There have always been talks of whether or not Nintendo would bring one of its popular franchises to a massively multiplayer online universe. It seems as though that question has been answered, and it’s Mario and his friends that are going to greet you online when Nintendo’s next console, code named the Revolution, launches later this year.

Supposedly Square Enix is working with Nintendo on the game, which is simply named Mario MMO for now. Squaresoft was the developer for the beloved Super Mario RPG for the Super Nintendo, and is supposedly bringing in many elements from that game to the new Mario MMO.

Confirmed gameplay elements include:

• Platforming: Players will move from town to town viewing the world and their character with a 3-D isometric camera view. Classic Mario platforming elements (as found in Super Mario RPG) will be a part of the world, including breaking blocks with your head and bouncing on weak enemies to kill them and bouncing on tougher enemies to get an advantage in the fight.
• Classic Mario Locations: It wouldn’t be a mario game without your typical lava, haunted mansion, desert, and underwater locations.
• Timing Based Combat: An increasingly popular combat mechanic in mario RPGs is the ability to time a button press or joystick movement with a maneuver to increase the damage and/or string combos. This feature will be a prominent part of hte battle system in Mario MMO. Specific attacks have not be revealed, but rest assured fireballs, bouncing on heads, and hammers will all likely be present.
• Items and Gear: Most MMOs put a strong emphasis on collecting items and gear, Mario MMO will be no different. Confirmed items included racoon feathers, frog suits, stars, mushrooms, shells, and even tanooki suits! Nintendo said to expect to find just about every item from all mario games, including mario kart, in Mario MMO, though some of the popular ones will obviously be rare and difficult to obtain.
• Characters: Unfortunately Nintendo and Square Enix are being very tight lipped about the types of characters you can choose to play as. Nintendo has announced that you will not be able to play as any of the “main” Nintendo characters, such as Mario, Bowser, or Princess Peach. However, Nintendo has assured everyone that all those characters will be in the game as parts of the story and as NPCs. Some may even join you on certain missions.

That’s about all the information released as of now. ATN will keep everybody posted on any new information as it gets released.

update: Mario MMO playable characters revealed.

Tags: Mario MMO, Nintendo, Square Enix, Super Mario RPG

Adobe has decided to change its approach to the war on piracy by making all future versions of Photoshop available for free. New figures presented to Adobe showed that there are more than ten times the number of pirated versions of the software being used than the legal versions.

“We realize that it is futile to try and stop certain people from downloading illegal copies of our software when the alternative is to pay hundreds of dollars for it,” a spokesman for Adobe said yesterday. “This is why we have decided to offer all future versions of Photoshop for free. The free software will be feature complete, with no restrictions on use.”

The spokesman went on detailling how Adobe plans on adding ads to the software, ads that will supposedly bring in more money since the free software should grab all the users of the pirated versions. The ads will use Google Adsense technology to determine the type of ads to serve, which will predominately be Photoshop Tutorial ads. The Adsense technology will take keywords from the text, layer names, and file names to determine what ads to serve. Adobe will then either get paid per click or per view, depending on the type of ad.

Certain menus and dropdowns will have ads included as well. For example, the bottom of the fonts drop down will have a link to a Google Ad for font downloads and the filter tab will have filter download and tutorial ads. There will also be a search feature included in new versions of Photoshop that will pull up results in a similar fashion as Google’s search results, with normal results being next to paid ads.

A complete list of ads, ad positions, and ad pricing has not be released.

Tags: Adobe Photoshop, Google Adsense, Google Adwords

With it being tax season, the discussion of whether or not the IRS will tax virtual game items and gold is heating up. Unfortunately for gamers, it appears the IRS is indeed planning on taxing in game items and gold in 2008. That means that everything earned in an online game next year will subject to federal taxes.

So far the IRS plans on taxing “anything that can be bought or sold outside the virtual world.” This includes items, gold, and even characters. Apparently the IRS has even started posting job listings for “virtual currency regulators” (click thumbnail for larger view) whose responsibilities will mostly be to “determine the currency exchange rates between the virtual and the actual along with monitoring any inconsistencies with returns by performing the necessary audits.”

The Internal Revenue Service is focusing on the virtual market as “gold mining” in MMOs has become a lucrative business model for some companies. Though most gold mining companies reside in foreign countries, many buyers of the gold, items, and characters are U.S. citizens. The IRS believes that virtual earnings have become so commonplace that they should be regulated in the same manor as more traditional earnings.

