Citing a report on Everything HQ, Computer and Video Games is reporting that Sony is working on a new SKU of the PS3 to deal with the leaked security key it is currently suing George Hotz and group Fail0verFlow over. The "hack-proof" model (is there such a thing these days?) is already "deep in development" and is not susceptible to the security issues that current models are vulnerable to.

Another rumor is that the company will lower the price of its current PS3 units to clear inventory. Old models will allegedly go for around £170 (roughly $274 USD). The hack-proof model is said to be a slim PS3 boasting a 300GB hard drive. The report claims it will cost £186.99 (roughly $301.USD)

A release window for this system is unknown and the system itself is not confirmed by Sony, but according to the report it will be a slim PS3 with a 300GB hard drive.

While Crytek CEO Cervat Yerli expressed disappointment earlier this week concerning the leak of Crysis 2, he still has mad love for the PC gaming scene. Writing on the MyCrysis message boards, Yerli said that his deep disappointment in this week's events have been eclipsed by the kind words and support from the community:

"While we are deeply disappointed by these events, we are all completely overwhelmed by the support we have received from you, our community," said Yerli.

"We can assure you that PC gaming is very important to us and will always be important to Crytek in the future. We are all still focused on delivering a great gaming experience to our true and honest fans," he continued. "I hope you will enjoy Crysis 2 on PC, as we think it is our best PC game yet!"

Chuck Bittner is disabled, a gamer, and in need of your John Hancock for a good cause. Chuck, who is the star of the web site, AskACapper.com, has put up an online petition asking video game console makers and game developers to allow consumers to reconfigure button configurations. Companies he is making this appeal to include Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Zipper Interactive, Infinity Ward, and Treyarch - though in general he would like ALL game developers to support remapping controller functions in games.

The reason he wants to have the ability to remap keys in games and on consoles is to make setting up configurations for those with disabilities a lot easier. You can read the entire petition below, but I urge you to visit it online and sign it:

What happens when you are playing a game in the subway and you don't pay attention? A ten-year-old boy from Milan, Italy found out when he fell off a subway platform and onto the tracks below because he was engrossed in playing a PSP game. Luckily a police officer nearby sprung into action and lifted the boy back up onto the platform.

On a personal note, I have a 10-year-old son and I could see the same thing happening to him. But it wouldn't matter if he was reading a comic book or playing a video game - sometimes he pays little attention to what is going on around him. It happens.

Anyway, watch the dramatic video to your left. Yes, I’m overselling it.

Thanks to nightwng2000 for the tip.

Source: MSNBC

Earlier this week Nintendo said that it was implementing anti-piracy measures into its upcoming 3-D hand-held that will help the company quell the use of third-party devices - like the R4 device for DS. Of course device makers probably haven't had a chance to design such a device yet, so Nintendo should probably bring its "A game" to this fight. And honestly, it has been a fight for Nintendo to stop the use of R4 devices all over the world, despite some pretty successful legal victories around the world.

Nintendo UK general manager David Yarnton believes that better protection methods and consumer awareness does have a significant impact on the overall problem of piracy.

Indie developer Daniel Amitay credits piracy with a doubling of sales (thanks to The Escapist). The developer behind the iPhone game "Punch 'Em!" says that his game being pirated ultimately helped double the sales of his game. This is not what you usually hear from game developers about piracy. Punch 'Em! is a 99 cent game that lets users fight each other using the iPhone camera. He was going to write about how the holiday shopping season gave him a big boost in sales until he examined the sales data and found that it was something else driving sales: piracy.

An interesting report from Ars Technica, citing a research paper (presented at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) conference last month in Philadelphia) from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid shows that around 25 percent of files downloaded from The Pirate Bay are fakes. Besides antipiracy companies seeding fake files into the mix, a fair share of the downloads are from hackers and other mischief makers looking to infect computers with viruses and Trojans.

