Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak offered more details this afternoon during an analyst earnings call about the company’s disappointing fourth quarter

When it comes to physical media, Szkutak said the biggest hit to revenue came in the area of video game sales, which includes both console and game sales (but not games sold digitally, say from Amazon’s app store). Even though he didn’t offer specific numbers on that front, he noted that video games sales are seasonal and normally take a big leap in the last quarter of the year — and that happened this year, but it wasn’t enough to match 2010 revenue. In part, that’s because more of those sales are going to Amazon’s third-party sellers, rather than Amazon itself. So video game sales, as measured in units, were up, while revenue was down.

As far as the Kindle goes, Szkutak would only repeat Amazon’s previous statement that Kindle sales (including the Kindle Fire tablet) grew 177 percent compared to the same period last year. When asked if the Fire might be cannibalizing sales of  Kindle e-readers, Szkutak said, “Both devices, meaning the readers and Fire, did very well.” And if you’re curious about Amazon’s original staple, physical books, those sales saw double digital growth too. As Szkutak noted, that’s “impressive given the shift to Kindle.”

Meanwhile, digital content sales were up across-the-board, he said.

Japan’s video game industry is the world’s second biggest (after the US), but it’s on a downward streak for the fifth consecutive year. Based on sales, the country’s video game industry has contracted by as much as 8% year-on-year, Japan’s biggest gaming magazine Famitsu is reporting [JP].

Between December 27, 2010 and December 25, 2011, Japanese game companies generated US$5.9 billion in sales. The Famitsu says that sales from hardware makers actually went up 2.4% (thanks to the launch of the 3DS and PlayStation Vita) to reach US$2.3 billion. Software revenues in Japan dropped 13.7% to US$3.6 billion last year.

This is how often the different video game systems sold in 2011 (total sales numbers in parentheses):

1. Nintendo 3DS: 4,135,739 units
2. Sony PSP: 1,960,177 (18,237,108)
3. Sony PlayStation 3: 1,467,261 (7,417,148)
4. Nintendo Wii: 937,451 (12,167,743)
5. Nintendo DS (all models combined): 711,204 (32,835,502)
6. PlayStation Vita: 402,794
7. Xbox 360: 114,075 (1,520,738)

This overview shows the top selling games in Japan in 2011 (total sales numbers in parentheses):

1. Mario Kart 7 (Nintendo 3DS): 1,082,391 units
2. Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo 3DS): 1,042,511
3. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd (Nintendo 3DS): 1,021,457 (4,502,446)
4. Monster Hunter 3G (Nintendo 3DS): 809,322
5. Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Sony PS3): 697,146
6. Final Fantasy Type-0 (Sony PSP): 696,428
7. Rhythm Heaven Forever (Nintendo Wii): 633,429
8. Tales of Xillia (Sony PS3): 632,151
9. Wii Sports Resort (Nintendo Wii): 612,807 (2,732,655)
10. Wii Party (Nintendo Wii): 584,545 (2,123,773)

It’s the middle of the year, and the Famitsu [JP], Japan’s (and probably the world’s) biggest video game magazine, decided it’s a good time to release the top 10 of the best-selling video games in Japan in the first half of this year, apart from a list of the top selling titles this week.

Top 10 of the best selling games in Japan in the first half of 2011:

1. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd (PSP, Capcom): 968,269 units
2. Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 Professional (NDS, Square Enix): 469,469
3. Dissidia 012: Duodecim Final Fantasy (PSP, Square Enix): 454,522
4. Dynasty Warriors 6 (PS3, Koei): 443,873
5. Ryu ga Gotoku Of the End (PS3, Sega): 376,193
6. Donkey Kong Returns (Wii, Nintendo): 368,527
7. Dai-2-Ji Super Robot Taisen Z (PSP, Bandai Namco): 364,881
8. Phantasy Star Portable 2  (PSP, Sega): 352,511
9. Wii Party (Wii, Nintendo): 349,951
10. SD Gundam G Generation World (PSP, Bandai Namco): 332,278

As you can see, the list includes only games made by Japanese companies.

But in the same issue, the Famitsu shows the top 10 of the best selling video games in Japan this week, too. And this list is topped by Rockstar’s L.A. Noire and includes titles by other foreign game developers (on 2, 3, 4, and 9). Last month, the Famitsu gave L.A. Noire an almost perfect score of 39/40.

