Sony Pictures has signed writer/director Josh Trank (Chronicle) to direct the long-in-development-hell adaptation of 2005 fan-favorite game Shadow of the Colossus movie. No word yet on casting for Wander... or the horse. [Deadline]

The bigger the gaming laptop is, the more powerful it is. At least that's been the experience I've had in my gaming laptop-reviewing career. A bigger chassis means more bells and whistles, better heat management, and a larger, more vivid display.

I've equated smaller size with sacrifice, so when Origin PC first unveiled the EON-11s, an 11-inch portable gaming machine and one of the more affordable units they offer, I was impressed by the engineering but skeptical of its capabilities.

Now that I've spent a couple of weeks caressing its keys with my own hands? I'm impressed. And a little squinty.

When I compare the form factor of the EON-11s to a netbook, bear in mind that I've not been testing out a system with one of the fancy new molded panels Origin PC is so very proud of. Instead, my review unit came with the basic Origin panel, a flat black textured number that really does enhance the illusion that this is the sort of machine you could pick up for a couple hundred bucks at Wal-Mart.

When a real customer purchases an 11-S they are given the choice of three molded colored panels, seen above, for no additional charge. What's the difference? I'd say it's the difference between someone swiping the unit or handing it in at the counter when you accidentally leave it at Starbucks. Some appreciate the flash; I'm perfectly fine without.

The simple back panel of my unit nicely accentuates the no-frills interior of the EON-11s. It's got a perfectly capable 11.6" HD 1366x768 display; a plain vanilla keyboard of the limited variety often found on, say, a netbook; a textured two-button touchpad that melds nicely with the base; and that's pretty much it. The power button is a black square of plastic with a blue accent light.

They've managed to cram quite a few ports onto the sides of the unit, aided by the fact that there's no internal optical drive on the unit. That sacrifice allowed engineers to fit two USB 2.0 ports, three USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI out, a VGA port, a sport for a network cable and the obligatory headphone and microphone jacks. To load my copy of Diablo III on the EON-11s I used the optional Samsung portable USB Blu-ray writer.

Indeed, only the Origin logo beneath the display betrays the fact that this is anything other than a limited-power budget notebook. It even has the battery life of a netbook, easily running for five or six hours during non-graphics intensive work, thanks to NVIDIA's Optimus Technology.

The true power of the EON-11s lurks beneath this unassuming exterior. Configurable with up to an Intel Core i7-3612QM quad-core processor with up to 16GB of memory and a standard 2GB GDDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M handling video, Origin can pack a lot of power into this tiny package.

My review system wasn't quite all that. Mine came outfitted with an Intel Core i5-2520 dual-core processor and 8GB of RAM. While not the most robust configuration, at $1429 (including the external Blu-ray writer and software) the price is nowhere near as outrageous as one would expect from such a miniscule machine.

And really, who needs the highest configuration when you can run Diablo III at the highest settings at frame rates approaching 60 frames per second? You? Well then you should probably go for the highest configuration then. Just saying.

All in all, the EON-11s handling gaming tasks far better than I expecting. Battlefield 3 ran at a nice clip, barely dipping below 40 FPS on High (Ultra ran between 20 and 30). Tera, my current MMO poison of choice, barely blinked when I set the graphics to max.

The only feature of the 11s that performed to my lowered expectations was the display. A smaller display means smaller text; smaller text means UI adjustments, holding the laptop up to your face, squinting, or possibly having your glasses prescription updated. That's not so much a problem with Origin's display as it is my eyes, though I would have loved a panel with a wider viewing angle — distortion comes quickly when tilting the screen or turning it left to right.

And the sound, well. It's good enough for a laptop with two tiny speakers on the underside of the unit. It positively sings with headphones on. I'm sure you can find a pair somewhere.

Alienware's recent discontinuation of its M11x line of compact laptops would seem to indicate that the market for a compact and capable PC gaming system just isn't there. If it was a factor of price, then the EON-11s is in trouble — a starting M11x runs $999, $200 more than the lowest-end Alienware machine. The discrepancy makes sense, as Origin PC is its own company and Alienware is a Dell subsidiary, but it's still a difference.

However, if a market does indeed still exist for tiny laptops that can play Diablo III, Origin PC's EON-11s has the market sewn up. Not only is it a powerful little bugger, it's available with options that don't mark you as a target for the hordes of gaming laptop thieves I'm convinced roam the streets of America.

Special thanks to Origin PC for sending an 11 inch laptop in a two foot-by-two foot crate than I now have to screw back together for the trip back.

On Friday, Mike Young, the creative director for Madden NFL 13 revealed that the game would feature the notorious "Tebowing" posture, whose namesake drops to one knee in a solemn and evidently religious celebration. Operation Sports today published the first screenshot of what that would look like. In fact, they said it came on a fake punt play.

Monday, EA Sports released a video of the New York Giants receiver Victor Cruz doing his signature salsa-dance touchdown celebration. You can see that video below.

These two celebrations, combined with the fact Ray Lewis' burst-every-blood-vessel-in-my-body pregame dance was a feature of Madden 12, means three of the four celebrations parodied in that Eli Manning Saturday Night Live skit are confirmed for Madden 13. And EA Sports last week released a prototype of a fourth, a humorously lame celebration the skit's writers cooked up as the gag's ultimate punchline.

