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Last month a long-in-development fan-made continuation of the classic King's Quest adventure game series was shut down due to a cease-and-desist order by the franchise's current owners Activision. Now the makers of the non-commercial game, The Silver Lining, say they want to take the next step and purchase the intellectual rights to the King's Quest franchise from the publisher.

Our sister site Joystiq spoke to the game's co-project director and art director Richard Flores at PAX East 2010 this weekend who stated their intentions to purchase the rights "if an online movement to reverse Activision's decision to stop production on the title was unsuccessful." The report has no details on how the developer, Phoenix Online Studios, plans to raise the money to accomplish this but we are guessing it's going to take an amount in at least the six figure range for Activision to be interested.

Even though the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 has taken critical hits from both fans and game journalists alike, sales of Infinity Ward's latest shooter title are supposedly higher than those of the previous game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. But how do these two games really stack up against each other? In our latest article in our Big Versus series we tackle that question head on as we compared the 2007 released Call of Duty 4 to Infinity Ward's latest entry in their series Modern Warfare 2.

Download the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Demo (1.37 GB)
Check out all the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare downloads
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Activision didn't mention E3 once during its press conference Tuesday night but the event certainly wouldn't have been held without all those journalists who just happened to be in Los Angeles attending the event. We mentioned a couple of things about the press conference already but here are a few more bits that might interest PC gamers:

Treyarch's Call of Duty: World at War was one of several games show in trailer form at the event (no live demos unfortunately). One of the two trailers showed off co-op gameplay in the Pacific Theater of WWII which is a first for th Call of Duty series. Also, the company announced that Jack Bauer himself, actor Kiefer Sutherland, will voice a character in the game and his unmistakable gravel-like voice was heard in the co-op trailer.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was also shown and is the latest open world action game for Marvel's web slinger. The visuals of Spider-Man engadging in mid-air combat against the Vulture were pretty impressive.

The new James Bond game based on the movie Quantum of Solace was also shown in demo form. As previously announced the game will also have movie elements from Daniel Craig's first Bond flick Casino Royale and we were treated to two gameplay sections in the trailers. One, from Casino Royale, showed Bond taking out armed bad guys in a hotel room and creating a lot of damage. The other was a never-before-seen section from Quantum of Solace which showed Bond fighting the bad guys in a sewer system.

While mention was made on the just completed Activision Blizzard merger no Blizzard or former Vivendi Games titles were shown at the event.

After months of going through the legal motions it's finally official. Activision and Vivendi Games are now no more; as the merger of the two game publishers behind Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and many other game franchises has been completed. Both companies issued press releases this morning with the news of the new Activision Blizzard. The company will be traded on the NASDAQ stock market under the name ATVI.

Technically Vivendi Games merged with an Activision subsidiary with shares of Vivendi Games' stock turned into Activision stock. At the same time, Vivendi Games' parent company Vivendi bought $1.7 billion in Activision stock giving Vivendi a 52 percent ownership stake in Activision Blizzard. A few days from today Activision Blizzard will launch a $4 billion all cash tender offer to purchase shares at $27.50 a share. If the tender offer goes through Vivendi will then own up to 68 percent of Activision Blizzard.