From the article:

If you have read 16-year-old Sonoma Academy junior Daniel Willens' editorial supporting the California Game Law, then you will be interested in reading this rebuttal in the Press-Democrat. 18-year-old Sonoma Academy Senior Jonny Moon opens his editorial with a discussion of afternoon adventures. Just like his parents sitting before the television watching re-runs of Gun Smoke or Bonanza, Jonny speaks of exploits in the Wild West:

"I came home from school and jumped into the saddle of my American Standardbred. I galloped through the plains of the Midwest and dueled my way to fame. I shot criminals, hogtied bandits and saved a revolutionary's wife. My good deeds saved the life of innocent people, but these actions may soon be banned, as I did this while playing 'Red Dead Redemption,' an alleged 'overly violent video game.'

To counteract all the good news coming from Microsoft about its consoles sales numbers and subscribers related to the Xbox 360, Sony made an announcement of its own at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Sony says that its PlayStation Network hit the 60 million-user mark in 2010. Annual signups of its free services were 20 million in 2010, the company added.

Those figures were announced by Sony chairperson, president and CEO Howard Stringer during its CES presentation

Also this week Microsoft announced that its online gaming service, Xbox Live, had hit the 50 million user mark. Unlike Microsoft, Sony focused on connected devices and 3-D products during CES and less on gaming. Microsoft talked about Kinect, Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7.

Source: MCV UK

Conservative gadfly Phyllis Schlafly put together a list of New Year's resolutions that incoming freshman republican lawmakers on the state and federal level should adopt, in her estimation. Schlafly tackles all the usual conservative bullet points including school choice, healthcare, the Boy Scouts and video games. Here is one of the resolutions she proposes in her Townhall.com column:

"VIDEO GAMES: 'There shall be no sale, rental or arcade-playing of extremely violent video games by children without parental consent.' Explanation: Video games are increasingly graphic and harmful."

Nintendo has been playing it very safe with the 3DS lately, publicly stating that kids under six shouldn’t view the 3D effects and providing parental controls that will lock the handheld in 2D-mode.

Is there really any danger to children’s eyesight though?  After all, we naturally view the world around us in three dimensions so what could the problem be?

Speaking to NPR, Ahna Girshick, a vision researcher at New York University, explains it thusly:

According to data gathered by TorrentFreak, the most pirated movie of 2010 (to date) is Avatar, followed by Kick-Ass. James Cameron's epic 3D movie was downloaded 16, 580, 000 times in 2001, while Kick-ass was downloaded 11,4000,00 times and Inception was downloaded 9,720m00 times. At number four (a choice that makes me question the taste of movie downloaders) is Shutter Island with 9,490,00, followed by Iron Man 2 with 8,810,000 downloads, and Clash of the Titans with 8,040,000 downloads.

Perhaps tempting fate, The Hurt Locker was downloaded 6,850,000 times. The makers of The Hurt Locker like to sue people..

You can check out the full list here.

An editorial penned by California State Senator and anti-game crusader Leeland Yee says that parents should be able to control what kids watch, but how parents come to that conclusion is the probably a sticky subject for many of our readers.

In the editorial Yee says that California has "been hard at work trying to protect children from the harmful effects of excessively violent video games. In the Legislature, we have attempted to give greater authority to parents in determining which video games are appropriate for their children."

He is of course speaking of the law they passed five years ago that was ultimately struck down by the courts shortly thereafter:

UKIE releases a PEGI app for iPhone and iOS devices that help shoppers - especially parents - in the UK get instant access to game related ratings data.

Similar to the app released by the ESRB, the PEGI app allows consumers to browse the database of all the video games that have received a PEGI rating (+16,000 games), get detailed information about the type of content each game contains, and read reviews (if one is available).

The app was created by PEGI S.A., the same group that manages the pan-European video games ratings system. The PEGI app is free to download now at iTunes. An Android version will be released soon. Eurogamer provides the reviews.

New data from NPD Group reveals that only 15 percent of children in the United States want video games for the holiday season. The data comes from the Kids Industry Data Service (KIDS) report. The report found that video game-related gifts were the second most wanted items, behind "toys," but ahead of items like electronics, books and other entertainment.

Of those kids who wanted video game-related items, The Wii and DS represented 22 percent of all requests, while 18 percent wanted an Xbox 360, 7 percent requested a PS3, while the rest were marked as "other."

Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach were the most popular video game items on children's wish lists.

Kinect was the most asked-for accessory, though accessory request only accounted for 6 percent of all items on Children’s wish lists.

Source: Gamasutra

Low-tech gifts rank higher this year than high-tech toys and video games on children's wish lists this year, according to a survey conducted by YouthBeat. The survey included kids (ages 6-10), tweens (11-13) and teens (14-18 years old) who were asked about items on their 2010 holiday gift wish lists.

While nearly half of those surveyed listed a video game or video game system as a preferred gift overall, low-tech items such as books or non-electronic games were also a popular choice. YouthBeat concluded that these results were due to the state of the economy.

"Children seem to be somewhat more strategic about their choices, adding more items and smaller gifts than in previous years," said Amy Henry, Vice President of Youth Insights at C&R Research.

Marina Krcmar, associate professor of communication at Wake Forest (Winston-Salem, NC), thinks that most parents just do not have a clue about the affects video games can have on children. Krcmar studies the impact of video games and other media on children and teens. She doles out free advice in a press release urging parents to pick games that are age appropriate and to get educated about the video games kids should be playing.

"Greater realism leads to greater immersion; greater immersion leads to greater effects. One of those effects can be increased aggression."

"The T-rating and M-rating for video games are not very consistent and not very informative for parents, so parents need more information," Krcmar says.

"The quality of the graphics and the sound in this year's new video games is amazing," she says, "It's getting closer and closer to virtual reality."

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who filed a lawsuit against multiple technology companies for alleged patent infringements, has met defeat at the hands of a U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington (Seattle). U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman called the allegations of the suit "spartan" and dismissed the case. Allen and his attorneys have until December 28 to re-file the case, which they have every intention of doing. Allen's lawyers called the judge's ruling a "procedural issue."

The lawsuit filed by Allen's firm Interval Licensing alleged that Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples violated patents that Allen secured while at the helm of Interval Research. That company may no longer be in business, but the patents live on.

The patents cover "fundamental web technologies." The patents in question are No. 6,263,507; No. 6,034,652; No. 6,788,314; and No. 6,757,682.

According to projections from DFC Intelligence, the PlayStation 3 will surpass the Xbox 360 in worldwide units sold by "within the next year." Currently, the Xbox 360 has 45.2 million units sold worldwide to date, with the number rising during the holiday season thanks to the release of Kinect and general holiday 2010 sales. Microsoft is expected to sell 5 million Kinect units in total this holiday season, some of which will be sold as part of a system bundle.

The PlayStation 3 has sold 41.2 million units worldwide to date. DFC Intelligence predicts that the PS3 will surpass the Xbox 360 in consoles sold worldwide sometime in 2011. DFC is basing this on a number of huge exclusive titles in 2011 such as Killzone 3, LittleBigPlanet 2, and SOCOM 4. The release of Gran Turismo 5 may also prove to be a motivator for some gamers to buy new PS3 systems.

After a Fall 2010 update failed to include any videogames, the National Parenting Center’s Seal of Approval awards focused on the 2010 holiday season includes four such entries.

The winners, part of the NPC’s 20th annual incarnation of the awards, were chosen following two months of testing by both parents and kids in the NPC’s test centers. Entries are judged by “a variety of levels including, but not limited to, price, packaging, design, stimulation, desirability, age appropriateness, instructions and more.”

A new Rasmussen poll of Americans on the subject of violent videogames found that 54 percent of those polled believed that violent games lead to more violence in society.

The latest survey of 1,000 adults took place on November 8-9 and that 54 percent number held steady from a similar poll conducted in April of this year. In response to the question “How concerned are you about the level of violence in many video games today?” 69 percent indicated they were at least somewhat concerned, while 48 percent were “very concerned.”

In response to Microsoft’s recent Xbox Live dashboard update, which added the ability for parents to limit non-game content such as downloaded movies and television shows on a per-user basis, CNN took a look at the current state of other measures designed to keep kids from viewing content that perhaps they shouldn’t be.

The article focuses mainly on “age gates,” or content that is hidden behind a screen in which users must input their birth date. Obviously such obstacles are easily overcome by any mouse-wielder, regardless of age.

