While rumors swirl about an EA/Take-Two takeover, the company’s programmers are quietly working on a new MMORPG based on William Stryon’s book Sophie’s Choice. Set in post-war Brooklyn, the MMOPRG will introduce a new “moral” game engine that encourages nuanced thought and reactions to real-life scenarios. While you can never play as Sophie or Stingo, you can interact with their characters. The game will not touch upon the more controversial aspects of the book and movie but should instead focus on the lifestyles and mores of an era shattered by war and riddled with moral ambiguity. Jack Johnson will be supplying some of the soundtrack and Meryl Streep is slated to do some introductory voiceover work. More info as we get it.

David Zatz of Zatz Not Funny was kind enough to show me his AT&T BB 8820 running Slingplayer Mobile. There’s no launch date at the moment.

I think some LEDs decided to die on my new MBP. I haven’t restarted as I’m trying to get some work done, but anyone else experience this?

I can’t say much about this right now but you will be amazed and trust me, it’s not what you think. Ben has one as well.

Tom’s Hardware has been doing a feature for the last week comparing the performance of six systems: budget (sub-$1000), mid-range (sub-$2000), and high-end (sub-$4000) PCs and then the same PCs overclocked as far as they’d go. The object was to find what offers the best value for the dollar. They ran about five billion tests, but I’ve got the Cliff’s Notes here. And the survey says:

The low end machine wins — sort of by default. Because most games were basically playable on <$1000 of hardware, that's what really matters and then what you start paying for is rapidly diminishing returns. In the end, they determined that to double the performance of the budget PC, you triple the price, or more. Fortunately, you're not bound by the rules of their experiment, and you can spend however much you want. I'd say the real winner is the mid-range overclock, since that’s what I’m running. You can still get a lot more performance and OC potential up to about $1500, I’m thinking, but after that you’re moving into the ridiculous zone.

The creators of the insane Velociraptor Off-Road Safari Rampage are well on their way to creating a new opus, which they call Jetpack Brontosaurus. Doubtless it will have the same nuanced plot and fascinating characters as their last game. Actually, it just looks like it’s going to be a ton of fun piloting your dinosaur around Tribes-style.

Indie developers are going all-out with great stuff like this, and they’re the ones who will make the awesomest games for your iPod Touch or GP2X — not EA or something.
[via TIGSource]

That Centro smartphone from Palm? The one now in Obsidian Black? The one I told you about this weekend that you could pick up for a measly $39 on sale at Best Buy? They just sold a million of them. That’s one million people in America walking around with the small yet powerful devices for AT&T or Sprint.

I’ve been a fan of the Centro since it was leaked. I said it was the perfect gateway device, as it retains a phone-like form factor while granting smartphone functionality. And it’s easy for first timers to use. I love being right all the time.

It wouldn’t be right of me to know about this excessively creepy 3D mouse-following Flash lady and not share it with all of you. If I must suffer, you must suffer. That is the price you pay for my genius.

This will sort of blow your mind a little bit. You’re welcome.

We’re thinking the Vu is the first real post-iPhone cellphone, using a haptic-feedback touchscreen, a fluid UI, and multimedia features in a phone that should cost less than the iPhone but still be cool enough to induce lust.

Laptop caught up with the phone on the floor of the CTIA Emerging Tech Awards pavilion, snapped a few shots, and did a pretty good hands-on. John Biggs here and I got to play with an early version of the phone at CES and it’s good to see Laptop has about the same impressions we did then.

We’re looking carefully at this phone as it supports AT&T’s MediaFLOW live TV service launching next month, and because it might siphon sales away from AT&T’s own iPhone. Is AT&T spoiling its own game? We’ll have to see how popular the TV application really is before we’ll know, but likely not.

I’ve been meaning to post about Whisher for a few months now but life has always gotten in the way. The company is based in Barcelona and they showed me their beta code back in February. Now, however, they’re ready to go live.

Whisher is essentially a metered hotspot system. You use their plug-in and see various hotspots on the screen. Instead of seeing an encrypted hotspot called “FARGLEBOXR” you will see a useful name and a price per minute or hour. As a consumer, you know exactly what you’re paying and as a Wi-Fi provider you’ve got an easy-to-use system for allowing folks to hop on without buying secret code numbers at the counter.
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While I tend to agree that RIM’s OS is definitely showing its age, Henry Blodget is totally down on the new 9000 interface with its iPhon-esque UI and, well, Blackberry-esque keyboard and lack of touchscreen. Again, this phone is not for skinny-jeans wearing hipsters. It’s for straight-leg khaki-wearing business guys who won’t shut up about cars and golf. Therefore, they’re perfectly happy upgrading incrementally every few months just to spend a little of that IT budget.

We’re glad to see RIM respond to the iPhone, even if it means we may actually have a choice to make when we finally trade in our battered Curve. (Until we saw the 9000 pics, we were just nursing the Curve along until the 3G iPhone came out. Now, we’ll at least take the 9000 for a test-drive. Who knows–we may even stick with the keyboard.) Given the rate at which business folks are setting aside keyboard concerns and snapping up iPhones, however, the days in which RIM had the corporate market to itself are gone.

I personally think Henry has a worse problem. His tendency to use the Royal We is unnerving.

