigabyte was very insistent that its product was for the benefit of the user).

Intel’s SSD technology is looking great

During one of our meetings with Intel, the company showed us how its Solid State Drive technology is shaping up because things have been a little quiet since its formal announcement at IDF Shanghai in April.

The first system that Intel demonstrated was a Home Theatre PC based on the newly-released G45 chipset, which featured one of Intel’s SSD drives.

What was interesting about this demonstration was that Intel had turned the monitor off before we entered the hotel suite – I had no idea the machine was powered up until Intel’s representatives turned the screen on to reveal the system playing a high-definition video. The machine was inaudible in what was a pretty quiet hotel room and, even with my ear to the top of the chassis, I couldn’t make out much noise. Maybe I had gone deaf.

SSDs: blindingly expensive for a while yet

At the request of one of our readers, we dropped by a few memory manufacturers today – these guys often do SSD modules as a diversification because there’s currently more money to be made in NAND than DRAM, as DRAM prices have hit rock bottom and margins are low.

Unfortunately, the news still isn’t quite so good: the performance we want is still far too expensive and capacities just aren’t there yet, we’ll have to wait for a while longer yet, we were told.

Amazon to offer exclusive Fallout 3 SKU

Online retailer Amazon has signed a deal with Bethesda to exclusively sell a collectors edition package for Fallout 3, titled Fallout 3: Survival Edition.

The package, which will be sold only through Amazon, will include the game, Making of Fallout 3 DVD, hardcover artbook and a specially made lunchbox and wrist-mouted alarm clock similar to the Pip-boy used in the game. Oh, and a Pip-boy statuette too.

Intel releases 4-series chipsets

Intel has formally introduced its 4-series chipsets at Computex, after months of talk about what will be Intel’s last FSB-based chipset.

The series consists of the P45, G45, P43 and G43 Express chipsets and Intel says that, together, they will help to turn the PC into "a centre of high-end entertainment and communications."

G45, which features the GMA X4500HD graphics processor, is the first Intel IGP to feature hardware-accelerated decoding capabilities for Blu-ray and HD video playback in h.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 formats. Because of this new feature, Intel is now able to use the graphics engine to perform post processing on the content to improve the visuals.

Plenty of Nehalem boards on show

Despite the fact that we had the corporate "we can neither confirm nor deny Tylersberg will be called X58" speech from Intel itself, it seems pretty obvious from the plenty of manufacturers on show at its own stand that it will be the intended name.

Asus upgrades the Eee PC

The original Eee was cheap and cheerful – it broke into the market at a super low price and has gained huge popularity, but the quality of product left a lot to be desired for many.

The new 8.9" Eee PC 901 and 10/10.2" 1000 and 1000H raise the quality to a new high standard to match the MSI Wind and other competing products, and also introduce a ton of new features too. However, our immediate concern is cost – the biggest attraction to the Eee in the first place.

AMD's new 790GX and SB750 pictured

Again we found five minutes to take apart something - AMD's soon to be launched 790GX super-overclocked IGP that supports dual PCI-Express 2.0 x8 for CrossFire-X, as well as the new SB750 southbridge which adds even more advanced overclocking features.

While the AMD OverDrive (AOD) software still needs work, we were told, the overclocking support is much improved and is now claimed (by vendors, we didn't speak to AMD) to be better than that of Nvidia chipsets.

Noctua already offers Nehalem coolers

Austrian designer of silent coolers, Noctua, will soon offer LGA1366 mounting kits not only for the current range of coolers, but for all Noctua products dating back to 2005. Not only that, but they will be simpler to use – the bolts will be pre-attached to the brace-plate, and they'll simply use thumbscrews to ready the mount, before using larger sprung screws for the compression.

Noctua hasn’t yet decided, but the mounting kits might be offered from anything from free to a small, few-euro service charge to current customers who want it. We certainly can’t fault the company’s excellent service here – especially since it now means upgrading will cost you next to nothing rather than a whole new cooler.

J&W 780G mini-ITX has niche HTPC features

J&W may not be the first motherboard manufacturer that comes to mind, but it has managed to scoop out a niche 780G mini-ITX board with its iPartner "Control Centre" that sits outside the case.

The iPartner features a power and reset button, as well as an eight digital LCD readout and Bluetooth built in - this allows you to connect a wireless keyboard or mouse directly to it, which is perfect for kicking back on the sofa and controlling your HTPC remotely.

OCZ Fatal1ty memory, new flash drives, keyboards

OCZ has today announced it will soon offer Fatal1ty branded mainstream memory “for gamers”. The idea is not to overlap the more popular overclocking brands like Flex or Reaper, but to provide a brand that a wider audience can identify with.

