EA and BioWare have officially announced a new Star War: Knights of the Old Republic game at E3 2008. A third KOTOR game has long been rumoured but this is the first confirmation that EA has given on the subject.

The mega-publisher didn't just stop there though, going so far as to confirm that the next KOTOR game will also be a massively multiplayer online RPG - making it the first Star Wars MMO since the ill-fated Galaxies.

Wow, so like, take one of the last few great single-player games and pimp it out, that's, that's nice. Superb. Now you and, like, a million of your pals can save or damn the galaxy simultaneously. That sounds grand.

Oh, and take Obsidian off the roster, you know, the guys that made the game cool, different, and not a Star Wars-themed total-conversion of Baldur's Gate. This is going to be mind-blowing--I'm so excited I can taste the vomit.

Actually, there's one possible saving grace: that this gets the Neverwinter Nights treatment; that it's actually just a single-player game with a buttload of free developer tools for anyone to use. If this doesn't happen, I'm just going to keep playing KOTOR II, most certainly once the Restoration Project wraps up.

Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista.

"Oh wow," said one user, eliciting exactly the exclamation that Microsoft had hoped to garner when it first released the operating system more than 18 months ago. Instead, the operating system got mixed reviews and criticisms for its lack of compatibility and other headaches.

I think anyone willing to take a run at Vista with eyes open, doors to perception off their hinges, and other mystical hippie crap, will actually find that it's a fantastic OS. This just bolsters my point.

I don't know how much it would cost Microsoft to roll out an actual "Mojave" (pronounced moe-JAV-eh) with, like, a slicker, prettier, transparentier UI, maybe with a little virtual desktop love... basically pitching anything that's bubbly or a throwback to XP, and then slapping it onto Vista Home Premium, (of course, making it a free update for all the existing buyers) but it certainly would cement the OS in the lead.

Because the only real flaw was that Vista didn't change enough.

Google.org, the search kingpin's philanthropic wing, has just added another notch to its eco-friendly belt with a recent (and sizable) investment in Aptera Motors -- makers of that absurdly futuristic gas-sipper we've been following. Along with ActaCell (an electric car battery maker), Aptera receieved a $2.75 million infusion via Google.org's RechargeIT investment program. Hopefully, some of the cash will be put to use bringing Aptera's Typ-1 vehicle to market, where its $30,000 estimated price tag and outrageous 230+ MPG fuel economy will be a welcome relief from rising fuel costs and concerns... and our lack of a fresh ride.

Let's all pray to the automotive gods that Google can help these guys bring a care like that to market. I feel a single tear run down my cheek every time I fill my car up and $80 leaves my bank account. The Typ-1 looks a little too much like a plane/submarine for my vehicular tastes, but you know what? You can't argue with TWO HUNDRED THIRTY MILES PER GALLON.

ACCORDING TO CVG, WIPEOUT HD'S DELAY CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO MORE THAN JUST TECHNICAL ISSUES AND "EXTRA FEATURES." THE GAME HAS REPORTEDLY FAILED EPILEPSY TESTING, REQUIRING IT TO BE "RE-ENGINEERED" BEFORE BEING RELEASED. IF ONLY THERE WAS SOMETHING WE COULD DO TO HELP SPEED UP THE PROCESS.

Hot! Correct implementation of the blink tag! By the way, if you didn't think this was funny, you're too uptight:

Hackers embed flashing animations on epilepsy support forum @ Engadget

Shortly after hearing a sad tale of a 7-year old cancer patient having his medication and PSP stolen whilst en route to treatment comes yet another story of the world's meanest preying on the innocent. This go 'round, a group of griefers (which appear to be members of Anonymous) managed to invade a support forum established by the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation and use JavaScript code and messages littered with flashing animations to effectively assault dozens of visitors who suffer from the disorder.

In a rare Blu-ray-videogame tie-in, Anchor Bay has announced an October Blu-ray bow for the animated direct-to-video game prequel 'Dead Space: Downfall'.

A full-length animated movie, 'Dead Space: Downfall' will debut on Blu-ray October 28 (day-and-date with the standard DVD), a week after the PlayStation 3 game it supports, 'Dead Space,' hits stores from Electronic Arts.
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Exclusive to the Blu-ray will be a pair of cheat codes for the EA game, and a Digital Copy (standard def) on a second disc.

Suggested list price for the Blu-ray has been set at $34.95.

This is either really smart or really dumb, and I'm leaning towards the latter. I might be all nostalgic, though, about Diablo II having that included DVD of its movies. I didn't even own a DVD player at the time, I just had the movie.

