Thanks to RetroGames for pointing to a new review of the Terminator 3 pinball machine from sole remaining pinball manufacturer Stern, which features "a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher in the backglass" as its chief gimmick. Unfortunately, there's no actual high explosives, as "..this interactive mechanism fires balls into targets for high score and progressive game play", but the official product page does point out that this machine was "..designed by Steve Ritchie, formerly of Williams.. [and creator of] Black Knight, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Firepower, and High Speed." The UK Pinball News site has a review of the pintable with plenty more pictures, but concludes that, though fun, Stern's previous release, The Simpsons Pinball Party was probably more enjoyable.

Thanks to GameSpot for posting the first in a series of developer diaries from The Sims 2, the sequel to the gigantic-selling PC people-prodding game. In this instalment, senior producer Tim LeTourneau indulges in non-skippable marketing-speak, before divulging fun gameplay details about the added physical, emotional, and mental growth for your Sims: "We decided on six distinct age ranges that make up the classic periods of life: babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, adults, and seniors. Each stage is punctuated by 'big life moments,' rites of passage we all equate with growing up: a toddler's first steps, a teen's first kiss, getting married, and kicking the bucket." There are more details in GameSpot's recent hands-on preview with the game, which is due in early 2004.

Thanks to IGN Xbox for their full review of Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, the ravenously-awaited Xbox RPG from BioWare, which has gone gold and ships on the 16th July (Wednesday) in the U.S. The review gives the game 9.5 out of 10, and concludes that KOTOR is "..an outstanding game because it covers every single angle in terms of audience expectations. It's got enough Star Wars to satisfy the fans and enough pure fun to draw in people who normally wouldn't get into role-playing games. You'll see this on several Game of the Year nomination lists." There's also a mini-review at Unlimitedlives.com which is similarly effusive, if a little brief.

Peter_Pork writes "New Scientist has an article about GridWars, a challenging new game that runs on large clusters of computers. Programs fight each other for supremacy in terms of the number of processors they control, and the main point of the contest is to develop better parallel algorithms. It seems a nice idea: have fun while you improve the state-of-the-art in cluster computing. The result of the last contest was somewhat of an upset, since a craftsmanly Russian program defeated a sophisticated genetic algorithm from NASA."

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

Thanks to Video-fenky for translating a Tokyo University lecture transcript with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, as originally posted on the Japanese Nintendo Cafe website. This in-depth talk discusses a cornucopia of interesting subjects, including originality ("..project documents that start out with 'If you did this and that to this other game, I think it would be really fun' are absolutely no good. Don't tell me about that! Tell the person who made that other game about it!") and job titles ("in Nintendo there aren't any official positions called 'director' or 'producer'.. [but] people overseas don't get that system. So when I started dealing with overseas folks, I wanted to sell myself to them, so I just wrote 'producer' on my business card. Later I got yelled at from the head office about assigning myself titles, but... (laughs).")

Thanks to InsertCredit.com for posting a translated interview with Seed9 president Gun Kim about his Korean company's success in Japan with their extremely bizarre dating sim, Tomak: Save The Earth. The Playstation 2 version of this PC game, which was instructively previewed by The GIA back in 2001, "..is a combination life/love simulation starring a girl's head in a flowerpot." The object of your affection can appear contented, glum, or even ecstatic, and The GIA also ran an earlier interview with Gun Kim, in which he explains possible inspiration: "..maybe I was looking at the plant pot and our graphic designer in the office when I got the idea." Seed9 are also responsible for the retro and fun Tomak 2D shmup for the Korean GP32 handheld.

Babbster writes "GamesAreFun.com is reporting that Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl are pleased with the ESRB ratings system for video games and specifically praise the changes being made to ESRB labels effective September 15th. A lot must have changed at the ESRB in the last seven months since both these men wanted congressional hearings on video game ratings."

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out a press release announcing Postal developer Running With Scissors has been ruled victorious in a court case brought by the United States Postal Service. This seems to be the culmination of a trademark suit which began in 1997 after the release of the original Postal, as the USPS commented "All of us at the Postal Service have a sense of humor, but there is nothing funny about your game 'Postal'", and then tried to prove the Postal Service has a proprietary use of the word 'Postal'. Running With Scissors have fun with this legal resolution: "With unlimited financial resources comes unlimited ego. POSTAL and POSTAL 2 represent everything the USPS isn't: a successful private enterprise that will never have to rely on an irrevocable government contract to keep its pockets perpetually lined with cash."

