Rolling out its new entry-level gaming console Xbox 360 Arcade in India, Microsoft intends substituting it with the Xbox 360 Core model. The new console offers five interesting Zbox LIVE Arcade games - Uno, Luxor 2, Boom Boom Rocket, Feeding Frenzy, and Pac-man Championship Edition.

Los Angeles - Dave Arneson, who co-created the Dungeons & Dragons game, which pioneered the format for role-playing video games has died aged 61 after a two-year battle with cancer. Wizards of the Coast, the company that produces Dungeons & Dragons, said Friday that Arneson died in a hospice in Minnesota on Tuesday.

Arneson developed the game in 1974 together with Gary Gygax, who died in March 2008. The game was one of the first to allow players to assume and develop an individual character while embarking on complex quests, and has inspired countless computer games.

San Francisco - A new study has found that action video games can improve players' eyesight, researchers said Monday.

The study, which was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, found that the visual processes needed to play games like Call of Duty 2 improved players' contrast sensitivity. Contrast sensitivity allows people to notice different shades and is particularly important for such tasks as driving at night and discerning patterns and facial expressions.

Packed with Qualcomm's cell phone technology, start-up Zeebo's first video game console for "the next billion" will be launched next month. Priced at $199, the console will specifically target the "emerging" BRIC - Brazil, Russia, India and China - markets.

Given the fact that Zeebo's console is developing world-specific, it is not intended to offer any direct competition whatsoever to the "big three" namely - Sony's PS 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or Nintendo's Wii.

Video-game publishers are pressurizing Sony Corp to take its pick out of two alternatives - one, lower the price of its PlayStation 3 console; and two, face the possibility increased development funds going Nintendo Wii's way! At its starting price of $399.99, the PS3 is $150 more than Wii and $200 more than the most-economical Xbox 360.

According to analyst Mike Hickey, of Janco Partners Inc. in Greenwood Village, Colorado, even though Sony has thus far stood unyielding against calls for lower price, there is likelihood that it might trim the price of PS3 by $50-$100 in the near future.

On 3rd April, UK would see Nintendo launching its new DSi, two days before its release in the US - at a retail price of 149 GBP.

A source, on condition of anonymity, disclosed, "A third iteration of Nintendo's hugely successful handheld hardware, the DSi adds two cameras while slimming the proportions, and perhaps most significantly adds both an SD card slot and 256MB of memory, transforming the DS into a multimedia tool."