Alert the media! LucasArts’ official Twitter feed has been tweeting non-stop about… something! It looks like the company is poised to announce a new game based on an old game/franchise tomorrow, July 6.

Dearest CrunchGear readers: I recently had the honor and privilege of speaking to Karen Dyer, who is not only the voice of Sheva Alomar, from Resident Evil 5, but who also did said character’s motion capture. I hope you enjoy it on this day, our day of freedom.

I guess Mafia games are a big hit these days. Zynga’s Mafia Wars, a multiplayer game that’s playable on social networks like Facebook, as well as the iPhone, has attracted some 4 million gamers to its clutches. (This, despite the fact that it’s more or less a rip-off of the earlier Mafia Life game.) Part of the game’s success, I think, can be attributed to the fact that, unlike in games like World of Warcraft, there’s not as much of a social stigma attached to “whacking” rival mobsters—slaying dragons and whatnot is still sorta “nerdy,” something that good ol’ Cnet says, too. So we’re in good company here.

This has to be a viral campaign of some sort, but seeing as though we’re on the cusp of a three-day weekend I’ll bite. GameStop is selling three unusual Nintendo Wii bundles that, I don’t know, belie all logic. There’s the “Take a Bath With a Buddy” bundle, the “Pirate Tattoo” bundle, and the “Summer Fun” bundle. Yeah.

Ladies and gentlemen! Fallout 3 can be yours this weekend for $25 on Steam. That’s a full 50 percent off the regular price. And if you have an extra couple of dollars to spend, may I recommend the two most recent expansion packs, Broken Steel and Point Lookout? I mean, what else are you going to do this weekend, celebrate the birth of your country by lighting dumb fireworks or something? Nope. Spend all day in front of an LCD monitor, I say. USA, USA!

Let’s say you’re not about to pay $30 for the Blu-ray edition of Blade Runner or Transformers, especially after you’ve already seen the film a dozen or more times on regular DVD. But now that The Pirate Bay, as far as I’m concerned, long gone, what are you gonna do? Will its “reboot” cause you to change your pirating ways, or will you merely move on to the next service and/or Web site?

Some hard science-related news for you now. Try this: name a scientist. Go ahead, name one, any one. If you’re like me the first name that pops into your head is Bill Nye or Michio Kaku. And if you’re also like me you can name several others. The average American? Not so much. USA Today ran a little poll a few days ago asking Americans to name a scientist, and a whopping 23 percent of respondents couldn’t name one. That’s right: 23 percent of the people USA Today asked couldn’t name a single scientist, living or dead, famous or obscure. And only 47 percent could so much as muster the name “Albert Einstein”! What person, let alone American, couldn’t come up with the name “Albert Einstein”?

Man alive is The Pirate Bay finished! Business Week has an interview with Hans Pandeya, the CEO of Global Gaming Factory, the company that’s set to buy The Pirate Bay for nearly $8 million (provided it can come up with the money). What’s mainly discussed it what type of business plan does this man have in store for The Pirate Bay. It’s safe to say that The Pirate Bay will be all but dead in one year’s time.

It’s safe to say that I shed no tears yesterday when, for all intents and purposes, The Pirate Bay ceased to be. Suffice it to say that if Usenet comes under attack next I will not be a happy camper. (I know, I know: The first rule of Usenet is not to talk about Usenet, but bear with the story for a minute.) The RIAA just won a lawsuit against usenet.com, which, as you might guess, is a premium Usenet provider.

How much would you be willing to pay for DJ Hero? The latest news or rumors or whatever you want to call it is that UK retailer ShopTo was apparently told by Activision that the MSRP of the game will be £107.99, or just shy of $180. That includes the turntable, of course.

Courtesy of Giant Bomb… the first pictures of the StarCraft II Tech Tree.

The Fitness Fairy just dropped off the Perfect Pushup V2, from Perfect Fitness. So consider this a quick hands-on, not a full review. (Give me a few days for that.) My first thoughts, compared to the mobile unit I reviewed a few months ago: my God the handles are a lot more comfortable.

Gamers of a certain age will remember the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality. It was a little mark placed on official Nintendo products in the NES/SNES era (well, that’s when it mattered) that let buyers know that, yes, this product has been blessed by Nintendo. It will not harm you, your cat or your NES. Fast-forward several years and now Sony has gotten into the business of slapping their logo on officially licensed gear with the “Official Licensed Product” gimmick.

Think back to the autumn of 2006, right before the big PS3 launch. Expecting someone to pay five-hundred-and-ninety-nine-U.S.-dollars was (rightly) considered ludicrous, but the ability to play the entire PS2 library on the system somewhat lessened the blow. But then Sony removed the Emotion Engine chip from the PS3, thus rendering it unable to play PS2 games. (More recent models, like the one found in the Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle, used a just-sorta-okay software emulation method to grant partial PS2 backwards compatibility.) All that may well change if Sony goes ahead and executes the idea found in this recently unearthed patent.

There’s currently a 144-page thread on the official World of Warcraft message board discussing this latest earth-shattering news: you’ll soon be able to take your Horde character and transform him to the closet Alliance equivalent, and vice-versa. So, for example, taking your Orc Warrior and changing him into a Human Warrior. And then cats and dogs will break bread with each other.

My initial reaction to the news that some company called Global Gaming Factory X has agreed to buy The Pirate Bay was, “Pfft, why should I care? The was only garbage on there anyway.” And while that’s still my opinion—there really was only garbage on there—we really ought to recognize that, for better or worse, The Pirate Bay was something of a symbol for the greater “music/movies/whatever wants to be free” “movement,” if you can even call it that.

Sometime this year iRiver, which will soon change its name to MouseComputer, will release its very own e-book reader in Japan. It’ll be called the Libre, and it’ll probably be priced around ¥29,800 ($312).

Bungie left Microsoft about 18 months ago, and what’s the first game it develops? Yup, a Halo game, Halo: ODST, to be exact. I just read a quick little piece over on the Seattle Times’ site that may be worth the effort, especial to those of you who are trying to figure out whether or not the game is for you.

Good news for you Adobe Photoshop (and other Creative Suite applications) CS4 users who just so happen to have a high-end Nvidia GPU. Nvidia released today a bunch of plug-ins for Adobe CS4 (both PC and Mac) that leverage the power of your GPU. For example, one such plug-in, Elemental Accelerator 2.0 for Windows, taps into your Quadro GPU to help encode video faster. Encoding H.264 video with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 while using the plugin improves encoding time by 11 times. (Mac users will have to settle with Elemental Accelerator 1.2.)

Like the Sky deal before it, Xbox 360 users in France will soon be able to view Canal+ content on their TV set. Users will have access to some 3,000 movies on demand and eventually Ligue 1 soccer.

When will that StarCraft II beta come out? We don’t know, but that won’t stop us from speculating!

CrunchGear, at the movies! Peter’s been talking pretty much non-stop about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for the past few days, and it brings me great joy to say that, despite the horrendous reviews—this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read—it’s well on its way to becoming the worst reviewed $400 million movie ever. The movie has been in theaters for five days now and it’s already halfway to the $400 million mark.

Quite a polemic we’re dealing with, friends. It seems that, suddenly, the PS3 is no longer able to play Hulu content. I just tried to play the Power Rangers movie on my brother’s PS3, and up pops the message: “Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Holy smokes! I interrupt your Sunday afternoon to bring you this shocking news: Billy Mays is dead! Yes, the guy from the OxiClean commercial and that show on the Discovery Channel was found dead in his Florida home today. I am completely shocked and terribly bummed out. That guy was tremendous.