By Luke Plunkett from Kotaku:

Final Fantasy XIII has been in development for over five years, has involved hundreds of staff and has cost the publisher a ton of money. So you can see why there'll never be another Final Fantasy game like it!

Speaking with Sony on the official European PlayStation blog, the game's producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama have said:

...Article continued at Kotaku

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From MMO-Champion:
Icecrown Citadel Attempts removed on Normal
Quote from: Daelo (Source)
After each region's maintenance this week, raids will no longer lose attempts on wipes in Normal mode for Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. There will still be limited attempts in Heroic mode.

We will continue to monitor developments in Icecrown Citadel in the future, especially since the Heroic difficulty has been unlocked by a significant number of raids.

...Article continued at MMO-Champion

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By Soulskill from Slashdot's slowly-but-surly deptartment:
An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."

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By Brian Ashcraft from Kotaku:

From website 4Gamer.net comes the news that Nintendo is developing new hardware, and Shigeru Miyamoto is working on a new Wii Motion Plus game.

The news is a recent symposium in which Miyamoto discussed things like hamsters. 4Gamer does not quote him directly, but does state that Miyamoto revealed he is working on a game that uses Wii Motion Plus. This game is not the upcoming Legend of Zelda title.

At the 2008 E3 gaming expo in Los Angeles, Miyamoto announced that Nintendo was making a new Pikmin game.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Luke Plunkett from Kotaku:

Nintendo sent out a press release today triumphantly boasting of victory in an Australian court over a man accused of pirating New Super Mario Bros. Wii. And how this single man now owes the mega-rich company $1.5 million.

Last November, Nintendo says it was able to "employ the use of sophisticated technological forensics" to catch the man, James Burt, who has been convicted of uploading the word's first pirated copy of New Super Mario Bros. Wii onto the internet.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Luke Plunkett from Kotaku:
Wonder Festival 2010 Winter was held over the weekend in Japan, and featured loads of cosplayers. It also featured loads of new video game toys.

While we've shown you some of the figures on display ahead of time, many more made public debuts at the show, like these guys: Jack Frost from Persona, Muramasa, Virtual On goes cute, some Tales of Vesperia figures and a blurry, yet still tempting, "Super Action Statue" of Yakuza's Kazuma Kiryu.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Introversion Software's port of the award-winning Darwinia comes to Xbox Live Marketplace this week for 1200 Microsoft Points. The abstract strategy game may not be the most graphically impressive of XBLA offerings, but its gameplay is rock solid. [Xbox.com]

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By kdawson from Slashdot's of-cores deptartment:
Dan Jones writes "As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux." And reader shmG notes Intel's release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Welcome to Kotaku Off Topic, the nightly open thread in which Kotaku commenters talk about anything and everything. Tonight you can do it with attitude.

Speaking of Compton, I drove down there today for something Kotaku related, something that we'll probably reveal within the next week or two. My only problem with Compton? The potholes are terrible. Someone needs to go down there and clean those roads up!

Alright, you probably don't want to talk about road construction. So feel free to talk about something much more interesting. Maybe one of these things?

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Annalee Newitz from io9:
Two weeks ago, I trudged up a steep San Francisco hill through pouring rain, then went through a strange door into another world. A world full of brightly-colored creatures who live in Neon Monster, a toy store and therapeutic bestiary.

I had come to witness the birth of plush toy Mitch, a one-eyed creature who has lived for a very long time and has become a little neurotic over the years. Things are hard for Mitch because he has no mouth, and yet his constant companion is a creature called Mouth who speaks for him - and frequently lies about what Mitch really wants to say. No wonder Mitch is in therapy with Dr. Darwin Dayglow, a kindly psychotherapist who runs the The Facility where Mitch lives with other creatures in the bestiary.

...Article continued at io9

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By Owen Good from Kotaku:

Since we just got off this discussion of how hitting will work - now with check swings! - in MLB 2K10, here's a video showing how at bats will play out in the game, for both pitchers and hitters.

It also offers a good three-minute look at gameplay. While MLB 2K10's visuals are not as crisp as the uncommonly good MLB 10 The Show, they have improved noticeably over last year's game. One thing I'm not crazy about here is the typeface on the name-tape above the uniform numeral. It doesn't correspond to its normal presentation and many teams (the Braves, for example) have variances on this.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Visceral Games' Dead Space 2 may not be the next game you play in the sci-fi franchise. Recent surveys point to an Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network port of Wii misfire Dead Space Extraction and something brand new, Planet Cracker.

