A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception. The specific benefits are wide ranging, from improved hand-eye coordination in surgeons to vision changes that boost night driving ability.

People who played action-based video and computer games made decisions 25% faster than others without sacrificing accuracy, according to a study.

Interestingly, violent games seem to provide the most consistent positive learning effect. Perhaps this is because that violence may provide the greatest stimulation and reward to the brain. Within games, the violence reward is the easiest to provide. It would be much harder to provide a sex or food reward. It would be interesting to see a game that had the explicit goal of trying to educate through violence. The game Company of Heroes is a game I’ve played which uses historical WWII units in the game that educates you about their inherent strengths and weaknesses. I had fun seeing the displays of violence within the game, but I also learned about the weapons and tactics of WWII:

Even so, researchers have yet to create educational software as engaging as most action games. Without such intense involvement, neural circuits won’t change, they believe. “It happens that all the games that have the good learning effect happen to be violent. We don’t know whether the violence is important or not,” said Dr. Bavelier. “We hope not.”

via When Gaming Is Good for You – WSJ.com.

My favorite new feature is where over 100 units of the horde appear at a time. Serious Sam had a lot of units at once, but they never had the realism or environment of the Gears of War.

This article touches on some of the crazy statistics for bleeding edge PC game machines. My latest game machine build is a Q6600 with a 8800 GTX with 768 Mb of memory. This system is great when I’m playing a game like Call of Duty 4 or World in Conflict, but this hardware powered by a 750-watt power supply is such overkill when I’m surfing the web or my kids are playing Club Penguin or Peggle Deluxe on the same machine. At this point, it appears that a lot of brute force requiring high amounts of power is the way video card manufacturers are approaching future designs. I hope to see some revolutionary solutions in the next 5 years – even only to save some power.

M4G: Will there be an official soundtrack album release?
Rich Carle: Midway currently has no plans for a soundtrack release, but you never know…everything changes…

Please, please, please come out with a soundtrack. I can’t get the main theme with the flute out of my head!

A developer of Stranglehold talks about why barrage is his favorite Tequila Bomb. Barrage is absolutely essential to taking down the bosses in Stranglehold. As he says, the animations are badass, and when you’re in barrage mode, you can not be touched while you lay down massive amounts of firepower. It’s great to use when there’s a wide area of view in front of you full of obstacles and baddies and you just want to quickly take out everything in front of you.