Steve Ballmer spoke at the Executive’s Club lounge in Chicago today or yesterday now for us and spoke about quite a few things but he did make one big announcement…

In 2010 a new Xbox 360 will hit the stores and be equipped with technology that is really really close to “actually”, the console will have a built in camera and a ‘natural interface’ that will be able to recognise movement and voice. This could be linked to a demostration Microsoft did a week or two back with the new Xbox Natal they called it, see video here.

Looks very interesting and 2010 is not far away now… If you like you can see coverage from there event here from TG Daily

**Update – just been checking around and while its a ‘new’ console the Natal will work wilth current consoles it seems and just the consoles in 2010 will have it built it. At least now we know when Natal will go live. Click here to see more on Natal.

Early this month it was announced that 3D Realms was shutting down which was then ‘confirmed’ by the webmaster Joe Siegler. This was indeed sad news as development of this game has been going on for 12 years…

On May the 14th Take-Two sued 3D Realms parent company, Apogee Software Ltd for failing to deliver on its contractual obligation to produce the game. Now there is a bit of mud slinging going on as 3D Realms hits back at Take-Two by declaring that it is not going out of business and this statement was issued by the CEO, George Broussard:
“Despite rumors and statements to the contrary, 3D Realms (3DR) has not closed and is not closing,” reads the statement. “3DR retains ownership of the Duke Nukem franchise. Due to lack of funding, however, we are saddened to confirm that we let the Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) development team go on May 6, while we regroup as a company. While 3DR is a much smaller studio now, we will continue to operate as a company and continue to license and co-create games based upon the Duke Nukem franchise.”
Now it turns out that 3D Realms has sunk over $20million of its own money into the development and its had to release its development team which is a shame. Will this game ever getting developed? I certainly hope so and would love to play it on the Xbox 360 with a nice big plasma TV and surround sound, just image that gum chewing coming from the background!

Read more about it here, quite a bit of detail and looks like a bit of a court case coming!

Wow, 2 new gaming releases on the same day… people are definitely starting to eye out the amazing amount of turnover the gaming industry is generating each year.

OnLive was introduced last night at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last night, all it consists of is a small (1MB) browser plug-in that lets you play games online.

OnLive has servers setup that handle all the gaming computation, graphics and anything else that gets generated then by means of a patent developed compression mechanism they stream the content to your PC/TV. These games that get streamed will be all your normal games from EA, Take-Two and Ubisoft etc.

OnLive has developed crazy algorithms which are able to push out 60frames per second over a 1.5mbps connection and 720p over a 5mbps connection.

This is available either via your PC or by a router sized device known as the MicroConsole.

Besides these ground breaking items the biggest or for me the most important is that it will be a subscription based service and customers won’t need to purchase games anymore – they just select them on the service and play away.

Now image how many players get cut out:
1) Retailers and 2nd hand shops/websites who sell the games
2) Console developers like Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo
3) Graphics chip designers (though nvidia has been working with OnLive to provide the graphics cards for the servers.

The gaming companies are quite happy with this idea as it will basically cut out any pirate versions of the games they release – all they would need to do is update OnLive’s servers. Due for release later this year, currently in beta testing.

A california based company, Zeebo, is releasing the worlds 3rd gaming console targeting gamers in developming countries.

The console is going to be available first in Brazil and then shipping around the world, it will retail for $199 but expected to drop pretty quickly. It will have a build in 3G connection to allow games/updates to be downloaded via the broadband connection. Zeebo is targeting this as they believe that 3G networks are more prevalent in developing countries than developed countries.

Major gaming companies like Electronic Arts have already committed to released copies of their games for this format.

Apparently this was banned because it was making ‘light’ of killing people, personally I just think its pretty funny and the sound effects are great – take a look:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uubisIpY3iU&hl=en&fs=1]