Thanks to GameGirlAdvance for pointing to an OgreCave.com interview with James Ernest, the founder of noted low-price, high-fun board/card game makers Cheapass Games. As the interview notes, "With a mantra of 'Games: they cost too much, and they are at some level all the same', Cheapass virtually created the cheap games market, selling the boards and cards for their games packaged in white paper bags. Shortly after taking gamers by storm with Kill Doctor Lucky, Spree, and a number of humorous titles, James and Cheapass were being imitated right and left. What did it take to get where Cheapass is now, and how does the company plan to stay on top of the cheap games heap?" The interview also notes Cheapass' diversification into videogame publishing, putting out Digital Eel's titles, including Dr Blob's Organism.

David Kennerly writes "The Entertainment versus Art debate flares perennially. These participants may be having fun, but the dichotomy is uniquely inappropriate to games. By the end of this article, we may disentangle the faulty dichotomy. After reconsidering what we think we know about a game, fun, and art we may come to discover that Nomura and Costikyan are correct: 'If you were to write a Seven Lively Arts for the 21st century, the form you'd have to mention first is clearly games.' --Greg Costikyan"

boredme asks: "With the free time I'll have this summer, I thought I'd get in some quality couch-potato time. I'm married, no children, and our Playstation2 is nice because it can be both more interactive than TV and more social than a computer since it's in the living room. The problem is that the vast majority of two player games are sports or arena fighting games that only allow confrontational interaction; since I have a dozen extra years experience gaming, these competitive games get old very quickly for both of us. What suggestions for cooperative, (not online) multiplayer games do the Slashdot folks have?" Along a similar vein, the Gauntlet games (available for most platforms) offer similar opportunities for co-operative play, but no other titles come to mind right now. What co-op games do you have fun with that you can play using a single console?

Kelli Hagen writes to point out a new CNN article about college degrees in video gaming, particularly the new 18-month course offered by The Guildhall at SMU. We've run stories on gaming university courses before, but this course is interesting because it has leading Texan game developers helping with curriculum and teaching, including id's Graeme Devine, Monkeystone's Tom Hall, and, of course, Ritual's highly 'individual' Richard 'Levelord' Gray.

smashr writes "It never really occured to me that postscript could be used for something other than printing, until I came across this page. Evidently someone has written the classic 'Game of life' entirely in postscript. You can even send it to the printer and have it output every single iteration.. now that would be a fun prank."

Thanks to retro site Zophar's Domain for hosting and highlighting a new PC tool for use with Nintendo Entertainment System cart images, NAPIT (scroll down to find link, and check out all the other interesting game editors while you're at it). This fun utility allows the user to save a NES game as multiple bitmap files, alter the parts of the bitmap containing graphical data (game sprites), and then reconvert to a perfectly working ROM image. Just don't alter all those pretty patterns that represent the game logic, will you?

Shackleford writes "CNN has an article that discusses a new Xbox videogame, the commercial version of an United States Army-sponsored project to train squad leaders in real-life combat tactics. It was developed by Pandemic Studios and the commercial Xbox game is titled "Full Spectrum Warrior" - there's an ad for it here." Here's the official site for the non-commercial console version of Full Spectrum Warrior - is this version intended for internal use only? Obviously, both of these are completely separate titles to America's Army, another Army-sponsored game.

So the E3 Expo in Los Angeles is finally done, and we wrap up our coverage with a look at the best of the other booths at the show, from Activision through Take Two to Eidos. Plus, we take a quick trawl round the evil troglodytic dungeon that is the Kentia Hall, deep below the main expanses of E3. Read on for info on virtual ping-pong, Starsky And Hutch, and Futurama....

Getting close to finishing up our three-day stint at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, this time we turn our attention to the Namco booth. So read on for info about Spawn, I-Ninja, and the can't-come-out-soon-enough Soul Calibur II..

Continuing with brief hands-on impressions from the most interesting booths at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, we turn our attention to Konami. Read on for info about Castlevania, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Gradius, Metal Gear, and more..

Getting straight on with our brief E3 Expo hands-on impressions, targeting the major companies and titles to watch at the show, we've made it to the Electronic Arts booth. Read on for info about selected titles featuring James Bond, Gimli, and those pesky Sims..