THQ today announced that its uDraw Gaming Tablet will be available in the US in time for this year’s holiday season. This wireless drawing system that will also be used by games from THQ is exciting news, unleashing the creative potential of gamers (and non-gamers alike) and once again thrusting the Wii into the forefront of “innovation”.

At last year's press conference EA shocked many by leading with titles aimed at kids (particularly young girls) and families. In one of the more uncomfortable E3 moment's ever, thousands of mostly male, testoserone driven journalists watched as a line of tween girls played party games.  Can you say creepy?  Well, that sojurn into pacifism and family harmony ended faster than Ahkenaten's brief experiment with monotheism at yesterday's EA press conference.  Blood, guts and dismemberment were center stage.

Nintendo is fond of saying, and I believe it will reiterate this morning's press conference, that the reason for its success is innovation and creativity realized in both hardware and software. There is no doubt that Microsoft's newest offering, Kinect, is also innovative. More powerful than the Wii, the new hardware device can see and hear us, permits us to control the console with voice and movement. But is that enough?

The generation that grew up on Xbox and Playstation has now grown-up and has kids. Microsoft is betting that those twenty-somethings that typified the the rock-and-roll pioneer of video gaming are now looking to play with their family. In a bold departure from the hard-core blood-and-guts b-roll that was the staple of E3 launches in the past, tonight's debut of Project Natal, now renamed Kinect, was a love fest that featured yoga and pet tigers.

It seems that many PC users of the new expansion to Dragon Age are finding the game nearly impossible to finish because of crashes.  In many reported cases the program crashes to the desktop, however on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine the game just locks the computer solid, as if hit by a petrify spell.  How is it that a nearly flawless game has fallen to such a poorly executed expansion?

Just received word about the new Tiger Woods On-line:

Nintendo's announcement that its next generation hand-held gaming platform will feature glasses-free 3D, once again places Nintendo in the forefront of technological innovation.  Time and again, Nintendo has pushed the technological envelope, reinventing what we think of as gaming.  Mario Paint, the Wii, Wii Fit, the Gameboy and the DS.  All of these products have taken gaming in new directions, unfettered by the preconceptions of established market.  3D, partciularly 3D without glasses, is a bold, innovative step that will help propel the company forward even as it faces new competition fr

My experience with Battlefield Bad Company 2 has been mixed.  The first few times I tried to run the PC version it crashed to the desktop everytime I died  the first mission.  Then, suddenly, it started working perfectly without any intervention on my part.  Now, just as suddenly, the game has gone dead again.

Last week I wrote about how Steam's outage killed my plans for an afternoon of gaming.  Today, Joystiq reports that Ubisoft's DRM authentication server went down under the strain of users looking to play and killed the weekend plans of countless gamers.

Over and over, users are reminded that legitimate purchasers of games are often punished by the very programs  they supported because of DRM gone amuck.

It isn't just games either, that are hurt when corporations treat their customers as the enemy.  This week my iPhone crashed.  I called into Apple and was told that I didn't have Apple Care, but I did. I even had the receipt.

Even as Steve Ballmer was talking up Cloud Computing today, I fell victim to it.  All I wanted to do was play a little Modern Warfare 2 to blow off a little steam.  Unfortunately, Steam seems to have been down all afternoon.  Their community sections says that they are down for maintenance...but should their janitorial services keep me from playing a game I "own"?