Live in China? No weekend-long WoW bender for you! The Chinese government will be rolling out a system in September that limits you to 3 hours gaming then forces a 5 hour break by cutting your levels. Certainly heavy handed though it’s interesting how they view this as a necessary solution to a real problem

Cancelled games are oddly interesting - like a half complete canvas we can only wonder what the final result might have been. All of these are old articles but good reads regardless.

The extreme-players article lists a few games that have actually resurfaced (Dark Sector and Prey) though sadly Outcast 2 is not one of them. I’m finally playing the first one now and it’s still beautiful and engrossing - such a shame the developers collapsed.

This article on Sharky Games (a site sadly no longer updated) covers games you’ve probably forgotten about by now - Indestructibles from Bullfrog, Golgotha from crack.com and Prax Wars from Rebel Boat Rocket.

Of course, there is also the excellent Gaming Graveyard series on GameSpot - highlights include their look at Black Isle’s Torn and Warcraft Adventures from Blizzard.

That’s what Ryu ga Gotoku is sounding like anyway. The trailer seems to provide a good feel for the game and the setting - dark and crime-ridden.  (via bdgamer)

What’s really interesting is that this is being produced by Toshihiro Nagoshi, the man behind Super Monkey Ball (though he assisted on Shenmue). If there’s one thing you can say about Sega it’s that they tend not to pidgeon hole their internal developers. After all, Tetsuya Mizuguchi did Sega Rally before he did Rez.

Yet another browser. This one sounds interesting though - Flock integrates with Flickr, uses del.icio.us directly as your bookmarks system and makes blogging a piece of cake.

The idea is to make it more than a tool to browse with, to hook into the parts of the internet which you contribute to - a proper two way internet tool in other words. No word on RSS though, surely the final piece of the puzzle if they want to make (shameless re-)blogging easier.

Their new (unreleased) learning machine translation system takes home the bacon and then some. And this is with Arabic and Chinese translations - could we be close to quick, readable translations of German, French and other easier-to-translate languages?

The good? You can add and edit friends via a web page (dear Microsoft - take note). The bad? No chat or lobbies, only regular races with friends or random match-ups. I’d say the bad outweights the good - this is proper online gaming in your hands for crying out loud! I’d also place bets that it’ll be far easier to use than whatever online gaming solution Sony comes up with, knowing their weak track record in this area.

It’s Track Mania for the PSP in all but name. "Stunt Driving, Puzzle Solving and Platform Action". Rip off or not, I want in.

Real-time combat, instanced dungeons and way less travel. After screwing up Asheron’s Call 2, with D&D Online Turbine might just be fixing three of my main MMO gripes.

Type to kill, simple really. For some reason I love games like this but there just aren’t enough of them!

Ah shame. Admitedly, none of the sequels were quite as good as the original. That didn’t stop me hoping that a new sequel would be good, even if GTA has taken much of what made Carmageddon great and added so much more to the formula.

I wish I still had the animated gif I made of my favourite Carmageddon replay. In the starting car I rammed the monster truck with the low gravity, pinball physics and concrete car power ups - it was at least 20 seconds until he came back down again. I was in stitches but you probably had to be there.

An entertaining glimpse of what could have been. Steve Purcell has the license back now so maybe we’ll see something in the future. (Thanks r1cola!)

Dubbed DisplayPort, this would replace DVI and VGA cables currently used. It’ll be very thin to fit subnote laptops (good), support even higher resolutions (good), include audio support (good) and support copy protection (bad). A display standard and video cable that supports DRM? Dear VESA - kindly get stuffed. (via TechReport)