Nintendo’s still not ready to spill all the beans about the 3DS, its handheld game system that projects stereoscopic 3D images without the need for special glasses, but it’s getting close.  

The company cryptically announced it would give details of a ‘new product’ on Sept. 29. And while it’s possible the company has something unknown up its sleeve, most industry observers expect it will use that date to give the launch date and price for the 3DS.

Nintendo, to date, has only said it would launch the system before the end of its fiscal year (which closes on March 31, 2011). There was some speculation that the company would slip it onto store shelves this holiday season, but that died down when Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told talk show host Jimmy Fallon the 3DS was planned for “next year”. (Nintendo has since backed off of Fils-Aime’s comment.)

Nintendo is the first gaming company to announce portable plans for 3D, but hardly the first to embrace the technology. Sony’s PlayStation 3 already supports stereoscopic 3D – and while Microsoft has not formally announced plans to enter the space, Electronic Arts implied the Xbox 360 would do so when “Crysis 2” is launched later this year.

The 3DS is meant less to compete with emerging console technologies, though, as it is to give Nintendo an upper hand in its escalating battle with the iPhone. Apple has been making steady inroads in the portable gaming space, offering quality games for less than $10. Titles for the Nintendo DSi typically cost between $20 and $40.

With a 3D display incorporated into the 3DS, however, Nintendo will be able to further differentiate its offerings from Apple‘s. The company’s handhelds already have exclusivity on some of the industry’s top game franchises, including Mario and Zelda.

 

Although some parties thought the eReader would fall by the wayside when the iPad hit shelves, Amazon is making an emphatic statement to the contrary. The online retailer has unveiled a new, upgraded Kindle device as well as a new lower-priced model.  

The new Kindle, like the old one, boasts a 6-inch screen, but uses a newer type of e-Ink – the same that’s used in the high-end Kindle DX device. It’s also 21 percent smaller, has twice as much storage (4 GB) and Amazon says it has an improved battery life as well.

The 3G version, which has been the standard for Kindles, will sell for $189 – but Amazon also unveiled a Wi-Fi only version of the device, which costs just $139 – further escalating the price wars started by Barnes & Noble in the eReader space.

Most observers expected something new from Amazon when the Kindle “sold out” on the company’s home page earlier this week. The device has been an unmitigated hit for Amazon – and eBooks have helped rejuvenate the publishing industry recently.

Author Stieg Larsson’s books have topped 1 million sold on Amazon – and the company claims that it sells more Kindle versions of books than it does hardcovers. CEO Jeff Bezos told USA Today in an interview that he expects the format to top paperback sales in 9-12 months. 

July 27 is “Starcraft II” day. And while that might not mean a lot to some people, for others it’s reason for celebration.

Twelve years after the original “Starcraft” hit PCs and became a cultural phenomenon, Blizzard Entertainment is trying to bottle lightning for a second time. And no one is betting against them.

Video game industry analysts expect the real-time strategy game will sell up to 4.5 million copies by the end of August – and 6.5 million before the end of the year. That’s not quite the numbers posted by a “Call of Duty” title – but it will be enough to make the game one of the year’s top sellers, which is particularly impressive given that it’s exclusive to the PC.

The original game has sold over 11 million units and is one of the best selling PC games of all time. It has spawned a trio of novels, a line of action figures and one nation of fanatics. “Starcraft” is so popular in South Korea that the country has two television networks dedicated to tournaments of the game. In 2006, one professional player signed a three-year deal worth $690,000 – plus endorsements.

The PC game industry is one that many people have written off, but Blizzard (the crown jewel development studio of Activision-Blizzard) has never wavered in its loyalty to the platform. The company doesn’t make console games (titles for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and especially the Nintendo Wii), but it’s still one of the most profitable studios in the industry. “World of Warcraft,” its hit massively multiplayer game, has 11.5 million subscribers paying a monthly fee to play.

“Starcraft II” is a game that has such momentum that Blizzard chose not to bother offering advance access to it to critics. The gaming press didn’t get to play the game before the general public. While that’s often a bad sign in Hollywood, in the gaming world it’s the ultimate vote of confidence.

