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Today Ubisoft announced that a new Prince of Persia is scheduled to release towards the end of 2008 for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.

This new Prince of Persia marks the debut of the critically acclaimed franchise on next-generation consoles. Developed by Ubisoft’s award-winning Montreal studio and the same all-star team that created the previously acclaimed Prince of Persia Sands of Time trilogy, Prince of Persia is opening a new chapter in the Prince of Persia universe, featuring a new breed of gameplay. The game is poised to rejuvenate the action-adventure genre in addition to introducing a brand-new illustrative art style.

Ubisoft will also release a Prince of Persia game specifically designed for the Nintendo DS system, featuring an entirely new storyline and new characters. More details to be unveiled in the future.

The screenshots available in the screens tab are the ones leaked back in October 2007.

The following is Alone In The Dark’s official fact sheet. It is written by the game’s developers, so please take all the “revolutionary and awesome” descriptive with a grain of salt.

Alone In The Dark official fact sheet:

Central Park is hiding a secret. Built as a safe haven not for the people of New York, but for something else entirely, the vast parkland has been protected by generations of guardians while the most expensive city in the world reached skyward on its fringes. Now the truth can no longer be contained, and paranormal investigator Edward Carnby finds himself inexplicably cast into the eye of the storm as over the course of one apocalyptic night he must uncover the earth-shattering secret behind Central Park. New York will never be the same again.

Inspired by the gripping style of contemporary TV dramas, Alone In The Dark game delivers a new degree of narrative intensity, presented as a complete season format of episodes each containing action, twists and cliff-hangers. Bursting with innovative technology, including unprecedented environmental interaction, revolutionary physics, stunning visuals, uniquely immersive user interface, and DVD style chapter select, Alone in the Dark breaks gaming clichés to fulfil the next-gen promise and change what players expect from action games.

GAME FEATURES:
- Exhilarating gameplay: Blockbuster action, tense exploration, dangerous driving, and vicious fights as hero Edward Carnby fights to survive one apocalyptic night to uncover the earth-shattering secret behind Central Park;
- Intense story: taking cues from blockbuster TV dramas, the story is told in a TV season-style to deliver pace and intensity throughout, keeping the player hooked with action, plot twists and cliff hangers;
- Never get stuck: creating the first game that everyone can finish, the innovative DVD-style chapter select lets players move on if they get stuck, with the grand finale reserved for those who finish a certain amount of the game;
- Improvise to survive: a new level of environmental interaction based on real world rules where anything you could do in real life, you can do in the game. Use your imagination to create unique tools and devastating new weapons;
- Immersion: the player is plunged into the heart of the action in real-time with full movement control, in-game inventory system, on-body damage and healing system, and physiological effects;
- Pyromania: unique physics and light rendering are applied to the realistic-looking fire which propagates realistically across all flammable surfaces. Fire is a valuable ally, but can become your worst enemy;
- Photographic Rendering: a lavishly detailed game world with advanced cinematographic effects including depth of field, camera focus, numerous light sources, and High Dynamic Range effects.

Alone In The Dark Is scheduled for release on Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Wii and PC on June 20, 2008. It will be released for Playstation 3 later in the same year.

Speaking with PC Play Magazine, Crytek president, Cevat Yerli revealed that they won’t develop PC exclusives anymore, thanks to the platform’s high piracy rate.

“We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis”, said Cevat Yerli. “We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable.”

“I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy”, he continued. “To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.”

We respect Mr. Yerli’s experience and reasoning, but we must ask why does Crysis “lead the piracy charts by a large margin”?

We must not forget the game’s steep system requirements. Crysis’s gameplay play also is a hate-it-or-adore-it experience. In our opinion, a lot of potential buyers had the urge to play 2007’s game of the year (second to Call Of Duty 4 on MegaGame’s voting), but feared that their PCs weren’t qualified to handle it. Obviously, piracy was the answer for those gamers’ worries (not that we approve it). So of all those who pirated Crysis, we believe that the majority had PCs that aren’t able to meet its minimum system requirements and some just hated the game. Some of the rest were content with their pirated copy and some decided that they liked the game enough to buy it.