Nationally syndicated columnist Esther Cepeda says something that most columnists would never say: let's blame the people that are not doing their jobs - the parents. The former first-grade school teacher notes in her latest column that kids - that is, very young children - tend to get access to violent video games, movies, and television from parents who are either too weak-willed or too lazy to pay attention to what their kids are doing.

Here is the most salient part of her column:

The author of an opinion piece appearing in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a piece ostensibly related to the Schwarzenegger vs. EMA Supreme Court case, takes a hatchet to videogames.

Author Jack Markowitz offers, “grudgingly,” that “the Supreme Court will uphold the precious freedom to sell stupid, overpriced electronic games to children.”

In an interview with Siliconera, Peter Dille, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, talks about how piracy has impacted the PSP:

Q: The PSP has a strong line-up of Japanese series including Monster Hunter, Final Fantasy, and Persona. While the handheld is thriving over there, in America the PSP seems to be struggling even though those games are coming over here. What do you think is the missing element, aside from trains.

In advance of yesterday’s oral arguments for Schwarzenegger vs. EMA, the First Amendment Center polled over 1,000 adults for their opinion on where responsibility should fall when it comes to deciding whether kids should be able to buy or rent violent videogames.

86 percent of the respondents indicated that a “great deal” of the burden for such choices should fall on parents, while 43 percent indicated that videogame manufacturers and retailers should carry a “great deal” of the responsibility. Only 28 percent thought the government should wield a “great deal” of influence over such decisions.

On the flip side however, 68 percent of those polled said that “yes, the government should be able to prevent the sales or rentals of violent videogames to children under 18.” Only 31 percent said that the government should not be involved in such a policy.

The Parents Television Council has a new Secret Shopper Campaign to tell you about - coincidently a week before the Supreme Court hears the California video game law Schwarzenegger vs. EMA. The PTC claims that it sent "activists" into 109 stores in 14 markets in 11 states: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

The PTC claims that "video game retailers sold Mature-rated games to minors 19 percent of the time, only a slight improvement over the 20 percent failure rate reported by the Federal Trade Commission in 2008." Around 21 stores sold M-rated games to minors, they say.

A chart showing the results can be found here.

The non-profit Web Wise Kids, which tries to keep kids safe online, has received support from a pair of videogame industry organizations.

The enterprise has received a grant from the Entertainment Software Association’s , ESA Foundation (ESAF), that will assist it in reaching middle school students with the “It’s Your Call” cell-phone safety game. The title "offers teens guidance about responsible cell phone behaviors and how to use these devices to enhance their personal safety.”

According to the ESAF, their funding will also back translation of the “Wired With Wisdom” program into Spanish, in order to help Latino parents safeguard their offspring online.

The Pirate Bay Appeal began this week in Stockholm, Sweden, and web site TorrentFreak began covering the first day of proceedings. The site will continue to cover the appeals process as it unfurls in the Swedish Appeals Court. On day one, three of the four defendants (Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstrom) appeared in court with counsel to hash out some of the preliminary disagreements.

One defendant, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, was unable to attend because he is apparently in a hospital in Cambodia and unable to travel. The court decided that the trial would go on without him present but ordered that Svartholm would have to hand over a medical report before October 7.

An underage World of Warcraft player’s dalliance with a fellow female player resulted in the arrest of a 35-year old Lowell, Michigan woman.

Angie L. Jenkins was arrested after traveling to Amherst, New York on June 11 to meet a 16-yeard old boy, who she ended up having sex with in a parked car. Jenkins, according to the Buffalo News, is believed to be the first woman charged in Western New York with using the Internet to entice a minor into sexual activity.

The two met while playing WOW in 2009, and both initially lied about their age, with the boy claiming he was 20 and Jenkins saying she was 21. At a later date the boy confessed to being only 15 (at that time), which Jenkins said didn’t matter. Jenkins reportedly kicked off discussions about meeting in real life and also “initiated the sexual contact” once they did meet.

Once the FBI uncovered Jenkins’ WOW screen name, and provided a subpoena to Blizzard, they were provided with her name, address and telephone number.