A joystick built like a tank

by Will Greenwald
It's hard to get old-school arcade action with today's controllers. Whether it's the Wii's motion-sensing remote or the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3's wireless gamepads, they just don't capture the frantic, rugged joystick-beating and button-thumping of yesteryear. Don't worry, though. $200 will get you the glory back, thanks to X-Arcade.

X-Arcade makes retro arcade controllers, and the Tankstick is the company's beefiest, most fearsome unit. This massive controller weighs 20 pounds and sports two joysticks, 22 buttons, and a trackball. Most impressive is this bad boy's lifetime warranty; X-Arcade will repair or send replacement parts for the Tankstick (or any of their other controllers) if it ever breaks. If it breaks in the first year, they'll even send you a replacement and foot the bill to send your broken stick back to them. I wouldn't worry too much about them breaking, though. The Tankstick is unbelievably sturdy, and X-Arcade claims its buttons are designed to withstand 1 million presses in their lifetime.

Xbox 360 getting next-gen 'Pac-Man'

Microsoft, together with Namco Bandai Games America, on Tuesday announced a new version of the classic arcade Pac-Man at the Pac-Man World Championships in New York's Times Square. Pac-Man Championship Edition will have the first new mazes in 26 years. The new title is set to be available Wednesday morning on the Xbox Live Marketplace for 800 Microsoft points.

Finalists Robert Glashuettner from Austria (age 28) and Carlos Romero from Mexico (age 27) went head to head on the new version, in lieu of the classic '80s title. Both were competing for the chance to win 100,000 Microsoft points (valued at about $1,250), a special Pac-Man edition of the Xbox 360, and free Quizno's sandwiches for the next 26 years. Romero, who has been playing video games since age 6, won the face-off, beating Glashuettner 22,160 to 17,730. As a runner-up, Glashuettner nets 40,000 Microsoft points, which is valued at about $500.

Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani also announced that he is retiring from game development to teach at Tokyo Polytechnic University. He had previously taught character design studies at the University of Arts in Osaka.

For Paris Hilton, 'The Prison Life' is all games

From GSN, the creative minds who brought us such enduring game classics as Kim Jong-Il: Missile Maniac, Rosie vs. Trump and Foley's Follies, comes The Prison Life: Paris, which offers players a behind-the-bars peek at the hotel heiress' life in the clink.

Orange is the new pink in this online title, in which an animated Hilton in stiletto heels, designer sunglasses and an orange jumpsuit attempts to undertake her prison duties under the watchful eye of a baton-wielding warden. "Paris is in jail and the warden has assigned her to design and build license plates. Help her with her job and watch out for her little dog "Clinkerbell"! explain the directions on GSN.com.

Players position the smirking Hilton between levers that "stamp" the blank California vanity license plates as they roll by on a conveyor belt. Line up the stamper with the plates using arrow keys and win a point. Miss and get slapped with an insult like: "Ouch--Lindsay Lohan plays better than you!" In a nod to Hilton's celebutante existence, the plates sport such phrases as PRTYGRL, DUI4ME, DRV2FST and PRVTCEL.

The tabloid story du jour started last year, when Hilton was arrested for driving under the influence and sentenced to probation. She also had her license suspended. In February, the paparazzi favorite was stopped for driving 70 mph in a 35 mph zone and charged with violating her probation. That occurence led to her current 23-day stint at the not-so-glam Century Regional Detention Facility in suburban Los Angeles.

PS3 is tops in Australia and a failure in the US

Michael Ephraim, managing director of Sony Australia, has officially announced that the Playstation 3 is the console war king - in Australia. According to Ephraim, sales figures in the Land Down Under have shown the "PS3...outselling Wii and Xbox 360 every week, except for last week."

The recent stories like this one out of the Sony camp are becoming pathetic at best. The company who formerly touted its dominance over the video game industry is left touting a 50,000 unit sale for March and a sales lead "for every week, except for the last week." Which brings me to another issue: what happened last week? Is this a sign of things to come?

Sony has gone to the well one too many times and now it's living with the ramifications of its poor decisions. Sony may be the leader in Australia, but it will never be the leader in the United States and within a few years, will finish dead last in Japan as well. The end is near for Sony's game division and time is running out on a new plan. There is no way the company will rise to the top of the console wars, but in the United States, look for Sony to finish second.

Yes you did just read that. And just to make you a little more confused, Nintendo will finish dead last. Why you ask? It's simple: the video game industry is controlled by software developers and very few of those companies will be willing to drop the time and money it takes to develop a new control scheme for the Wii.

I know this may sound like the same old story that most Wii fanboys have been laughing at for the past six months, but as we move into the summer and the holiday season, the future is becoming all too clear.

Microsoft is leading the console wars right now regardless of Wii shortages because it offers more to the developers than the Wii or the PS3. We can talk all we want about the innovative Wii console and how it sets a new standard for the video game industry, but it is not a money-maker for software developers like the Xbox 360 is. If I was writing this ten years ago, then that argument would not only be valid, it would be true. Unfortunately, we are knee-deep in an era of cash flow dictating what we play and how we play it. And believe it or not, the Wii doesn't fit into that business model.

In order to turn a profit in this business, most developers need to take your favorite game and port it to other systems. And because the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are so much more powerful than the Wii, developers typically start their work on these consoles. Once the game is complete on say, the 360 for example, they can easily map the entire game's controls to the PS3 controller because it offers the same layout: four buttons, two analog sticks and a D-pad. For the Wii, it's not so easy. Instead, developers need to create an entirely new control scheme and some kind of interaction with the Wii functionality or else the game will be hammered by video game reviewers begging for better controls.

