With E3 just a couple of days from now, Midway Games, Inc. has revealed the list of titles it will be presenting at the event. The company's lineup covers a wide range of genres across all major video game platforms.

Thanks to a mix of new properties and proven brands, Midway president and CEO David F. Zucker has commented that this is the company's "most diverse and strongest line up yet". Here's a list of titles Midway has lined up for E3 along with their expected shipping dates.

• Stranglehold (PC, PS3, Xbox 360; August)
• BlackSite: Area 51 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360; September)
• Unreal Tournament 3 (PC; Fall)
• Ultimate Mortal Kombat (DS, November)
• Cruis'n (Wii, November)
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Zombie Ninja Pro-Am (PS2, October)
• Game Party (Wii, November)
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Imagination Invaders (DS, November)
• The Wheelman (PC, PS3, Xbox 360; Winter)
• TNA Impact! (PS2, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360; Spring)
• The Bee Game (DS, GBA, November)
• The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (PC, Available Now)
• Hour of Victory (PC, Fall)
  

In-game advertisements are not really new to gamers. Game developers can basically plaster a Coca-Cola logo on a zombie's chest and players wouldn't mind. (Though that doesn't make them less annoying.) Anyway, analyst Paul Verna from eMarketer sees a bright future for in-game advertising.

Developing games is not cheap at all, especially when the technology improves every other day in leaps and bounds. The solution for some developers is offering advertising spots to other companies that they will insert in-game. In a report called "Video Game Advertising: Getting to the Next Level", Verna says that in-game advertisements would help marketers (it's a whole new platform), fresh opportunities for tech companies, and a good source of revenue for game developers.

Verna gives the figures: "over the next five years video game advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%, reaching nearly $2 billion by 2011." The growth will be caused by the widening demographics of gamers - young and old, men and women, casual and hardcore. Online console titles and MMOs are the best sites for in-game ads as they have the bulk of the gamer population and they will be a great factor in the growth as well.

Currently, the cost of making "advergames" have reached US$ 164 million and is expected to reach US$ 344 million in 2011. Revenues from the in-game advertisements are estimated to reach a whopping US$ 969 million (in 2011) in the US alone. And those are very good numbers from a marketing point of view.

There's no turning back now.

GamesRadar alerts folks that in a recent interview with Edge magazine, the legendary Hideo Kojima, head of super-studio Kojima Productions, revealed his unlikely and unhinged vision for a zombie-themed game. According to Kojima, he's "less interested in the idea of the living dead than the fact you can turn people just by biting them." So much is his focus on "turning" people, that he even considers implementing his take on zombie-apocalypse in a massively-multiplayer online environment.

He explains:

Imagine a large town where half the inhabitants are zombies. Users would subscribe, get inside the town and get bitten. At that stage they become undead and can't control their character - all they can do is modify the camera angles.

...They'd see their character attacking humans and have to pay just to watch! ...The only way they could end it is by opening another account, hunting themselves down and killing themselves. Of course, the problem is that your second character can get bitten as well.

Not getting to control your character if you get turned? Having to hunt your former "self" and kill it (if it got zombified it's an "it" now), just to progress the game? Get bombarded by cinematics of mindless zombies? All too silly? Well, despite Kojima's own reservations about his over-the-top and unlikely Zombie-MMO, he says that he won't rule the idea out. GamesRadar reports that should he feel that the moment is opportune, he will "take some time to prepare. Very seriously."

Well, the cinematic aspect of the whole thing is trademark Kojima.

Some of us really prefer that the old school "choose your own adventure" style of entertainment just stay in the form of thin easily purchasable pocket books. However, one can't stop the march of the machines, everything's getting a Web 2.0 make over now, and that includes the "Choose your own" format.

From the folks responsible for Massively Online Gamer (MOG) we now have "Jethro Thule: Zombie Killer", the first ever choose your own adventure podcast.  Each week the audience gets to decide the next step of the story by making their opinions heard at their MOG Army site.

Originally part of the MOG podcast, "Jethro Thule: Zombie killer" was one of the most popular portions of the show. Well, it seems that all that popularity warranted a spin-off. Producer Todd Zelin had this to say:

We all agreed that Jethro needed an upgrade ...Initially Ryan Verniere, co-host of MOG, would read that week’s installment during the taping of the weekly show. On part 5 of Jethro, we started to pre-record and sound-designing the segment. After an awesome response from the fan-base we commissioned artist and MOG fan, Jake Harold, to draw story-boards and comic book like panels to illustrate the story each week.

For more information on the podcast adventure feel free to use our read-link below, it leads to the MOG Army site.

Since the new year is here (or has come and gone for you), it's time to have a bit of fun. Instead of talking about Saddam Hussein's hanging or the impending zombie apocalypse, I've decided to come up with a short list of my favorite game-related vids.

I've always had a penchant for picking up videos. For the most part, I find videos of games here and there, and sometimes, some of those videos just stick in your head long after you've seen them.

Here are my top five game-related bits of weirdness, which anyone with a degree in googling can hunt down and download for themselves. In no particular order...

Street Fighter Salsa

I do some ballroom dancing myself, so this was funny to watch. As you can see, this is a Korean salsa competition where the contestants are playing Ryu and Chun Li. Definitely weird, but you can see some of the obvious Street Fighter references in their routine, giving this a definite spot in my top 5.

Less ballroom, more weirdness if you click on "Full Article".

  

"Depths" quest series in House Deneith now gets an update, and for all Dungeons and Dragons Online fans, there's a whole lot of new stuff in store for you. The update includes a new list of bestiary, NPCs, Quests, and Zones.

An incomplete list of updated Bestiary includes Lesser Violet Slime, Skeleton, Lesser Gray Ooze, Argor Soulbane, Black Widow, Zombie,  Troglodyte, Gray Ooze, Hobgoblin Infiltrator, Wolf, Hobgoblin Slayer, Hobgoblin Witch Doctor, Troll and many more.  The update gives you more info about the Level, Type of monster, Classification, Habitat, Weak vs. (weapon), Feats and Spells effective against a particular monster, and its special abilities.

The updated NPCs includes Giggs Elorreathi, Scholes of Vedykar, Keane d'Deneith, and Neville Stormhammer. This gives you the Type, Zone, and Description of the Quest.

The updated Quests let you on new stuff for The Depths of Despair, The Depths of Darkness, The Depths of Discord and The Depths of Doom. Here, you get a chance to read more about the Rating, Start NPC, Starting Zone, Starting Level, Length, Temp Access to (the database), and Related Monsters. There's more about Objectives, Opt. Objectives, Factions Raised, Related Zones, Related Quests, Effective Feats, and Effective Spells as well. 

The updated Zones for all the updated Quests above give you hints about  the Level, Type (of gameplay/location), Bordering City Areas, Dungeons (in the particular Quest), Zone Information, Description, and the Map of the particular Quest.