gaming

To date, the Call of Duty franchise has been strictly a World War II affair. But with Call of Duty 4, Activision and developer Infinity Ward move the action to a 21st century setting. The military shooter brings an all-new graphics engine to the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC when it hits stores this fall. Can you say, "Halo who?"

Microsoft's media event on Tuesday evening--the first slot on our E3 2007 agendas (aside from picking up our press badges)--came with the company slogan: "Jump In." It was displayed on signs outside Santa Monica High School's outdoor amphitheater, where the event took place, and on the giant projection screen behind the stage (when the screen wasn't displaying a tag cloud of the Xbox Live usernames of those present). The slogan was even on the access badges that were mailed to us a week in advance, with the admonition that if we didn't have … Read more

Dan Ackerman will have the update on all the Xbox 360 stuff from this evening's Microsoft press conference (to be fair, there's more of that than there is PC news). But it looks like I beat him back from Santa Monica High School, where Microsoft hosted the event. In the meantime, I have the dirt on Microsoft's PC-related announcements.

The two biggest items PC-wise are that Viva Pinata and Gears of War, both formerly 360-only titles, will be out for Windows by the end of the year. Interestingly, when Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinsky (aka Cliffy … Read more

WordBreaker is a free, online word game for iPhone that challenges you to guess a computer-generated word before it guesses your word. Choose from varying levels of difficulty with shorter or longer words.

iPhone link: http://www.wordbreaker.org/

I rolled into the seaside city of Santa Monica, Calif., home of the E3 Media and Business Summit, this morning after a flight out of New York City that wasn't technically a red-eye, but might as well have been because it was pretty darn early (would you call that a pink-eye?). Let's just say it's a far cry from the conference's former home at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The above photograph shows something that I snapped with my camera while--no kidding--on the way to pick up my press wristband for Sony Computer Entertainment America's … Read more

In years past, E3--the Electronic Entertainment Expo--involved as many as 50,000 members of the video game industry descending on the Los Angeles Convention Center in early May. This year, the show--now dubbed the "E3 Media & Business Summit"--has been radically downsized, rescheduled to July, and moved out to Santa Monica.

With all of the gaming consoles now effectively old news, the show doesn't quite have the air of anticipation as it did the last few years, when gamers were scrambling to get a glimpse of the then-unreleased Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii. Still, … Read more

Google PSP redesign or PSP2, and you'll get tens of thousands of results (and even a few interesting homemade Photoshop jobs, such as the "PSP Mini" shown above)--a testament to the fact that many gamers, it seems, were never quite comfortable with the design of Sony's first handheld gaming system. To be sure, the PSP has its share of issues, not the least of which is the UMD format--the proprietary optical disc format is hobbled with slow load times, and the moving parts sap the PSP's battery life. Controls have always been suspect, too, … Read more

This morning King.com is launching its new user-generated casual games site, MyGame.com. The service combines some of the professionally made casual games offered on King.com alongside user-generated titles and those made by users with a Web-based game creation tool. Game creators who publish on MyGame.com can opt-in to a revenue-sharing program, which pays off ad clicks. The service is also promoting an advanced payment scheme similar to recording industry contracts that pays in advance to popular titles.

I had a go with MyGame's game creator yesterday, and had a good time with the three titles that are currently available for editing. Users can upload a picture either off their hard drive, or by using their Webcams. MyGame will do its best to map your face, as well as give you a quick and dirty cropping tool to fine-tune. You can then test the game to make any last-minute adjustments to your face.

Once done, users (even unregistered ones) get quick-sharing links, along with embed codes to put their creation on a blog or Web site, which I've done below. Users who decide to register with the service are given some extra power tools, like a stats manager, high-score list, and guest book.

I'm looking forward to seeing some of MyGame's future game offerings, along with some of the user-submitted content, although between Kongregate's recent inclusion of badges, and that oh-so-addicting McDonald's Flash game, MyGame must compete for my unfortunate lack of attention span. … Read more

Sony launched a pre-emptive strike on the E3 grapevine with its announcement yesterday that it's cutting the price of the 60GB PlayStation 3 to $500, and offering a new 80GB model for $600 in August. But what else does the company have up its sleeve for the show? There are still at least a couple of unanswered questions offering grist for the rumor mill:

rumble-enabled Sixaxis controller: Sony has already shot down rumors that the 80GB PS3 will come bundled with a new rumble-ready Sixaxis controller. (Of course, the company was denying rumors of a PS3 price cut as … Read more