Hasta La Gadget!

What do gaming icons Richard Bartle and Ralph H. Baer have in common? They are meeting at the Games Convention Online in Leipzig to usher in the first trade show of its kind.

In case you didn’t already know, Richard Bartle is the co-author of the text-based multi-user dungeons (MUD) and one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) industry. Ralph H Baer, on the other hand, helped bring gaming to the home with the Magnavox Odyssey console. He also created the first light gun game for the home.

The Games Convention Online will bring these two minds together and show audiences how far gaming has come. They will be there from July 31st to August 2nd and will have an open exhibition “From Pong to Ping: The History of Online Games” that will tell the story of gaming in four epochs.

Those of you planning to watch Netflix movies via your Xbox on Tuesday might want to make other plans. A scheduled Xbox maintenance outage will also affect its Netflix linkup.

“While Xbox is performing this maintenance, you won’t be able to instantly watch movies on your TV via your Xbox 360,” Catherine Fisher from Netflix corporate communications wrote in a blog post.

The outage, which will affect Xbox Live and Xbox.com, will last all day – from 12:01am to 11:59pm Pacific time. Users will not be able to access the “My Xbox” section of Xbox.com and Xbox forums will in a read-only mode. The rest of the Web site will be operational.

The downtime will not result in any new functionality or features, according to a memo from the Xbox team.

Editor’s Note: Story was updated to correct attribution.

Adults play their share of video games, but a new study finds that about 97 percent of kids ages 12 to 17 play video games–and often.

Half of the teens surveyed said they played video games “yesterday,” according to the report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which interviewed kids in the fall of 2008.

Of those polled, about 86 percent used consoles such as the Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii, and 73 percent also played PC games. About 60 percent used portable devices like the Nintendo DS, while 48 percent played games on their cell phones.

What are they playing? Racing, puzzle, and sports-related games were the most popular, while virtual worlds like Second life produced the least interest.

There was not a huge difference in terms of genre preference between boys and girls, though boys were more likely to enjoy “mature” games that featured violence, gore, and rough language, Pew said.

Microsoft’s Project Natal took a step away from the stage
and closer to the living room when Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan and Mark Wilson took
the system for a test drive.

While the preview did consist of some of the same
style of tech demos we saw on Monday, the exciting part involved playing
Burnout Revenge, an existing 360 game, with the system. The game was able to
run even with Natal‘s processing
overhead, controlled via an air steering wheel and moving feet forward and
backward to represent the gas.

Despite their dedicated efforts to get the
system to hiccup, Gizmodo was impressed with the device, commenting on how
natural and polished the experience felt. Despite the usual pre-production
glitches, Natal seems ready to take
on the gaming world whenever it comes out. Video after the jump.

Yesterday at E3 I met with a company called Fusion-io. I was largely unfamiliar with the company, save for that recent bit of news about Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak coming on board as chief scientist. Thats no small bit of news, of course. While the hes been busy with extended polo games, d-list dating, and reality show flirtation, the Woz was more or less in retirement when it came to running tech companies.

At the time, Fusion-io was primarily manufacturing products for the SMB world, devices aimed at reducing the bottleneck on servers. With Woz in the picture, however, the company has taken a turn toward consumers, offering up the ioXtreme. The company was showcasing the product at E3, with help from pro-gamer Jonathan Fatal1ty Wendel.

The device sits in a computers PCI Express slot, in order to [fill] the performance gap between RAM and disk drives. I didnt get a chance to benchmark the thing at the show, but Funsion-io assures me that its blazingly fast, and has definite applications for those doing video editing or 3D rendering.

There are applications for games, too, of course, but at $895, its probably best to wait until the price comes down on the thing. The ioXtreme is set for a July release.