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EA's "grittier, darker" 2010/11 | News : Publisher Electronic Arts has revealed a clutch of new titles for the next year and beyond, putting an emphasis on dark and edgy themes. Darkspore redeploys the procedural generation systems of Maxis strategy title Spore, but in an action-RPG with more mass appeal, while Alice: Madness Returns is the horror-adventure sequel to 2000 PC game American McGee's Alice. The Sims 3 will also head down more sinister paths, with Autumn's vampire-starring expansion Late Night, while even the Fight Night boxing series is to be taken in a 'grittier, darker direction' with next year's Champion. More levity can be found in Wii exercise title EA Sports Active NFL Training Camp, plus EA Sports Active 2 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and iPod Touch. I'm not sure when "darker and grittier" became the default position for "improving" games, but I wish we could move past it. Nintendo doesn't need to own...

Troughton resurrects Pitbull name Robert Troughton, co-founder of UK developer Pitbull Syndicate, has opened a new studio in Newcastle and already secured a development project. Pitbull Studio opens a year after Midway liquidated the Pitbull Syndicate team, which were renamed Midway Newcastle after an acquisition in 2007 for more than £3 million. "The North East has a lot of games development talent. It was a very sad day when the old studio closed and it’s really been my dream to revive it, said Troughton, managing director of the new business. "The industry has changed a lot since the day that we sold the original Pitbull – it was a real shame that Midway’s management never seemed to move fast enough with the trends. We won’t be making the mistakes of the past with the new studio – what happened there has actually strengthened us, I would say, we’ve learnt a lot from the experience of being part of a large publisher." As Pitbull Syndicate the studio created n...

Music Piracy By 1882, Edison had a dynamo that operated at 82 percent efficiency. In September, 1882, he had opened a central station on Pearl Street in Manhattan and was eventually supplying electricity to a one-mile square section of New York. Enter Alexander Graham Bell and his cousin, Chichester Bell. The Bells got together with an instrument maker named Charles Sumner Tainter and they set out to make a better version of Edison's phonograph design. The new design was called the Graphophone and the main improvement was that their version, using recorded cylinders, gave a longer life to the recordings. They could simply be played more times than Edison's tinfoil phonograph design. The intent was to market it as an office aid, much the same as we view tape recorders today, as a dictation machine. Of course, Edison was irate when he found out about this. He felt that Graphophone had basically stolen his idea. So much so that when Graphophone asked him to pool their patents,...