If “Starcraft II” lives up to expectations and does sell 4.5 million copies in the next five weeks, it will be the industry’s best selling game, year to date, regardless of platform. “Red Dead Redemption,” which leads console sales so far in 2010, has sold less than 2.5 million copies through the end of June., according to data from The NPD Group.

The release of the game marks the beginning of a string of big PC titles from Activision-Blizzard. Later this year, “World of Warcraft: Cataclysm” will hit shelves – the latest expansion to the juggernaut franchise. And next year, presumably, Blizzard will release “Diablo 3,” the latest installment in yet another fan favorite franchise – that could be an even bigger breadwinner.

Following several days of rumors, The Walt Disney Company has confirmed that it has bought social game developer Playdom, a move that dramatically expands the company’s footprint in one of the fastest growing segments of the video game world.  

Disney is paying $563.2 million for the company – as well as a performance-linked earn out for investors of up to $200 million. That’s a substantial premium over the $400 million Electronic Arts paid for Playfish, a larger company in the space, last November.

And it’s sure to be music to the ears of investors in Zynga, which is far and away the leader in the social gaming space and already has an estimated market value of over $1 billion.

Disney and Playdom were hardly strangers. Disney’s Steamboat Ventures recently was part of a $33 million financing round for the company – and in May Playdom reached a deal with ESPN to create sports games for social media platforms. The first of those is scheduled to launch this fall.

Playdom is the industry’s third largest developer of social games, behind Zynga and Playfish, with 42 million active users. Its titles include Facebook and MySpace standards including “Social City,” “Sorority Life,” “Market Street” and “Bola”.

“This acquisition furthers our strategy of allocating capital to high-growth businesses that can benefit from our many characters, stories and brands, delivering them in a creatively compelling way to a new generation of fans on the platforms they prefer,” said Disney president and CEO Robert Iger in a statement.

Earlier this month, Disney broadened its footprint in the mobile space, acquiring music rhythm game maker Tapulous, makers of “Tap Tap Revolution” for an undisclosed sum. While it was a much smaller deal – and in a different segment of the market - the Tapulous acquisition had some characteristics in common with a potential Playdom buyout. Specifically, each deal gave the company instant credibility in the space.

It also gives the company an executive who knows a growing market that Disney doesn’t. With Playdom, that’s CEO John Pleasants, who will become an EVP in Disney's Interactive Media Group. 

GameStop has taken a few knocks for being behind the times when it comes to digital distribution, but now the brick and mortar retailer is showing at least some awareness of the online world. It just might not be exactly what investors were hoping for.  

The company has launched the Facebook game “Gangsta Zombies” through its Jolt Online Gaming arm. It’s the second social media game the company has released.

To play, consumers have to pick up a promotional game card at any U.S. GameStop location – so it does succeed in getting bodies into stores. The company is also offering a $10 pre-paid card for premium in-game content and a sweepstakes to lure people into the game.

The bigger question, though, is will the promotion result in a significant increase in purchases – or will people just pick up the free game, then try it out at home. Or, worse, will they bypass it since joining is not as easy as the plethora of other social games on the market.

So far, the game has accrued middling ratings, averaging three stars out of five by users. As of midday Monday, “Gangsta Zombies” had attracted nearly 20,000 fans on Facebook. 

(Editor’s note: Author Jeff Siedlik is a designer at Variety who attended last week's Comic Con. He submitted this piece to Technotainment.)

Dave Gibbons is the penciller and inker of the most celebrated graphic novel in comics’ history, but he’s hardly one to stick with tradition. The man whose style steered “The Watchmen”  – along with a slew of other comic works – no longer uses pencils or ink to do his work.

“I do everything digitally (now),” says Gibbons. “I don’t even scan in roughs anymore. From page layouts to preliminary sketches to the finished art, all the work is done on the computer.” 

Gibbons says he uses Smith Micro’s Manga Studio Pro, which combines the comics-related aspects of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator with 3-D capabilities. It’s not a photography program that’s applied to comics, it’s software specifically developed with comics in mind.