“It’s no different to spend hours a day earning gold in a game to sell it on eBay as it is to go to work and earn a wage,” an IRS spokesman said last week. “Just because the currency starts off as ones and zeros doesn’t mean somebody can eventually exchange it for real cash later. We are just trying to balance the taxation process as to not put the entire burden on those earning money in traditional ways.”

The IRS has yet to release any official documentation on exactly how the virtual assets will be taxed, but they say a system will be in place for 2008.

Tags: IRS, internal revenue service, MMO, World of Warcraft

Well, Google has finally moved beyond the desktop and internet with their new project titled Gaware. Google’s new (and free) product hits the road in the form of a technologically advanced automobile, home, and internet integration system.

The system is a combination of GPS, Google Maps, real-time traffic, and wifi connectivity. The system will actually connect to your home computer allowing you to access anything your home computer can access including email, important documents, and instant messaging.

Gaware will be able to track the places you go to and the purchases you make using the GPS navigation. By doing so, the car and/or your computer can alert you to items you may need to pick up on your way home from work, like groceries or remind you to drop off some bills that may be due.

The system will also roll out with a new enhancement to Gmail and Google Talk where emails and IMs can be “tagged” as a specific alert. These alerts will be things like changes in schedules, location changes, or reminders. What that means is that somebody can email or IM somebody (or themselves) with a specific tag that will let Gaware know to alert the driver that something has changed.

For example, let’s say you get in your car to head to a meeting that is scheduled for 1:00 pm at a park. On your way your assistant gets a phone call saying your client can’t make it until 1:30 pm and that they want to meet at their office instead. If your assistant emails your email account with a tag saying that the schedule and the location have changed, Gaware will pick it up and alert you. But it won’t just alert you, it will also update your GPS points to the office location specified in the email along with a tag of the new time.

That’s not all though; Gaware can also then determine that between you and your new meeting location there is an Home Depot and that your spouse emailed you earlier saying to pick up some paint for a project. It will take the extra 30 minutes time into consideration and ask you if you’d like it to plan a route to Home Depot first then to the meeting. If you do go to Home Depot, you can then tell the system what you picked up and it will email back to your spouse what you’ve picked up.

So, you’re thinking this is all pretty amazing but why would Google spend time and money on such a large, free product? Like everything Google… it’s in the ads. Google’s Gaware will track everything you do in your car along with all the purchases you make. With that information Gaware will place small ads on the navigational unit. Google says that these ads will not only bring in money, but will be an added benefit for its users since the ads will be targeted to the individual’s needs, making the ads very relevant. There is also rumor that Gaware may eventually be linked to specific radio stations so that radio ads can be tied to the individual driver’s spending habits.

Tags: Google, GPS

Slashdot, the popular nerd news site, has always been notorious for its ability to “slashdot” sites by linking to them causing massive amounts of traffic to hit the linked site. Slashdotting has usually been considered a positive occurrence since websites are given large amounts of free traffic, which is generally a big goal for sites. However, some recent receivers of slashdots have started a class action lawsuit against Slashdot for this very thing.

The “victims” are claiming “undue stress and monetary drain in the form of intentional harm caused by the increased cost, unexpected website downtime, and excessive amounts of unwarranted, unnatural visits at inopportune times - all resulting from being linked to in news posts on the Slashdot website.”

The amount being pursued by the lawsuit has not been disclosed, though many speculate the figure to be around the half million mark. There is little chance the suit would stand a chance in court, though Slashdot may want to settle for a smaller amount if possible to keep it from dragging out through the court system.

No representatives from Slashdot were available for comment.

Tags: Slashdot, class action lawsuit

Gamers around the world rejoiced yesterday when Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s President, announced that Sega’s Genesis console games would be available via Revolution’s “virtual console”. Many speculated that Nintendo kept secret a few other key publishers, not wanting to let too many cats out of the bag before E3. Well, those speculations were confirmed this morning in a private meeting between Nintendo representatives and key members of the gaming press.

So what other games will Nintendo be offering for download onto the Revolution? Xbox games. Yup, Nintendo announced in the meeting that Xbox 1 games would be available via the “virtual console”. Not only that, all Xbox 1 games are reportedly going to be downloadable, including the many popular games missing from the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility list, such as Top Spin, Burnout, Project Gotham Racing, and EA Sports Titles.

There is debate about why Microsoft has allowed this to happen. Some people are claiming that it was a loophole in the publishing deals Microsoft made, and that Microsoft can’t legally stop Nintendo. Others are saying Microsoft made a very lucrative deal with Nintendo for exclusive download rights to all previously released Xbox titles, and that Microsoft’s royalties and upfront money will more than cover any loss of customer to the competition.

