Welcome to today’s daily dose of game industry news, where we find reports of much-money-investing, new VWs, the spiking of vid-game sales and other strangeness. Welcome to GNoI, please restore your tray-tops to their upright and locked positions, extinguish all flammable materials, and be sure that your seatbelts are fastened as we are now taxing the runway for take-off. GNoI:

Joystiq and Political Game give a nice summary and opine on the current EA vs Take2 dilemma. For those that haven’t been following it, here’s your chance to really catch up on the all the juicy bits as well as a get a good view of some of the longer reaching possible effects of the inevitable aftermath.

Penguin, traditional massmarket/paperback publisher, is broaching new ground with a new interactive fiction feature. Dude(!) where are my interactive choose-your-own-adventures!?

According to the ESRB, DLC can have a different rating than the original title… which means that even though the ESRB is looking to further ‘educate’ parents on the in’s and out’s of the actual rating system for their kiddies, the parents might very feesibly be crying ‘foul’ down the road when they buy a game for their kid with one rating and then let them download some DLC with a higher rating (like Mature) weeks later for the same game… /sigh. I don’t know what the real answer to this is though.

Post mortem roundup of the recent Midway annual report held in Vegas, spurns some questions regarding the once great company’s ability to beat its current losing streak and become viable once more- or are they going to go the way of Atari, who has been dying the slowest corporate death ever.

Very interesting Q&A regarding the future of casual gaming, XLA and newly conceived, I-play with Oberon Media.

38studios has now added an Evercrack ex-pat to their line-up for the still undisclosed MMO project. So now we have some jock running a game company and he’s bringing out a new MMO innovation, which is… erm, a fantasy-world-set-sword-and-sorcery-flinging game?… great

SCi, while not disclosing any actual details as of yet, has confirmed that they are considering an open offer, reportedly in the amount of $100mUSD (likely from NBC). Now, for those not interested, this is a bit of industry blustering for SCi as the big debate is not whether or not they’re going to get the funding as much as who would be giving it to them and at what agreement… this is about control, and the fact that NBC is a big contender for this, which would give them another stronger foothold in a varied media outlet.

According to the authors of GrandtheftChildhood, parents often ignore ESRB ratings on their kiddies games. Why am I hearing crickets instead of shocked gasps of outrage? Oh, that’s right, because I think most of us already knew this to be true.

The Florida State ruling on Jack Thompson, may now be delayed until the end of Summer. Judge Dava Tunis wishes to wait until my birthday, August 31st to release her decision, and I wholeheartedly thank her for the gesture as long as Jackie-boy is duly disbarred. Come on Judge-y and give me a good birthday present!

According to one analyst, the game sales for the industry at large may well have peaked for this current calendar year… seems a bit early with a whole holiday season still many moons away. This seems especially odd with the upcoming release of GTAIV alone looking to break Halo3′s record, but they’re the professionals and it was on the internet so it must be true.

HelloKittyLand with Playhut’s GoLive2 is beginning Closed Beta from April 23rd to May7th. Now for those that aren’t aware, I have a horrible love for cute things, and special, horrible place in my heart for Sanrio in general (particularly Kurumi!) and I believe that HelloKitty Cube Frenzy to be one of the single most ‘evil’ and difficult games ever created… but even I am not exactly jumping up and down to get in on this thing.

According to VirtualWorldsManagement over $184mUSD+ has been invested in 23 different vw companies in Q1 of2008. This is a small TON of moolah, but just the same, considering the recent predictions for VWs/Soc-nets and the comparison of the game industry at large being on par to the film industry for profitable return, it is interesting to note how little the investment amount really is by comparison – even if you segregated the comparison to genre movies alone, it’s still staggeringly small.

Barbie and Mattel in light of recent earnings reports will be moving to a ‘competitive subscription’ model in the very near future. Um, are there really little girls who still play with Barbies enough to warrant this sort of program? I’m asking honestly, because I really can’t believe that there are…

Nasa Learning Tech has cut the budget for their educational MMo project. Yay! Go government go! Don’t spend money on anything educational or innovative! That’s the way to do it!

And here it is, to close out today’s GNoI, your daily dose of zen, complete with NES mods, Grant Morrison, Lego jewelry and pres-candidates getting into wrestling. Begin direct neurological-zen-dowload-now:

Spoon me!

–Aleister

Adicts – Swat Her