A new fitness center opened up in California last week, specifically targeting teens aged 13 through 18. The first of it’s kind fitness center focuses on striking a balance between electronics, fitness equipment and a hangout spot, by featuring exercise machines that have been mashed up with video games, giving the teens a healthy, multiplayer environment, where a bike workout can turn into an impromptu bike race up a virtual mountain. The gym also features Dance Dance Revolution-style machines as well as LAN-connected XBoxes for gamers to get in a quick Halo deathmatch while getting their iron on.

Read more: Fitness center mixing exercise and video games

Dolby Labs announced today what it’s support for the Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3 consoles will be. The Wii will utilize Dolby’s Pro Logic II, giving audiophile Wii fans a bit of a shot, but, inline with Nintendo’s stance on gameplay over technology. Dolby PLII is a non-digital, “5.1″ technology which is currently used by the last generation consoles as well as the Microsoft 360. The Sony PS3 naturally will be a different story. Costs be damned, Sony went all out, including Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound for games and Dolby Digital with Dolby TrueHD for 7.1 channels of pure Blu-Ray movie playback bliss, for those who decide to sell a kidney in order to actually buy the thing.

Read more: Dolby Labs announce support for Nintendo Wii and Sony PS3

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Fresh icons for your Nintendo DS
I love this site and I now spend more time creating icons for my racer in Mario Kart than actually playing the darn thing. My favorite so far is still the hammer and sickle icon by the way.

Box art from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii and Gamecube
Can’t decide which to buy, but it will probably be both. The Gamecube box art does have a bit more color depth, I wonder if that’s due to the press scans or because the Wii want to be a bit more understated to attract more mainstream gamers. Whatever, it’s Zelda, that’s all we need to know.

The Syndicate® guild trademarks their name
The grandfathers of clan-gaming, The Syndicate, have trademarked their name, taking online gaming one-step closer to have virtual lawyers, courts, and taxation on every level. Yay.

Game developer rants off on the lack of quality coding practices within the industry
Independent game developer and software architect Wolfgang Deutsch believes there is something ailing today’s game developers, that being hacked-together, untested code. An interesting take on one of the many problems currently ailing the mainstream gaming industry.

NCsoft brining MMOs to consoles?
City of Heroes, Auto Assault and Lineage II on the Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii? Yes please! NCsoft need to mix things up a bit in order to regain their status as a high-quality massive multiplayer publishing house. This could be a step in the right direction, following them finally implementing their one monthly fee / play all NCsoft titles program! I want my City of Heroes, City of Villains, Lineage II, Guild Wars and Auto Assault for one low monthly fee dammit!

Online Blackjack
Seems to be pretty hot, with lots of online casino gaming sites popping up around the web. Who would have thought the government’s banning of domestic online gaming services would result in a massive shift of business activity (and tax revenue) offshore?

Tabula Rasa, the upcoming MMOFPS from the Garriot brothers and Starr Long, is a much anticipated return for the Ultima creators and for fans of NCsoft’s massive-multiplayers. The story revolves around an alien race attacking a human-variant race and the resulting battles will play out across a few planets (at release, more will open up in future expansions), with it rumoured that players will be able to effect the overall outcome of the war with every battle that is waged, though the game’s focus has shifted greatly during it’s development, so most of the previous rumours may prove to be untrue. One thing that will probably not change much is the game’s lofty system specifications. Not one to be happy with meeting just the minimum system specs, I’ll certainly have to perform a series of upgrades in order meet even come close to the recommended system specs, something I imagine many fans looking forward to Tabula Rasa will be doing as well.

Minimum system specifications for Tabula Rasa:

* Windows® 2000/XP/Vista
* 512 MB System RAM
* 2.5 GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 or equivalent AMD™ processor
* 128 MB Direct3D and Shader 2.0 compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
* 8x DVD-ROM drive
* 4.6 GB free hard disk space
* DirectX 9.0c
* DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
* Keyboard, Mouse
* Broadband Internet connection

Recommended system specifications for Tabula Rasa:

* Windows 2000/XP/Vista
* 3.5 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD processor
* 2 GB System RAM
* ATI™ X1800 series, NVIDIA® GeForce 7800 series, or higher 3.0 Shader compliant video card

Read more: Tabula Rasa system specifications

In a recent interview over at GamesIndustry.biz, one of the directors of NCsoft Europe, Thomas Bidaux, spoke of bringing NCsoft MMOs to consoles and the difficulties that are present in creating a viable persistant online world and supporting the community via a console. Though I’d rather NCsoft finally come out with their one-price-play-all stucture, I’d certainly love to be able to play Auto Assault or Tabula Rasa via the Xbox 360, or dare I say, Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately, it seems Nintendo will continue to be as unfriendly as possible in their support of online gaming, so it seems the Xbox 360 is the perfect candidate to see console-version MMOs in the future. Thinking of the different NCsoft properties, I’d love to be able to play City of Heroes and Lineage II via a console, but, there will be some massive hurdles to overcome from a design perspective.

