"We are announcing that 21 positions are being eliminated in the Austin office of NCsoft in the area of product development," an NCsoft spokesman told Kotaku. "Primarily this is related to products which we have not previously announced and were in prototype phases. We are also cutting some positions on the Dungeon Runners team after deciding not to port the client to other platforms at this time."

Among those let go, Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings.

The news comes a day after parent company Korean-based NCsoft announced a bump in sales but a drop in operating profit and net income. The news is a stark contrast to rumors that surfaces earlier this week that 140 to 160 people were going to be let go and the office possibly shuttered. At the time NCsoft told Kotaku that the rumors were "not accurate at all" and "pretty outrageous."

Just two days after word hit that Activision was taking inventory of future Sierra titles, including Ghostbusters The Video Game and Brutal Legend, and trying to decide which to publish and which to mothball, I received this in the mail.

That's right, a preview copy of Ghostbusters The Video Game. The letter, written by the Evil PR Ninja Monkey (that's actually his title) at Activision Blizzard says that the hands-on preview code is not embargoed and that I can write about it as soon as I'd like to.

According to the included fact sheet the game has a Fall 2008 release date, but of course since the sheet isn't dated I have no way of knowing how accurate it is.

Sounds like someone is trying to reassure the gaming public. Now about that Brutal Legend code?

A new Playstation 3 SIXAXIS controller prototype has been sent out to the development community, according to SCEA's Dave Karraker.

The new controller is more of a tweak than any giant leap forward. Karraker said that the controller has slightly enhanced sensitivity for the analog sticks and and motion sensing. He also said that have not added rumble to the PS3 and "have no announcements regarding this feature"... I wonder if there should have been a "yet" at the end of that sentence? Otherwise it doesn't really say anything we don't know. It merely addresses the status quo, not what may happen down the line.

Hit up GamePro for the full quote on the tweaked SIXAXIS prototype.

Sony: 'We have not added rumble' to PS3 controller [GamePro]

Hmmm, this seems an interesting lesson in spin control.

On July 27, a Bizarre Creations staffer posted on their forums that the upcoming Project Gotham Racing 4 won't have day and night versions of their tracks in the game because "Whilst this wasn't a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we've worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city."

Seems pretty straight forward, right? But when people sorta went quasi-ape-shit pointing out, rightfully so, that perhaps the medium (DVD) is holding back the game, Bizarre Creations cranked up their spin machine and issued a response under the befuddling headline "Wrong end of stick been grasped?"

In it they seem to blame "fanboys" for the spin on their story, instead of the person in their company who actually said the DVD didn't have enough space.

But the DVD has plenty of space, they say now: "DVD size is absolutely not a factor that we consider when designing our games... and PGR4 is no exception. DVD9 gives us more than we need to create a fabulous experience for you guys."

Notice the word "designing", does that mean that it is a factor when they actually get down to creating them? Because it certainly seems so. BC goes on to write that the issue of no night and day was one caused by developer time and resources, which directly contradicts what was posted in their forums. They had to pick and choose what they wanted to spend development time on and they went with dynamic weather rather than time of day.

The question now is who do we believe: Bizarre Creations or Bizarre Creations?

Disc-oh? Wrong end of stick grasped?

Yes, I'm being a smart-ass, but to take an off-handed remark that the Blizzard Veep of business development made at some launch party for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade and turn it into anything but that is absurd.

Specifically this is what Itzik Ben Bassat, Vice President Business Development and International for Blizzard Entertainment, told a gathering of WoWers at an HMV:

"I'm a StarCraft player myself and I hope it's not a decade, and we launched StarCraft in 1998, before I'm standing here again, celebrating the next game in the series."

Yep, there you have it, a biz development guy hopes there's a new Starcraft within the next ten years. Now go celebrate. Brian Crecente

Blizzard hints at new StarCraft by 2008 [Pro-G]