Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, Red Alert 3, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2 -- oh my! Folks declaring the death of PC gaming are clearly smoking something, as all those games and more have been making waves at E3 this week. You're going to need a computer to run those, right? Thing is, these days notebooks are outselling desktops by quite a large margin. And for good reason -- who wants a giant, bulky brick uglying up their space?

Hence the rise of gaming laptops. To help you make the call on which one to get and how to configure it, GameDaily has a guide to buying a gaming notebook. It's mostly beginner stuff -- and some of it we kinda wonder about; it asserts that a 1280x800 screen resolution is too low for serious gaming, for example, which we're not sure everyone cares about quite so much. In fact, wouldn't you want a lower screen resolution to ensure that your notebook will be able to handle newer games at the native resolution for a longer time? But all around it's a good intro to what you need to look out for. Give it a read if you're in the market.

During a press reception for the Games for Windows brand at E3 this week, we learned from Microsoft's marketing manager for the Games for Windows program, Kevin Unangst, that the company plans some major announcements for the Games for Windows and the Games for Windows Live brand for next week at Microsoft's annual Gamefest game developer conference.

One of those announcements could be that Microsoft could finally do away with the "Gold" price of the Games for Windows Live. Up until now players that had games that used Games For Windows Live had to pay extra for things like matchmaking, chat, cross-platform multiplayer and other items. IGN is reporting that at least one upcoming game, THQ's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, will have those "Gold" features in Games for Windows Live free out of the box. At the event we askd Unangst why all of PC titles that used Games for Windows Live couldn't do the same thing and he told us, "There's no reason why they shouldn't." We will be chatting more extensively with Unangst next week about their planned announcements at Gamefest.

One of those announcements will be Direct3D 11, the next version of their graphics API for PC gaming. The Gamesfest schedule shows several panels that will talk directly about Direct3D 11 including its support for Shader Model 5.0.

For decades, Mac owners have had to sigh dispiritedly when assessing their gaming options compared to what has been available for the PC. Development studios like Bungie and Blizzard aside, most gaming houses have always decided to create their games for the larger market share, which have always been PC-based. While there have been successful ports of PC games from studios like Aspyr, these have always arrived much later than the launch of the original versions.

Later, a slew of Mac-dedicated studios appeared on the scene (see last week's MacMonday, which focused on Freeverse) and have proven that not only is it possible to create great games for the Mac, but to be successful at the task. This has helped energize the Mac gaming community and is undoubtedly a good thing, but a recent arrival to the Mac lineup of products has added a new element that ought to be considered. In this post we'll talk about how the iPhone could affect developing games for the Mac.

It looks like the line-up for E3 2008 has expanded yet again, even at this late date. The official E3 site (password protected for invited members only) has revealed that the D-Box Motion Code company will have a meeting room next week at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

There's no word on what the company will be showing at E3 but their previous products have included some very expensive gaming controllers for both racing and air simulation titles where the player is enclosed in a seated platform with tons of pedals and throttles. It should be interesting if D-Box will launch any new products at E3.

It's never a good think to miss your financial goals on the stock market. PC graphics chip maker Nvidia found that our the hard way today. Late on Thursday the company announced it will miss its projected revenues for the just finished second quarter by about $200 million thanks in part to reducing prices for chips to compete with AMD's new products as well as a one-time charge to fix a defect in an older notebook chip.

That piece of news sent Nvidia's stock way down today on the NASDAQ market. Even though trading was cut short several hours because of Friday's Independence Day holiday, Nvidia's stock went down 30.73 percent to settle at $12.49 a share. In addition to the bad financial news from the company, several financial analysts downgraded the company's stock today ahead of trading.

PC graphics chip maker Nvidia has been riding high lately with impressive revenue figures in the last several financial quarters. Now it looks like the company has hit a bit of a speed bump as it announced late on Wednesday that it will not make its previous predictions for revenue for the quarter that just ended on June 30.

Previously Nvidia predicted the quarter would generate revenues of about $1.1 billion but now that has been revised with numbers between $875 million to $950 million. Part of the reason is that Nvidia was forced to lower prices faster than expected on its high end chips to compete with new ATI chips from its main rival AMD. Nvidia will also take a one time charge of between $150 million to $200 million to deal with a hardware issue in some of its older notebook graphics chips. Nvidia's stock price is expected to take a hit later this morning when official trading begins; after-hours trading saw the stock plunge as much as 20 percent on the news.