One survey's description of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 port of Dead Space Extraction indicates that any planned port of the game would feature the same on-rails "guided first-person experience" gameplay, pitched as an "interactive horror experience" in "full HD." A tentative price of $15 USD was mentioned in the survey forwarded to Kotaku.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By kdawson from Slashdot's don't-need-it-until-you-need-it deptartment:
An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details.

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By Owen Good from Kotaku:

A mini-foofaraw stirred up after MLB 2K10 previews revealed the game had no check-swing mechanic. 2K Sports felt an improved batting eye and new "defensive swings" eliminated their need. But they've backtracked, and said check swings will be patched in.

So you'll now have four swings in MLB 2K10, all executed by the right analog stick. Pushing up is a normal swing. Pulling back and pushing up is a power swing. Pushing either right or left is the defensive swing they've introduced to help you foul off pitches, work the count, and tire out the pitcher or get the pitch you want to hit. Now there's the check swing, which is accomplished by drawing back on the right analog after you've executed one of the other three. Remember, check swing is just to keep from swinging at something outside the strike zone, a decision the batting eye and pitch tip is supposed to help you make before the ball arrives.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Mike Fahey from Kotaku:

White Knight Chronicles: International Edition presents the classic coming-of-age tale of a teenager learning what it truly means to be a thirty foot-tall killer robot.

Dark Cloud developer Level-5's first foray onto the PlayStation 3, White Knight Chronicles tells the tale of a teenaged orphan named Leonard, who through a series of unfortunate circumstances makes a pact with the White Knight, a powerful weapon of war from the distant past. Using his newfound ability to transform into a gigantic armored behemoth, Leonard sets out on an epic quest to rescue a kidnapped princess and solve the mystery of the Knights.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Owen Good from Kotaku:

After telling everyone that NCAA Basketball and NHL 2K might be getting passive cancellations, I've been sent this tip from an anonymous reader: According to an ad listing, 2K Sports is seeking artists for an NHL 2K11 soundtrack.

The listing, at Sonicbids - a music gigs site pairing artists with clients - 2K Sports was looking to pay a $3,000 flat fee to bands "who can provide a song to help round out the NHL 2K11 soundtrack. NHL 2K11 is the latest in a series of critically acclaimed hockey games, due out in September 2010."

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Charlie Jane Anders from io9:
Robot uprisings, demon armies, women fighting dragons and men striding the cosmos have never looked cooler, or lovelier, than in the pulp magazine cover art going on display at the University of Connecticut. Beware: Some of it is quite spicy.

UConn's Benton Museum is hosting a massive exhibition showcasing the Robert Lesser Collection of Pulp Art. Called "From Amazing Stories to Weird Tales: Covering Pulp Fiction," the exhibition includes a ton of original pulp cover art in amazing quality. They've put up nearly 500 of these images online, and here are a bunch of our favorites. [via Vogue Immunity]

...Article continued at io9

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:
Owners of the Xbox 360 version of EA's Need For Speed Shift will get a chance to get behind the wheel of 10 new Ferraris next week thanks to the Ferrari Racing Pack.

The Xbox 360 exclusive, 800 Microsoft Points download also adds, in addition to the cars listed below, 46 new Ferrari-specific challenges including hot laps, eliminators, endurance races and a world tour, plus 125 new Gamerscore points.

Some of the cheapest Ferraris you can buy (starting February 16) include:

1. 1996 Ferrari F50 GT
2. 2005 Ferrari F430 Spider

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Charlie Jane Anders from io9:
In honor of Comcast's decision to rebrand itself as XFinity, Time Magazine published a list of the 10 worst corporate rebrandings, and the Sci Fi Channel's decision to become Syfy made #3. Writes Time, "Spell Check On Syfy: Unless science fiction is spelled syience fyction, owners of the popular television network need some serious spelling help." [Time Magazine]

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By kdawson from Slashdot's slicing-up-the-pie deptartment:
bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Rockstar Games has updated the look of its Red Dead Redemption box art, looking noticeably less red, much more The Good, The Bad and the Ugly than before and more like the John Marston of the game.

Updated box art means the release date of April 27 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is looking, finally, much closer to reality. Keep your fingers crossed and... look out behind you, Marston!

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Owen Good from Kotaku:

For the sixth time in seven years - and the first time picking an underdog - EA Sports' Madden Simulation has correctly predicted the Super Bowl winner. But it's not as simple, or as complicated, as one might think.