It wasn't that great. That is, conveniently enough, also my prediction for Dead Space.

Lets just say Square-Enix recognizes how much meat there is on the carcass that is Final Fantasy VII. This title has received more direct sequels, prequels, side stories and general fansterbation than any other title in the series. I won't go into the quality of these titles, but they are out there. Now there is a rumor that says the Squeenix may be bringing the title to XBL and the PSN.

This all likely started as the result of the statement hinting at a "big FFVII-related announcement" that will come at next month's DKΣ3713 event. 'Inside sources' (I love how important that makes someone sound) stated that not only will the original be available through the Playstation store as a PS1 original download there will "definitely" be a remake or spin-off announced. I don't know where the XBLA release fits into this but that's the rumor anyway.

I wouldn't mind playing through this again. I don't remember how it ended. Does Cloud kill Sephiroth or just woo her? What about Jenova? She get some Zach-dupe lovin'?

It would actually be screwed up if they don't re-build the game from the bottom up. I'm not talking typos, either, and I don't care if they continue to use the same 12-polygon models for everyone, but the thing had better be widescreen, 1080p, with re-mastered backgrounds. Actually, some extra polys wouldn't hurt.

Dollars to doughnuts, though, Barret will exude less T-derived 'sploit. I mean blaxploit.

I'm really disappointed that Comic Sans was the hero in this clip. I mean, I get it - Comic Sans, but it's got no class. Wingdings should have showed up and confused the bad dood to death. That gives me an idea. Wingdings is totally underused. I'm bringing it back. No more Times New Roman in Word - it's all Wingdings from now on. I'm gonna go talk to the icanhascheezburger guys today to see if I can sell them on some LOLcat-Wingdings mash-up action. Finger-Pointing-Right, Snowflake, Circled-Cross.

Despite the first Mass Effect being billed as an Xbox 360 exclusive, famed developer BioWare tells Joystiq that it has "never confirmed any plans of Mass Effect exclusivity for the trilogy."

Though the sci-fi action-RPG later appeared on PC, the title is still considered an Xbox 360 exclusive in terms of the console market--meaning it has not appeared on rival systems PlayStation 3 or Wii.

PS3 guys, I'm going to ruin it for you. Mass Effect was a beautiful, plot-driven Cleavland steamer. With it's fantastic visuals, the game actually starts in on choppy when you're talking and smiling at the same time. The incredible voice acting insures that no matter what decisions you make, the actors say exactly the same thing and none of your decisions affect the game, and then at the very end, you can talk the boss into suicide. HAHA, spoiled!

But you see, that's not clever, it's, God damn necessary, since, you know what? there's no point in wasting your time fighting, everything after hour 4 you can pistol-whip to death. I know because I did that with my spy--who can use sniper rifles but not assault rifles. You do have to make a handful of chicken-shit decisions where you can pick some of your party to kill, which is fine because they're totally static and you don't care about them anyway. It's not like you don't have more pleasure girls on your battleship The Casual Encounter.

And I hope you like pointless, derivative, and dull minigames, oh yeah. There's only the two, but you get to do them, like, anytime you aren't having sex with a tentacle.

Well, since we all know how cool DX11 and multi-GPU is going to be, wait, maybe we don't.

GFW Live Goes Free, DirectX 11 Unveiled @ Kotaku

Games for Windows - Live multiplayer features are free, effective today, Microsoft announced at today's GameFest 2008 conference in Seattle.
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In other news from GameFest, DirectX 11 was unveiled [and adds the ability for] compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for the GPU to be used for more than just 3D graphics, so that developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor.

But the Shuga Shack makes a more interesting, real point:

Games for Windows Takes on Steam @ Shacknews

Microsoft today announced that its Games for Windows initiative is set to expand with the launch an online PC gaming marketplace this fall. The service will deliver free and paid downloadable game content, along with trailers, demos, and other content comparable to the company's Xbox Live offerings.

In addition to the added features, the Games for Windows Live interface will also be redesigned to be "much more PC friendly." Microsoft has not yet specified whether full games will be made available for purchase on the network.

Which, as far as I can tell, isn't going to stop people from using Steam--it's not like you can't just install both. And how else are you going to hear the magic words, "Gordon Freeman, is that really you?" And maybe it'll have the side effect of forcing Valve to make Steam less... camouflagey.

don't ask my why astroboy was the result of the search terms "god live sucks", but it was either that or someone's faith splattered all over photobucket

Forget about cellphones causing car accidents. In the UK, a ridiculous 300,000 car crashes have been caused by GPS. And, according to a survey commissioned by Brit tabloid rag The Mirror, 1.5 million drivers have swerved through traffic when following their sat-nav's instructions a little too closely.

