Enjoying the perks of having a new Steam client? If you are, then you are in for a two-fold treat for Audiosurf. An update has been unleashed containing new features and fixes. Also, the Audiosurf FM update has just been released. Details in the full article.

Want to know more what's Microsoft's plans for the gaming scene? Well, Corporate Vice President of LIVE, John Schappert, will be one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming 2008 Game Developer Conference (GDC). His address "A Future Wide Open: Unleashing the Creative Community" will be setting the stage for changes in game development in 2008.

Details on John Schapperts upcoming keynote speech after the jump!

PLAYXPERT announced in an official press release that their new line of in-game "widgets," uncannily named PLAYXPERT (oh the horror!), for the avid PC LAN and MMO gamer. These little management tools sit inside your game, offering a semi-transparent feature so that they don't obscure your field of view, but still allow you to view content streamed right through.

 

The universal instant messaging and chat system (with VoIP support) is compatible with Xfire, Yahoo!, AOL, ICQ, and MSN engines for IMing or chatting. But the PLAYXPERT platform is especially helpful for World of Warcraft players, since the initial release will come with special features for the successful Blizzard MMORPG. Future support for other popular games will soon be supported through add-on releases to the platform.

Other widgets include the Armory widget, Thottbot Widget, WoWWiki widget, and a WoWhead widget. A Google widget will also be provided so that any game can find key information online without having to ALT-TAB out of the game and launch a browser. Utilizing an in-game overlay technology, the widgets actually are rendered through DirectX (with OpenGL support coming soon) and not through the Windows GUI.

Aimed specifically for the techie, geeky and even hardware enthusiast gamers, other future widgets will include real-time hardware diagnostics. Game stat tracking, clan and team management, in-game music access along with other additional community features are also slated to come soon.

And of course, budding coders can even add their own widgets to the platform without having to tackle the difficulties in coding overlay engines. PLAYXPERT has already published a full application programming interface (API) for the platform so widget coders can get started on their own custom additions to their gameplay experiences.

 

Well, if it isn't April Fools Day, it's certainly a time for strange news. As reported on digg.com">Digg and first broken by Squid News, it seems that Richard "Dampe" Denton, the creator of video game Ocarina of Time 2D, may not actually be dead.

The post on Squid News outlines a rather plausible account of fact-checking the events behind Dampe's death. Furthermore, it seems his accounts on MSN and MySpace have remained active, which does indicate that someone's using his accounts, at the very least.

Unfortunately, due to the timing of this news, we're still calling this a rumor for now. It could just be a very bad joke, but it also could be an attempt of the developer to get away from the pressures of having to work on OoT2D. In either case, we're hoping more evidence points to his being alive than dead, just so everyone can breathe a sigh of relief.

 

Yeah, yeah, you've read the studies, it's likely that casual gamers are your mothers, so no need to go into the gamers. Money-wise though, this means that Casual Games are big business at the moment. Not to pass-up an opportunity to make a profit, Microsoft has launched a new casual games website.

The site boasts what they claim to be over 400 games in every major genre possible. Of course these figures include games on Xbox Live, MSN Games, and games over Windows Live Messenger. Here's what Microsoft had to say in their Casual Games Fact Sheet:

The casual games space is growing at an unprecedented rate, and Microsoft has emerged as an undisputed leader in multiple-platform casual offerings, with more than 10 years of experience in the space. According to DFC Intelligence, revenue from casual games is expected to grow from $713 million (U.S.) in 2005 to $1.56 billion(U.S.) in 2008, fueled by the global appeal of games such as Bejeweled, Hexic, Diner Dash and Bespelled.

Check out the site yourself if you wish, just click on our "read" link below.

Casual games: small things employees play when they're bored at work.

Playing scrabble bring back a lot of childhood memories for us, and while some of 'em are pretty stupid (Zork is NOT a word, lol), we like to kick back and enjoy the good times this game provided us when we needed a quiet time off from the gaming world...or during the last major power failure.

FUN Technologies just announced that Scrabble cubes is now available for play over at the WorldWinner site since yesterday, which also hosts old faves like Zuma, Bejeweled and Luxor.

This 3-d adaptation of the traditional board game features an ever-changing 3d cube on which players must connect letters to form as many words as possible, with features like “double word score” adapted from the original game. Expect the game to pop up next year at the following sites: GSN.com, AOL Games, MSN Games, Pogo, Real Networks and Virgin Games