No matter what the reason behind this remarkable news is, Nintendo’s Revolution is definitely making some waves.

Tags: virtual console, Nintendo Revolution, backwards compatibility

Some of the founding web engineers behind web 2.0 have let it slip that they’ve begun work on a batch of web 4.0 websites that will “absolutely blow visitors away”.

I interviewed one of these great minds. He asked to remain anonymous, since some web 2.0 developers are quite upset that web 4.0 is coming out much too early.

Q: So, what exactly is web 4.0?
“It’s everything you’ve come to love about web 2.0, but more advanced and more visitor oriented. AJAX was a key technology used with web 2.0 projects. Well, we’ve developed our own new technology that will take AJAX type user experiences to the next level. Imagine Google Maps on crack.”

Q: What are some projects you know of that are currently in development for web 4.0?
“Due to competitive reasons and the simple fact that like you said, they are in development, I can’t divulge many details about specific projects that are going to capitalize on the web 4.0 standards. I will say new and improved versions of everybody’s favorite web 2.0 sites are in the works. This includes a Google Maps type project, a Digg clone, and a Flickr / MySpace combo.”

Q: Some believe it’s much too early to start developing web 4.0 websites when web 2.0 has just started getting off the ground. What is your take on that concern?
“It’s never too early to make advancements in any field. If somebody out there decides to start work on a new food that could feed the world’s hungry, should we tell that person it’s too early to work on such a thing?”

Q: When are you expecting web 4.0 to be officially announced and/or unveiled?
Well, it’s hard to say. We are waiting for a bit more input on web 2.0 before we lock in a few new standards for web 4.0. We want to make sure every new feature is a step forward and not a step back.

Q: What happened to web 3.0?
“To be honest, nobody noticed that web 2.0 was no different from web 1.0, so we figured we may as well skip up a version since it really doesn’t matter.”

Q: So what you’re saying is the whole web “versioning” wave that’s hit the internet is a facade?
“No, well, not really. I just mean, if nobody notices the differences, it doesn’t mean the differences don’t exist right?”

Q: Do you even know what web 2.0 is?
“No.”

So there you have it, a concrete interview with an expert in the field confirming the existence of web 4.0.

Tags: web 2.0, AJAX

Ealier today some scientists announced that they have created a new color. They have named the color Trougliue but have yet to agree on a pronunciation.

They say the color is not a shade of an existing color, such as “reddish orange” or “popcorn yellow” but in fact a brand new color that looks unlike any other.

Unfortunately, since all computers built to date have video cards that can only support the previously known colors, Trougliue (top left) appears grey on your monitor.

Tags: colors

In case you’ve been out of the comics loop, Marvel and DC have been trying to own the word “super-hero” by trademarking it. Well, it has come to my attention that they have decided to take things a bit further and trademark many more words and phrases commonly associated with comic books and super-heros.

Below is that secret list:

• evildoer
• good guy
• bad guy
• sidekick
• cape
• tights
• heat vision
• faster than a
• off like a
• henchman
• headquarters
• take over the world
• or else
• evil plan
• evil genius
• evil lair

It is more than likely that there are many more words and phrases that Marvel and DC are working on trademarking. It seems as though both companies are waiting to see the outcome of their super-hero trademark battle before proceeding with any more trademarks.

Tags: comic books, Marvel, DC, super-hero

The U.S. patent system is generally regarded as a failure when it comes to technology. Evidence of this can be found in cases such as RIM’s Blackberry vs NTP, Sony’s Dual Shock vs Immersion, and eBay’s Buy it Now vs MercExchange LLC.

Well, if you thought any of those patent disputes were absurd, you’ll really love this. Apparently a company called WHLOP, which stands for “We Have Lots of Patents”, has just sued Google for their patent on “Using a textbox on a web page to enter data, which then can be used for a variety of purposes such as storing for later use, searching, and logins.”

A Google rep has said “We will fight this rediculous suit with as much force as necessary. It should be evident to the populace that such lawsuits can cripple advancements in technology.” WHLOP has yet to comment on the suit.

WHLOP has other web based patents including; “highlighting text on a web page”, “using a button to submit data”, and “having images be clickable by hyperlinking them.”

WHLOP has only attacked Google for now, but if their case against Google wins, expect to see many more lawsuits hit the web.

Tags: patents, blackberry, dual shock, Google, Sony, RIM, NTP