EA v. Zynga isn’t the only game-copying lawsuit in the news this week. Gree and DeNA, two of Japan’s biggest social game publishers, are locked in a copyright infringement battle over a pair of similar fishing games.

In the latest ruling in an ongoing conflict, the Intellectual High Property Court this week overturned an earlier ruling and declared DeNA did not infringe on Gree’s copyright, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Gree is expected to appeal.

The dispute

Jeff O’Connell, senior producer of the upcoming Hong Kong action game Sleeping Dogs, is our guest on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

Having played the whole game — the review will be up on Tuesday when the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game arrives in stores — I sat down with O’Connell for a look behind the scenes of this open-world, martial-arts crime story.

The discussion has a few

One of Sony’s biggest fall releases is PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, its unabashed knock-off of Nintendo’s popular Super Smash Bros. fighting game series that pits established franchise characters against each other in free-for-all arena matches.

All-Stars Battle Royale was given a major push during Sony’s E3 presentation in June, and it is one of a few games coming to both PlayStation

Dragon Quest X Online, the first MMO in Japan’s biggest RPG series, made a rather unceremonious debut last week. It sold 367,148 copies sold in four days according to data from Media Create.

Were this a game by any other name, those would be swell numbers in the ever-shrinking Japanese game market. But since this is a Dragon Quest game, publisher Square Enix may be disappointed. Historically

Not content to simply slug it out on Facebook, rivals Electronic Arts and Zynga are going to square off in court over similar social games.

EA said on Friday that it would sue Zynga over its recently announced game The Ville. “Zynga copied the original and distinctive expressive elements of The Sims Social in a clear violation of the U.S. copyright laws,” said Lucy Bradshaw, general manager

Jet Car Stunts is the best 3-D racing game on iPhone that nobody’s ever heard of, and it to support iPads and high-resolution iPhone screens. That’s enough reason to go buy it.

Although I just called Jet Car a racing game, it’s more like a timed obstacle course that happens to involve a thing with an engine and wheels. The game straps a big rocket to a tiny car and abandons you to a mile-high

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It hasn’t been a good week for news about massively multiplayer online games.

Activision Blizzard said that World of Warcraft subscriptions had dropped off yet again, from 10.2 million in May to 9.1 million as of August 2. Electronic Arts said that subscriptions for Star Wars: The Old Republic had dropped below one million, and that it would introduce a free-to-play option in the hopes of attracting

Sony lost 24.6 billion yen (approximately $314 million) in three months, the company revealed Thursday in an earnings report for the first quarter of its 2012 fiscal year.

Sony also lowered its sales forecasts for a number of consumer electronics products, including handheld videogame consoles such as PlayStation Vita.

Sony expected to sell 16 million portable game consoles by next March

One of the charms of a sudoku puzzle is its low barrier of entry. Unlike crossword puzzles, which require a tolerance for deciphering abstruse clues, sudoku merely asks players to count to 9 over and over again without repeating the same numeral in the same row or column.

Elemental, a puzzle game on Android and iOS, takes the sudoku concept and simplifies it further: one cell without numbers

The problem with Deadlight isn’t that it’s a zombie game in 2012. The problem isn’t that it’s a side-scrolling adventure, although there are far too many of those, too.

The real problem with Deadlight, to be released Wednesday on Xbox 360, is that it doesn’t aspire to be anything more than “just another zombie game” or “just another side-scrolling adventure game.” Not a single piece of it will surprise you. You’ve seen it all before, but here it is again in a slightly repackaged

Oh hi! You may notice something a little different about Game|Life today. Did we do something different with our hair? Get a tasteful lower-back tattoo? Yes, metaphorically speaking.

If you are a reader of the many different sections of the Wired website, you have probably noticed that several of them have undergone a significant revamping that began with the launch of Wired Design. Today, it’s

Square Enix will release a version of its Final Fantasy III role-playing game on the Ouya platform in time for its March 2013 launch, the publisher said Tuesday.

The Ouya game will be based on the 3-D remake of Final Fantasy III originally released for the Nintendo DS platform in 2006, which featured a complete overhaul of its graphics and many gameplay elements. Square Enix has since ported

In just two days on the market, the latest Mario game and the new super-sized edition of the 3DS look to be big hits in Japan. 430,185 copies of New Super Mario Bros. 2 and 193,441 3DS XL units were sold in 48 hours according to data from Enterbrain as reported by Famitsu.

At just under 200,000 units, the 3DS XL made a much stronger debut than the DSi XL did when it sold 104,000 over two days

The Game|Life video crew spent our weekend at California Extreme, an annual show featuring an insane collection of classic video and pinball games from the heyday of the arcade.

It’s becoming harder and harder to play the great old arcade games we grew up on. Even on the off chance that you find one somewhere, there’s a good chance that it’s broken down. But there’s a die-hard group

For almost 30 years, Will Wright’s creations have attracted people who would never have played videogames. He’s also managed the trick of developing games that enthrall hardcore fans while making rabid players out of novices. The secret: In Wright’s worlds, there is no win or lose—there’s just the game.

Also in this issue

• The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
• Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery
• Former McDonald’s Honchos Take On Sustainable Cuisine

He’s best known for creating the Sim franchise: SimCity, The Sims, and other titles. These unlikely blockbusters—more than 180 million sold so far—drew on the works of arcane architectural theorists, urban planners, and astrophysicists, yet they were consistently addictive. They thrived thanks to a concept Wright calls possibility space: the scope of actions or reactions a player can undertake. Most videogames give players a narrow possibility space: Do you want to kill the bad guys with bullets or grenades? Take the door on the right or the left?

Wright and his team at Maxis, the development studio he cofounded in 1987, blew past those constraints, creating an infinitely flexible gameworld limited only by the skill and imagination of the player. In Wright’s best work, players have so much leeway to determine their own objectives that

The Korean Customs Service is claiming that 25 suspects have sold over 90,000 illegally copied games and copying devices for Nintendo DS worth over 100 billion won ($87 million). The agency turned over information on the alleged software pirates to prosecutors on Monday, according to the Korea Herald.

Customs investigators told the paper that this operation had been going on since April of this year.

Unlike recent arrests in Japan, which only involved hardware or software that interfered with the built-in copyright checks performed by a game console, Korean Customs says these suspects were distributing unauthorized copies of Nintendo DS games alongside the R4, DS TT and other similar devices.

Individual packages allegedly sold for 40,000 to 100,000 won ($35 to $87) and included as many as 300 games on a single memory card.

Among the

Players of Nintendo’s latest Brain Age game, Five Minute Demon Training, can submit their data over the internet via Spotpass for use in scientific research, Nintendo revealed Monday on the game’s official website.

The data will be collected by the Tohoku University Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, home of the real-world inspiration for the Brain Age series, Dr. Ryuta Kawashima.

While the popular Brain Age series aimed to keep players’ minds sharp through rigorous puzzle solving, Demon Training instead seeks to actually enhance players’ “working memory” through intensive regular mental exercises.

The actual mental health benefits of the Brain Age games are unclear at best. “We’re in the entertainment business,” Nintendo has said in the past regarding questions surrounding the game’s practical applications.

Nintendo said the ability to share information with researchers is unlocked after “continuous training”

At this very moment, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are all in the midst of summer promotions, releasing new anticipated downloadable games to fill all those hours that would otherwise be spent doing boring stupid stuff like going outside or whatever.

On this week’s episode of Game|Life, I walk you through the three different promotions — Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade, Sony’s PSN Play and Nintendo’s 8-Bit Summer — showing you the games and talking about the bonuses you can acquire by purchasing them. Get educated!