In other words, Crysis’s unreasonable system requirements served only to decrease its sales without affecting the number of pirated copies; and hence, caused that larger than usual piracy to sales ratio.

In a recent interview, Valve’s VP of marketing, Doug Lombardi was asked about the effect of PC games’ piracy on their business, and here is his response in full:

“Well, Steam allows us to eliminate ‘Day Zero’ piracy - which is between gold and when the game’s on the store shelves - and that’s when all the real piracy, the damaging piracy happens.”

“Gamers are generally good people, right? They’re pretty intelligent, you know, they usually have a job. They’re not derelicts out on the street, looting and robbing all of the time. But when they’ve been hyped up on a project and they really want to play this game and they can’t wait to play it… Maybe they bought a new computer or console just to play it, and it shows up on a torrent site and it’s not at the store… Temptation’s going to come into play.”

But with Steam you can’t, right? We tell you to pre-load the game, regardless of where you’re going to buy it. Download it now so you’re ready to play it the day it comes out. The disc that we send out is useless until we turn it on launch day. So we don’t have the problem of sending the disc to replication and having some punk grab it and put it on a bit torrent site and take the sales away from us.”

We saw that in 2004 when we released Half-Life 2. Doom 3, Halo 2 and whichever version of GTA came out that year were all available on the pirate network before they came out at stores. The final version of the games. Half-Life 2 wasn’t. The only difference was that Half-Life 2 had Steam anti-piracy stuff in place.”

There is no official patch for GTA IV Playstation 3 freezing bug yet, but an inquiry on Rockstar’s technical support site received a detailed 12 steps guide to, hopefully, fix it.

Rockstar’s technical support response reads fully as follows:

Please run through the following, go through in order.

1) Delete the game’s install data. This is done via the PS3 options. Scroll along the cross media bar until you reach the ‘Game’ tab, now scroll up / down the list until you reach the ‘Game Data Utility’ Enter this and locate the GTA IV option. Highlight this and press triangle once, from the menu select Delete. This will delete the game’s install information.

2) Delete the game’s save files. To delete any save files you will need to do the following. Scroll along the cross media bar until you reach the ‘Game’ tab, now scroll up / down the list until you reach the ‘Save Data Utility’ Enter this and locate the GTA IV option. Highlight this and press triangle once, and from the context menu select Delete.

3) Disable your Internet connectivity for the PS3. To do this scroll along the cross media bar until you reach the ‘Settings’ tab, now scroll up / down the list until you reach the ‘Network Settings’. Now scroll down to the Internet connection option and press x, now select the disable option. Once this has been done unplug the ethernet cable if you are connecting to the Internet if using this.

4) Disable the console’s information board. To do this scroll along the cross media bar until you reach the ‘Network’ tab, now scroll up / down the list until you reach the ‘Information Board’, highlight this and press triangle. From the menu select ‘Do not display’ Press X to confirm this.

5) Disable Media Server functionality. Scroll to Settings, now scroll up / down to ‘Network Settings’ select Media Server connection. Once this has been done press triangle and change the option Disabled.

6) Delete all of the system’s Internet cache. To do this scroll along the cross media bar until you reach the ‘Network’ tab, now scroll up / down the list until you reach the ‘Internet Browser’, highlight this and press X. Once you browser opens press the triangle button once, from the new menu highlight the ‘Tools’ option and press X. Scroll down the menu until you reach ‘Delete Cookies’ and press X. Confirm the files deletion. Repeat this for ‘Delete Cache’.

7) Turn off the PS3 screen saver. Use the cross media bar to scroll to ‘Settings’, select ‘Display Settings’. Now highlight ‘Screensaver’ and set this to ‘Do not use’.

Once this has been done, manually restart you PS3 by holding down the power button for 5 seconds it will beep once and then shut down. Release the power button and re-press it and hold for about 5 seconds. The system will then boot and reset all display settings. You will be prompted to reset your display settings to how you require them.

9) Once restarted please try the game again, you will be prompted to reinstall.

Once the game has started please turn off the following features:

1) The game’s auto-save. Press Start, Game, and locate the Auto-save option. Turn this off.

2) Turn off the game’s flicker filter. Press Start, Display and locate the Flicker Filter option. Turn this off.