1. L.A. Noire (PS3, Take-Two): 58,436 units
2. Infamous 2 Sony (PS3, Take-Two): 33,474
3. Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon (PS3, D3): 30,189
4. Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon (XBOX360, D3): 17,817
5. Wii Play: Motion Nintendo (Wii, Nintendo): 17,008
6. Little Battler Xperience Level-5 (PSP, Level 5): 15,807
7. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS, Nintendo): 14,985
8. Steins Gate (PSP, Kadokawa Shoten): 13,700
9. GoldenEye 007  (Wii, Nintendo): 13,216
10. Wii Sports Resort (Wii, Nintendo): 12,877
11. L.A. Noire  (XBOX360, Take-Two): 12,621

The original Dragon Age was a pretty good game — lots of free roaming, but also precise timelines. It wasn’t uncommon to spend 90+ hours in the main story, but at least the story had substance, just a bit long. Today, Dragon Age 2 released, and continuing on the steam from the first, BioWare has released the game for PC, Xbox 360, PS 3 and Mac OS X simultaneously.

Mac gamers now have a really good game to look forward to, and on day one too. But you’ll need a pretty powerful machine. Dragon Age II needs at least a Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz or faster chip, Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later, 2GB of RAM or more and a minimum ATI HD2600 or NVidia 9400 or better video card (at least 256MB VRAM).

Gamers can grab the game for $60.

[via MacNN]

It’s not the best time to be a gamer in Vietnam. The country’s government, by way of the Ministry of Information and Communication, has decreed that ISPs there block access to online games between the hours of 10pm and 8am. No late-night raiding for you, I’m afraid.

The ban is ostensibly in place to diminish the negative side effects associated with excessive gaming, particularly online gaming.

It puts a certain stress on the country’s ISPs, which now have to sit there and monitor traffic all night long.

Never mind that it may backfire. Won’t let me game when I have a few hours free at night? Fine, I’ll just start skipping class then.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the government has promised a policy review within the year to ensure that everything is working as intended.

Everybody panic. The video game industry was down 5 percent this past January compared to January 2010, even if Activision still managed to sell an inordinate number of Call of Duty: Black Ops copies.

It’s hard to look at NPD data these days given its recent policy of not releasing its information as frequently as it used to.

Here’s your January 2011 top ten:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops (Activision Blizzard) – Xbox 360, PS3, Wi, DS, PC
2. Just Dance 2 (Ubisoft) – Wii
3. Dead Space 2 (Electronic Arts) – Xbox 360, PS3, PC
4. Little Big Planet 2 (Sony) – PS3
5. Zumba Fitness: Join the Party (Majesco) – Wii, Xbox 360, PS3
6. NBA 2K11 (Take-Two Interactive) – Xbox 360, PS3, PSP, Wii, PS2, PC
7. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft) – Xbox 360, PS3
8. Dance Central (MTV Games) – Xbox 360
9. Michael Jackson The Experience (Ubisoft) – Wii, DS, PSP
10. DC Universe Online: The Next Legend Is You (Sony) – PS3, PC

Probably most impressive on the list is Dead Space 2. It only came out on January 25, and yet it still managed to grab the third-place spot. EA sold 425,000 copies in just about a week.

Another proud showing was DC Universe Online, but as we all know Warhammer Online did quite well its first few months then all but fell off the planet soon after.

As far as hardware goes, Microsoft says it shipped some 14 percent more 360s this January compared to last January.

Must be all those people buying Kinect, which has done quite well for itself. In fact, peripherals in general were the biggest “winners” in January, shooting up a solid 6 percent from the previous January.

March is shaping up to be a pretty big month. Crysis 2 (which just became available via Stream for pre-order), Dragon Age 2, Total War: Shogun 2, Need for Speed Shift 2, Pokemon Black and White, and the 3DS. Maybe if I could slow down time I’d have the time to play all these.

Valve has released the details surrounding pre-ordering Portal 2. The game is available for pre-order right now on Steam (and other retailers), and if you pre-order the game they’ll knock $5 off the price, bringing it down to $45.

Different retailers have different pre-order bonuses (beyond the $5 discount). Steam, for example, will throw in a free copy of the original game with every pre-order. If you already own the game, feel free to give the game to a friend or relative. Other bonuses include skins for multi-player bots.

The game is currently scheduled for release on April 18.

