After shooting out of the sales gate, things aren’t slowing down for 
“Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty”. Activision-Blizzard has announced the game sold 3 million copies in its first month on shelves.
That secures its standing as the year’s best-selling PC game – and is letting analysts (who were a bit concerned with the early sales numbers) breath a sigh of relief. By the end of the quarter, it’s quite possible that “Starcraft II” may be the industry-at-large’s best selling game year to date.
Amazon may be riding high in the eReader rodeo these days
with the release of the new Kindle, but it doesn’t own the market – and it’s feeling pressure from the competition once again.
Effective Wednesday, Borders will lower the price of its two eReaders, the Kobo and the Aluratek. The Kobo is falling from $149 to $129. The Aluratek will drop from $129 to $100, putting it in the sweet spot for consumers.
The cost of playing “Modern Warfare 2” with friends on the 
Xbox 360 is about to go up. Microsoft announced Monday it would raise annual subscription rates for its Xbox Live service from $50 to $60 starting Nov. 1.
That’s the first price increase in Xbox Live’s eight-year history — and it’s a move that will affect more than just gamers in households. Microsoft has steadily added adding non-gaming functionality to the service in a bid to lure consumers who are looking for other entertainment options, including streaming of films and music.
With a new handheld gaming system 
on the way, Nintendo is giving its current device one last hurrah at retail.
The company announced plans Monday to shave $20 off the price of the two most recent versions of its Nintendo DS — the industry’s best-selling hardware.
Can You Find It? doesn’t offer a lot of innovations in the hidden 
object puzzle genre, but it doesn’t need to. The game uses a smart hint system, eye-popping photos, and a local high score board to keep players captivated and challenged. Fans of Where’s Waldo and Little Things will feel right at home, looking for a hypothetical needle in a haystack. It will take a while to figure out all the puzzles, but once you do, there’s not a lot to keep players engaged. Until that happens, though, it’s a great diversion.
Read more at Common Sense Media
Today’s phones are often used more for texting than calling — 
and the costs of those SMS messages can add up quickly. TextFree Unlimited lets people text as much as they want without causing a spike in their phone bill. The reliability of the app is pretty solid. We didn’t encounter any “dark” periods when testing, regardless of time. Receivers always got their messages promptly and their replies were just as speedy. The volume of ads is annoying, though — and tacking on a recurring annual fee to a free app feels a bit iffy. (The app used to carry a one-time charge of $5.99 for no ads.) Parents will still need to monitor who their kids are texting and what’s being said, but for the budget conscious, this is a good alternative.
Mother Goose Interactive Nursery Rhymes strives hard to bring the 
joy and magic of the classic children’s tales to life, but misfires on a few key points. While the art and illustration are gorgeous, the app only tackles a small number of nursery rhymes — certainly not enough to justify the price. Worse, the narration of the rhymes often doesn’t match the words onscreen, which will be unhelpful to kids who are trying to learn to read via the app. (For example, in “Three Blind Mice,” the text reads “they all ran after the farmer’s wife, who cut off their tails with a carving knife,” but the narrator skips the word “off”.) The extras — a puzzle and a freeform art pad — are fine, but are done better elsewhere for less.
Read more at Common Sense Media
Just a heads up that I’ve added Gamasutra.com to my client roster. I’ll be acting 
as an editor at large for the site, contributing a couple of stories each week that dig beyond the headlines and look at the business side of gaming.
Further details – along with other recent staff moves and news of a new traffic milestone at the site – can be found at Gamasutra
Touch-based maze puzzles seem like a great idea for products like the iPhone 
and iPod Touch, but in order to be fun, the touch sensitivity has to be flawless. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with TOUCH MAZE. All too often, the screen will fail to keep up with users’ finger drags, taking players’ minds off of the solution and focusing it on getting the on-screen marker moving again. That’s a problem when playing a time-based game. The iPad two-player version of the game is a nice twist — and adds to the enjoyment of the app, but ultimately suffers from the same flaws.
Marine HD is chock full of information about the sea. Unfortunately, 
none of that information is new or original. Every entry appears to be lifted word-for-word from Wikipedia pages, which are free to anyone with a web browser. What’s more, the app actually makes it more difficult to get information available online. Marine HD presents the information as huge blocks of text that are very difficult to read. The little text that’s not lifted from the free web encyclopedia is littered with misspelled words and sentences that, frankly, make no sense.
For example, the sentence that greets you upon opening the app begins, “Life is not merely around us, there is life even in the most inospitos of our beautiful planet earth, as marine life, a world in which there is also an ecosystem, evolution, biology…” You get the point. If you want Wikipedia pages, don’t pay for the pretty background and information that won’t be updated. Just open a web browser.
Chris Morris: Journalist 