By Werner Dohse Of all the Final Fantasy games, Final Fantasy VII was probably the most successful. Ask any FF fan and I’m sure that 8 out 10 would say that VII was the best iteration. So it should come as no surprise that Square Enix would cash-in on this. Thus the Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary Collection: 3 games …

Two idiots in Canada (yup not the USA this time) have been banned from playing violent video games for a year by a judge. Apparently for no real reason they decided to break into a friends house, cause $25 000 worth of damage and then nuke the family cat to death. For this they get banned from playing video games …

Ensemble Studios, the developers of Halo Wars and known for the Age of Empires games have announced that they will be shutting down after the release of Halo Wars. Not only that but today they announced that they are giving the axe to all non-essential employees as well as employees not directly related to the Halo Wars project. All the members that will stay onboard are being offered incentives to stay with the studio until the game is complete. More after the jump. What on earth is going on at Ensemble? Why would the studio be shut down so suddenly and why would a studio of this caliber need to be shut down anyway? These are things I don't know and maybe there is a good reason, but we don't know it because there have not been any other official statements or comments released by Microsoft or Ensemble yet. Halo Wars is due for release in the first half of 2009.

When browsing the net this morning I noticed the unfortunate placing of two article on N4G. We could go into a deep social analysis of interpreting why people are still looking for the year of the PS3 (We are looking at you Dynamo) and why, no matter how hard they try, they will never truly find the peace that they …

Yes my favourite topic is back. I have managed to ignore it recently but when I saw a news article this morning stating that Bioshock is going to have a mandatory 5 GB, 10 minute install I had to write about it. Now the only PS3 that has been available locally so far (for a while) has been the 40Gb …

One of the big cheeses over at Midway has been chatting to Gamesindustry about the state of gaming in Europe and has come up with an interesting point. He mentions that Europe was under developed (compared to the US) when he started and since then the Midway business has more than doubled it’s market size. However he goes on to …

Oddworld creator Lorne (Lawn) Lanning has been speaking about why he thinks that consoles are a step backwards and not what he was excited about years ago. Lanning has the following to say: "Personally, I think the consoles are a problem. Years ago I was excited about consoles, but anything that makes development more expensive rather than better, faster, cheaper, I think is a step backwards. When I look at what's happening, it's a bit disappointing because the consoles are running into a place where affordable games are having a rough time getting out there." I guess that all the big money and schedules are starting to add more and more pressure to a lot of smaller developers that aren't graced with huge budgets. Is he right though? A lot of us are all gaming fanboys, we love it all but we also love to see technology progress and get better. The main reason that I turned to consoles was because I was tired of having to keep my PC up to date so that I can play the latest games. Now I get home with my shiny new game, pop it in and run it the way that the developers intended. It seems that Lanning is targeting a market that is more interested in customisation and a lot of sharing options, saying: "PC games also allow people to build their game as they chose. There's a big difference between spending $50 or $60 on a game and hoping I love it and buying a game for $5 and then buying additional content for that game, so by the time I have invested $50 in it I really love it and I've personalized it a lot more to what I'm interested in." Hello. Hello. Follow me. Ok. [Who knows where that comes from?]

At the moment Sony are having problems with the Beta and the servers crashing but that hasn’t stopped this video from being leaked. It a ten minute long video that shows the majority of the customisation options open to the player as well as a couple gunfights which gives a fairly comprehensive view of what you will be getting when …