It’s not the first time this has happened, and it most certainly won’t be the last time. A reasonably complete build of Crysis 2 (reports suggest people have already beaten the game) leaked at the weekend, prompting Crytek, the game’s developers, to release a statement saying that it, along with EA, the game’s publisher, was “deeply disappointed by the news,” and that it “encourage[s] fans to support the game and the development team by waiting and purchasing the final, polished game on 22nd March.” The download clocks in a just less than 10GB.

It’s also emerged that a build of Killzone 3 leaked at the weekend, but it’s a monster of a download at 41GB. Surely the size alone will serve as a deterrent, no?

Marvel vs. Capcom 3, due for release tomorrow, has been floating around online for about a week now.

Notice a pattern?

It’s the sad reality that “big” games leak all the time, oftentimes weeks ahead of their official release date. Crysis 2, and Killzone 3, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, are merely the latest examples of a sorry trend in the exciting world of video games.

Probably the most [in]famous example of a big game leak is Half-Life 2 in 2003; calling that a “leak” is even a bit of a misnomer given the way in which the game got out there. That it wasn’t all that playable is another caveat.

Remember Doom 3? An alpha build of the game leaked nearly two years before the game’s release in 2004.

Consoles aren’t exempt from big leaks, either. Halo 2 leaked nearly a month before its official release date back in 2004. Granted, it was a French-language version, but that didn’t stop people from downloading, did it?

(If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that all of these games went onto great commercial success despite their having leaked so far in advance.)

More pertinent to the Crysis 2 leak will be the investigation into how it got out there. Given that developmental tools are included in the leak it’s probably safe to say the leak wasn’t merely a review copy given to a magazine or Web site.

My greatest fear here is that Crytek and EA will use this as an excuse to move away from PC development altogether. A sort of, “This is why you can’t have nice things.” It can’t be too uplifting for the folks at Crytek to see thousands upon thousands of people seeding and leeching the game. It’s like, come on, guys, the fact that we even bothered with a PC version at all says we care about the platform, and this is what you do? Thanks.

It would appear that Crysis 2 for the PC has leaked in some capacity. A quick look at some of the more popular sites when it comes to this kind of thing suggests that many thousands of people have no problem downloading Crytek’s unfinished game, which is due for release next month. Well, was due for release next month—who knows how this leak will affect development?

You’ll find no links here, of course, but the fact that such a big game leaked weeks before its intended release date is certainly worth mentioning as a news item.

According to various threads I’ve been reading, the game is absolutely playable and includes the CryEngine 3 editor.

Needless to say, this isn’t probably what the folks at Crytek (or EA) had in mind for their weekend.

It’s not rare for games to leak a few days before their official release date (and these are usually plain ol’ retail copies), but well over a month? There’s trouble afoot, that’s for sure.

Now here’s a rumor that will stop many people in their tracks. An analyst at Wedbush Securities, “one of the largest securities firms and investment banks in the nation,” says that he’s “certain to [his] core” that Activision is planning a pay-to-play Call of Duty. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of millions of gamers around the country flipping out. Picture an anime character with a giant teardrop running down his cheek.

Activision, in the same earnings call where it announced that the Guitar Hero franchise was as dead as disco, said that it had tapped Beachhead Studios to create “new, innovative Call of Duty content and services.” Such work will “enable tens of millions of players around the world to continue to enjoy the experience that Call of Duty offers.”

Call of Duty “services,” and “new [and] innovative” ones at that? Sounds an awful lot like Activision is preparing for at least some form of pay-to-play.

I suppose Activision could take this in a few different ways. One, it could just outright charge people to play the games, which, eh, I’d doubt. Two, it could follow the hardly-innovative-at-this-point tract of delivering a free-to-play online multi-player game (or mode) while tacking on additional, “premium” content, content that you’d have to pay for.

Maybe there’s a level cap, a cap that can only be removed by paying, say, $5 per month? Maybe premium users—and you know they’d give these users a silly name like “officers,” referring to free users as mere “enlisted men”—will have access to “über-weapons” like tactical nukes and whatnot? Free maps delivered at regular intervals, etc.

Now the question to ask you guys: will this fly? How many of you are prepared to pay something like $5 per month for the privilege of playing Call of Duty? I’m sure Activision has worked it out where they only need, who knows, 10 percent of its existing playerbase to become premium members in order for this to work, but man, I fear for Activision if this doesn’t work out. What do they have beyond Call of Duty? How much harder can they afford to lean on World of Warcraft?

