8w ago - Today Microsoft spokesman Major Nelson has confirmed plans to officially reveal the next-generation XBox video gaming console at an event to be hosted on May 21st, 2013.

Below are the details, to quote: On Tuesday May 21st, we’ll mark the beginning of a new generation of games, TV and entertainment. On that day, we’ll be holding a special press event on the Xbox campus and we invite you to join us via the live global stream that will be available on Xbox LIVE and Xbox.com. If you are in the US or Canada, you can also watch the broadcast on Spike TV.

On that day, we’ll share our vision for Xbox, and give you a real taste of the future. Then, 19-days later at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, we’ll continue the conversation and showcase our full lineup of blockbuster games.

We are thrilled to pull back the curtain and reveal what we’ve been working on.

A New Generation Revealed
Xbox Campus, Redmond WA
Tuesday, May 21st at 1p ET/10a PT/17:00 GMT (timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=%23XboxReveal&iso=20130521T10&p1=234&ah=1)

Follow me on Twitter where I’ll share updates leading up to the event.

Update: According to Paul...

212w ago - As part of Ubisoft's financial report released yesterday, company founder Yves Guillemot stated "10 percent of Ubisoft's workforce is working on developing games for the next generation of game systems that will eventually replace [the] Wii, [the] Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3."

Yes, he actually said that.

To quote: "What has helped us is we always take the new technologies right at the beginning of their availability, and we go after them faster than everyone else," he continued.

The company was one of the first to make titles exclusively for the Wii, and appear to wish to continue this with launch titles for the PS4 and whatever the next Xbox will be called.

216w ago - The NY Times recently ran an article about a General Electric science and research team and their findings of storage capacity in the medium of holography.

This isn't particularly new news, given that holography has been around for ages. However, what it is new about these findings is that they can use holographic optical media to maintain data storage equivalent to 100 standard DVDs.

To quote: "This could be the next generation of low-cost storage," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

The light-pattern encoded medium, at the moment, is fairly expensive and will only be available for medical, marketing and research purposes. However, by 2011 the team is expecting mass-market breakthroughs that will see Holographic Optical Media being used as a standard-fare storage medium.

According to the article, "The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines."

So what does this mean? It means that...

219w ago - In the dark days of the GameCube, amidst Internet rumblings of Nintendo going third-party, a little white box was being secretly developed in the inner sanctums of Nintendo.

Having already launched the strange yet undeniably appealing DS, this new console had a working codename of Revolution.

Nintendo dropped that moniker for the more market-friendly and more perverse title of the Nintendo Wii. Revolutions were scary they said, revolutions were about bloodshed, terrorist organizations and babies crying. Nintendo just wanted everyone to play.

Controllers are scary, like the cockpit of a flaming 747. People just want to throw around their television remotes and Nintendo happily provided.

In Apple fuelled haze, Nintendo went on a marketing blitz and began to do something they haven't done since the era of Super Nintendo; they ran commercials that targeted everyone including your dear old Grand Pappy.

Gimmicky as the Wiimote may seem in retrospect, Nintendo grabbed the attention of the media and consumer wallets with its technology and Wii Sports. Not since the SNES has a system been so ready to play out of the box. It's that type of mass market acceptance that the other game companies would love to have.

On the outside to the hardcore set, it seems...

233w ago - Red Faction: Guerrilla is one of the marquee releases of early 2009 and easily one of The 60 Hottest Games of 2009. We caught up with producer Rick White to talk about life, the universe and well... everything Red Faction.

Gameplayer: How important is Red Faction in general, and particularly Red Faction: Guerrilla, to Volition?

Rick White: I think for me personally it extends a brand that a lot of Volition is known about, and so for us it's been important to kinda go back to that root, of where Volition came from, and bring that IP back to life in a big way. I think strategically at THQ it's as important as any other project, but I think it's of more personal importance to the team at Volition.

Gameplayer: You've left one competitive genre to enter another, going from a linear first-person shooter to an open-world third-person shooter - how has the team responded to this challenge?

Rick White: I think early on they responded, to be honest, in shock. I was the new kid on the block and once I started seeing the destruction engine and seeing how you were taking damage from this physics-based system I was getting frustrated. We'd bring in testers from the local college and they were getting frustrated because they were getting knocked down by...