Electronic Arts cuts forcast, shares fall [News.com]

The company’s shares fell nearly 13 percent and weighed heavily on the sector in after-hours trade following the news, the first time in EA’s history as a publicly traded company that it issued a profit warning during a quarter.
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“I think this is a carry-over of not only the hardware shortage but also them not having a ‘Halo 2’ or ‘GTA,’” he said, referring to the two hottest games of last holiday season, neither of which EA published.”

I think EA just got a wee bit too complacent, and they are beginning to feel the effects of their complacency.

A person named Amit Singh has figured out a way to use the Apple Motion Sensor (AMS), found in the latest generation of PowerBooks, as a human interface device. The AMS detects the movements of the PowerBook and can park the Hard Drive heads in the event of a sudden acceleration (such as during a fall). But now it has a new use; it can replace your mouse.

There are a number of concept videos showing a racing game and a game called NeverBall, both being controlled by tilting the PowerBook in different directions. It can also be used to scroll documents in various applications.

A free download of the software, AMS2HID, is available by clicking the first link below.

The Mac version of id Software’s seminal shooter Doom 3 has finally gone gold and will be on store shelves by the end of the week. All is not well, however, as Macworld magazine got an early look at the game, and put it through a series of benchmarking tests, with somewhat disappointing results.

Macworld used a dual-2.5 GHz Power Mac G5 with 2.5 GB RAM and the ATI Radeon X800 XT with 256 MB VRAM, running 10.3.8. The fastest they were able to get the game to run was 47.1 FPS on average, and that was at 640x480 with no FSAA. See the complete results.

The reaction to those numbers has been mixed, but it mainly focused on blaming Aspyr Media, the Mac codeshop responsible for porting the game, for poorly optimizing the game. In response, Aspyr’s Glenda Adams spoke to arsTechnica, addressing that issue:

“The truth to Doom 3 OS X performance is that there isn’t one magic low hanging fruit optimization that will fix it. Engineers at Aspyr/id/Apple/ATI/nvidia haven’t ‘overlooked’ something, or just blown off an easy fix for some reason. We held the game for over 4 months purely for optimization, its not like it was rushed out for a certain date,” she wrote.

Aspyr will continue to work on the game, despite its gold status.

If you’ve got a GeForce graphics card in your PC, you’ll probably want to pick up nVidia’s new WHQL-certified Forceware driver package. Highlights of the new release include Windows XP x64 support, over 60 new SLI game profiles, nVidia PureVideo support, improved HDTV display support, and the usual compliment of bug fixes and performance tweaks.

Blizzard announced over the weekend that they have permanently suspended the World of Warcraft accounts of those members it feels have been “Gold Farming.” Gold Farming is the practice of constantly generating in-game gold for the purpose of selling it on eBay for real money.

Blizzard’s terms of service prohibit the sale of any in-game assets for real money, as Blizzard asserts ownership over all in-game assets.

As a result of Blizzard’s actions, over one thousand World of Warcraft accounts have been permanently disabled. Because each account is tied to a Retail CD Key, and each key can only be used once, affected players will be required to buy a new copy of the game in order to continue playing, and even then they will not have access to their old characters.