securitas writes "Reuters and AP tell us that Epic Games and the US Army have announced the America's Army series of games, jointly developed by the Department of Defense and Epic. The first two-part game in the five-year project includes an RPG called Soldier and a first-person shooter called Operations. The game will be free of charge and available for download in July or August, with 1.2 million CDs simultaneously released, attached to gaming magazines. Does this remind anyone else of the war-room scene from Toys or Ender's Game?" Future installments will include Sim Mess Duty, Sim Standing Guard in the Rain, Sim Blister, and Sim Invading Iraq to Keep Approval Ratings High.

Warped-Reality writes "GameSpy has a new Doom III Preview covering aspects of the storyline and how Doom III will be different from the rest of the FPS genre. It includes some pictures of the E3 Doom III demo booth. As the article says, "This is DOOM III, and it's going to scare you to hell."" Looking at these images, I can only say two things: Wow and Cool Toilets. Update: 05/22 19:55 GMT by M : There's also an interview with Carmack giving a few more details about the game.

MonkeyBot writes "Nintendo has posted news from the E3 convention concerning big name titles and their release dates. The new Metroids for the Cube and GBA, Legend of Zelda for the Cube, and a new Mario Game for the Cube are just a few of the titles for which new information is available. It'll be just like I'm a kid again, but with better graphics (and beer)!"

mrquackers writes: "Looks like the price war in the console gaming world is starting a bit early. With Microsoft expected to announce a drop in the price of the Xbox to $199 next Monday at E3, Sony's rumored to be cutting PlayStation 2 prices as early as tomorrow. Meanwhile, Nintendo says it won't be making ANY price cuts before or during the show -- though it's not ruling one out for later in the year." Update: 05/14 18:01 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points out this CNN story indicating that the PS2 cut is official.

greggman asks: "So, I'm watching 'Tonight 2', the night news program here in Japan and they are showing E3 coverage. I guess one game that hit it off was a game by KOEI called Dynasty something or other. They visited KOEI here in Yokoyama Japan but they had masked out all faces from the team. When the interviewer asked why, the company rep said 'because other companies would try to steal our employees'. That's messed UP!! I consider that to be akin to treating your employees like slaves. If you can't afford to keep your employees and therefore have to make sure they don't find out about better opportunities then you deserve to go out of business. It's their life not the company's. It almost seems like there'd be a law against action like that. All I can suggest is that you don't support companies that actively prevent their employees from bettering themselves." Couple this with the long hours, the draconian employment contracts, and the insane deadlines, and I begin to wonder if this guy has a serious point. For all the money that programmers make, do Employers do more to make their jobs harder than most?

legLess writes: "Salon is carrying a thought-provoking article saying that 'The soft-porn fixation embarrassingly displayed at E3 is dooming the gaming industry to the nerd-geek ghetto.' It says that the gaming industry, in terms of sales and audience, is much closer to porn than Hollywood. Some great quotes ('[GOD] CEO Mike Wilson decided that preeminence should also involve a lot of cleavage and dwarfs'), and interesting thoughts ('Games should be treated as art, but they are becoming more and more like hamburger')."

mmmmbeer writes "This article at Daily Radar and this one at MCV share an unsettling development. Apparently, Hiroshi Yamauchi, President of Nintendo, has said that if Gamecube doesn't get a "positive response at E3," then they may not go through with producing the Gamecube. Personally, I doubt that Gamecube will get anything but great reviews, but it's worrying that he would have said that."

yesthatguy writes: "According to an MSNBC Article, Microsoft 'plans to voluntarily insert a V-chip-like control in its new video game console.' More details are to be released at E3 in May. I wonder if this will catch on, or if it is just a Microsoft move to appease the government, or if, as the article suggests, it will reduce game censorship, and allow consumers to censor the games themselves."

soapy writes "Europe's biggest computer gaming trade show, ECTS, took place in London this week. There's a pretty good show report that summerizes all the games coming out later next year such as Violition's Red Faction by Volition which uses the Quake 3 engine and No One Lives Forever, that James Bond first person shooter. There's also some details on some the console stuff going on such as Nintendo's Gameboy Advance, The Sony PlayStation2 and the PSOne. " If you're got more links, post 'em below.

James Hills sent us the following report from the E3 Expo. Not exactly read-em-and weep, but James has pinpointed some of the highlights (and lowlights) of the current position of Linux in the gaming world. (Read more.)

