Similar to other FPS games, but similarly much more grand, this MMO like shooter takes place across the entirety of Europe, with up to 10,000 players participating in several reenactments of the second world war. As part of either the Axis or allied forces, you’ll take to the skies and ground, on foot and in vehicles (even on the odd bicycle) and take the fight to the enemy.

It all works seamlessly through a browser experience, making the game accessible to a wider audience, as well as offering a strategic gameplay experience over the traditional run and gun of games like CoD and MoH. Perhaps the most exciting element however, is that similar to titles like Savage, some gamers will be able to rise up the ranks of command. This allows them to manage the war at large, calling for gamer reinforcements in some sectors, while sending in those with pilot characters to perform bombing runs.

There’s a lot of depth to this game and the surface has only just been scratched. We’ll be keeping out eye on it, and signing up for a beta key too.

It showed up on the twitter account of a QnA tester at lego developer TT Games, making it seem incredibly likely that an NDA has been broken with this image. That said, it’s nice when gamer fans get thrown a bone once in a while.

This latest image shows fully fledged thumbsticks, whereas in the past there were mere nubs suggesting a new direction in controller design beyond just the touch screen. However this latest version appears to show much more typical analogue controls.

The Wii U was initially debuted at E3 2011, with the hardware and controllers shown off, but with neither of them powered on. With an intended end of year release date, E3 2012 is expected to see Nintendo really show off what the next-gen system is capable of and perhaps some of its planned launch titles.

Microsoft and Sony will certainly be watching closely, having chosen to not début their own hardware this year and instead wait for 2013 before any of its competitive console components begin appearing in the wild.

The report comes from a leaked email from Nintendo, posted up on WiiUDaily. Apparently it was designed for retail store staff in Japan, giving them an idea of when to prepare for the next-generation console launch. It was previously known that Nintendo’s console would be landing later this year, but there had been no official date until now.

While some may speculate as to the authenticity of this date, the original Wii was launched on Sunday 19th of November, and in 2012, the 18th is also a Sunday. The closeness of these two dates makes it seem pretty likely that this is legitemate.

So far we know that the Wii U will be a bit more powerful than current generation Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 hardware and will make use of a new touch screen controller that some developers have said could be a game changer when it comes to certain titles.

Nintendo will also have a year of being the only next-gen console around, if purported release dates for Sony and Microsoft’s next iterations of their console lines.

The legal action claims that the TV campaign for Siri is misleading and pure “fiction” and deliberately “deceptive.” Filed by New Yorker Mr. Frank M. Fazio, it invites anyone similarly affected by Apple’s advertising to come forward and join the suit. No doubt Mr Fazio’s legal representative is hoping for as many as possible.

“[Apple's] advertisements regarding the Siri feature are fundamentally and designedly false and misleading,” the complaint reads. “The iPhone 4S’s Siri feature does not perform as advertised, rendering the iPhone 4S merely a more expensive iPhone 4.”

Apple’s defence for much of the complaints will likely be that the software is still firmly in beta and therefore not fully representative of what it will become. The court room will have to decide whether you’re allowed to advertise a product as it will be though, instead of how it is.

Commenters at the Washington Post have said that while they can agree that Apple is perhaps stretching the truth with its advertising, it would be a bit far to call the ads fiction – considering the author of the article had no problem setting appointment reminders and other basic Siri functions.

Apple has been in the news for its Siri app for other reasons, its Japanese version performing poorly in comparison to a native Japanese mobile provider’s own offerings. I wouldn’t be surprised if Siri ended up incorporating that somehow – saves the fruity firm tweaking its somewhat problematic software.

Featuring an accelerated processing unit (APU), the Edge is no bigger than past versions, offering up a full PC experience in about the size of a small book. Having tested previous versions I can atest to the minimal nature of the Edge systems and their surprisingly impressive performance considering the size. This latest version should be improved even more so though.

Combined with the AMD E450 APU, you get 4GB of DDR3, a 320GB hard drive, native wireless connectivity, ethernet adapter, twin USB 3.0 ports alongside two traditional USB 2.0. For graphical output there’s HDMI and VGA, with a bundled HDMI-DVI converter if needed, the former of which can output at 1920x1080p resolution.

The E450 that is brand spanking new in the Edge 3 is the most powerful of AMD’s E series of APUs, featuring two cores with a clock speed of 1.65GHZ each, 1MB of level 2 cache and a TDP of just 18w. In terms of graphical power, there’s 80 on die Radeon cores, featuring a clock speed of 600MHz.

Kitguru already has a review out of this little guy, and impressively on the lower settings, it was even able to just about play Left 4 Dead 2, though it did get a bit jittery in some of the tougher action sequences, bottoming out at about 20FPS.

Fudzilla has been perusing some data that seems to suggest internal tests comparing the equally clocked i7 2600 and the new i7 3770, the Ivy Bridge hardware – which sports four cores, eight threads and 8MB of cache – was between seven and 16 per cent faster.

According to the report, the lowest difference between the two was found when benchmarking ProShow 4.5 when operating a slide show. However, the 16 per cent results showed up when testing Excel 2010. Other software used includes: Sysmark 2012, HDXPRT 2011 and Cinebench 11.5  with the i7 3770 coming up trumps every time, with a lead of about 10 per cent.

Some of the performance difference could be put down to the slightly improved turbo frequency of the new Ivy Bridge chips. However there’s only 100 MHz difference, so it seems that most of it can be attributed to the new achitecture. It seems likely as well that thanks to the die shrink, and therefore reduced power requirements and thermal output, that overclocking on this new line of hardware could be monstrous.

