Crystal Tools? That's so 2009. The new thing in Square Enix tech is "Luminous." 
The original release of 'The Witcher' was something of a cult classic in the circles of high-fantasy RPG players. The premise, established through a series of Polish fantasy novels, perfectly suited a deep game scenario, and the lead character, Geralt of Rivia, was all kinds of bad-ass. However, as developer CD Projekt RED openly admit, it was a work of flawed genius; the ideas were there, but the execution lacked polish. 
Treyarch online director Dan Bunting and multiplayer design director David Vonderhaar took the stage during a special event in Los Angeles tonight to announce new multiplayer modes for Call of Duty: Black Ops. 
At the IFA 2010 in Berlin today, Sony announced its new digital music service Music Unlimited Powered by Qriocity will launch later this year. 
When Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty was released, analysts were bullish with their estimates, with projections of as many as 7 million copies this year. Blizzard is making headway towards these figures, as the publisher today announced one-month sales of 3 million copies.
Valve dropped a sizable bombshell during the 2010 Electronic Entertainment Expo, when former PlayStation 3 critic Gabe Newell announced that Portal 2 would ship for Sony's console in addition to versions for the Xbox 360, PC, and Mac. What's more, Newell crowned the PS3 version of Portal 2 "the best console version of the game," due to its inclusion of Steamworks, which allows for auto-updates, downloadable content, and community support directly from Valve.
At an event in April, Apple unveiled the iPhone Game Center, which was billed as "a social network for gaming," one that operates in a fashion similar to Microsoft's Xbox Live platform for the Xbox 360. Apple CEO Steve Jobs promised the service will offer portable gamers matchmaking services, friends lists, leaderboards, achievements, and a singular gamer name for use across all titles. 
Mainland Europe won't be getting voice recognition with Kinect when it launches this November, with the feature being patched in next Spring. 
After spending the last several years on top, the momentum of the Wii is slowly starting to wane, and now both Microsoft and Sony are getting in on the motion control action. Microsoft is going bold with their controller-free camera solution, Kinect, but Sony has taken the middle ground, blending the best elements of both; maintaining the familiarity and precision of a controller, but integrating a camera for full body tracking and augmented reality applications. Has Sony simply reinvented the waggle or have they perfected the concept of motion control? The answer falls somewhere in between.
Disciples has been a respected series in the turn-based strategy genre. It's been years since a proper sequel, though there have been several expansions released for Disciples II: Dark Prophecy that came out in 2002. Over that time period it seems the developer Akella focused more on creating a game with visual flair than one with an interesting story and satisfying gameplay. Although the third game, subtitled Renaissance, has good elements to it, overall it's a testament to how monotonous turn-based games can be. 
Back at Gamescom 2010, a major videogame event in Cologne, Germany, Blizzard held a press conference to break some news about Diablo III. No, it wasn't a release date. It was instead a crafting system, called the Artisan system, which game director Jay Wilson detailed during the hour long session. While Blizzard likely won't be making public any more bits of information about its anticipated action-role-playing game until Blizzcon this year, which takes place at the end of October, we were able to sit down with Wilson to get some additional details about how development was going.