It's a no-frills simulation, said Anthony Stevenson, senior product manager on the Madden NFL team. This year it was done on an Xbox 360; they loaded the latest roster update and depth chart, booted up a game with ranked-match parameters (basically, All-Pro difficulty) started it, then ran the game from kickoff to final gun in the Super Sim menu, which takes 23 seconds. (I timed it.) Last week, the Madden Sim spit out New Orleans as a 35-31 winner. In reality, the Saints won 31-17.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Annalee Newitz from io9:

Early this morning in the pre-dawn hours, the space shuttle Endeavor shot into space for a two-week trip to the International Space Station. This will be its last nighttime launch.

This launch occurred amid the controversy that began last week when President Obama announced his future plans for the NASA space program, which included scrapping a program to build replacements for the space shuttles, which will retire after 2010. The Endeavor is on one of its final flights, and before it launched, NASA chief Charles Bolden told reporters that Obama's plan is "screwed up," and swore he would fight it.

...Article continued at io9

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By kdawson from Slashdot's party-like-it's-1997 deptartment:
angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML)"

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Electronic Arts touted worldwide sales of Left 4 Dead 2 and Dragon Age: Origins during today's investor call, the two titles combining for more than 5.6 million in sales. In other good news, EA lost $82 million last quarter.

No that is good news, considering that EA lost $641 million during the same quarter last year. A remarkable improvement, you might say, especially since revenue was down to $1.243 billion as compared with $1.654 billion from the year prior. Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello is understandably pumped.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Meredith Woerner from io9:

George Lucas' live-action Star Wars TV series is still moving forward in Australia, and little clues are slowly popping up here and there as to which characters will turn up, and which Star Wars film will it most emulate.

Author Karen Traviss announced a while back that she is no longer writing her long-awaited Boba Fett novel. The author explained that contract issues were getting in the way of her story line, and it seems like what she was planning for Boba Fett, and what Lucas was planning on his new TV series, conflicted.

...Article continued at io9

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By Graeme McMillan from io9:

Astro City writer Kurt Busiek shares a genuine piece of comic history at his blog: the original notes for the story that became the return of X-Men's Jean Grey, unseen even by the people who actually wrote the story. [Busiek.com]

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By Owen Good from Kotaku:

NCAA Basketball is not listed among key sports titles due for release in Electronic Arts' coming fiscal year, fueling speculation that the poor-selling franchise has been discontinued.

In its filings today, EA notes that the list is not a complete picture of all titles to be released in the coming year. However, NCAA Basketball typically has been included, along with all other sports titles, in guidance offered in years past. The list also includes three TBA titles under the EA Sports banner, two of them EA Sports Active, one an unnamed fighting game due in early 2011. It would be unusual for NCAA Basketball to be considered not a key release if an unnamed project a year away is.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By ScuttleMonkey from Slashdot's size-does-matter deptartment:
natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"

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By Mike Fahey from Kotaku:
<!-- videoId: VE1NfLw85k4 --><!-- /videoId: VE1NfLw85k4 --> These custom Mario 64 music tracks from YouTube user TheGrinz might never make it past the Rock Band Network's copyright violation checks, but they're still impressive as hell.

Kotakuite Nick pointed me towards these videos, created using Harmonix's tools for porting songs to the Rock Band Network, and Koji Kondo's Mario 64 music really seems to work well in the format. Watching the drum line in the Bowser theme had my leg aching though, so in a way I'm glad that the Rock Band Network has copyright filters. Otherwise I'd just end up doing something stupid to my leg, and I like my leg.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Developer BioWare has a busy 2011 ahead of them, with a new Dragon Age title, Star Wars: The Old Republic and, according to EA execs "something far-reaching coming from Mass Effect" in early 2011.

Electronic Arts COO John Schappert added that "something far-reaching" from the Mass Effect franchise to the list of upcoming titles due in the fourth quarter of the company's 2011 fiscal year. That means something Mass Effect related arriving between January 1 and March 31 of next calendar year.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Esther Inglis-Arkell from io9:

Futurama showed us a world with space travel, robot sidekicks, and Al Gore riding the Mighty Moon Worm, but what really made hearts beat faster were the downloadable Lucy Liu robots. How close are we to robot lovin'?

Appearance:

There are probably a few sites on the internet that cater to people who want to make out with toasters - pictures, safety tips, ads for bulk-rate burn creams – but most people want a more lifelike robot. How is it possible to make a robot that transforms into anyone the end-user wants? There are two possibilities.