3) Turn off the controller vibration feature. Press Start, Controls and locate the vibration option. Turn this off.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, Take-Two allows tech support users to reopen their cases within seven days.

In a recent interview, Game Republic founder and Street Fighter II creator Yoshiki Okamoto expressed his concern that Nintendo DS’s market might have grown too fast for its own good and that it might deflate soon

“Actually, and again, and this is those whispering voices saying this, but you’ve started hearing the phrase ‘Atari crash’ pretty frequently. People are talking about how the second ‘Atari crash’ is around the corner. And Nintendo is the one that has to figure out a way to stop it.”

Mr. Okamoto refers to the infamous North American videogame crash of 1983 when the console market was flooded by dozens of consoles and hundreds of mostly low-quality games. The lack of consumer interest as well as the games’ overproduction resulted in an economic crash that almost destroyed the fledgling industry and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America. Actually, the bizarre black and white photo included alongside this article is taken from a September 1983 Alamogordo Daily News article which reported that between ten and twenty semi-trailer truckloads of Atari boxes, cartridges, and systems from an Atari storehouse in El Paso were crushed and buried at the landfill within the city.

“In Japan we often say that history repeats itself, and it’s going to take some serious effort to keep it from happening this time”, Yoshiki Okamoto continued. “Japan had its economic bubble in the late eighties, and that burst. I think some of the same things are happening in the American economy right now. Like, they’re going to have to do something to prevent it. It’s foolish to keep making the same mistakes people have already made.”

“So, Nintendo’s going to need some sort of strategy to deal with this. I think it’s a fact that the market blew up more rapidly than even they thought it would. And the faster something expands, the easier it is for it to deflate again, right? I hope they come up with a way to avoid this with the DS. But for one thing, there are way too many titles out all at once.”

Another similarity Okamoto noted is the abundance of low quality titles. “[At least in Japan] all sorts of companies that have never made games before are getting involved. I mean, the cost of development is really next to nothing. And what about this flood of ‘brain training’ games? Can they really keep that up?”

“Nintendo put a lot of thought into the original, and ran some really cool commercials for it. But some of these companies just slap something together, put the word ‘brain’ in the title, and release it. There are a ton of them, and barely any of them are interesting.”

Microsoft is still holding its position that the death of HD-DVD doesn’t mean that Xbox 360 will be getting a Blu-Ray attachment any time soon, but the Chinese beg to differ.

According to the Chinese Economic Daily News, Pegatron, an OEM subsidiary of ASUS, has won the order from Microsoft to assemble “Xbox 360 consoles with Blu-Ray drives”.

Shipments are expected to begin within Q3 2008 and the consoles should be available for consumers by Q4, same year.

Nintendo has thrown down the gauntlet for Mario Kart Wii racers worldwide. Now it’s time to see who’s up to the challenge, as players take on the world in Mario Kart Wii Tournaments.

Every few weeks, a new tournament will appear on the Mario Kart Channel, an online feature that not only allows players to compete in tournaments, but also exchange race data with friends. Tournaments might take the form of a challenge for players to race a certain course as fast as they can with specific characters, or to collect a number of coins on a course using the Wii Wheel accessory or another control setup. They can feature unique rules or obstacles on the course.

The first tournament, which appears today, directs racers to compete for the fastest time on the Mario Circuit. Look closely though - something may be different. Players can attempt the challenge as often as they like during the duration of the tournament. Their best time will be recorded and added to the worldwide rankings, allowing players to see how they stack up against the best racers from around the world.

Fans of The Chronicles of Narnia will get to experience two unique film scenes only one way - on their home consoles or Windows-based PC.

Disney Interactive Studios announced today that two original scenes for Disney/Walden Media’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian video game were filmed exclusively for the product and appear separately from the film. The unique scenes link The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian stories with Dr. Cornelius (Vincent Grass) telling Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) the story of how Narnia fell to the Telmarines hundreds of years ago.

The scenes were shot on the film set in Prague, Czech Republic, during principal shooting and feature dialogue revealing plot based on the events of the book, game and film. The creation of the live action content was directed by Andrew Adamson, the film’s director. The two original scenes are part of 18 live action moments in the game, which include 16 excerpts from the feature film.

