"More intensity, Alec, or the stunt double gets your love scene."

THQ has announced a new “trans-media” strategy for turning their biggest games into blockbuster movie titles. First on the list, it seems, is the open world sci-fi epic Red Faction.

But hold on for just a second. Don’t video games make terrible, terrible movies? Oh yes. (more…)

Apple has released official sales figures for the iPad launch: by midnight on Saturday 3 April, over 300,000 units had been sold, including pre-orders. In addition, new iPad owners had downloaded over one million apps from Apple’s App Store and over 250,000 ebooks from its iBookstore by the end of day one.

Steve Jobs says, “It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world—it’s going to be a game changer. iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad.”

Check out this video taken by Andrew Miller just before opening time on 3 April at the Apple Store in Portland:

Towards the end of last week Twitter quietly implemented a small tweak to the way it displays search results. The three “most popular” recent tweets containing the search term are now displayed above the rest of the chronological results, with a note to indicate how many times each has been retweeted.

Taylor Singletary, Developer Advocate at Twitter, explains a little of the thinking behind the new feature: “With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author’s profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted, favorited, replied, and more. It’s an evolving algorithm that we’ll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time.”

Here’s a screenshot of a search for the term “easter”, illustrating the new feature:

The “most popular tweets” feature is currently opt-in for developers, so don’t expect to see it in your favourite third-party app just yet.

Broadband provider iBurst has launched iGame Unlimited as a premium open gaming platform for South Africa’s online gaming community.

For only R99 per month, iBurst subscribers using the new iDSL package will have access to one of the fastest, most responsive gaming servers in South Africa, with a host of extra features to make online gaming better, easier and more rewarding. The biggest advantage is that for iGame Unlimited subscribers, all traffic to the iGame server is free—no longer counting towards your normal bandwidth cap.

The iGame platform is open to all gamers in South Africa, connecting via any ISP, and has already become one of the largest gaming communities in the country, attracting gamers of all ages. iGame Unlimited is available exclusively to iBurst iDSL customers to give them a host of exclusive benefits. For players that are not iBurst Wireless customers and want to subscribe to iGame Unlimited, they can pick up a 80 MB iDSL account for only R19/month extra.

iGame Unlimited users not only have uncapped gaming bandwidth, but get preferential status with guaranteed game play even when the servers get busy, will receive priority support on the iGame community, and will be automatic entered into monthly prize pools.

“We recently redesigned our iDSL offering for ADSL users to bypass Telkom’s routing infrastructure and connect directly in to iBurst’s core. This offers gamers a better connection with lower latency (responsiveness) and jitter (consistency). Now, with iGame Unlimited, gamers can play to their heart’s content using one of the best gaming servers around, without worrying about using up their bandwidth,” says Steve Briggs, Executive Head of Commercial iBurst.

iGame is one of South Africa’s most successful gaming communities, with an active community support network provided by Nanogames, and offering a wide range of popular titles. It hosts multiplayer servers for popular PC games like Call of Duty 4 and Call of Duty 5: World at War, Team Fortress, Wolfenstein, Quake4, Track Mania and Left 4 Dead 2. Gamers simply require a legal copy of the game and the iGame game server IP address.

Earlier this morning we announced the winner of the uncapped MWEB adsl competition. Congratulations to Monique Theron and we thank her for supporting our competition! (She retweeted our post quite a few times!)

Bandwidth blog hopes you enjoy your two months of uncapped 4MB adsl!

"I'm the Duke. I NEVER come early."

By now the most famous game never to have been made, Duke Nukem Forever almost, almost crossed the publishing finish line sometime this year. But legal woes, perhaps owing to the 13 ridiculous years the game spent in development, pulled the plug on the game before it saw the light of day.

Duke fans are left to wonder what might have been. In our opinion, this video gives a very clear answer: not that much, hey. (more…)

Gene Munster, analyst at the US investment banking firm Piper Jaffray, has estimated that as many as 700,000 iPads were sold this weekend (that figure includes pre-orders), more than double his pre-launch forecast. Original predictions for the iPad’s opening-weekend sales ranged from 200,000 to 400,000, depending on which analyst you spoke to. If Munster is correct, that means that the iPad launch is likely to prove significantly more successful than the launch of the original iPhone – it took Apple over 70 days to move 1 million units of the iPhone when it launched in 2007.

Prior to the iPad’s launch on Saturday, research company iSuppli predicted that global sales would hit 7.1 million by the end of 2010, doubling to 14.4 million in 2011, and almost tripling to 20.1 million in 2012.

Amazon announced yesterday that their free Kindle App for iPad, first announced on 22 March, is now available in the App Store, to coincide neatly with today’s US release of the iPad.

Jay Marine, director of Amazon’s Kindle division says, “Kindle for iPad includes all the features customers love about Kindle for iPhone, including a massive selection of over 450,000 books, along with a beautiful new user interface tailored to the look and feel of iPad.”

One of the iPad-specific features is page turn animation, designed to replicate the experience of turning a page in a physical book. Customers will have the option of switching this feature off and opting for “Basic Reading Mode” instead. In addition, readers will be able to dim the iPad’s screen within the app and will have a choice of background colours, font sizes and font colours, to ease eye-strain and make reading easier.

As with the other Kindle apps currently available (for iPhone, iPod touch, Mac and PC), readers will be able to sync their books, last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across devices.

Marine says, “Kindle for iPad is the perfect companion for the millions of customers who already own a Kindle or Kindle DX, and a way for customers around the world to download and enjoy books even if they don’t yet have a Kindle.”

Let the ebook-reader wars begin.