CVG is reporting that the first tidbits of Activision's new Bond game have been detailed in GamesMaster magazine. Pulling from both Casino Royale and the Quantum of Solace films, the new game will feature mostly FPS gameplay with some third-person elements. "GM says that the core FPS gameplay is broken up with third-person elements, supposedly to remind you that you're 'being' Bond, which sounds like an idea straight from the 'brand' department. The mag compares the game's cover system to that of GTA IV, where the camera pulls out to an external view so you can see Bond on screen against the wall with his enemies in the background. A bit like erm, every cover system then."

Ubisoft's Julian Geright is apparently quite confident in the power of the next installment of the Tom Clancy series with Tom Clancy: Endwar . Designed specifically for the PS3 and Xbox 360, Geright hopes that this is a breakthrough for console RTS play similar to Goldeneye's FPS breakout. "This is the first game of its type and I don't think that games on console will be made the same after Endwar, [...] It's kind of boastful, but I really do think that this is a watershed type of game."

Nexon America, publisher of MapleStory, has announced the closed beta for a new free-to-play, FPS-centric, MMO. The new "Combat Arms" is planned for a full release later this summer and promises not only the ability to customize your soldier, but also your guns and equipment. "The closed beta test will run exclusively at FilePlanet.com for one week beginning May 30th. Once the game is released to the public, Combat Arms will receive regular content updates, including new weapons, gear, maps, and more free game modes."

spoco2 writes "The id Software site has announced that work has begun on the next sequel to their most famous game, Doom. Will they be able to resurrect the series after what many considered to be a serious misstep with Doom 3? Oh... and they're hiring for the team, so maybe you can steer them in the right direction?"

Slack3r78 writes "Gizmodo is running a feature putting the gaming marketing hype to the test and seeing whether it really makes your playing any more 1337. They match up the latest products from Razer and SteelSeries along with some five-year-old Logitech products and come to the conclusion that ... it doesn't seem to matter that much. It looks like maybe you can't buy your way into finally beating that annoying 13-year-old at your favorite FPS after all."

An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA's CUDA system, originally developed for their graphics cores, is finding migratory uses into other massively parallel computing applications. As a result, it might not be a CPU designer that ultimately winds up solving the massively parallel programming challenges, but rather a video card vendor. From the article: 'The concept of writing individual programs which run on multiple cores is called multi-threading. That basically means that more than one part of the program is running at the same time, but on different cores. While this might seem like a trivial thing, there are all kinds of issues which arise. Suppose you are writing a gaming engine and there must be coordination between the location of the characters in the 3D world, coupled to their movements, coupled to the audio. All of that has to be synchronized. What if the developer gives the character movement tasks its own thread, but it can only be rendered at 400 fps. And the developer gives the 3D world drawer its own thread, but it can only be rendered at 60 fps. There's a lot of waiting by the audio and character threads until everything catches up. That's called synchronization.'"

Croakyvoice writes "Law56ker has today released the Nxdoom Collection, a massive collection of 220 Doom Mods for the Dreamcast, a collection of best Total Conversions, Megawads, and Various levels for use on NXDOOM for the Sega Dreamcast. Wads Include Duke Nukem GP, Half Life, Star Wars, Goldeneye, Quake 2 and Star Trek. They come on 2 CDS." Registration is required for downloading anything, but if you're low on Megawads this seems like one-stop shopping.

Nvidia has stated that their translation of Ageia's physics engine to CUDA is almost complete. To showcase the capabilities of the new tech Nvidia ran a particle demonstration similar to Intel's Nehalem demo, at ten times the speed. "While Intel's Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. In the very likely event that Nvidia's next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can't ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics."

An anonymous reader writes "TG Daily is running an interesting interview with EPIC founder and Unreal creator Tim Sweeney. Sweeney is anyway very clear about his views on the gaming industry, but it is surprising how sharply he criticizes the PC industry for transforming the PC into a useless gaming machine. He's especially unhappy with Intel, which he says has integrated graphics chipsets that 'just don't work'."

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Brandon Erickson has an interesting post about an experiment on players' emotional reactions to killing and being killed in a first-person shooters (FPS) with a group of students who played James Bond 007: Nightfire while their facial expressions and physiological activity were tracked and recorded moment-to-moment via electrodes and various other monitoring equipment. The study found that "death of the player's own character...appear[s] to increase some aspects of positive emotion." The authors believe this may result from the temporary "relief from engagement" brought about by character death. "Part of this has to do with the intriguing aesthetic question of precisely how the first-person-shooter represents the player after the moment of death," says Clive Thompson. "This sudden switch in camera angle — from first person to third person — is, in essence, a classic out-of-body experience, of exactly the sort people describe in near-death experiences. And much like real-life near-death experiences, it tends to suffuse me with a curiously zen-like feeling." An abstract of the original article, "The psychophysiology of James Bond: Phasic emotional responses to violent video game events" is available on the web." Obnoxiously this alleged scholarly research is not available for free, so we'll just have to speculate wildly what it says based on the abstract.

russoc4 writes "Most people who play the United States Army's freeware FPS sit through training simulations so that they may be able to get into the action and rack up some kills. The medic skills learned in the training allow you to heal teammates in the game, but it seems that they also apply in real life situations. According to Wired and the America's Army forums, 'a North Carolina man who saw an SUV flip and roll on a highway last November was able to provide medical aid to the victims with skills he learned from the America's Army.'" See? We learn things from videogames! Feign Death works sometimes, too.

