Some of these upgrades will include an mp3 player and a camera, which could be used for some games. Additionally, the wireless strength of the new model will be bolstered, a blessing to anyone who has tried to play a multiplayer game with anyone more than a room away. The print version of the article says that a possible price would be ¥20,000, which is only about $30 more than the DS Lite costs in Japan.

Interestingly enough, this attempt to barge in on a cell phone’s territory goes directly against Nintendo’s “Blue Ocean” business strategy, which focuses on creating new markets instead of trying to compete with other corporations.

Is this upgrade what Nintendo is going to announce at their two simultaneous press conferences in Tokyo and San Francisco this Thursday?

Via Game Life

Click here to view the embedded video.

As part of Project 10^100, Google is convincing people to come up with a charity project that will help as many people in the world as possible. They will be accepting submissions until October 20th, and on January 27th, the public will have the chance to vote on their favorite of 100 projects. Google will then commit $10,000,000 dollars to whichever five projects are selected.

Think you can change the world? Submit your ideas here.

The solution to this problem is to instate IPv6, which will allow for 340 trillion, trillion, trillion (34 followed by 37 zeroes) new addresses. This system has been ready for implementation for ten years and would interface fine with IPv4, but has yet to be put into motion.

Already some countries such as China, Japan and Korea have begun to roll out IPv6, and one really has to wonder why it isn’t being adopted so readily.

Via Times Online

The Florida Supreme Court just issued a report that Miami lawyer Jack Thompson, scourge of the video game industry, will be disbarred starting October 25th, and will no longer be allowed to practice law. This is due to ten different counts of inappropriate behavior in a court of law, including, but not limited to:

• respondent [Thompson] targeted an individual who was not involved with respondent in any way, merely due to “the position [the individual] holds in state and national politics
• respondent falsely, recklessly, and publicly accused a judge as being amenable to the “fixing” of cases
• respondent harassed the former client of an attorney in an effort to get the client to use its influence to persuade the attorney to withdraw a defamation suit filed by the attorney against respondent

Fans of the video game industry, of course, know him for his almost zealot approach to violence in video games, to the point that he went as far as to intentionally misquote statistics in his favor. 

Although I’m sure the whole of the industry just breathed a sigh of relief, I wouldn’t be so quick to relax. For one, Thompson is currently trying to delay the order of his disbarment. Also, according to GamePolitics, Thompson announced his disbarment with an e-mail entitled “Now the Fun Begins.” 

Via GamePolitics

You think that you get bad customer service? Matt in Massachusetts was browsing Best Buy’s online store when he discovered that they were selling 2GB flash drives for only $2.49. When he ordered five of them for in-store pickup, his service was less than ideal. Not only did the assistant manager refuse to honor the price, citing a price error, but he did something much worse.

To top it all off, he then takes my printed receipts from my emails and calls 1-800-Best Buy from the store and tells the CRS that “I” wanted to cancel my order and that it shouldn’t have been picked. After 30 minutes of arguing with this person, while he is on the phone I tell him that I wanted to talk to the CSR and he refused to let me speak. I wanted to tell the CSR that I did not want my order cancelled and that I expected my order to be honored. He gets off the phone and tells me that my CC would be credited immediately and that they would send me out a new gift card to replenish the one I used with my order. Needless to say I left that store very irate and went right home to call Customer Service and Customer Relations to complain about how I was treated.

Unfortunately, Customer Relations wasn’t very helpful either. After hearing about his experience at the store, they offered him a $15 gift card as compensation, but couldn’t honor the deal, as – get this – he had already cancelled it.

Talk about your bad customer service.

Via The Consumerist 

This species, designed by CarcinomaAngel, can only reproduce three times before it dies.

Feel cheated by Spore’s DRM? You may be entitled to a settlement, thanks to a class action lawsuit that Melissa Thomas of Maryland has filed on behalf of all owners of EA’s long-anticipated PC game (within the United States, of course). Claiming that the SecuROM digital rights management is permanently and unknowingly installed on a user’s computer, she cites the almost 2,500 one star reviews on Amazon.com focused only on the DRM. If the case goes through, then EA may have to pay upwards of five million dollars to owners of the game.

 

This court case is sure to put a damper on the news the EA has sold 1 million copies of Spore. 

Via GamePolitics.com

Wired has a great piece up about Myst today. Check it out here.

Why, one of the XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child organization of course! Seems like that do-gooder Homestar is doing his part to make sure that kids in third-world countries get good educations

Speaking of which, I’ve heard that OLPC is going to be restarting the Give 1, Get 1 program this winter in partnership with Amazon.com. If the G1G1 program, you can buy two XO laptops, one for yourself, and one for a child in a third-world country. Check it out when it starts November 17th.

Don’t know who Strong Bad is? Take a look at my Cheat Sheet to Free Country, USA.

Thanks to local Jim Schultz, teenagers in Traverse City, Missouri have a new way to spend their Saturdays – at the library, rolling dice and killing goblins. 

Every month for one year, Schultz is volunteering to act as Dungeon Master to anyone 15 and up who wants to try their hand at adventuring through a fantasy land. He is excited to do this because of the effect that Dungeons and Dragons had on his high school years.

You’re always pushing yourself. This game got me through high school, taught me how to read, how to reason, how to do math.

This quest has even got some of the people at the library excited, such as Linda Smith, the computer center coordinator for the library.

This just reaches a different population rather than the standard library patron you think of. It becomes more of a community center rather than a place to get a book.

Those interested who live in the Traverse City area can visit the library on any of these upcoming dates: October 11, November 8, December 6, January 10, February 7, March 7, April 11 and May 9. The games will start at 10:00 AM and can go on for as long as four hours.

Via Geekdad

 

Onion News might not have been so far off, as World of Warcraft developers Blizzards Entertainment has announced that they will be collaborating with casual developer Popcap Games to bring the popular puzzle game Bejeweled to none other than World of Warcraft.

Originally an add-on developed by WoW fan Michael Fromwiller as a means to kill time when waiting for something in the game to happen, Popcap contacted him not to tell him to stop distributing the add-on, but to make a polished, official version. This updated version of the add-on is expected to launch this Thursday. WoW players who find themselves with too much downtime in the realm may want to keep an eye out for this download.

Via Game Life