As long as cooling is enough, it seems perfectly reasonable to hope for 5GHz on air, maybe 6GHz on water.

Some information about these cards is already known, but the full rundown was only revealed this morning. The highest of the high end will be using the GK110 core which will ultimately find its way onto four different PCBs. First there’s there’s the dual chip GTX 690. This one isn’t set to arrive until the third quarter but is set to cost just under $1000.

The GTX 680 comes with 2GB of RAM with a 512bit memory bus and makes use of 1024 CUDA cores, though there’s no information on the core clock of memory speed at this time. Purportedly this card will be almost 50 per cent faster than AMD’s 7970 but I’ll have to see it to believe it. A little lower down the pack we have the GTX 660 TI. Fudzilla claims it will come with an 850MHZ core clock, 768 stream processors, partnered with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory. Nvidia claims that at launch it will be 10 per cent faster than AMD’s 7950, but with 1.5GB of RAM less, it’ll be interesting to see the benchmarks.

Other cards include the more mid-range GTX 560Ti which will use the GK104 process. It features a 224-bit memory bus, 448 cores, a core clock of 850MHZ and an impressive memory bandwidth of 154GBps.  Not shying away from extra GDDR5 though, this card will still make use of 1.75GB, though the price will be a much more competitive $250 at launch which will be sometime in early April. The GTX 660 that will release around the same time should bump things up to 2GB of memory and a 900MHZ core clock but will cost a little more, running up to just under $320.

The rest of the detailed GPUs include the GTX 640 and 650, each priced just under the $200 mark and set of the lower end of the spectrum. Still, they’ll still come with a minimum of 1.5GB and a maximum of 2GB of memory, so these are hardly unimpressive.

Nvidia’s Kepler line looks about as ready to shake things up as AMD’s 7000 series has done. It’ll certainly be an interesting April this year.

“Kinect has had an amazing first year, selling over 18m sensors,” said Steve Clayton on Microsoft’s official Technet blog.

“Now it’s game on for businesses to show us what they can do with this technology – once they have Kinect for Windows hardware and have installed the SDK, they’re free to innovate away. Just how we like it.”

The retail version of Microsoft’s Kinect motion tracker for Windows hit recently, with a suggested retail price of $250. Educational discounts see this drop to £150, so students can motion control to their hearts content – or develop their own clever uses which I suppose is the point.

“Companies such as United Health Group, American Express, Mattel, Telefonica, and Toyota that already are developing applications with Kinect for Windows – and more than 300 companies from over 25 countries are busy dreaming, inventing and building.”

When the beta of the SDK – now available in full for free – was released, clever individuals used Kinect for all sorts of things, creating on screen light sabres, on the fly facial manipulation, voice controls and more. Minority report style screens are here people. It didn’t take long did it?

It was initially thought that along with Nintendo’s offering, both Microsoft and Sony would step up to the plate and get their hardware out within several months of one another. They certainly don’t want a repeat of the PS3 fiasco which saw it released almost a year after its competitors. However, now it looks like the Wii U will land first, with the other two consoles coming at least 6 months, perhaps more, later.

The announcement about the Xbox 720 delay came from Microsoft France’s marketing director Cedrick Delmas, who denied rumours that the successor to the 360 would be arriving this year. He didn’t however say whether the world would get its first look at the next-generation console at E3 this year or not.

“We’re in an industry that talks a lot, that likes telling stories,” Delmas told Lepoint (translated from Eurogamer). “I am not convinced that things will happen this year. The Xbox 360′s cycle is not over at all. The proof is that we haven’t price cut this year.

“Afterward, what will happen at E3, it’s still too early to say. What’s certain is that there will be nothing new in 2012. If we wanted to counter Nintendo, we would have to be in a position to release something immediately, and that is not at all the case.

“We’re not here to counter Nintendo and they’re not here to fight the other manufacturers. Nintendo has put itself in a different cycle, it’s going forward to its own rhythm, with success as we have seen with the Wii, and now it’s their turn to present their innovation.”

Microsoft’s 720 has featured a lot of speculation lately, with many claiming that the hardware within could produce up to 6 times as much power as its predecessor. This would make sense considering the leaps and bounds in CPU and GPU performance in the past 7 years. Adding an AMD 7000 series GPU – which speculation suggests has been done – would give the 720 unprecedented levels of graphical headroom.

This announcement came during talks about Nintendo’s current financial situation, which thanks to increasingly strong sales of the 3DS, is staying afloat, but the Japanese firm will eat a 65 billion Yen loss on the last financial year. It was expected that Nintendo would be showing off the next-generation console at E3 this year, so it’s not too surprising that an official launch confirmation for the end of year season has now been made.

It was E3 2011 that saw the Wii U revealed for the first time, with much speculation about its internal hardware as well as the touch screen, tablet like controllers that Nintendo was touting. The console itself won’t be anything extraordinary, packing in hardware equivalent to – educated guesses – about 50 per cent more powerful than current generation Xbox 360 and PS3. In contrast, the next generation Microsoft console is thought to be upwards of 5 times more powerful than the 360 – including a 7000 series GPU to boot.

The Wii U will also make use of AMD hardware, taking onboard a 5000 series chip specifically designed for the console. The processor is thought to be a quad core 3GHZ chip, with 768MB of onboard memory backing it up.