But that’s for another day. Today’s question is all about how big a success (or failure) would a pay-to-play Call of Duty be?

Kudos to Activision for doing exactly what so many people had been predicting for years now. The world’s biggest video game publisher said yesterday that it was going to “disband Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero business unit,” citing a decline in interest in the music game genre. And what could possibly be the reason for that, hmm? Maybe releasing sequel after sequels after sequel in such a quick succession that you don’t give gamers any room to breathe? Gotta maximize short-term profits! The future? That’s someone else’s problem.

The last game in the series, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, was the sixth “main” game in the series, having been released last September. It only met with so-so reviews, currently hovering around 72 (out of 100) with the critics; users were still less kind.

Perhaps this is why people lost all interest in the franchise:

Guitar Hero: November 2005

Guitar Hero II: November 2006

Guitar Hero Encore Rock The 80s: July 2007

Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock: October 2007

Guitar Hero Aerosmith: June 2008

Guitar Hero World Tour: October 2008

Guitar Hero Metallica: March 2009

Guitar Hero Smash Hits: June 2009

Guitar Hero 5: September 2009

Band Hero: November 2009

Guitar Hero Van Halen: December 2009

Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock: September 2010

All the while, from late 2007 on, competing with all those Rock Band games. Games, which, incidentally, were better received critically. Let’s not forget the DJ Hero franchise, either.

My question is, how long will people keep supporting the Call of Duty franchise? When will folks realize that they’re paying $60, year in, year out, for what amounts to Quake III mods? And buggy ones at that.

Let it be known that 2011 will be the year that console gamers will be jealous of their PC gaming brethren. (As if that matters, but whatever.) Red Orchestra 2, Crysis 2, and the mighty Battlefield 3 will be best experienced on the PC, and if you’re sitting there on your couch, controller in hand, you’re really not getting the full experience. Sorry.

Take Battlefield 3. It’ll be released for all platforms, yes, but Dice, the game’s developers, recently told Game Informer that the PC will be the “lead platform.” An engine built from the ground-up to take advantage of the raw power of your fancy Nvidia or AMD GPU. A nice change of pace from the Call of Duty games that were merely designed not to explode the meek Xbox 360 first and foremost, then tossed over the to PC as afterthought. It’s more than graphics, of course, with PC gamers having exclusive access to a 64-person multi-player mode. The console versions will be limited to 24 players. Battlefield with only 24 players? Why even bother?

Red Orchestra 2 won’t even be available on consoles, with PC Gamer saying that the game arrives at a time “when even the best multi-player shooters on PC consider mouse and keyboard support or a server browser to be a feature worthy of being printed on the back of the box.” John Gibson, the president of Tripwire Interactive, the game’s developers, says:

all these games being developed right now are great achievements for a console, but they’re not pushing what’s possible on the PC…. For too long I feel that multi-player shooter designers have only been trying to give players joy. Now is the time to stop feeding FPS players only cotton candy, and give them some steak and potatoes along with the sweet stuff.

In other words, too many of today’s console-derived shooters have zero substance to them. Am I right in thinking that the latest Call of Duty all but plays itself? Where’s the fun in that?

There’s no reason to think that Crysis 2, despite being mutli-platform, won’t be best experienced on a PC. Cevat Yerli, CryTek’s president and creative director (whom I talked to for all of 8 seconds at least year’s big Crysis 2 reveal) told Edge that the game “will have a PC version that’s a PC game. We’re going to push it as much as the engine can take.” The PC version also benefits from the increased budget, courtesy of EA freaking out and needing a hit that’s not called Madden or Fifa.

It’ll be at least as beautiful as Crysis, but the context is different. It’s New York. Not a jungle, but an urban jungle. You have to understand that the budget for Crysis was much lower than for Crysis 2. We could spend much more on Crysis 2 because we expected to sell more through multiplatform development. So PC gamers will get a better game out of that; it isn’t just take, it’s also give. The gameplay has received much more research about accessibility, streamlining and making it more fun, but also making it deeper. So every angle is improved. The amount of diligence and production volume we’ve spent makes it so much better than Crysis.

There’s so much potential for PC gaming that it hurts to see slapdash port after slapdash port. I’m just happy to see studios give the PC more than 15 seconds of thought.