Casual gamers interested in waggling a stick might be interested in GoLive2's Stix controller, a Wii remote-like motion-sensing device for the PC.

Modeled unabashedly after the Wii remote, the Stix 200 controller "allows for a more active role in Internet games," according to the product's official website. Further, "The Stix 200's unique, 2-D motion control technology and LED lights transform thousands of existing games into a brand new gaming experience."

Focusing specifically on casual gamers, the Stix controllers wouldn't be ideal for hardcore titles requiring more than two to four buttons, but might provide a bit of extra entertainment for simple web-based games. Prospective buyers are encouraged to visit the Stix website for more information.

One of the biggest problems currently with PC gaming is that many hardware rigs simply can't run modern PC game titles. Stardock, who has a better handle on this issue than most, still got surprised when people couldn't run their latest title, the strategy-sim game The Political Machine 2008. Why? Because the game requires video cards that can run pixel shader 2.0 features and that's something that many people who pick up the game discover they can't do on their PCs (the game is designed more for a mainstream audience).

So Stardock has announced on their official forums that they will offer full refunds on The Political Machine, even if folks bought the game from a brick-and-mortar store. Refund requests must be made within the first 10 days after the game is bought and must contain the box, the receipt and a note on what video card the person has installed n their PC.

[Via Blue's News]

There are various middleware game engines trying to get clients; Epic's Unreal Engine, Valve's Source Engine and so on. Another such company is Trinigy who today announced that the seventh version of their Vision Engine is now available for use by game developers.

According to the press release there are numerous new features in the engine which has been designed for use for PC game development as well as other platforms. These include support for the Bullet physics engine, a new terrain editor and a revised geometry pipeline. The engine is already being used for, among other titles, the upcoming Dungeon Hero game from Firefly Studios.

Nvidia has been cranking out the new releases of drivers for its products lately. Last week it announced its new GeForce 200 series of graphics chips and Thursday it released some new official drivers (117.41) for the GTX 280 and 260 chips. The new releases are mainly for some minor issues.

However those who want to walk on the wild side and have the GTX 280 or 260 cards installed on their PCs or a GeForce 9800 GTX card can also download some new beta drivers (177.39). These beta drivers allow for PhysX hardware game physics support for games that have those features implemented. Nvidia Bought PhysX earlier this year and this represents their first attempt at bringing the hardware support directly into their graphics cards. Again these are beta drivers so that means download and install them at your own risk.

Last week, AMD revealed what game graphics might look like with demos of their new graphics chip that was code named "NV770". Today the company officially revealed their next generation high end ATI branded graphics chips. The Radeon HD 4800 series are designed not just to be fast PC graphics chips for gaming they are supposed to be affordable. The high end Radeon HD 4870 comes in at $299. This compares to Nvidia's just announced GeForce GTX 280 which comes in at $600.

Already web sites like FiringSquad, HardOCP and others are praising the new ATI chips based on running benchmarks of both the 4870 and the cheaper 4850 model. The sites stated that both chips give tons of performance for the cost compared to the competition at Nvidia. AMD has also released some new "hotfix" drivers for the 4870 and 4850 models that improve stablility and performance. You can download them at AMD's web site.

The folks at Novint have demoed their unique force feedback PC game controller the Novint Falcon by, among other means, using Valve's Half-Life 2. The demo allowed people to use the controller to "feel" effects like weapon fire recoil, the weight of holding objects like barrels and even feel textures in the game world. Now IGN is reporting that Novint and Valve are planning to expand their relationship.

The report states that Valve plans to support the Novint Falcon beyond just Half-Life 2 to cover all of the games covered in their Orange Box collection (Half-Life 2, Episodes One and Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal) along with Counter-Strike Source and the upcoming Left 4 Dead. Novint will also release a special Orange Box version of the Falcon controller later this year. A new pistol grip attachment for the Falcon should start shipping to stores soon.

Last week Nvidia launched their new high powered GeForce GTX 200 series of GPUs and also released new graphics drivers to go along with them. But what about the rest of the GeForce family? That problem has been solved with new drivers for the 6, 7, 8, and 9 series of GeForce cards.

The 175.19 version of the drivers adds support for the Hybrid SLI and three way SLI support and has an improved shader optimizer. That should improve performance and load times for a number of DirectX9 and 10 games among other applications. You can get the full info on what's been added to the 175.19 drivers via the release notes.