Epic Games (Unreal series) announced Gears of War exclusively for Xbox 360. It looks like a mashup of Ghost Recon, Half Life, Resident Evil, and a good measure of cocaine. The Unreal engine is gorgeous. Check out the shaky-cam movies.

IGN has a Q & A article on what to expect in Civilization IV. Among other things, it has a completely new government model, it uses a 3-D engine, and it will have multiplayer out of the box. This last bit was moronically omitted in the first release of Civ 3.

Team 17, of Worms fame, is releasing Lemmings for PSP. There will be classic and new levels with a promise of downloadable content. Boomtown has some screenshots. The next question is where the hell is Worms (2-D) for the PSP?

Extreme Tech asked a M$ veep what wireless technology will be used in the Xbox 360 controllers (wi-fi, bluetooth, etc.). Here’s what the company man said:

It’s a proprietary technology that we developed. In order to do great games in a wireless fashion, you want to make sure you address some latency issues and some bandwidth issues. So we developed a proprietary technique in order to do that.

You don’t say. Microsoft has piss-poor developers, but hawk-like brand managers. They’ll take a popular technology developed by someone else, tack on a few random bits of code or hardware to make it incompatible with the tech on which it’s based, and sell it as their own.
Case in point, the controller ports for the original Xbox are USB. They changed physical shape of the connectors from rectangles to ovals. For the 360, expect them to take bluetooth, cripple a component that’s not critical to work most of the time, then brand it “ActiveNoWires”.

Need a GBA you can hide in your mouth? The Nintendo Micro is 4″ x 2″ x 0.7″

There has been much speculation on whether the Xbox will be backward compatible. Reuters says “yes”:

Microsoft Corp. said on Monday its new Xbox 360 will run video games developed for the earlier generation of its gaming machine, an enticement to get fans who have already spent hundreds of dollars on older Xbox games to purchase new hardware.

Shacknews says “somewhat”:

Xbox 360 will have limited backward compatability. Only the most popular Xbox games will be supported, through an emulator.

Sony unveiled their PS3 at E3. AnandTech has the deets.

USA Today is by no means the pinnacle of video game reporting, but they did break it first:

Nintendo, whose GameCube sales have lagged, hopes to gain ground, particularly among the fast-growing older-gaming market. Revolution is about the size of a stack of three DVD cases and has no visible knobs, buttons or ports for joysticks. The system will use only wireless controllers, and it sits flat or stands vertically.

There were rumors for a while that the GameCube was going to be Nintendo’s last non-portable console. It is well agreed upon that you buy a Nintendo console for two reasons. Either you’re a kid, or you want to play their exclusive first-party titles like Mario, Zelda, Metroid. The conventional wisdom says if you make good games, but are losing money on the console, get out of the console business and publish your games for other platforms. Sega rightly did it, but Nintendo tenaciously resists. They see a future where they are once again the leading platform. Hey, Nintendo… good luck with that.