What do fans of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Mass Effect 2 have in common? One group of fans spends its time playing a pop-a-mole shooter set in outer space, while the other group of fans spends its time playing a pop-a-mole shooter set on earth. Oh, and both groups of fans have been fighting game-breaking bugs for some time now. One such bug, gone unpatched for more than two weeks now, corrupts save files in the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2, while Call of Duty: Black Ops has had any number of annoying bugs since its release last November. The game’s so buggy that a UK consumer group reported the game to the mighty Office of Fair Trading for being, in essence, a hunk of junk. What does Treyarch, the Black Ops developer, have to say for itself? In essence, “Pobody’s nerfect.”

The company’s community manager, Josh Olin, said that while it’s “unfortunate” that these bugs have to exist at all, the simple fact of the matter is that pretty much impossible to release a bug-free game.

In an ideal would we would love to ship a completely bug-proof game. I can’t think of a single developer in the world, though, that could achieve that… When [bugs] pop up, though, it’s really important that we are well equipped to quickly address them and quickly patch them.

One such bug, apparently, deleted movies made in the game’s theater mode. That’s mighty inconvenient, no?

Treyarch also said that when you have a game as popular as Call of Duty is, you’re bound to have more and more complaints and reports of bugs than a game that had no buys. ¡Ay, bendito!

Mass Effect 2′s bugs are also worth mentioning, because not only is there the new save file corruption bug—who honestly wants to sit there and obsessively back-up their save files to a USB drive?—but many of the bugs that were present in the Xbox 360 and PC version are still present. Nice.

(In BioWare’s defense, it says it’s submitted a patch to Sony for approval, but that was two weeks ago. Two weeks with nigh zero communication on the issue is a long time to wait for what was supposed to be the “definitive” edition of the game.)

Is a bug-free game possible? Probably not, no. But there are ways to go about patching them, ways to keep the community up-to-date without making your customers (your fans!) feel like a bunch of jerks.

At the CrunchGear offices, after all our tireless work, we sit around and talk time; watches, clocks, and 2012 occupy our general water cooler discussions. But, when we aren’t talking time, video games is usually next on the list. So combining 1 and 2 would be like the sweet combination of peanut butter to our chocolate. That combination can now be had in a clock called the Wise Clock: our Reese’s Cup, if you will.

The LED clock is brilliantly simple, it simply just tells the time on top of a pong game. The game is not playable by users, instead one must simply watch in amazement that a computer is doing a fine job pretending to be human. Next to making this a DIY project, this is one of the easiest way to have a different kind of clock. Check out the video below.

[via hackaday]

What exciting times we live in, what with word that Sony has plans to subpoena a boatload of Web sites and individuals in an attempt to track down the members of fail0verflow and other PS3 hackers. Good luck with that. But wait, what’s this? Now LG wants to ban the sale of PS3s here in the US of A because of a patent dispute? In the words of Scott Hall, two sweet!

LG alleges that the PS3 infringes on as many as four patents related to the playback of Blu-ray discs, and has subsequently asked the United States International Trade Commission to disallow the further importation of the video game console until their lawyers figure out what’s going on. (A separate lawsuit has also been filed with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of California, and it covers other, non-PS3 devices, including PCs and digital cameras.)

The FOSS Patents blog says this could all me a matter of revenge. Sony filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission last December over some of LG’s mobile phone patents. So what better way to fight a patent complaint than by filing a completely unrelated patent claim?

That’s pretty much where we are now, complaints lodged and awaiting rulings. I suggest you pass the time by listening to the Tropico 3 soundtrack.

Last week saw a full-on Mad Catz arcade stick for the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and this week we have something a little less conspicuous.(Not everyone wants to store a big arcade stick around the house.) It’s the Marvel Edition Versus Fighting Pad, from Performance Designed Products. If nothing else it looks pretty good, not some slapped-together thing designed to make a quick buck.

It’s a wired controller, it’s only available for the Xbox 360, and as you can see with your eyes it has six action buttons on the front. Nobody wants to play a fighting game with left and right triggers. And nobody usually wants to play a fighting game with the standard thumbstick, instead opting to use the D-Pad. But wait, there is no D-Pad here?! Yup, PDP says it’s designed the thumbstick has been “custom designed and constructed to feel like an arcade joystick but with the more comfortable and compact feel of a thumb pad.”

Strong words, but never having used the controller I can’t really comment either way.

