Kevin Butler's accidental retweeting of the PlayStation 3's jailbreak code may have been humorous, but Sony still isn't laughing. In a quest to appraise the damage of the PS3 jailbreaking, the company has won access to the IP information of all users who visited hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz's website or interacting him on social networking sites.

The court issued the order on March 3, asserting that the host of Hotz’ website, Bluehost, must relinquish all information that could help identify the sites’ visitors. Names, phone numbers, e-mail, IP, and other information is included in the personal information. Sony is primarily using the information to discover where the information has spread to.

Sony says such extremes are necessary. The computer entertainment juggernaut says it has “a good faith basis to obtain this information because it is relevant to whether the Court has jurisdiction over Mr. Hotz. SCEA needs to determine how rampant the access to and use of these circumvention devices has been in California in order to rebut Mr. Hotz’s suggestion that his illicit conduct was not aimed at the forum state.”

The company is also entitled to relevant information from YouTube, Google, and Twitter regarding Hotz’s jailbreaking antics.

Source: GameSpot

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Solitaire Games

Want to run a railroad? Guide trains to their destinations by managing direction and switches. Pick up cars, avoid the express and make it to the station! Chugga Chugga Toot Toot Ding Ding Choo Choo!…



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Flash Game – Play free online games at Mopixie

From the presumably brain-frozen mind of Orhan Gurbanov comes the Elctro Ice Cream Maker concept, a stylish, portable way to enjoy everyone’s favorite frozen treat.

Inventor Spot – Inventions, Innovations, and Interesting Ideas for the Inventor in All of Us

Two weeks ago in my post Pre-Alpha Videos of My Windows Phone 7 Games in Development I posted a short video of a game called ‘Hungry Castaway’ that I am working on with one of my friends for Windows Phone 7. At that point I had only gotten as far as replicating a concept I had done in Silverlight over to XNA. Now that I’ve had two weeks to get some work done I wanted to post an updated video.

At 0:44 into the clip the video skips ahead to show more hectic gameplay to give an example of how the gameplay scales based on skill. Please keep in mind this game is still early on, so the gameplay in this video likely doesn’t reflect the final game.

Smarty Pants Coding – - Coding with a touch of flava

We have a little sheet in Mantic Towers that lists the contents of what’s in the Dwarf King’s Hold game and, when we look over the quality of the figures (there’s nothing like having them in your hands!), the production values that have gone into the artwork and packaging, the rules and the way the game plays, it’s easy to think that this might just be the best darn thing to come out of Mantic yet.

So, here is an example of what a game of Dwarf King’s Hold will look like:

And here is a shot to give you an idea of just how much stuff you get in this game:

(This isn’t even everything!)

Why not drop us a comment and let us know what you think!

Dwarf King’s Hold: Dead Rising will begin shipping on the 28th March and you can pre-order your copy here.

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Mantic Games

Match pairs in this cool memory game. The goal of the game is to find all the matching pairs from the set of cards. Click on a card and it will turn face up, then attempt to find its match by…



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Flash Game – Play free online games at Mopixie

Currently if you build an XNA game and run it on the WP7 emulator you’ll note that once you exit the program, it isn’t listed in the main application list like it would be for a Silverlight application. This can make it tough to validate how your icon looks, and makes it impossible to pin it to the emulator’s tile-view start screen.

Luckily, Michael Klucher blogged on this subject last month here. Michael points out that by editing the WindowsPhoneManifest.xml, you can change the ‘genre’ attribute from “Apps.Games” to “NormalApp” to make your game show up in the start menu’s full application list. Once you do this you might notice an odd name listed for your game, to update the name displayed in the start menu you’ll need to edit the following field in the AssemblyInfo.cs of your XNA project:

[assembly: AssemblyTitle("Hungry Castaway")]

Once you pin your game to the start screen, you’ll end up with something like what’s on the left in the screenshot below.

The DefaultTile image and title

To set the title and image used for your tile, you’ll need to right-click on your XNA project, and click on Properties. On the project properties screen under the XNA Game Studio tab you’ll find two fields: Tile title and Tile image. Add a tile image (173×173) to your project, and then select it from the picker – then just type in your game’s title. Once your build and run again you should notice your own custom tile once you pin your game to the start screen.

Where to set your custom tile image and tile text

Smarty Pants Coding – - Coding with a touch of flava

Mantic are all about big battles and big armies, but the subtleties behind smacking a skeleton with a Dwarfen hammer isn’t lost on us either. We knew for the cover of Dwarf King’s Hold we wanted to depict the decaying Dwarfen hall and a fierce fight between an Undead warrior and a Dwarfen adventurer. We wanted them going at it hammer and tongs and, as you can see below, this is exactly what Jonas Springborg has given us!

Everything from the malice in the Skeleton’s eyes to the crumbling pillars in the background sets the scene for this slick new board game!

Let us know what you think!

Dwarf King’s Hold: Dead Rising will begin shipping on the 28th March and you can pre-order your copy here!

Want to keep up to date with all things Mantic? Then follow us on Facebook and sign-up to the Mantic newsletter!

Mantic Games

An updated version of the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone was posted on the Windows Phone 7 forums today. There is also a big collection of Photoshop files to help when designing your apps which can be downloaded here as well.

click the image to download

Take a look through the new guide and feel free to post anything you find interesting either here or at the official forums. The guide has gone from 69 pages to 101 pages, so there should be lots of expanded content to look through.

Below are some sample shots from the updated guide. You can find the 10 items that can be shown in the Status Bar, the push notifications whose colors conform to the user’s accent color, and the updated application bar which now shows button labels – hopefully you’ve already noticed most of this playing around with the most recent release of the developer tools.

You can also check out all the available accent colors in the updated guide. My guess is that these are the final theme choices, but I wouldn’t be surprised if different phone carriers add in their own company colors and perhaps set them as the default.

Smarty Pants Coding – - Coding with a touch of flava