The list of errors caused by slavishly obeying absurd commands would be hilarious if they weren't so dangerous: Driving onto a railway line, heading the wrong way down one-way streets, hurtling headlong into ditches, getting stuck under bridges and ignoring road signs. The instructions given to GPS users by Direct Line Insurance, which carried out the survey, are so obvious they should not need to be stated:

I can't imagine that US drivers are any better at avoiding danger whilst paying too much attention to their navigation screens. At least Britain's doing something about it - you can get 2 to 5 years in the clink if you cause massive damage resulting from both eyes being on the GPS, not the road. Folks should probably just look out their car windows more often if they want to avoid such epic failure.

(image resulted from a google search for "navigation fail")

We started in the main warehouse, which is half a kilometer long. Here they house the silos holding the raw plastic granulate. Through them, 60 tons of this material is processed every 24 hours. These towers are connected to the molding machines through a labyrinth of tubes that push the granulate mixtures in a permanent tin-pitched rumble.

It's the digestive system of the enormous factory, always feeding the molding lines through the tubes and moving big boxes full of pieces–using conveyor belts–into the storage area in an endless and precise dance which never ends: this factory works around the clock to fulfill the worldwide thirst for Lego.

One of the guys from Gizmodo got a chance to take a fantastic tour through the Lego Factory in Denmark. His write-up details the manufacturing process, from feeding plastic granulate into the molding machines to painting individual pieces to packaging & shrink-wrapping the boxes. All aspects of production are handled by robots - you have to peep the videos behind the read link to see them in action. Lego totally keeps all of the molds ever made, so don't lose hope that your favorite set is lost forever. If they started taking custom orders out of their back catalog, I'd be living on the streets in 6 weeks.

Nintendo is flying high. Rather than examine the nature of this flight, the birdmen are mesmerized by the feathers. The analysts and executives do not see the concepts of disruption and don’t even understand the Blue Ocean principles (though they think they do). The feathers they see on Nintendo’s ascent are casual games. Therefore, they surmise, if they make casual games then they will be flying high with Nintendo.

There is nothing new here. Years ago, when Grand Theft Auto 3 hit big, all the birdmen began putting out Grand Theft Auto 3 clones. Years before that, it was first person shooters. More years before that, it was bloody fighters. One can find the birdmen back in the 8-bit generation making platformers. They would look at Super Mario Brothers and go, “Oh, I get it! We just need to make a game with cute music, colorful world, and upgrades like the magic mushroom!� Slapping wings on their arms, these games flopped. Amazingly, despite how many times the birdmen fall down, each generation they are ready to put on feathers and jump off a cliff.

This is the most acute look at games development I've ever read. This guy needs an RSS feed or something, and maybe even some kind of real image hosting. Don't worry, you don't need the graphs and charts. The point gets made and well. He even comes back at the growing fear that "hardcore" games are going to take a hit--they will, but the vacuum won't go unfilled long--and doles out solid commentary next to reasonable prediction.

And he says "retarded" a whole lot, which makes him the bee's knees in my book.

Curious as to just how the Netflix functionality is going to work on the Xbox 360 when it's added this fall? Major Nelson just posted a video of him going through it, showing off just how it's going to work. Essentially, it looks exactly like the interface on the Roku Netflix box.

You can't search through the entire Netflix database, instead needing to add movies you want to watch to your instant queue. It's a bit annoying, but as you can add as many movies you want to the queue, not that big a deal. If you own an Xbox 360 and bought a Roku box, however, get that thing to eBay ASAP, as you won't be using it anymore come this fall.

I've been using a Roku for some time now, and my review in brief is: there are a lot of other options out there. I mean, it's pretty cool if you're alright with the idea of a home theater being a TV and a DVD player. It'll fit right in. But if you don't really think that there should be any difference between you TV and a gaming workstation, well, save the hundred bucks and use it to buy movies you won't get on Netflix this decade.

the above image the result of the search terms "a third wheel" which roku is about to be, yeah, pretty much. and it's dark knight themed! go see it already! it's almost less full of bat-love than that photo

So when the Radeon HD 4870 gets busy with a very graphics-intensive application and gets hot, the fan spins up. Not to a troublesome level, mind you, but enough to hear the whine in my super-quiet PC at home. In fact, some users are more concerned about the GPU temperature and have set the fan to manually spin at around 35–40%, claiming you "can't hear it." If I do that, I definitely hear it. It all depends on how much noise the rest of your machine makes.

