GEARS OF WAR OFFICIAL WEBSITE NOW LIVE
If the rumors are to be believed, Emergence Day is sometime in November so Microsoft can take some thunder away from the Playstation 3 behemoth. With the possibility of a playable demo of Gears of War appearing on Live during E3, the anticipation is beginning to hit a fever pitch. To push you just a bit further over the edge, Epic Games has now launched the official Gears of War website. Head on over to www.gearsofwar.com and check it out!
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The more I see of Gears of War, the more Emergence Day seems just too far away, even without a tentative date. Join with me in hoping that a playable demo is premiered at E3 and that it quickly finds it's way to the Live Marketplace.

Reggie Bush named EA Sports NCAA Football 2007 cover athlete
Hot off naming NFL MVP Shaun Alexander as the cover athlete for Madden 2007, EA today announced that USC running back and Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush will be the cover athlete for NCAA Football '07. When asked about the honor, Bush showed a bit of his gamer side;
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“This has been an amazing year for me and being chosen for the cover of NCAA Football 07 is a great way to end my college career, I’ve grown up playing EA SPORTS games and never imagined I would see myself on the cover of one.” - Reggie Bush

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As I was posting this, the Houston Texans announced that they will be taking North Carolina State DE Mario Williams with the first pick in the draft.

Man, why didn't the Jets trade up for the #2 pick earlier in the week, we could have had Bush!

BIZARRE CREATIONS ANNOUNCES PGR3 LEADERBOARDS TO BE RESET
Bizarre Creations announced that because of the changes made to the ranking system in the "World Tournament" patch, they have reset all Project Gotham Racing 3 online leaderboards as of this morning. From things I had read recently, it had seemed a lot of people had stopped racing competitively in PGR3 for fear of losing their standing because of the way rank is now calculated. According to Bizarre it should only take a few races for people to wind up back in their correct skill classes.
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Now I wasn't big on racing in PGR3 online against strangers, so this really doesn't affect me much, but I'd like to hear news from people who do race on Live often and how wiping the leaderboards has affected them and if it's done anything to rectify the problem created by the Tournament patch where no one was willing to enter ranked races.

Major Nelson tells readers how to make their own 360 Dashboard blade backgrounds
In his daily blog, Xbox Live's Major Nelson told readers how to make their own background images for the blades in their Xbox 360 dashboards. While regular users are limited to only having the same image for all blades, it still is pretty neat. From MN's blog.

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"I just loaded one of the water ballon pictures as my Xbox 360 dashboard background, and it looks pretty good, so I thought I'd go through the steps of you can to do it:

All you need to do is download the hi rez version of this photo, then put it on a USB memory stick. Pop it into your Xbox 360, and sign in with your profile. Once you sign in, go to the Media Blade, then to Pictures. Go to Portable Device (this is your USB memory stick) scroll to find the photo (you'll see a thumbnail) and when you have the photo highlighted, press X. That will make the photo your background on all blades as seen below. (You can not make a different image for each blade, only developers can do that with themes.) " - Major Nelson
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Pretty nifty indeed. I haven't tried to add one yet, but rest assured, once I finish tonight's site updates, I'll be trying to find one that suits my style just right.

Halo 3 video to be shown at E3?
IGN is reporting that Microsoft will be debuting a 2 minute video of Halo 3 at it's Pre E3 news conference on May 9th. Hopefully this time the action will not only be on Earth, but stay on Earth. For more on this story, head on over to IGN.
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Now I don't know about you, but to me, the single player component of Halo 2 was a massive dissapointment. The weapons weren't as much fun, the locations were a lot weaker and many of the elements that made Halo so great were missing entirely. It seemed to me that the entire thing was really just built around the multi-player component (which was done flawlessly) and that they eprhaps let the story carry the game a little too much. I really missed those open area battles with lots of troops on eother side and a nice collection of vehicles.

It probably didn't help that they forced you to play as the Arbiter, when if you're like me, you believe the only good Covenant is a dead Covenant .

Here's to hoping that we get what we were originally promised with Halo 2 - a full scale battle for Earth.

Galactic Civilizations II - The game Master of Orion III should have been
Now then, I picked up GalCiv II after hearing all the good press from places like Penny Arcade, Gamespot and the like, and I've got to say, they hype wasn't far off. GalCiv II is certainly the game Master of Orion III should have been. Beyond some small gripes I have with the gameplay elements and ship construction, the game certainly is a masterpiece.

