.!. Sony Europe’s sandbox platformer receives 10 nods for 12th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, to be handed out Feb. 19 at the DICE Summit in Vegas. In a bid to become the definitive gaming-awards ceremony, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences announced in October that it had folded the International Game Developers Association into [...]

Uwe Boll given lifetime dishonor by Razzies Though it’s a reporter’s duty to present information objectively, it is just shy of objective fact that Uwe Boll movies suck. Since concocting the film adaptation of House of the Dead in 2003, the German director has made a name for himself by regurgitating a steady succession of [...]

What we heard: Yesterday, the other shoe dropped on long-speculated head-count reductions at Xbox 360 creator Microsoft. With early speculation indicating that as many as 15,000 jobs were in danger, Microsoft confirmed that it would cut its workforce by 5,000 over the next 18 months, with the marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR, IT, and R&D [...]

.!. NPD figures have Activision’s rocker outselling Harmonix rival two-to-one in the United States last year. Last week the NPD Group, the industry standard of game-industry research firms, released its US sales figures for 2008. However, the company’s top 10 game rankings only tracked individual products, or SKU (Stock Keeping Units), sold at retailers in [...]

.!. Outrageous Fortune divx The original Gears of War hit the Xbox 360 like a sledgehammer, going on to sell millions of copies and winning GameSpot’s Game of the Year award in 2006. When we reviewed the game, we called it an “amazing technical achievement,” emphasising that “games just don’t typically look this good.” True [...]