We were shown PC2-8500 C5 branded memory (further specifications will be released next week along with the official announcement) with black XLC heatspreaders that had the Fatal1ty logo in the middle. Other Fatal1ty products include OCZ PSUs with black casing and red fans.

Silverstone presents The Raven case

Better known for its aluminium beauties, Silverstone has taken a curious turn to the extreme with the new Raven RV01 case.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Silverstone has basically reinvented the case as we know it – the motherboard is angled 90 degrees pointing it upwards instead of out the back. This means the heat from the 200+W graphics cards can rise naturally and that plugging in your cables is far easier to see. There are two large fans in the base, while the PSU fan sucks in from the bottom to avoid funneling conflicts.

Researchers create photonic jet storage

For those of you always looking ahead to the next big computing breakthrough, prepare yourselves for increased storage capacity on optical media via photonic jets.

An article over on Ars Technica explains the work being carried out by a team of engineers at Northwestern University, Illinois and published last week in Applied Physics Letters.

The research, which holds the promise of massively increased optical disc storage, is based around an interesting interaction between beams of light and glass spheres: basically, when light hits the sphere a photonic jet is emitted from the opposite side at a wavelength far lower than that of the original light. While this beam rapidly spreads, if an optical storage system is placed within the focus of the photonic jet the technology should be able to boost data density far higher than has been possible thus far with blue laser systems such as Blu-Ray.

AMD announces Puma at Computex

AMD has introduced its Puma notebook platform and announced the availability of products based on the platform at a press conference in Taipei city today.

The Puma platform features the new AMD Turion X2 Ultra dual-core ‘Griffin’ mobile processors and ATI Radeon HD 3000 series graphics. AMD claims that this will enable users to experience "the ultimate HD visual performance and increasing energy efficiency."

Ubisoft celebrates ten years of Tom Clancy

Ubidays 2008 has seen a string of promising games get unveiled or detailed more fully, like with Beyond Good and Evil 2 or the new Prince of Persia game, but Ubisoft is still trying to remember where it has come from as much as where it’s going to and is celebrating ten years of Tom Clancy games this year after an announcement at Ubidays.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot took the stage at the opening conference to the publishers showcase in the Louvre, Paris and was keen to remind the assembled crowd where the series had begun.

Ubisoft working on 3D glasses game

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has said that Ubisoft will be making old-fashioned 3D games which require stereoscopic glasses, as well as well as moving on to create CGI films, books and a new TV series.

Speaking to GI.biz at Ubidays 2008, Guillemot said that the Movie tie-in game of Avatar will be the companies first attempt at creating some stereoscopic gameplay, but that the game will require specific monitors in order to work.

Nehalem and X58 show up in Taipei

MSI showed us how it is currently testing early versions of Intel’s next generation Nehalem architecture, which is based on the Bloomsfield CPU platform and Tylersberg chipset – the latter will be branded under the X58 nomenclature.

First, the CPU and its new socket: while the roadmaps say the high-end Nehalem to be launched in Q4 will have up to eight cores, the one MSI had in its office was just a quad-core but with eight threads.

Ubisoft sees 25 percent growth in market

That last year was for games was no real secret. We had classics like The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4 and Mass Effect steadily flowing in towards the end of 2007 and we exhausted ourselves trying to cover them all.

And now it seems we weren't the only ones after Ubisoft Executive Director in Europe and the Middle East Alain Corr revealed at UbiDays 2008 today just how the French publisher had grown over the last 365 days.

Resident Evil 5 to feature online co-op

News has come in of a whole load of new and returning features to be included in Resident Evil 5, including a new online co-operative mode which lets players drop in and out of a singleplayer game, being replaced by a computer AI when a human ally is not available.

Games Radar confirmed the features in a recent article, but the information has since disappeared from the site. Fortunately, the news spread before it could be quelled and Eurogamer is hosting all the details.

Gears of War 2 multiplayer details come out

An extensive cover feature and interview with Cliff CliffyB Bleszinski in American gaming mag EGM has uncovered some new details on Gears of War 2, the upcoming sequel to one of the biggest games released on Xbox 360 so far.

The mag says that Gears 2 will now allow for up to ten players in multiplayer deathmatches, and it's possible that there will be AI bots available to fill up not-so-full matches.

There will also be plenty of new weapons introduced in the sequel, with the rapid-firing Gorgon Burst Pistol and the one-use-per-map Scorcher flamethrower being uncovered in the feature.