Ant was among the first to write with a link to this article on Blue's News claiming that Epic's new game engine is Direct 3D only, based on statements made at an E3 demo yesterday. Check that link to read the full article, but consider this excerpt: "A major side effect of this is that any future ports of Unreal-engine titles that use the new technology will need to have a completely rewritten rendering system, making Mac and Linux ports significantly more difficult." DoenerMord also wrote, saying "This kind of puts some perspective on recent comments from Tim Sweeney (the man behind the Unreal engine) on Microsoft's breakup ..."

RP writes "It will be if Peter Molyneux (the designer) has his way. I noted this link over on thecitadel.net where he is quoted as saying: "The first thing is my ambition to make the whole of Black & White, the AI engine, the 3D engine, the physics engine, open-source. Then anybody can download and use that stuff. To use it in a commercial product, you have to pay us a royalty, but, you know, absolutely free for enthusiasts to use." If you've seen any screenshots of Black and White, you know this could be exciting. " Very impressive looking stuff.

Some useful stuff: An anonymous reader noted that AltaVista has opened Raging.Com which is a super fast minimal search engine without all that bloated portal crap. gi_wrighty noted that the winneers of the 5k HTML Contest have Been announced. Impressive minimalism. Soeren Staun-Pedersen noted that a new The Gimp User Group has come along. j1mmy pointed us to pictures of the new Lara Croft Model from E3. Yaruar sent us a story about Lego Filmsets that come with cameras for you do-it-yourselfers. If you don't want to make your own films, how about your own Mars Polar Lander Site? (Thanks Biff Studly). antiwesley sent us interesting insight into a typical geek cube. Speaking of things found in geek Cubes, BenTheDewpendent sent us a page that tracks tons of info on Mountain Dew and bob_jordan found pictures of upcoming Futurama Bender Action Figures (Not as cool as Nate's Picolo tho) Baloo Ursidae sent us a story about electricity generating shoes. Gorphrim sent us some Duron Parodies Finally some Slashdot references: DrFun (one of the original net comics) mentioned us in a recent strip, Someone noted that Geek Culture is selling First Post T-Shirts. QuasEye noted that someone registered hotgrits.org and ironically enough, is running Slashcode. And the WashPost ran an article on us which is mostly accurate. And to wrap things up, maxxon showed us the way to Crank Dot Net, which has stuff on all sorts of conspiracy theories and urban myths and other crazy stuffs on the net. Stuff like UFOs, the face on mars, Creationism, Scientology, antigravity, and perpetual motion and more.

e3 writes "The Washington Post is running a provocative article in which Bill Joy is quoted as, "...essentially agreeing, to his horror, with a core argument of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski -- that advanced technology poses a threat to the human species." " As it stands, the title sounds sensationalistic - but read the article, and think about what point he's trying to make. Bill Joy's a pretty level-headed guy, and I think we need to consider these issues /now/ so that they don't come true.

Daniel Boese writes "From: breynolds@firaxis.com (Brian Reynolds) ... be interested to learn that we have just announced (at E3 last night) that we will be developing Sid Meier's Civilization III as one of our upcoming products. This is a brand-spanking new development, so I'm not ready to go into loads of detail just yet, but I do plan to stay in touch on the newsgroups during the development of the game, because I think every Civ fan has an idea in his/her head about what Civ 3 should be. We'll do a "call for features" once we have a serious prototype we like. Firaxis Web Site " Jeez-this is just what I need. Alpha Centauri has siphoned more then enough time away. Ah well-who needs spare time?

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "Microsoft has announced that NT was awarded this security classification, equivalent to the US C2 security classification, under the ITSEC, the UK's IT Security Evalutaion Criteria. As with the NT 3.5 C2 rating, this doesn't include being connected to a network. This is interesting, given that any local user on NT 3.5 or above server or workstation can become a member of the administrators group, which is not a Good Thing for a secure system... "

Jay T. Millar sent us this little bit of news: I know this is game console related, but seeing the article about the Sega/MS deal and being an ex-Atarian (400/800, 520ST, TT, Falcon) I figured I'd put my .02 in. In any case, former Atari employees responsible for the design and programming of the ill-fated Jaguar 64-bit game console have started a new console company called VMLabs. Among these is Jeff Minter of Tempest 2000, Atari, and Commodore fame. They have new custom hardware designed, and a development kit based off a heavily modified gcc at the ready. They displayed the current development unit (Project X) at CES behind closed doors, with a more informative rollout supposed to happen at the E3 show later this year. Regardless, this new company is the only real remnant of the once grand Atari Corporation, whose passing in '96 went almost completely unnoticed by the entire computer and gaming industry. Sad.