Diablo III Welcomes Players to Beta Hell This Summer

Fans around the world have been waiting for their chance to play Diablo III since the game was announced back in June of 2008. During today's Activision financial results conference call, Blizzard boss Michael Morhaime pinpointed a three-month window for the Diablo III beta.

"The game is looking great," Morhaime said during the conference call, "and we're currently aiming at a third quarter launch for external beta testing." A third quarter target would have beta testing for Diablo III launching sometime between July and September of 2011.

What Morhaime didn't offer was any sign of an official release date. "I want to be clear that we do not have an official release date or window yet," he said, explaining that Blizzard would not compromise quality to hit a release window. A slide accompanying the conference call did mention the company was "driving hard" to get the game released this year.

With beta testing kicking off in the third quarter of 2011, we're sure to hear something regarding Diablo III's launch by the time BlizzCon 2011 rolls around in October.

Sega reveals new 3DS game 'Crush'

Heading out this fall, the puzzler/platformer game 'Crush' is sure to make a splash.

The game was just announced by Sega, along with a proposed September release date

What's unique about this announcement is that Crush was originally released for Sony's PSP handheld, which at the time was the only portable game device capable of running the game.

Now, of course, the 3DS is more than capable of powering any title that was originally developed for the PSP, though this is believed to be the first game that is a direct platform cross.

Crush 3D - the official title of the upcoming 3DS installment - is not just a port of the PSP adventure, but it is not a completely brand new experience either. Rather, it's more like a highly updated version of the PSP original.

Even on the PSP, Crush was a game that relied on viewer perspective and the manipulation of 3D graphics (despite being presented on a 2D display). The transition to 3D makes it a much more inventive concept.

"Navigate across the surreal platforms of Danny’s mind by ‘crushing’ your way from a 2-dimensional to a 3-dimensional world and back again whenever you need to. Discover how ‘crushing’ takes you to impossible heights, over insurmountable obstacles, and even disposes of dangerous enemies. With full 3D graphics that make complete use of the Nintendo 3DS capabilities, CRUSH3D also sports the possibility to leave gifts for friends to collect in-game, using the innovative StreetPass communication system," described Sega.

Caixa Mágica 16 Beta

A development build of Caixa Mágica 16, a Portuguese Linux distribution for the desktop, has been released for testing. The biggest change is the fact that Caixa Mágica is no longer based on Mandriva Linux as in the past, but it is now built from the latest Ubuntu, with standard GNOME 2 as the default desktop environment. Version 16 is based on Ubuntu 11.04 and it it includes many more installation and configuration options while supporting a much larger number of hardware devices than previous Caixa Mágica releases. For graphics card with 3D support it's possible to activate 3D effects (Compiz Fusion) in the control centre. As always, this is a beta release, so it is not recommended for critical computer system. See the release announcement and release notes (both links in Portuguese) for more information and known issues. Download: caixamagica-16-desktop-i386-beta.iso (700MB, MD5), caixamagica-16-desktop-amd64-beta.iso (701MB, MD5).