So I stopped by my local PC white-box shop, Central Computers and picked up a Zalman VF900-Cu VGA cooler for $40 (you may find it, or similar products, online for a bit less). It's made to fit a variety of cards, including Radeon HD 3000 series; almost all the coolers that fit 3000 series cards fit the new 4000 series. After 15 minutes with a small screwdriver, it was installed and ready to roll, still taking up two slots as the card did before.

Make no mistake, this is a bad idea. The power regulation hardware on a card that can pull 125W needs a lot of love, and the last thing it wants is to breathe freely. At least take some of the spare memory heatsinks and put them on farcically.

Because you know what makes even less noise than a Zalman heatsink? A block of wood. Classier than some rolled up newspaper duct taped to the front of the card, a block of wood still drives home the point that you hate computers and like house fires.

Extra: redemption for people smart enough not to follow in Extremish footsteps.

I'm on vacation with family in Orlando, FL right now, but I just wanted to write a quick post to share my thoughts so far on the iPhone 3G, which I purchased last week.

The phone I upgraded from was a Treo 650 (without the data plan), and I switched to the world of Mac a little over 6 months ago, so syncing never went quite as smoothly after that. Even with Missing Sync, it was a pain to sync my phone because it would take ~30 minutes every time. With the iPhone I can finally keep my mail, contacts, and calendars in sync, quickly and easily (and it does a few other things, of course). I'd been holding out to buy an iPod until the iPhone 3G came out because I didn't want to spend $500 on an iPod sans phone capabilities, and it was worth the wait.

We all know what the iPod does well, so here are a few things that haven't been so great:

1) MobileMe issues - I think Apple underestimated the load that would be placed on the MobileMe servers, and things didn't go very smoothly at first. Push wasn't really working in any direction, and I'm not even talking about the widely reported 15-minutes that it takes to push things from your computer. Even with a manual sync, or after several sets of 15 minutes, contacts added on the computer weren't showing up on MobileMe. I also had an issue where I put a number with an extension and it never showed up at all - presumably because it was in an unacceptable format, but there was no warning or error message to tell me so.

2) No Video and No MMS - I knew the iPhone lacked Video and MMS functionality before I bought it, but I've found myself missing it sorely. My Treo didn't have video MMS but it did have videos, and it did let me send photos from my phone to other phones. It wouldn't bother me so much if there was a logical reason why these weren't included. Surely, this is a software issue and not a hardware one. Maybe the hardware isn't up to snuff for videos, but I'd be surprised. Hopefully someone is developing an application to add this stuff. In the meantime, I've been using the free app AirMe to upload photos from my iPhone straight to my Flickr account (check out my photos from Disney World here). Unfortunately, I have to take the photos within the AirMe app to actually upload them, and it still doesn't let me send photos to other peoples phones, but at least it lets me send the photos in some form straight from my phone.

3) Battery Life - Once upon a time, my Treo 650 would last for 4-5 days easily on a single charge. I don't think I'll be getting more than 2 days out of my iPhone, and I've actually run it down from a full charge in a single day for a couple days in a row. Granted, I'm playing with it more than I normally would, downloading lots of apps, etc... but still.

Once I'm back from vacation, I'll do an in-depth review of the iPhone 3G and I'll definitely be doing some write-ups on accessories and apps as well.

Immediately following this morning's press conference, we got a chance to sit down with Xbox VP of Strategy and Business Development, Shane Kim, to pick his brain about the new Dashboard (called the "New Xbox Experience") and its various components, like the Netflix integration, Avatars, Party support, Primetime, and more.

So... E3 is over, and a bunch of really cool stuff was announced. For the 360, we'll get a totally new front end for the system. I love the original dashboard, but this one looks to be a worthy replacement. The avatars are a total rip-off of Nintendo, but I'll let it slide. If you are a Netflix junkie, you can stream movies from your queue from your Xbox now. Primetime sounds slick, with frequent live competitions for real prizes (note: Joystiq's emphasis on a new car! tugged on my "Price is Right" heart strings a little), and a price cut on the current 20GB system is very nice - almost enough for me to go pick one up again. All of these announcements are making me long for another 360... anyone need a kidney?

A few days ago, we published a story about how much better our Eee PC 1000H performed when we swapped the system’s 5,400rpm Seagate Momentus hard drive out for a Samsung SATA II SSD drive. Not only did the system boot faster and all apps load faster, but we got 20 more minutes of battery life with the SSD.

