Adventure Classic Gaming is running an interview with Chris Tolworthy, an indie game designer who is working on a project to make video games out of various literary classics. His decision to develop these kinds of games was sparked by a desire to reach out to gamers who want more "serious" subject matter, as well as finding an audience among people you would find in a book store, rather than a game store. Tolworthy has already released one game, an adaptation of Les Misérables, and has almost finished Dante's Divine Comedy. After that is done, he'll move on to other works, including Theogeny, by Hesiod, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, aiming for two or three releases a year. He said, "I try to keep as close as possible to the original text. When I create a game I simply go through the book and adapt it chapter by chapter. As far as possible all my puzzles are based on ideas in the original book. So my Dante's Inferno is a lot closer to the book than EA Games' Dante's Inferno that changes Dante into a warrior with a giant scythe! Although I stick closely to the story, I would find it boring to only give the straight text, so my games always give a different twist. For example, I show Les Miserables from the point of view of a minor character who dies early on. In my Divine Comedy I show other points of view as well as Dante's, and they don't see things the same way. Really, what I'm doing is what theater directors do when they put a Shakespeare play into a modern setting. It's the exact same story, but presented in a new way."

duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The BBC is carrying a report from a team of researchers at Newcastle University who claim to have developed a the first 'artificial' human sperm from stem cells. The research, reported in the journal Stem Cells and Development, involved selecting meristematic germ cells from a human embryonic stem cell culture and inducing meiosis, thus producing a haploid gamete. The authors claim that the resulting sperm are fully formed, mature, human sperm cells but the announcement has been greeted with mixed reaction from colleagues who claim the procedure is ethically questionable and that the gametes produced are of inferior levels of maturation."

Officials in Papakura, New Zealand have come up with a billboard that bleeds when it rains. They hope it will encourage drivers to slow down when the weather makes conditions dangerous. Since the billboards have been erected, there hasn't been a fatal accident in the area.

MojoKid writes "There have been a handful of NVIDIA Ion-based products with Intel's Atom processor that have been unveiled recently, ranging from NVIDIA's own reference system, to the Acer Aspire Revo SFF PC. Today Zotac announced an Ion motherboard that will be appealing to the DIY crowd. The design of this IONITX-A model board tested and reviewed here in particular, offers some very interesting features, not the least of which is its DC power input with an external power brick. It also is built on Intel's dual core Atom process for a bit more horsepower to back up NVIDIA's Ion integrated graphics chip."

Lionhead Studios today announced that their next section of downloadable content for Fable II, called See the Future, will be available on May 12th. The new content will include new quests, monsters and items, a Colosseum, and alter egos for the player's dog. Peter Molyneux also hinted at a connection to the next Fable game, saying, "... it would be pretty poor to say See the Future if it didn't have some connection." Further details are available in the latest in Lionhead's series of developer diaries.

Several sources are reporting that work on The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf, a console port of the popular PC game, has officially been suspended. CD Projekt, makers of the original game, were working with WideScreen Games on the new version. WideScreen says that CD Projekt missed a significant payment for their role in the development, leading them to stop work on the game. They are emphatic that development won't continue until CD Projekt makes good on the debt, but CD Projekt says, "All payments were done on time according to milestone plan. ... Truth is that payments were later than originally planned but this was solely due to delays in production. The delays were growing in the project due to WSG [continuing] to miss the deadlines." The game's future is uncertain.

Random Feature writes "In response to Build an Open Source SSL Accelerator, in which o3 magazine detailed how to build a solution comparable to an F5 BIG-IP 6900 on the cheap, F5 Fires Back claiming it's not as cheap as it appears and pointing out the potential performance implications of a 'cobbled together set of components designed to mimic similar functionality.' The discussion on the performance of the Open Source solution based on Opteron RSA operation processing capabilities brings into question the validity of the 'more SSL TPS for cheaper' argument presented by o3."

Mikey Win writes "ExtremeTech shows us a cool hardware hack that allows multiple operating system to boot without dealing with any tedious BIOS setup changes. How? By building your own SATA hard drive switch. The result? You can expect a longer hard drive life span, power supply load reduction, and partitions protected from becoming overwritten or corrupted."