Read more: GamesIndustry.biz interview NCsoft’s Thomas Bidaux

The best move Take Two / 2K have ever made? Quite possibly. After 8 long years of hibernation, the Midnight Marauders, A Tribe Called Quest, have reunited for over a dozen dates of the annual 2K Sports Bounce Tour. All 3 original members are back, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Q-Tip, as well as a few new remixes from Dan the Automator and an appearance in the game 5they are promoting, NBA 2K7 from 2K Sports, a publishing label under the Take Two house.

Read more2K Sports’ Bounce 2K7 Tour

I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Pirate-themed MMORPG, Pirates of the Burning Sea. Unfortunately I’m not too interested in the traditional fantasy-based MMOs that are all around, so I’m always happy to see someone breaking the mold and taking on a subject matter that I both find extremely interesting and somewhat new. Who doesn’t want to be a pirate, I mean, come on? Pirates of the Burning Sea takes the player on an epic and historic trip back into the days of sea-battles, peglegs and frilly feather caps, allowing the player to take on several professions and compete both financially and with firepower. My only concern is, who would want to be anything BUT a pirate in the game? I’m sure there will be a few people who want to be traders or navy captains, but, come on, where’s the fun in that!? PotBS is currently in beta and is accpeting beta applications now.

Watch the E3 2006 hands on preview after the jump..

Read more of “Pirates of the Burning Sea E3 2006 hands on“

Independant game developer Wolfgang Deutsch has posted a thought-provoking rant over at his games and software development blog, On Programming, taking the industry and more specifically, programmers within the industry, to task over their seeming lack of appreciation for quality coding practices. As one would expect from a blog about coding practices and software development, coders take the brunt of the rant for ignoring proper coding practices within their implemented code and for many times simply substituting hacks in-place of actual tested code. Also included is a stern warning for producers to pay more attention to their project’s souce code, keeping an eye out for apathetic or just plain pathetic comments or notes explaining hacks to the source that just may end up in the final product. Though I’ve heard many excuses from many conferences, blogs and presentations on what ails the gaming industry, this is honestly the first time I’ve heard a rant against the coding practices of the industry’s developers. I have to admit, though many points in Deutsch’s post do ring with some truth to my ears (er, eyes), I think these are but some of the many problems that ail the mainstream gaming industry.

I’ll end this with a random quote from Wolfgang’s rant on the lack of quality coding practices within the games industry..

The real reason for exploding costs in game development is incompetent software developers. I am sorry to say. It’s not the big, all encompassing, unrelenting and unchangeable advancement of technology and refinement of consumer taste and expectations, neither is it those “risk averse” publishers who won’t finance your creative idea. No, it is simply incompetence. Our skill in devising reliable and flexible software architectures is, to put it mildly, severely lacking.

Read more: Game dev rants about the lack of quality coding standards within the industry

Even though Talk Like a Pirate Day has passed, the gents over at my most-anticipated new MMO have put together a brilliant little contest in order to celebrate. The devs behind Pirates of the Burning Sea have put together a t-shirt design contest, where they are seeking contributions for future PotBS t-shirt designs from their large (and eager) fanbase. The contest runs until October the 3rd and the winner gets the first shirt off the press, signed by the entire PotBS development team and a collection of the “coolest booty you will ever see”.

Hit the jump for all of the info on the contest, arghhhh..

Read more of “Pirates of the Burning Sea t-shirt contest“

Worlds collide in the latest EVE Online developer’s blog post, where EVE developer and amateur economist “Redundancy” takes on the heavy task of analyzing the massive multiplayer’s player-driven economy, resulting in a short tutorial on how EVE Gross Domestic Product is affected by inflation and deflation and giving fans insight into the latest financial data available for EVE. Whew. I need a Tylenol after just thinking about that. The data runs from October 2003 until June 2006 and shows that EVE’s GDP is growing monthly, appearantly inline with EVE’s subscriber growth. Ah, back in the old days when we were only making 60,000 ISK a month, those were hard times.

Read more: Analyzing the GDP of EVE Online