However, when we posted our story, we heard from users that Tom’s Hardware, a site we admire a great deal, recently published an article which claims that SSDs use more power than traditional hard drives. The Tom’s Hardware story got some major attention from sites like Engadget and even got a responses from SSD-makers Super Talent and Micron, who both claim that the drives used in the Tom’s test are “early generation” and therefore more power hungry than newer models.

Is Tom’s Hardware right? We don’t think so.

So yeah, now Tom's goes an retracts their previous article, but not without some apologetic prosthelytizing:

Flash SSD Update: More Results, Answers @ Tom's Hardware

First of all, we want to take this opportunity and apologize to our readers, for we made a procedural mistake when we compared battery runtime of various Flash SSDs, which we used to replace a 7,200 RPM hard drive on a business notebook in an effort to compare battery life of SSDs versus a conventional hard drive. As it was commented by our readers (see comments of that article) and other sources (thanks, George), part of the test procedure was inaccurate because of varying workload. This may cause other system components such as the CPU to be used more intensively, hence contributing to draining the battery earlier than on a slower drive.

The conclusion, however, that Flash SSDs are often misleadingly presented as energy savers to increase your battery mileage on notebooks, is not invalidated. The truth is that more and more Flash SSDs will be increasingly efficient. But many conventional hard drives can also be more efficient than today’s Flash SSDs in the scenarios some of you were demanding: when providing data under a defined workload such as video playback or in idle until the notebook battery runs empty.

But you know what, it doesn't matter, not when a good 64GB drive'll cost you nine hundred dollars. Speaking of cool, cheap things, has anyone noticed that AMD ninja-released a 3GHz Brisbane? It's, like, less than $100. Woot.

When AMD began talking about no longer building high end hardware using single monolithic GPUs a few weeks back, we let them know that improving CrossFire support would be incredibly important going forward. AMD told us that they are putting a lot into that but also that they have some exciting technology up their sleeves with R700 to help out as well. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten as much detailed information on how it works, but the new technology is GPU to GPU communication.

Until now, CrossFire has done zero GPU to GPU or framebuffer to framebuffer communication. As with the first iteration, each card fully renders the parts of the screen for which it is responsible (be it a whole frame in AFR, the top or bottom half of a screen, or alternating tiles). These results are sent to a combiner where the digital signals are merged and output to the screen. This is the only communication that takes place in CrossFire at the moment. R700 will change that by allowing GPUs to communicate.

Eff why eye, the card's got two gigs of RAM. Which means that 1GB 4870s had better be around the corner. All these hardware releases sure are making the 4850 seem like a really great buy. And I hope that this direct GPU-to-GPU connection makes a larger real-world difference, driver tweakage pending. Also, why are there still no custom templates for CrossFire? Jeez, you've got working drivers, and a perfectly good NVIDIA control panel to copy, ATI. Hop to it.

Stream of conscious commentary ending in three, two... My cores can beat up your cores.

Ever wonder why some PSUs claiming huge wattages are so cheap? Why should you buy a branded one - or are you just paying for the name and some fancy cables?

Well, no, you're paying for the fact that it won't blow up - that's why we test PSUs to their limits and we never, ever recommend anything other than branded products. Some people don't listen though and Corsair recently took it upon itself to test some of shoddiest looking power supplies we've seen.

I gotta admit, I had never heard of "smoke burning stoves" before searching for images of computer fires. Computer fires not laptops. But those things look cool! I'm going to have to find/ make one and take it camping. Maybe not a full-ATX variety... Any excuse to Dremel, really.

A link to a dude's mahg-type smoke-burning stove project.

Oh yeah, don't buy cheap power supplies. That's dumb.

Class actions charged against NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) reveal that the two companies may have staged a competition over the past half-a-decade or so. A judge read out an email which suggested price fixing was rife in the graphics card market. That follows a class action of 51 different plaintiffs, now combined into one, and across different legal jurisdictions, alleging cartel behaviour not only in graphics chips, but flat panels and CRTs too.

In other words, NVIDIA and ATI may have been fixing prices of their products for a while now, it is believed that they held secret meetings to discuss staged competition, chart out prices, timings of product launches among other things. These pseudo-competitions staged provided improved sales among other things.

I cannot imagine that this comes as a surprise to anyone. The whole industry is designed around the idea of inflated prices. It doesn't actually cost Intel any more money to make an E8200 than an E8500, but the latter costs an extra $200. Trying to figure out what people are willing to pay is what the business is really about, but it is a little shifty for the two competitors to get together and decide what that amount is secretly.

It's all fun and games until a price war runs amok.