...Article continued at io9

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By Mike Fahey from Kotaku:

Registered Cerberus Network members will be receiving a special treat tomorrow, when the Cerberus Assault Armor and M-22a Eviscerator Shotgun become available for free download.

According to a post in the BioWare community forums, the two new pieces of equipment will be available to download free for Xbox 360 and PC players tomorrow at noon Mountain time. All that's required is an active membership in the Cerberus Network, which you should have, unless you somehow picked up a copy used, in which case you are made of magic.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By ScuttleMonkey from Slashdot's ford-why-is-this-fish-in-my-ear deptartment:
nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller&rsquo;s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language."

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By Mike Fahey from Kotaku:

Two years after operator GameTap shut the servers down, Myst Online: Uru Live is back in action and free to play, thanks to original developer Cyan Worlds.

Myst Online: Uru Live was originally intended to be the online multiplayer component of Cyan Worlds' Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, but that never quite worked out. The online portion missed the 2003 release of the PC game, and by April 2004 had been scrapped entirely. Then video game digital delivery service GameTap resurrected the multiplayer in 2007, only to shut it down again in February 2008.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Charlie Jane Anders from io9:
<!-- videoId: ucns7CxdDrk --><!-- /videoId: ucns7CxdDrk -->If you're one of those people who hasn't yet gotten hooked on a science-fiction webseries (other than Dr. Horrible), this trailer for webseries aggregator SciFinal might just change your mind. It's 46 seconds of weirdness, silliness (multi-breasts!) and intriguing drama.

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Electronic Arts has is aiming for the first quarter of 2011 for two of its bigger upcoming releases, pegging Visceral Games' Dead Space 2 and BioWare's next Dragon Age title for release by March 31 of next year.

EA also lists the Dead Space and Dragon Age sequels as bound for handheld platforms in addition to consoles—with "Dragon Age Title TBA" also coming to the PC. That could mean Nintendo DS, PSP or mobile platforms, like Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Annalee Newitz from io9:

This week, while many humans ready themselves for a consumer-oriented celebration known as Valentine's Day, io9 takes you away from the hearts and candies and into Romance 3000AD. We're going to get futuristic, romantic, and a little naughty.

We'll be bringing you stories about everything from the science of aphrodisiacs, to the best love potions in science fiction. You'll get wantonly-researched features on epic romances from science fiction and the true nature of erotic dystopia. Plus, some of the biggest names in paranormal romance will finally answer your most burning question: What the hell is paranormal romance, anyway?

...Article continued at io9

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By ScuttleMonkey from Slashdot's shocking-discoveries deptartment:
MikeChino writes "As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles."

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By Alasdair Wilkins from io9:

Phllip Klass, who wrote under the pseudonym William Tenn, was the author of off-kilter, humorous Golden Age stories like "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi" and "Venus and the Seven Sexes." He died Sunday at the age of 89.

Born in London on May 9, 1920, Klass moved to Brooklyn with his parents when he was a year old. He served as a combat engineer in Europe during World War II, and then he worked at an Air Force radar and radio laboratory and at Bell Labs. While at Bell Labs, he started writing science fiction under the pen name William Tenn.

...Article continued at io9

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By Mike Fahey from Kotaku:
<!-- videoId: Y1NpU0NwKKk --><!-- /videoId: Y1NpU0NwKKk --> From seeds planted back in August of last year springs Plants Vs. Zombies for the iPhone, ready to grow and groan all over your phone on February 15th.

PopCap Games' garden defense game Plants Vs. Zombies seemed tailor made for the iPhone, so when the company announced the portable version of the smash PC hit last August, we weren't surprised at all. We were surprised, however, by the string of delays that struck the title, moving it from late 2009 to mid-January to late January.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Stephen Totilo from Kotaku:

There's not much Shakespeare in video games, no major Hamlet games and only scattered hopes for a Macbeth one. The lead creator of Dante's Inferno thinks the writer himself, could have been a game design visionary.

Hey, the Wall Street Journal asked Dante's Inferno lead game creator Jonathan Knight the question:

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Meredith Woerner from io9:

The prequel film for John Carpenter's The Thing starts filming next month with newcomer actors Joel Edgerton and Elizabeth Winstead. But does the audience really care what happened to the science team before the monster ran into Kurt Russell?

Matthijs Van Heijningen is directing the film which was penned by Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D. Moore, and rewritten a few times since then.

According to the Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blog, Winstead will play a Ph.D. candidate who joins a Norwegian research team in Antarctica after it discovers an alien ship in the ice. When a trapped organism gets loose and begins a series of attacks, she's forced to team with a blue-collar mercenary helicopter pilot (Edgerton) to stop the rampage.