I hate, hate spam and fully agree that spammers should, after being convicted, be torn apart by a pack of BigDogs, drawn-and-quartered style. Spam is now 15 years old, and over 90% of communications on the Internet are spam.

Mark Sunner, chief analyst at online security firm Message Labs, likens fighting spam to an arms race, and in a sense he’s right: every time the spam fighters make an advance, the spammers make an advancement beyond that.

Likely this war of attrition will never end, but thankfully modern spam filters kill most of what comes in. Many people think that spam kills some parts of the Internet, but if those people had adequate filters, they problem wouldn’t be there at all.

Since January 1st you’ve been able to request your free $40 voucher for a digital-to-analog converter for grandma’s old CRT TV. Well, Crave is saying don’t act so fast. You still have plenty of time and market logic states that you’ll get a better converter for a lower price over the next year or so. Right now the choice is rather limited — I’ve seen a few models from Zenith but that’s about it — and you could conceivably pay a bit over that $40 if you’re not a particularly savvy shopper.

Personally, I’d just get grandma a new plasma and leave it at that. You’ll never get to see In Treatment in HD on an on Trinitron from 1988.

I drive a Kia Spectra that I just love. I bought it brand new 2004 and one of the first things I did was have an iPod adapter kit installed for the car stereo. I’m an iPod guy, and I want to take my songs with me always. I took it to Circuit City and while the install was fast, they messed up the facing on my dashboard, so now it just sort of hangs there. They told me there was nothing they could do about it, and that I should talk to their insurers, who cover the repairs but have a $500 deductible. The damage estimate was $350. Sucks to be me.

But not as much as it sucks to be VTECnical, a poster on Consumerist, who’s 2007 Honda Civic was destroyed by the install techs at Circuit City, leaving it “unsafe to drive” in Honda’s opinion, rendering it uninsurable and thereby undrivable.

Circuit’s only willing to refund $3,190 to VTECnical, despite the total bill to fix it coming to $12,119. For everything else, he has to turn to the same insurers I did, and we know how well that went for me.

Here’s hoping he has better luck.

For as long as ninjas have existed, kids (and secretly adults) have been pretending to be them. I personally was a ninja for Halloween three years running. But because not all of us are sneaky and murderous, sometimes the only way to get that ninja feeling was to grab a controller and get shuriken-ing. Bear in mind this is not a list of the top ten ninja games, but a list of the killer ninjas within. These were the guys you always wanted to be. And it’s not too late to join in the fun even if you, like John, are a 30-year-old balding raver with a paunch. So without further ado I present to you the top 10 video game ninjas of all time. Note: We have ranked them based on their ability to kill Snake Eyes in real life.
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I must admit that I had quite a massive Star Wars collection as a kid. I loved it, and obsessed with figures I didn’t have, sometimes even driving hours to track down second hand stores where Amamaman was rumored to exist.

But this guy is just nuts. He’s indexed his entire collection on this amazing Flash-based Webpage for easy browsing. It’s extensive, and his design is nice, too. Congrats, Joshua Budich, I tip my geek hat to you.

I’m not a PC gamer at all. I think the last game I played on a PC was my freshmen year in college when the Internet connection was blazing fast and everyone on my floor was into Unreal Tournament. Yeah, pretty sure that was the last I played a game on a PC. But there are millions of gamers out there and tons that are professional. I didn’t think about gaming peripherals until the Falcon Dust-Off Keyboard Quiver arrived at the CG office.
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Just when the recording industry is getting comfortable with the idea of digital downloads for music, piracy and all, along comes a new breed of online copyright infringement: that of digital books.

Those fantastic eBook readers like the Kindle and that thing Sony wants us to like are a blessing for us bookworms, but it could be a headache for authors. As DRM is circumvented and copies of works make their way onto P2P networks, where will the royalties come from?

The problem isn’t that people want the content for free — indeed, libraries are still around — it’s that copyright law needs to be wholly overhauled to account for modern times. While there’s much buzz about doing just that, for now authors will just have to hope Amazon can out-market services like BitTorrent and make people pay.

As we quick approach zero hour for CTIA this year, let’s look at what we can expect from the big boys in the months to come. This week’s trade show, CTIA Wireless, is the “business” head of the CTIA hydra and where most of the big handset announcements for U.S. carriers happen. Notice I italicized U.S. Because of our backward and Soviet-style carrier system here in the U.S., we very rarely get cool phones. This is why, on the hole, every phone we have here pales in absolute comparison to even a nicely outfitted Nokia N95, let alone the iPhone.

That said, don’t expect any crazy NTT DoCoMo phones with a built-in robot dog. Instead, set your sights on something like a pink RAZR with a special Gwen Stefani charm hanging from it and you won’t be disappointed.

Here’s what else to expect from this show of shows.
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I’m not sure exactly what the draw is to USB displays, but I guess for some people it’s pretty handy. If you can get daisy-chaining to work, it could be nice, but there are data bandwidth issues when you’ve got a lot of information going over that cable. In any case, they’ve released a beta driver set for Intel Macs and “even” MacBook Airs.

Thing is, it doesn’t support any kind of acceleration, so any kind of hardware-based tracking, smoothing, filters, or hardware handling of codecs is inapplicable. Bad news, but chances are if you’re using USB as your primary display connection, you’re not using too much hardware acceleration. It looks like there are a lot of limitations, but it is beta after all.