“For a long time, the tech guys had no artistic vision, while the art guys couldn’t grasp the tech,” says Gibbons. “With Manga Studio, the developers and artists worked very closely to put out something specifically for comics.” 

Laying out panels, a process considered tedious by many artists, can be done in seconds. Brush strokes can be nudged and tweaked to precision. And complex 3D objects such as cars can be imported, rotated and re-used from one panel to the next.

And in a world where many professional pencillers complete one page per day, Gibbons says he’s now able to pencil, ink and letter six pages per week. – assuming he doesn’t keep re-tweaking the work

“The best thing about the computer is that you can keep changing your mind,” he says. “And the worst thing about the computer is that… you can keep changing your mind!” 

 

If you’re one of the folks who owns an iPhone 4 and had purchased a bumper to help with the antenna issues before last week’s press conference, you could be seeing a little extra money in your account today.  

Meanwhile, if you’re hoping to get your hands on one of the white iPhone 4s, it’s going to take even more time.

Apple has begun automatically refunding purchases for select customers. The company expects the refunds (and promise of free bumpers to those who haven’t bought them already) to cost the company $175 million.

Separately, the company announced the new white iPhones were being delayed a second time – just days after promising them at the end of this month. Apple now says the devices won’t be available until “later this year”.

“White models of Apple's new iPhone 4 have continued to be more challenging to manufacture than we originally expected, and as a result they will not be available until later this year,” the company said in a statement. “The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected."

The company has additionally stopped taking orders for the white version of the phone on its Website.  

Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios continues to surprise people. The game development house headed by the former major league pitcher took the wraps off of its first game – “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning” – last week. Now it’s showing some of the talent behind it.  

Celebrated artist and writer Todd McFarlane worked with Zoic Studios to create the trailer for the game (viewable here), which is based on the works of R. A. Salvatore.

It’s an impressive lineup of talent that surprised many casual industry observers, who assumed Schilling would take the easy route and create a baseball game. What they don’t realize is that he’s a long-time gamer, who has been watching the industry for years.

Leading the development team on the game is Ken Rolston, a 25-year industry veteran best known for his work on the “Elder Scrolls” franchise at Bethesda. (He was lead designer on “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” one of 2006’s most critically acclaimed games.)

Zoic, meanwhile, is an fx house who has done work on ABC’s “V” and “Flash Forward” as well as Fox’s “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”.

The BBC has seen a lot of buzz surrounding this season’s “Doctor Who,” with the recasting of the titular role as well as the show’s omnipresent companion. Now it’s hoping that excitement will carry over into the gaming world.  

The broadcaster has released the first two chapters of an episodic game based on the series (and featuring voice work by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan) to the U.S. and other territories. (U.K. gamers got their hands on it last month.)

Unlike the Brits, who got the game for free, other global citizens will have to pay $4.95 for the pair – entitled "City of the Daleks" and "Blood of the Cybermen". The games, developed by Sumo Digital, are available exclusively via Direct2Drive.com.

The episodes currently for sale have received decent, though not glowing, reviews from the gaming press, though most critics agreed people who weren’t fans of the series would probably wonder what the big deal was.

Developers are reportedly working on two more installments to the game, though no release date has been announced yet. The U.S. release of the games comes as BBC America prepares to air the season finale of Doctor Who Saturday night.

Starz is doing a multimedia juggling act as it ramps up the marketing machine for “The Pillars of the Earth,” its eight-hour miniseries based on Ken Follett’s novel. The cable channel and publisher Penguin Group have teamed up to launch an “amplified” version of the tome for Apple’s iPad.  

The new version offers the complete book along with an audio adaptation and the opportunity to watch key scenes and view images from the series. The eBook will be updated with additional visual content as the series airs.

Also included is a character tree to help readers keep the story’s sizable cast straight – but avoids any spoilers for the story. As new characters are introduced in the story, they’re added to the tree.

Follett himself contributes a multimedia diary giving his on-set impressions  - and gives a preview of his next book, which is due this fall.  

The eBook sells for $12.99 – and an optimized version for the iPhone and iPod touch will be available in the coming days.