The answer could come this weekend when video game enthusiasts find out whether "Grand Theft Auto IV," expected to set sales records in the gaming world this week, will steal glory and revenue from a different entertainment empire: the movies.

As the hype for "GTA IV" continues to grow and reviews scream perfection, some speculate that the game will put a dent in Marvel Studios' opening weekend box office for "Iron Man."

"GTA IV" is the ninth incarnation of a video game in which the user acts as a criminal roaming a city. The series has faced criticism for being too violent, because users are allowed to beat, stab, shoot and kill citizens and police officers. "Iron Man" is a movie based on the Marvel comic book superhero who creates an impressive suit of armor to save his life and help save the world.

"GTA IV" was released Tuesday at midnight and is expected to gross about $400 million in the first week.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is the latest group to join the fray, criticizing a sequence in the game that allows players to drive drunk. The group has asked the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), which sets the ratings for video games, to change the rating from M for "Mature" to AO for "Adults Only." An AO rating is generally considered a kiss of death for games, as major electronics retailers refuse to carry AO-rated games.

"Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke," MADD said in a statement this week. "Drunk driving is a choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable."

Amanda Beard, a seven time Olympic medalist, is expected to continue her success as she prepares for her fourth Olympic Games this year in Beijing, China. She has competed in the Atlanta 1996 Games, Sydney 2000 Games and Athens 2004 Games, making her one of the most prolific Olympic athletes ever. Amanda became the second youngest gold-medal swimmer in USA swimming history when she won her first gold medal at the Atlanta Games at the age of 14. She currently holds the Olympic Record in the 200m breaststroke and the American record in the 100m breaststroke, 200m breaststroke and 200m individual medley.

Tyson Gay will be sprinting for the title of "Fastest Man on Earth" as he makes his bid to win gold and shatter Olympic Records this year at the Beijing 2008 Games. Last summer, he became a double World Champion at 100m and 200m, and topped that off by winning gold as part of the U.S. 4x100m relay team. Tyson was selected as the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) male World Athlete of the Year for 2007 and is currently ranked #1 in the world.

Nastia Liukin is a Senior International Elite gymnast and is expected to be one of the top contenders on the U.S. Women's Gymnastic Olympic Team. Specializing in uneven bars and balance beam events, she is a two-time world champion, a six-time world medalist, a four-time U.S. National Champion and has won the American Cup titles in 2006 and 2008. Tied for the most ever, Nastia is a nine-time World Championship medalist and is widely considered to be the most graceful and artistic gymnast in the world today.

Reese Hoffa is poised to take home gold in men's shot put, when he makes his second Olympic Games appearance of his career this summer in Beijing. A member of the U.S. Olympic Team in the Athens 2004 Games, he has earned a number of prestigious titles in his shot putting career including 2007 USA outdoor champion, 2006 world indoor champion, 2004 world indoor silver medalist and 2003 Pan American Games gold medalist. Reese is the reigning world champion in shot put and currently ranks 11th on the world all-time list for the sport.

"Mario is truly a one-of-a-kind character; clearly fans can't get enough of him and his friends," said Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. "We're giving Wii users brilliant new ways to enjoy him while expanding our series of active-play games."

In the same spirit as other sports-themed Mario games on Wii like Mario Strikers Charged and Mario Kart Wii, Mario Super Sluggers blends richly interactive baseball action with eccentric characters and elements from across the popular Mario universe. Players can swing the wireless Wii Remote just like a real bat or wave it toward the plate to deliver a masterful pitch, enjoying the same intuitive, easy-to-learn controls that helped make Wii Sports a living room hit. With Mario and his unpredictable pals filling out the roster, imagination and active-play innovation are sure to dominate the diamond in this lively title, scheduled for release later this year.

Jumble.com is the new flagship site for "everything Jumble." The site also offers a Jumble shopping experience where fans can buy books, board games and other puzzle and game products. Later this spring, Jumble.com will feature a Jumble "Player's Forum" and a blog where Jumble creators David Hoyt, Mike Argirion and Jeff Knurek discuss classic and new Jumble games in print, online, and on mobile.

