A minister has testified that his teenage son asked his parents to close their eyes for a surprise, then shot each of them.

The Rev. Mark Petric cried as he testified on Monday in the bench trial of 17-year-old Daniel Petric, who is accused of killing his mother and shooting his father in 2007.

Hasbro has dropped its lawsuit against the makers of a popular online version of board game Scrabble.

According to documents filed in US District Court in New York, Hasbro dropped the lawsuit on Friday.

Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to the word game, sued Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, brothers from Calcutta, India, this summer. The brothers developed the unauthorised version, called Scrabulous, after they couldn't find an online version they liked.

 Legal case with Facebook plug-in game. Solved by having the name changed from scrabulous to to lexulous

Parents who buy their children video games such as Big Brain Academy for Christmas will be unable to claim them as educational expenses, attracting a stinging rebuke from the games industry.

 Example of the pandering to education within the games industry, that is yet to receive 'official' evaluation or acknowledgment.

Despite the economic gloom, video games and consoles are selling in unprecedented numbers. Industry analyst GfK reports sales this year are up by half over last year's, itself a record.

A Japanese firm said today it would launch an internet-based slot machine game using mug shots of criminal suspects on the country's wanted list.

Violence may still be rife in the world of videogames, but when it comes to religion, caution remains the watchword in the big bucks business.

Sony's decision this month to delay one of the most anticipated games in the history of PlayStation, LittleBigPlanet, to avoid offending Muslims, is the latest sign that videogame-makers are playing prudence when it comes to religion.

Sony finds a new home in cyberspace, writes Jason Hill.

Sony is preparing to open the doors of its new virtual world to the public. After several embarrassing delays, PlayStation3 owners should be able to explore the stylish expanses of PlayStation Home before Christmas.

Take a group of scientists and a video game designer and what do you get? Spore, a game that can help teach players some evolutionary biology.

Videogames are getting smarter with virtual enemies improvising during battles, storylines shifting based on moral choices and in-game characters sending players text messages for help.

Nintendo's Wii Fit game has attracted the ire of childhood obesity experts for telling healthy kids they are fat, which might cause eating disorders and self-esteem issues.

Consider it Star Wars III and a Half - complete with a pivotal plot twist.

When LucasArts releases Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on September 16, the video game will serve as George Lucas' official median between 2005's Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and 1977's Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

Australia's censorship regime is under fire for inconsistent rulings following a recent decision to ban one of the year's most anticipated games, Fallout 3, from sale in this country.

 Discussion of 2008's banned games, and responses to the banning.

As Facebook has blossomed into a hot Internet hangout, its users have passed countless hours playing Scrabble with friends - or at least, an unauthorised version of the word game that Scrabble's owners have tried to shut down.

The Nintendo DS isn't just fun and games anymore for English students at Tokyo's Joshi Gakuen all-girls junior high school. The portable video game console is now being used as a key teaching tool, breaking with traditional Japanese academic methods.

A giggly class of 32 seventh-graders used plastic pens to spell words like "hamburger" and "cola" on the touch panel screen - the key feature of the hit console - following an electronic voice from the machine.

Injured athletes may find themselves playing Nintendo's Wii Fit as part of their rehabilitation.

This and other fitness-oriented video games have "great potential" for core strengthening and rehabilitation and may boost compliance with rehabilitation exercises, Sue Stanley-Green, a professor of athletic training at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, told Reuters Health

The launch of a new video games console is a hallowed day in the calendar of the gaming faithful, many of whom will brave long queues and even call in sick if it means getting their hands on the hardware first.

Rebellious players import GTA IV because our censors still think games are child's play, writes Jason Hill.

The year's most highly-anticipated video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, hits stores on April 29 but many Australian gamers have cancelled their orders.

Simmersion's chief executive, Bob Quodling, says Mycosm is designed so that anyone can quickly create or customise a virtual world for their own non-commercial purposes, regardless of their level of technical or graphic expertise.

"Instead of just creating a gaming engine, we're putting out a virtual worlds engine that allows you to build and share virtual worlds for games, social networking, or simply because you can," he says.