“The special filmed content that is exclusive to the video game provides insight into Narnia and the events around the ‘Prince Caspian’ story like nothing else,” said Andrew Adamson. “With movie fans’ enthusiasm for unique experiences in video games as well, these scenes are ideal to complement the ‘Prince Caspian’ game’s action.”

The England-based game production and development teams worked in cooperation with the London-based film crew and Andrew Adamson to assure the game’s overall accuracy to the film. Capturing two original scenes was only possible through the collaborative partnership between Disney Interactive Studios; and Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media.

“The close partnerships we maintain with our film division and Walden Media allowed us to utilise the cast, crew and set to create two unique scenes exclusively for the video game,” said Ed Bainbridge, vice president of European production, Disney Interactive Studios. “These entertaining and memorable scenes enable us to portray a part of the Narnia history that is drawn from the fiction and played out in the game.”

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian video game will be available for Xbox 360 Playstation 3, PlayStation 2 and Windows-based PC. A separate Nintendo DS version will also be available.

Developed by Traveller’s Tales, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian for home consoles and Windows-based PC takes players throughout Narnia and includes a gameplay level, which is unique from both the novel and the film. The level, which is set between the events of “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” and “Prince Caspian,” takes place at the castle of Cair Paravel and tells the story of how Narnia fell to the Telmarine hordes. In “Prince Caspian,” Cair Paravel is seen only as abandoned ruins the Pevensies discover hundreds of years later.

The action/adventure game offers gameplay for one or two players on the same system and drop-in/drop-out features, allowing either player to join the game and leave. With combat, exploration and puzzle solving that extends beyond the film. The game features more than 20 playable characters including the ability to play as Prince Caspian.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian for Nintendo DS, which is an action/role playing game, will include the debut of DGamer, Disney Interactive Studios’ innovative new technology that provides a fun, connected game community for Disney video game fans. With DGamer, players earn content, interact and chat with others on Nintendo DS through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection or on a computer through the Disney.com website. DGamer will be offered in North America in future Nintendo DS games from Disney Interactive Studios with a future launch scheduled in other global regions. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian for Nintendo DS is being developed by Fall Line Studio, the Nintendo platform-dedicated development studio of Disney Interactive Studios.

HP announced that researchers from HP Labs, the company’s central research facility, have proven the existence of what had previously been only theorized as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering.

This scientific advancement could make it possible to develop computer systems that have “memories that do not forget, do not need to be booted up, consume far less power and associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain”.

In a paper published in Nature, four researchers at HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab, led by R. Stanley Williams, presented the mathematical model and a physical example of a “memristor” - a blend of “memory resistor” - which has the unique property of retaining a history of the information it has acquired.

Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department of the University of California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements.

Building on their groundbreaking research in nanoelectronics, Williams and team are the first to prove the existence of the memristor.

“To find something new and yet so fundamental in the mature field of electrical engineering is a big surprise, and one that has significant implications for the future of computer science,” said Williams. “By providing a mathematical model for the physics of a memristor, HP Labs has made it possible for engineers to develop integrated circuit designs that could dramatically improve the performance and energy efficiency of PCs and data centers.”

One application for this research could be the development of a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Computers using conventional DRAM lack the ability to retain information once they lose power. When power is restored to a DRAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming boot-up process is necessary to retrieve data from a magnetic hard disk required to run the system.

In contrast, a memristor-based computer would retain its information after losing power and would not require the boot-up process, resulting in the consumption of less power and wasted time.

Another potential application of memristor technology could be the development of computer systems that remember and associate series of events in a manner similar to the way a human brain recognizes patterns. This could substantially improve today’s facial recognition technology, enable security and privacy features that recognize a complex set of biometric features of an authorized person to access personal information, or enable an appliance to learn from experience.

Williams is the founding director of HP Labs’ Information and Quantum Systems Lab, which is focused on turning fundamental advances in areas of mathematics and physical science into technologies useful for HP. For the past 12 years, Williams and his team have conducted primary scientific research into the fundamental limits of information and computing, which has led to a series of breakthrough discoveries in nanoelectronics and nanophotonics.