"Jumble.com offers Jumble fans a destination for all things Jumble," said Steve Tippie, VP Licensing at Tribune Media Services (TMS), which owns the brand and licenses Jumble products. "Jumble has been the most popular and most syndicated word puzzle in newspapers for more than fifty years and has a fanatical player base in print. In the last ten months, TMS and our game development and publishing partners uClick have created interactive and mobile versions of the popular newspaper puzzles-Daily Jumble, Jumble for Kids and Jumble Crosswords -- and five all-new Jumble-themed games, with more to come."

As traffic in the real-world museum is somewhat limited, the museum's curator, Avnet's Director of Multimedia Services, Bryan Carter, suggested an experiment with recreating the museum experience, down to the minutest detail, in the virtual world to bring it to more people, or avatars, as they're called in Second Life. "The result is a real geek-fest," according to Carter. "Visitors to Avnet's space in Second Life tell us they're fascinated with the in-world freebies on our giveaway table, with the ability to zoom in on objects in the museum and with the speedboat trips they can make around the Avnet island."

Highly interactive, the Avnet Second Life experience gives in-world visitors the opportunity to talk to the receptionist, an artificial intelligence greeter named Samantha, and also to ask for more information about Avnet, inquire about job openings and find out who the trading partners are that Avnet works with in the real world.

Carter says one of the recent visitors went giddy when he experienced the virtual recreation of the Leak Amplifier in the museum. "I had one of these!" the nostalgic visitor noted on his guest comment card.

"Resources allocated to Second Life are considered R&D investments, since the platform is new and many of the sales, marketing and training possibilities it offers haven't even been thought of yet," said Jan Jurcy, Avnet's vice president of digital communications. "We look at this as another piece of the social media revolution. In fact, all of the buzz we've created so far with Avnet's presence on Second Life has come from word of mouth among visitors. Wow. We've come full circle in the communications arena - all the way back to people simply telling other people. Well, ok, they're probably telling each other via their BlackBerrys."

A small group of socially conscious people from three continents have developed an online game designed to help the environment and fight poverty in the real world by turning game rewards into real-life help for social and environmental causes.

The game, called Glupod, will debut worldwide on May 30. It's the brainchild of Ioannis Tsiokos of Athens and a small band of colleagues at Something, Inc. who collaborate online from Greece, India, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Glupod players will be able to provide food for a starving child in Africa, protection for a whale species going extinct or offset carbon emissions and help fight global warming - all by playing Glupod, the first Video Game to deliver direct emotional fulfillment to the player.

In a nutshell, Glupod gives gamers a variety of real-world causes to choose from and enables them to convert their in-game winnings into actual help for that cause.

"A Glupod gamer has a real purpose and a human mission" says Ioannis, managing director and co-founder of Something Inc. "Glupod is more than a game. It's a simple, fun way to do good that anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can participate in."

The videogames business, after hitting a new sales high last year, this week plans to showcase new technologies to help spur further growth -- including a new product from Nintendo Co. to get users to exercise using their Wii game consoles.

Nintendo announced today that it will ship a new exercise product on May 19 in the U.S. called Wii Fit that comes with a weight-and-motion sensing device called the Wii Balance Board.

Jone's snake phobia hasn't been overlooked either. When faced with slithering nasties the hero will be rendered ineffective leaving it down to another character - presumably AI or player-driven - to help out. And the phobia mechanic won't be exclusive to Indy, either.

Stacking the Indy adventure up against the Star Wars games, Edge says that "Pulling levels to open doors, building platforms to reach them and then destroying them (and everything else) for studs has grown into something more open and explorative".

According to the article, Lego Indy is far funnier than Lego Star Wars. It describes how, in the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy shoves the Staff of Ra into a hole in the map room, the intense beam of light that reveals the resting place of the Ark will actually either blind the hero of set the room on fire. But it's not saying which.

Perhaps partly in keeping with this, according to Edge Traveller's Tales has chosen to remove Nazis - and any reference to them it appears, from what TT says - from the game, "Lego having already replaced them with an anonymous genocidal, occultist, trenchcoat-wearing master-race". The studio explains it has left it down to the strength of the Indy characters to show they are bad guys - but "that said, we like to reinforce the fact that these really are terrible, terrible people".

Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.

Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.

In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.

A new report by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) claims that 38 percent of all gamers are female, with the average female gamer spending 7.4 hours per week playing games.

According to the survey, the majority prefer to play casual style games and use primarily either the PC or Nintendo DS for their game playing.

Despite the high percentage of female game players in today's market, an International Game Developers Association (IGDA) study suggest that women only make up 12 percent of the games industry workforce.