Now from September, Wright will let people play god with his latest brainchild Spore.

"The big hook with Spore is that practically the entire game is user created," said Shane Satterfield, editor-in-chief at GameTrailers website. "Spore is really the first game that pretty much puts all the power in the hands of the player."

Mr McMahon, for Ahmed Raad, said of his client's apparent insensitivity while watching a video of American soldiers shot by a sniper: "How much insensitivity is there among your typical Anglo-Saxon young adult male playing M15 and R-rated video games about car crashes — Auto Theft, or whatever it's called?"

THE most violent video games available could soon be sold in Australia after the Federal Government said it was considering updating the classification system for games to include an R18+ rating.

 Brain Age Interview

 good sales figure fopr australia sector

stats about Wii sales

 Another use for DS

 Discussion of Game localization

 Discussion of the sucess of the Guitar Hero franchise.

 Game that has tutorials to perform real-life magic tricks in front of an audience.

 Largely negative review of award-winning Australian made game.

 Interview with new head of IEAA, places piracy, and the ratings problem high on the list of challenges that they face. Excellent discussion.

A US study by the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona has found surgical residents performed better during simulated surgery after playing on the Wii for an hour beforehand.

The new video game WolfQuest allows players to follow the call of the wild in the role of a wolf in Yellowstone National Park.

Players learn quickly, with help from realistic graphics, that wolves do a lot of running across plains, through forests and up and down steep slopes.

Prof. Ryuta Kawashima, who helped develop Nintendo's "Brain Age" games, is teaming up with Toyota to develop intelligent cars that will help seniors drive safely, the researcher said on Tuesday.

Bruckheimer, whose movies and TV shows include the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and the C.S.I franchise, will set up a gaming lab with MTV Games, the company announced on Wednesday.

Franklin Perry used to spend hours performing video game feats with his thumbs but lately he has been using the Nintendo Wii, and the rest of his body, to regain his strength after suffering a stroke.

The residents at the centre, about 32 kilometres north of Chicago, were an unlikely test audience for the season's hottest toys. The plan: determine which toys to give the grandchildren for Christmas. The assumption was that they would give their grandchildren toys they approved of.

But it didn't turn out that way. The Nintendo Wii was so popular that the residents clamoured for their own.

Some call it Nintendonitis or Nintendo thumb, but it may be known more widely as repetitive strain injury or carpal tunnel syndrome.

CANNY gamers are taking advantage of the weak US dollar and importing games from online merchants much cheaper than most Australians are paying at retail stores.

Chavez supporters in Venezuela's National Assembly suspect the makers of Mercenaries 2: World in Flames are doing Washington's bidding by drumming up support among Americans for an eventual move to overthrow Chavez.

Made using virtual reality software called VR Worlds 2, Dr Rosenthal's cyber crack house could easily be mistaken for a video game. And for good reason, since it's based on the same gaming engine used for the first-person shooter classic Half-Life 2.

Google said Thursday it is testing ways to deliver ads in computer games but declined to comment on the internet buzz that it will be in the market by year's end.

Gaming e-zine 8BitJoystick, through a blog published on the website of newspaper Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reported that Bungie was leaving Microsoft so it could create new game series without being controlled by Microsoft or tied to the Xbox.

A COMPUTER game about a rebel group of humans fighting back against evil aliens who have taken control of the Earth could this week become the biggest phenomenon in entertainment history.

Agatha Christie has found a new lease of life as a video game heroine, with the “Queen of crime novelists” holding her own alongside sector stalwarts Lara Croft and Princess Zelda.

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile, released as an internet download, has become one of the top ten games played on personal computers, the most popular platform for video games, figures released today show.

A youth welfare group has come up with a novel way to improve mental health in young people: an online video game.

But players won't be gunning down hordes of alien scum a la Halo, or hooning around the track in a BMW M3, Need for Speed style.

Rather, Reach Out Central, championed by the Inspire Foundation, is an online role-playing game in which players can "test-drive life and play it when and how you want to".