Mark Best

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Find out who else has made the list in Naruto Shippuden: Clash of Ninja Revolution 3.

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Despite suspicious timing of stock dump, judge finds no evidence executives’ “puffery” deceived public to inflate share price of doomed publisher.

After years of financial turmoil, Midway Games finally went bankrupt in February. While the bankruptcy proceedings have wrapped up with the bulk of the business sold to Warner Bros., the fallout from the publisher’s prolonged collapse continues.

Midway executives: Masters of the fatality, the babality, and the legality.

The latest news surrounding Midway’s demise wraps up a lawsuit alleging that executives–including former CEO David Zucker–willfully deceived shareholders about the company’s financial well-being in order to artificially inflate its stock price.

Last week, a district court judge dismissed the suit, saying the shareholders “failed to show that defendants said or did anything more than publicly adopt a hopeful posture that its strategic plans would pay off. Such preening for the financial press is classic puffery. Even if these statements were not puffery, plaintiffs cannot establish that they were false when made.” (Emphasis in original.)

The shareholders pointed to two specific events to back up their allegations, the first of which was the August 2005 purchase of Australian developer Ratbag Holdings. The publisher at the time said the acquisition would bolster Midway’s in-house development capabilities, but it shuttered the studio just four months later, which contributed to the publisher’s $13 million in restructuring charges for the year.

The other event mentioned in the suit was the cancelation of Midway’s contract with developer Stainless Steel for the PC real-time strategy game Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War. Midway yanked the project from (quickly shuttered) Stainless Steel in November of 2005 and handed the game off to its own San Diego studio. The shareholders allege the move cost Midway millions in additional development costs that it concealed from shareholders.

The judge was swayed by neither charge, faulting the shareholders for failing to properly back up their allegations. However, the judge did appear to side with the shareholders in their suggestion that executives knew a rumored acquisition of the company by Viacom would not go forward before then-majority shareholder Sumner Redstone declared as much in late December 2005. Specifically, the judge frowned upon the executives collectively selling more than $10 million in Midway shares over the week before Redstone publicly squashed the acquisition rumors and used his own majority stake in the company as collateral for a personal loan, actions which sent Midway stock spiraling downward.

“The timing of Defendants’ extensive stock sales vis-à-vis Redstone’s announcement does seem a little too perfect,” the judge determined, “and defendants may well have possessed and traded on knowledge of Redstone’s plan before it was announced to the public.”

However, even if that were proven, the judge said it would not have supported the shareholder’s actual allegations of misleading shareholders to falsely inflate the publisher’s price, and so would not have helped their specific case.

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Netflix PS3 and a new DSi? Tor Thorsen gives you the lowdown with the GameSpot news update.

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Following Modern Warfare 2 furor, EA DICE calls out availability of player-run online multiplayer spaces for upcoming military shooter.

Infinity Ward hit a chord with PC gamers last week, when it revealed that the desktop edition of its highly anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 wouldn’t support player-run dedicated servers. Instead, Infinity Ward plans to introduce IWNet, a service that trades off dedicated servers for a more structured, console-like online multiplayer experience controlled entirely by the developer. Though billed as an improvement in matchmaking, the move will prevent owners of the PC version of the game from managing their own servers as they wish.

Bad Company 2 hopes to find good company online.

Following the news, many devout PC gamers expressed their discontent over Infinity Ward’s decision en masse through an online petition that has secured more than 164,000 signatures. Capitalizing on this furor, fellow online PC shooter developer EA DICE has taken the opportunity to remind its fan base that dedicated servers will be a part of the Battlefield: Bad Company franchise’s first iteration on desktops.

“Since Battlefield 1942, DICE has used dedicated servers for all platforms,” the developer wrote on its Web site this week. “This formula has worked well, and still works well, for us and for the gaming community. We have stayed true to this practice and will continue this tradition into the upcoming title Battlefield: Bad Company 2.”

As noted by DICE, Battlefield: Bad Company 2′s online servers will be hosted by a variety of a datacenters in locations throughout the world that players can rent space from. Accordingly, server owners will be afforded admin control over their rented space, “allowing you to manage your server, your way.” Players will also be able to earn ranks and rewards on dedicated servers, and they will also be covered by anti-cheat software.

The sequel to last year’s well-regarded new expansion of EA DICE’s shooter franchise, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will be available for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC on March 2. For more information, check out GameSpot’s previous coverage.

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