As we walked into Maxis' offices in Emeryville, there were giant posters up all over the walls that iterated the designers' mission statement. They might have been placed there for the benefit of visiting journalists, but I got the feeling they were a semi-permanent installation, meant to remind team members every time they walked by that they want players to be able to get all the way to the "space" portion of the game without feeling frustrated.

This was reflected in other design choices. Rather than force the player to start at the "cell" level, you can instead select between any of the five different parts of the game right from the start. While this is certainly sure to be a controversial decision -- it takes a lot away from the sense of growth and expansion that I believed the game would have if it forced you to start from the beginning -- it'll let anybody jump in wherever they feel most comfortable.

As we walked into Maxis' offices in Emeryville, there were giant posters up all over the walls that iterated the designers' mission statement. They might have been placed there for the benefit of visiting journalists, but I got the feeling they were a semi-permanent installation, meant to remind team members every time they walked by that they want players to be able to get all the way to the "space" portion of the game without feeling frustrated.

This was reflected in other design choices. Rather than force the player to start at the "cell" level, you can instead select between any of the five different parts of the game right from the start. While this is certainly sure to be a controversial decision -- it takes a lot away from the sense of growth and expansion that I believed the game would have if it forced you to start from the beginning -- it'll let anybody jump in wherever they feel most comfortable.

It will have more than 300 levels, "a cast of over thirty wacky characters" and seems to be built around letting players take on "Blox-laying chickens or...baseball-throwing monkeys" or cartoonlike grim reapers in tiki, medieval, frontier, or haunted themed settings.

EA has never said a lot about the Spielberg partnership beyond the fact that the director would be spending occasional time at the company's Los Angeles studio. It's also never been entirely clear exactly how involved Spielberg has been in the creation of the games, or how much involvement he'll have going forward. EA has said there would be at least three games under the terms of a deal first made public in 2005.

Last summer, Newsweek published a story describing the game that is now known as Boom Blox as blending "the creativity of the building-blocks game 'Jenga' with the charm of a Saturday-morning cartoon."

EA Sports revealed their prediction for the outcome of the highly anticipated Super Bowl XLII game. Based on simulations using the award winning Madden NFL 08 video game, the New England Patriots were victorious over the New York Giants by a narrow margin of eight points with a final score of 38-30. Over the past five years, EA Sports has a perfect record predicting the winner of the Super Bowl.

The Madden NFL 08 engine simulated the game based on each team's roster and their players' statistics. Using the most current information available, the Patriots and the Giants went head-to-head in a computer-generated match up. The New England Patriots came out on top, making them the first team in NFL history to record a perfect 19-0 season.

The simulated game got off to a very close start with two touchdowns by Patriots running back Laurence Maroney and three field goals by Giant's kicker Lawrence Tynes. Late in the third quarter, the Patriots led by only one, 24-23. They were able to add to their lead with a 31-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Tom Brady to wide receiver Randy Moss. Entering the fourth quarter, the Giants trailed 31-23 with an opportunity to tie-up the game with a big drive. But instead, a tipped pass by quarterback Eli Manning was picked off by Patriots cornerback Asante Samuel. The Patriots scored with their possession from the turnover, increasing their lead to 38-23. The Giants scored one last time and the game ended 38-30.

Super Bowl XLII kicks off Sunday, February 3rd at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. We will then know whether EA Sports has extended their own winning streak using the Madden NFL engine to predict Super Bowl champions.

"Virtual worlds with scientifically accurate simulations could permit learners to tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity," it says.

The document calls for a game engine that includes "powerful physics capabilities" that can "support accurate in-game experimentation and research".

"A Nasa-based MMO could provide opportunities for students to investigate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics career paths while participating in engaging game-play."

Other organisations such as the US armed forces already use online gaming as a recruitment tool.

America's Army for example introduces players to the "seven Army Core Values" and now claims to be one of "the most popular computer games in the world".

1. How a NASA-based educational MMO should be designed.
2. How a NASA-based educational MMO should support both formal and informal education efforts.
3. How a NASA-based educational MMO should connect to current and future NASA missions.
4. How NASA career opportunities exploration and significant STEM learning experiences would be incorporated into the design a NASA-based educational MMO.
5. How a NASA-based educational MMO game play would be engaging for all participants.