...Article continued at io9

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By Chris Braak from io9:

Benjamin Parzybok's Couch is an epic for the apathetic, a journey to save the world undertaken by the post-college American slacker - for the essential reason that there doesn't seem to be anything better to do.

Couch effortlessly evokes those depressing after-school but just-before-life years of weird roommates, cramped apartments, and the yearly ritual of moving one's furniture and meager possessions to somewhere new. Roommates Tree, Erik, and Thom (Bakker, in a subtle shout-out to the assembled nerditry), after their apartment is inadvertently flooded by the sex maniacs living above them, undertake a seemingly simple task. They need to take their huge, red, handmade couch down to the Goodwill. Things being to grow gradually stranger as the Goodwill turns them away, as everywhere starts to turn them away, and Thom and his roommates begin to think that the Couch itself has a bit of a longer journey in mind.

...Article continued at io9

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By ScuttleMonkey from Slashdot's and-nothing-of-value-was-lost deptartment:
An anonymous reader writes "According to 4chan's owner and administrator 'moot,' Verizon has explicitly blocked all traffic on their network from boards.4chan.org, where all of 4chan's boards are located. Moot explains that only traffic to and from port 80 is being dropped and they were able to confirm that it was intentional. 4chan's downtime for Verizon users has been in effect for at least 72 hours since Saturday, February 7."

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By Michael McWhertor from Kotaku:

Welcome back to the beautiful city of Rapture, the dystopian underworld introduced in 2007's BioShock, a failed utopia all but destroyed by its inhabitants, a world less mysterious than when you last left it.

BioShock 2 puts players in the suit of Subject Delta, a hulking Big Daddy prototype who longs to reunite with his bonded Little Sister, a girl who happens to also be the daughter of Sofia Lamb, the woman now running Rapture, the underwater city somehow still as chaotic, leaky and menacingly well populated 10 years after the events of the original BioShock. Along the way, you'll be aided by Lamb's opponents and Eleanor herself on your search for your lost little Lamb, growing stronger with all new genetic modifications in the form of offensive Plasmids and passive, ability-granting Tonics. This time, you'll dual wield the power of Plasmids in your left hand, burning, electrocuting and freezing foes, with deadly new weapons for your right.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Mike Fahey from Kotaku:
Australian developer Halfbrick attempts to stand out in the undead crowd with Age of Zombies, a time-travelling zombie-killing adventure, coming February 25th to PSP and PlayStation 3 minis.

In an industry chock full of games involving zombies, how does one small developer stand out? Well I suppose this post helps. Other than that, Halfbrick is giving time travel a try, mixing brain-hungry undead horses with Egyptian mummies and Dinosaurs in order to freshen up the concept. Why not simply avoid zombies altogether? According to the official announcement, money might have something to do with it.

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By Stephen Totilo from Kotaku:

Platinum Games has made a video game that's really sexy. Before that, one that's really violent. Next: A game that's really... spaceship?

Infinite Space is set for March release in the U.S., a Nintendo DS game from the Platinum label behind Bayonetta and Madworld but developed primarily by Nude Maker, creators of erotic games. Oh, and before that, Nude Maker's chief, Hifumi Kouno, made Steel Battalion.

Like the infinity of outer space itself, the essence of Infinite Space is hard to grasp. In New York, last week, what I saw on the DS was hard to appreciate. The story seems good. In this science-fiction role-playing game future, the player will control a boy who grows up to become a space pirate. He will command an armada of up to 12 ships, traveling from system to system, similar to the exploration of the galaxies of Mass Effect. But from that set-up you'd expect to see action: Gun battles and starship clashes, perhaps?

...Article continued at Kotaku

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By ScuttleMonkey from Slashdot's lavishly-rewarded-for-failure deptartment:
With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word "deserve". But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."

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By Charlie Jane Anders from io9:
<!-- videoId: i7d7qb4NGNg --><!-- /videoId: i7d7qb4NGNg -->You might think you generate a lot of scrap-paper, but you're nowhere near as scribble-prolific as Blackout author Connie Willis. She just donated 36 containers, with 128,000 pieces of paper, to a university. And they may soon be online.

Willis has donated all of her papers to the University of Northern Colorado, in her hometown of Greeley. These are the results of her daily habit of spending hours in the local Starbucks, poring over piles of papers. According to the Greeley Tribune:

...Article continued at io9

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