The controller, which is available now, is only $40, so at the very least it won’t put you in the poor house.

One week and counting till the release of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Any takers?

One of the better deals during Steam’s holiday sale was the Stalker series for something like $5—pretty much an insane deal. The games are the definition of the PC shooter (as opposed to console shooter like Killzone or Halo): freedom of movement, no silly scripted sequences, mods all day long, etc. Well now it looks like a group of modders, from Russia, have taken it upon themselves to port the game to the engine that powers Crysis.

The team, AP Production, has a forum detailing the mod, officially called Cry Zone Sector 23.

It’s not just a visual overhaul, either. Case in point: the mod will implement Far Cry 2-style healing.

Meanwhile, all of us are patiently waiting for Stalker 2.

Sony is apparently going after more hackers than just George Hotz and fail0verflow. Sony is looking to get DMCA suits against all PS3 jailbreakers who share Sony’s source code on Github. Well-known PS3 hackers Waninkoko, KaKaRoTo, Hermes, Kmeaw and Graf_Chokolo have been named in documents to Github requesting all docs and posts from the users, as well as all contact information.

This comes just a few days after Graf_Chokolo claimed to have a fully stable version of Linux running on the PS3 with all of the GameOS features. Graf_Chokolo posted a comment on XorHack saying:

And here we go  Linux is officially back on PS3 3.41. It’s even better now 

It has all GameOS features, it has access to all HDD, VFLASH and FLASH regions. It can communicate with Dispatcher Manager, Update Manager, SYSCON Manager, it can run isolated SPUs, and of course RSX 

I uploaded some screenshots of the Debian distribution i installed on my PS3 HDD. The Debian distribution is a just normal PPC64 Linux without any modification, all i changed was my dutifully and beloved Hypervisor 

I modified the Hypervisor so far that it boots the Linux bootloader petitiboot from VFLASH and petitboot loads the Linux distribution installed on a HDD region.
And what is better than Linux to boot Linux ? 
I practically implemented Dual Boot feature GameOS+OtherOS in the Hypervisor  Linux is not the only OS which can be booted like this from PS3 HDD.

Now we don’t need GameOS anymore to run our code, no need anymore for SELFs and we can start now programming our own games on PS3 on Linux 

I will make everything public 

And greetings to SONY  Hand me over the maintance and implementation of PS3 Hypervisor  I will improve it and maintain for free  We all will benefit. HV hacking is great fun 

He also shared photos of his hacks. We’re unsure if all his will help his case against Sony.

[via dukio]

It looks like there will be a Halo: Combat Evolved re-make after all. So says mighty Joystiq. It’ll be available on November 15, 2011, 10 years to the day after the game’s original release for the Xbox. Oh, happy day!

What can we expect with this re-make? Supposedly it’ll be running at a higher resolution, 1080p, but who knows if that’s 1080p native or merely upscaled like previous Halo 360 games. I’m certain gamers who exclusively use consoles have no idea what “HD gaming” truly means. Rumblings of a 3D mode, too, but if it’s running in 3D I can’t imagine how low the resolution would have to be. The Xbox 360 isn’t a top-of-the-line Nvidia GPU, you know.

And it won’t necessarily just be a higher resolution, oh my no. The game’s developers, believed to be Saber Interactive, will be using entirely new art assets. She won’t be using the Reach engine, though. Mystery!

Multi-player? Yup, at least online co-op.

If true, and I’ve no read to believe it’s not true, I imagine E3 this year will be all about Halo. Hmm.

Bad news for people who think they’re great drivers because they play games like Gran Turismo 5: you’re not. New research suggests that while playing games may improve reaction time, it also seems to help churn out aggressive drivers. It’s easy to be an aggressive driver in Gran Turismo where damage is minimal (if existent at all), but not when you’re driving down I-95.

This news comes to us by way of Continental Tyres, which says that gamers, sure, bring some useful skills to the table, “they need to apply some balance with a sensible assessment of risk.”

Risk? Gamers admitted to speeding more frequently than non-gamers, getting stopped by the police more frequently than non-gamers, and having crashed into stationary objects more frequently than non-gamers.

In other words, just because you’ve 100 percent’d Gran Turismo 5 doesn’t mean you’re the second coming of Alain Prost.

Maybe we need to wait for the fully automated cars Rey Kurzweil was just talking about on Opie & Anthony.