An unassuming press release announced that Vivendi would be publishing Double Fine’s next game.

Normally a developer getting a new publisher isn’t a big deal, but when you consider that Psychonauts was the developer’s previous title, it kind of is. Keep in mind that this psychedelic trip - forging wildly imaginative game levels from the mindscapes of a bunch of oddball characters - was so tough to explain that many retailers wouldn’t sign on the dotted line to bring the game into their shops.

Even after a bunch of great reviews, it was still a mission to track down copies of the game.

I guess it means that Vivendi is willing to back quality over a game that sold a squillion. I suppose it could also mean that Tim Schaffer’s latest won’t be quite so far out.

Now the question is: is that a bad thing?

At the Leipzig game convention Peter Molyneux delivered a bitch-slap to the way hand-to-hand combat is handed in PC games. Or at least he delivered a presentation to that effect. For someone like me, who loves PC games but is more or less forced to look to consoles for a regular dose of chop-sockey, this is music to my ears.

One of the key points that Molyneux points to is that the uber successful console fighting games like Street Fighter, Tekken, Virtual Fighter and Mortal Combat have been a bit too successful in shaping our views of clanging sword and fisticuff mechanics. They give us things like health bars, special energy metres and combo moves.

It's all true, these slick round-after-round fighting games have poured us into a single perception mould. Molyneux thinks we should throw off the shackles and try some different things. He showed Kill Bill as an example of the deadly, and stylised dance, we could see in a fighting game. He talked about game mechanics with context sensitive controls where fighting was more about timing and using the environment than memorising complicated combos.

Forget the analogue pen. It’s time we took our kids digital…

Yahoo news is reporting that Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is planning to take the One Laptop per Child project to heart and start a program aimed at making the name of the project a reality in Thailand. It all starts in October and, of course, it will start slowly and, of course, we’re not talking your Dell XPS gaming rig. The laptop program was the brain child of a bunch of clever folk at MIT and is about delivering a portable computer for about $100.

The specs go something like this: 500Mhz processor, 128MB RAM, a colour screen (plus a black and white one with higher res for reading) and between 512MB and 1GB of flash memory so you can forget the hard drive. It will come with wireless capabilities so the tikes can hit the 'net and so it's easy to form LANs. Of course, the machines will be Linux based to avoid all those software costs. The bit I like best is that MIT is working on a model that it powered by a hand crank. No power points in your rural village? No problem.

Kentia Hall. It was a weird and wonderful place, where strange tech gadgets nuzzled games you’ve never heard of and cute girls played yo-yo while they waited for people to check out their lonely mobile phone stand.

With the news of the re-formed and streamlined E3, we also have news that the streamlining will probably cost many of the smaller players their invite. Many of these guys got a polite message from the ESA saying, thanks for the support in previous years. Where does that leave our beloved E3 gadget carnies?

On a basic level it makes a lot of sense. If you have two thousand exhibitors, the intimate meeting room approach probably isn’t going to work. It’s still a pity to have things shake out like this. The little guys managed to claw their meager coverage on the back of magazines sending their journos out for more "serious" work. Even if they managed to have their own splinter shows, there's almost no way it would be practical for PCPP to get out to them.

Talk about a tough act to follow.

We were happy enough when we heard that the System Shock legacy would live on in Irrational's BioShock. Sure it didn’t use the System Shock name and the setting would be different but the team would draw on a lot of that Looking Glass talent that helped make the original Shocks tingle with such lasting effect. Maybe the new name and setting was just the series evolving. So yeah, we were happy.

Of course, the name change also probably came from the fact that EA owns the rights to the System Shock name and trademark (which it renewed in January). The question you have wonder about is this? Would Irrational have changed settings if they could have done the space ship again? I think the answer would be yes. It’s the paranoid pressure cooker atmosphere that is the required component and the undersea city replicates the trapped confines while letting them take setting somewhere fresh and new.

This leaves EA in an interesting position, for its run at System Shock 3, which a certain UK games mag has said is likely according to its sources in the company. Let’s say it’s true, even if it’s just for the sake of discussion. Where do you take the licence? Do you try to make a System Shock that is more System Shock than the first two? Will people appreciate you staying true to the spirit or will they think you’re rehashing the space dungeon that we outgrew five years ago.