Now I know what you're thinking: it may be difficult, but with the number of Wiis in homes in the US, it makes sense to spend the extra time and money to port a game to the Wii. Wrong. There are a number of issues that may arise when developing and porting games and with suits dictating a release schedule and a budget that often times runs over on the original port, it quickly becomes impractical to develop a new control scheme for the Wii.

The Wii will become (or has it already?) a mini-game console that will feature big games from Nintendo and the like, but will never reach the pinnacle that Microsoft will enjoy in this generation.

So where does that leave Sony? A distant second to the Xbox 360. Over the course of the next five to ten months, Sony will be releasing a slew of wildly popular games like Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy and Killzone. Not only will these games help bolster sales of the system, an impending PS3 price drop will significantly increase the number of people who will choose a PS3 over a Wii or Xbox 360.

With that said, Sony has already done enough damage that it cannot recover from. Why you ask? It's simple: Microsoft obviously understood this business far better than Sony and wooed software developers. Microsoft understood that hardware doesn't drive sales and make a console king, it's the software that dictates who will come out on top. Sony on the other hand, rested on its laurels and thought an advanced (and expensive) device would be enough to run Nintendo and Sony out of the video games industry for good. Obviously Sony was wrong. By relying on hardware, developing for the console was difficult and the centerpiece of the device: its Blu-ray player, has been all but ignored by the average video game player who only wants to play Madden and couldn't care less about the high-def DVD wars.

So, in an age where money takes center stage and innovation is relegated to other forms of entertainment, the video game industry trudges on with executives claiming victories and fans screaming obscenities at each other in a Halo death match. And while some people believe their own favorite console will become the leader of this generation, time is running out. The Xbox 360 has an installed base that demands developer attention, while the Wii has the most entertaining experiences we have ever enjoyed and the Playstation 3 is nothing more than an expensive piece of machinery that has yet to prove its worth. But within a few shorts months, all of the cards will be on the table and each member of the pack will take its rightful place in order: The Xbox 360, followed by the Playstion 3 and the Wii.

With GreenBorder, Google gets deeper into Net security

Google's purchase of GreenBorder Technologies--a browser virtualization software company that creates a sandboxed environment for your existing Firefox or Internet Explorer browse--follows on the heels of Google announcing a blog from its nascent antimalware team. With rumors of a possible forthcoming antivirus acquisition, the Mountain View search giant has jumped into the Internet security business feet first.

Nerves must be raw at traditional security vendors Symantec and McAfee. Last year Microsoft announced its own security suite, Microsoft Windows Live Onecare, and proceeded to capture a lion's share of sales in the Internet security suite space. Now Google is arming itself with online security products, possibly providing these tools for free. Unlike Microsoft, Google's drive is more focused. Where Microsoft is providing tools to defragment your hard drive and backup files in addition to their firewall and antivirus choices, Google appears to be protecting their main asset: online businesses.

In a paper, "The Ghost in the Browser" (in PDF), Google's antimalware researchers looked at several billion Web sites. They studied a subgroup of 12 million web sites, within which they found 1 million engaging in drive-by downloads of malicious code. Overall that's only 0.1 percent (less than 1 percent) of all the Web sites, but any one bad experience on the Internet is enough to threaten Google's long-term usefulness. By purchasing software technology that protects the end-user from malicious code, Google is ensuring that most people enjoy an event-free experience while surfing the Internet.

Mozilla issues security updates for Firefox 2 and 1.5

By Robert Vamosi
Mozilla has released Firefox 2.0.0.4 and Firefox 1.5.0.12 to address six security vulnerabilities. Most users will automatically receive this update and be asked to restart Firefox to install it. This update will probably be the final one for Firefox 1.5. As such, Mozilla provides an easy upgrade path for current 1.5 users to upgrade to 2.0. All Firefox users are urged to install this update, as it addresses the following security issues CVE-2007-2871 (XUL Popup Spoofing); CVE-2007-2870 (XSS using addEventListener); CVE-2007-1362 (Path Abuse in Cookies) CVE-2007-2869 (Persistent Autocomplete Denial of Service) CVE-2007-2867 and CVE-2007-2868 (Crashes with evidence of memory corruption).

This update also enhances Firefox support within the Windows Vista operating system, although links within some applications still may not open in Firefox even if you have chosen Firefox as your default browser; a Windows Media Player plug-in still doesn't exist for Firefox; Windows Vista Parental Controls are not completely honored yet within Firefox; and cookies and saved forms from Internet Explorer still have to be manually imported. Mozilla has posted workarounds for these.

Finally, this release of Firefox adds language support for Afrikaans and Belarusian.

YouTube Trojan horse rides in on Web TV show's fame

According to Trend Micro, a Trojan horse that downloads a certain YouTube video could compromise your computer. The video appears to be an episode of Afterworld, a Web TV series about a society where technology is dead. Security vendor Websense has also been tracking this Trojan horse and has traced the video to a .su domain, which was originally assigned to the former Soviet Union and still remains in use today.

The use of online media files to infect end users with malware is not new. A worm last October used a JavaScript flaw in Apple Quicktime to spread on MySpace. For this attack, Websense has produced, ironically, an informative YouTube video demonstrating what happens to your computer. This YouTube Trojan steals personal information from a compromised PC and then broadcasts it to an undisclosed location.