Another thing that has endeared the game to me is the fact that you don't need to have the disc in the drice to play. Call me the laziest person on earth, but a lot of times I just don't feel like trying to find where I put a specific game disc. Stardock feels that the reputation of their games and the ability for legitimate users to download free content is all the copy protection they need, and I for one thank them for it. It's nice to be treated like a customer instead of a criminal sometimes.

So go fire up Stardock Central, load patch v1.1 and get moving!

Nintendo officially renames Revolution... to Wii...

Well, Nintendo has officially revealed the true name of the Revolution, and the name is...Wii. (Pronounced We) I personally really like the "Revolution" code name, as it summed up everything Wii was about, but it appears Nintendo feels Wii is more marketable. Let the gnashing of teeth begin. I'll update more on this story as it breaks, but for now head over to the Revolution section of the Nintendo website for details.

UPDATE: According to sources, Nintendo chose Wii over Revolution for several reasons, including;

1.) The word Revolution had too much in common with the Xbox 360. (One revolution is 360 degrees)
2.) Wii will not be abbreviated when listed the way other systems are.
3.) Wii can be promounced the same way in any language.
4.) It better focuses on the "It's a console for everyone" approach Nintendo is looking to take with the... Wii .

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I don't know about you guys, but Wii has "marketing pukes" written all over it to me. I think most people really liked the Revolution name as it was what the... Wii was all about - turning the industry on it's ear with a whole new approach to gaming. A revolution, if you will.

So what do you guys say? Is Wii the worst name that's ever graced a console and is this an even bigger blow than the PS3 took when the "boomerang" was first shown?

2K Sports releases patch for Xbox 360 version of MLB2K6 to correct freezing issue
2KSports has finally released a patch to correct the lock-up issues in MLB2K6 without having to resort to their "workarounds". The patch can currently be obtained via Xbox Live. Gamespot reports that 2K is working on a way to get the patch to people without access to Live.

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Apparently the problem was caused when a game would be interrupted - the cache data would be corrupted, and the game would hang when trying to access the bad data. I'd probably have more to say on this, but due to mail issues, I haven't seen a rental disc from Gamefly in a few weeks now.

Electronic Arts announced Wii version of Madden
Gamespot is reporting that Electronic Arts has announced they have a Wii specific version of Madden in the works. The game will NOT be a port of Madden for the other consoles on the market, and is even being produced by a team other than EA Tiburon. While that may be a very good thing (based on the 360 version of Madden), I'm still not sold on the concept of the Wii controller and many game types, this being one of them.

To give you an idea of how it will play...
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Players will hike the ball by mimicking a quarterback receiving the ball from the center, and then pass it to a receiver by making a throwing gesture with the free-hand controller. The faster the passing motion, the more of a bullet pass it becomes (in previous Madden editions, bullet passes were made by holding the passing button down longer).

Kicking the ball will be accomplished by sweeping the controller up as if it were a kicker's leg striking the ball. A fast, level swing will make for a hard, straight kick.

The Revolution controller will also come into play when running the ball, as jerking the controller left or right will make the ball-carrier juke to either side, while shoving it straight ahead will make him stiff-arm the opposition. - Gamespot
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As with many of the other Revolution concepts, (Not the offical things shown by Nintendo last year, but the supposed uses you keep hearing about) they all seem to hinge on conditions that will most likely not be optimal in many players gaming enviornments. Further, the juking thing strikes me as a very bad idea, as I'd say the controller gets whipped around quite a bit when playing (especially if playing 1 vs 1 vs a friend) and I can just imagine inadvertant juking all over the place. It just seems to many of these ideas would require a player to be standing while playing, or at the very least sitting with their arms completely free to swing around with no obstructions.

Again, I haven't seen the tech, and if anyone can pull it off, it would be Nintendo, I'm just calling it based on what my gut instinct is telling me.
So what do you think?

Datel releases Max Media Player for Nintendo DS
Well, it looks like Datel is at it again. As I posted in an earlier news bit, recently Datel has been coming out with some truly innovative products. The latest to down the pipeline is the MAX Media Player for the Nintendo DS. Simply put, it's a 4 gigabyte hard drive and software package that will allow you to listen to MP3's, watch videos, view pictures on your DS and uhm... run executable files. It's a bit expensive at a suggested retail of $189.99, but if you want a device with those features, such is the price you'll pay. How well does it work? That I couldn't tell you, but I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who's picked one up.
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So, do you think that for the price it's worth picking up? If you've purchased one, how well does it work? Inquiring minds want to know!