1up is reporting that, along with the big announcements from yesterday's MacWorld event, the welcome news trickles down that OSX will be getting some more games. The much-delayed Spore has been confirmed for the platform, as has the hit FPS title Call of Duty 4. "In Spore's case, the magic of cross-platform portability is achieved through the use of a special software layer supplied by Toronto-based TransGaming Technologies. This software is capable of interpreting hardware calls to Windows DirectX into Mac-capable instructions. Through use of this technology, Electronic Arts (and others) seem hopeful about bringing even more games to mac in the coming months."

With FASA studios closed and the Shadowrun IP now under better care, what remains of the disastrous Shadowrun FPS is now being swept under the rug. Team Xbox notes that the official forums for the game are going to be closed. This news comes with hope for a better tomorrow from the ex-FASA folks: "We're going to be closing down the Shadowrun forums in about two weeks. As many of you know, the old FASA crew has mostly moved on to other roles within Microsoft, and that means we don't have enough people to monitor and respond to posts here for the coming year. We'll eventually close down www.shadowrun.com and transition it to the folks working on the next generation of Shadowrun products."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux-gamers.net has posted a thorough, although harsh, comparison of free software shooters. It compares seven open source shooter games in a lengthy discussion. Few have gone to the trouble of comparing and carefully examining the genre before. The author ranks the games in the following order (best to worst): Warsow, Tremulous, World of Padman, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, OpenArena, and Sauerbraten. In making these choices, it claims to use gameplay, design, innovation and presentation as criteria and includes a short history of free software shooters in the introduction."

An anonymous reader writes "For the first time, the Army has set up a project office, just for building videogames. The military has been training troops with games for decades, of course. But this is the first wing of the armed forces dedicated exclusively for gaming. One of the first projects: a tool kit that would let soldiers "build and customize their own training scenarios — just like the Marines' did, adapting Armed Assault for military purposes."

Next Generation has one of those end of the year 'top 10' lists we all love so much, with plenty of room for discussion on this one. They claim to have picked out the top 10 game design innovations of 2007. It's hard to argue with elements like Portal's portals or Mass Effect's conversation wheel, but was Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii really as good as a mouse-and-keyboard PC FPS? "When people ask 'How do we make a good shooter on a console' what they really mean is 'how do we make a shooter that feels as quick and responsive as a PC shooter on the console?' Apparently the answer is the Wii mote. I was blown away by this fact. Nintendo had always been the 'family friendly' console to me so I didn't consider the FPS ramifications of the Wiimote but clearly it's the best tool for the job. With some tweaking and some refinement down the line I could see the Wii (or a console with Wii like controls) becoming the platform of choice for hardcore FPSers, even over the PC. If this does become the case it will owe it all to Metroid Prime 3."

The Call of Duty series is a benchmark for first-person shooters. The first title refreshed the already-tired World War II setting by added a gripping gameplay-based narrative, while the second was an important launch title for the Xbox 360. The newest chapter in the series, Call of Duty 4, is a new standard for the series and the genre. Set in modern times, the title breaks the mold of previous CoD titles in other ways as well. Most intriguing is its online 'character' development system, which takes some of the great ideas used in Battlefield 2 to the next level. Though the game suffers somewhat from overly-familiar gameplay in the single-player component, you'll probably be too busy gawking at the scenery to care. Read on for my impressions of this extremely attractive series update.

"PC Gaming is dying," the analysts tell us. "The Massive genre is the only viable business model left," websites report. That they're off the mark is obvious to anyone that's actually played a PC game in the last few years; games like Sam and Max , Battlefield 2 , or any of the numerous puzzle titles available online prove the flexibility and strength of the PC platform. Then, every once in a while, you get an offering like the Orange Box. A value-packed storm of content from Valve, this single sku offers five complete games at an amazing price. That would be great, even if the games weren't any good ... but they are. They're very, very, very good. Read on for my impressions of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and (the cake is a lie) Portal.

mytrip passed on a link to a PC World post about a unique accessory for FPS gamers. Called the 3rdSpace Gaming Vest, its goal is to translate in-game impacts into physical sensations. "Designed by a surgeon, the vest was originally created for use in the medical field to poke and prod patients in order to get a sense for what they were feeling. Since then, the vest has been adapted for the game industry, capable of delivering hits and shots exactly where you would feel them. Utilizing air pouches — four on front, four in back — the vest nudges and jabs gamers at eight different contact points."

Eurogamer notes that the beta demo for Unreal Tournament 3 is now available over at Fileplanet. "Currently the open beta demo is only available to Windows users, and will give you all a chance to test out a couple of maps and then leave your feedback for Epic Games so it can make a more polished end product - like a shoe."