It makes me wonder, hell, maybe we will see Manning making an imaginary sandwich, dropping it on the floor, and then surreptitiously consuming it after a touchdown.

Madden NFL 13 Screenshot - Tim Tebow... Tebowing After Fake Punt [Operation Sports]

The mythology built up around Major League Baseball 2K is that the game could not do anything right. Eight-figure losses and terrible review scores every year are, yes, terminal deficiencies. But its pitching and hitting mechanisms forced the dominant MLB The Show to respond with weak revisions to its controls, and MLB Today—when it worked—was the freshest introduction in a main mode of play since the singleplayer career.

And, if the series is truly finished, there is a still greater legacy Major League Baseball will leave: It created 2K Games.

That's right, 2K Games, not just 2K Sports.

See, the other mythological component of MLB 2K's Greek tragedy is the origin of its hated exclusive license, the one that effectively made it the only baseball game available on the Xbox and, then, the Xbox 360. It was viewed as a desperate, if not spiteful swipe back at Electronic Arts, whose exclusive deal with the NFL killed NFL 2K5, still mourned by gamers with Arthurian longing.

But Sega lost out on that football deal—not 2K Sports. Sega published the 2K line of sports video games developed by Visual Concepts. And Sega's decision to cut the price of NFL 2K5 to $19.99 delighted customers, but offended a league that views itself as anything but a discount brand. And that would prove fatal to one of the last vestiges of Sega as a first-party publisher of console titles—the 2K line had been created for the Dreamcast, after all.

At the end of 2004, Sega was looking to rid itself of an expensive disappointment. Enter Take-Two Interactive, founded by Ryan Brant, heir to a newsprint fortune and barely 32 years old at the time. Though no longer Take-Two's CEO or a member of its board, the company still reflected a young, aggressive, risk-tolerant approach. Take-Two had hit the jackpot when it acquired Rockstar Games in 1998 and, three years later, published Grand Theft Auto III, a landmark title in video gaming.

With the enormous success it had seen, Take-Two was looking to buy in to other segments of the video games market and Sega's sports studios, Visual Concepts and Kush Games, represented a chance for Take-Two to become a true challenger to EA Sports' third-party dominance over sports video gaming. At the time, licensed simulation sports video games were, with only a few exceptions, made either by EA Sports, or by the in-house operations of a console maker (or a former one.)

Sega sold Take-Two the 2K line of sports video games and the two studios for $24 million, creating not only 2K Sports, but 2K Games, on Jan. 25, 2005. That same week, Take-Two inked the now-infamous deal with Major League Baseball. News accounts at the time speculated it was worth $200 million in sum.

This money—nearly a quarter-of-a-billion dollars for the license, the games, the brand and the studios—represented a big buy-in to a high-stakes poker game that Take-Two's old management regime would ultimately lose, and lose big. Major League Baseball 2K began life as the centerpiece of not just a specialty label, but of a new games division, which added Sid Meier's Firaxis studio later in 2005.

Major League Baseball 2K5, the last game published without the exclusive license, scored reasonably well but was still outperformed by EA Sports' MVP Baseball 2005, which occupies a space in gamer nostalgia similar to NFL 2K5. The next year, the wheels fell off.

Major League Baseball 2K6 landed with a thud on the PS2 and Xbox, cited for bland execution and a lack of polish, no doubt hurt by the loss of the ESPN presentation gamers had enjoyed in the 2K lineup. On the Xbox 360, it was even worse, savaged by bugs that reflected a studio caught flat-footed by the new hardware generation.

Elsewhere, 2K Games had bloomed into a reasonably robust label, featuring Sid Meier's Civilization series surrounded by licensed adaptations of films like Fantastic Four and The Da Vinci Code, agreements much less expensive compared to the licenses needed in a sports video game. More importantly, BioShock was shown at E3 in 2006, and Ken Levine's dystopian epic figured to be a huge coup for the publishing label.

But 2K Games and Take-Two Interactive still had big problems.

In February 2007, Brant, the founder, pleaded guilty to falsifying business records in a scandal involving backdated stock options. The company also lost nearly $185 million in its fiscal year ending in 2006. Investors, fed up with careless governance and spiraling losses, staged an insurgency that fired five of six members of the board of directors and seized control. Strauss Zelnick, who led the charge, was installed as the board chairman that year.

By now, MLB 2K was being blamed for $30 million in annual losses, thanks to the hubris of the deal cut by the former regime. Bugs, framerate drops and embarrassing glitches returned in force for 2008, followed by the total collapse of MLB 2K9. Kush Games' closure in 2008 meant Visual Concepts would inherit the project on a nine months' production schedule, and MLB 2K9 reflected the last minute change in design ownership.

Spinoff titles like Front Office Manager failed to draw anything at the cash register, and it was becoming clear that the MLB deal was anchored by a product whose name was now irrevocably tarnished. Zelnick was now openly calling the license a money-loser, the kind of mistake his investor revolt was formed to scrub away. And indeed, the culture of Take-Two and its two labels, Rockstar Games and 2K Games, was now prioritizing wholly-owned franchises and ensuring high-quality releases in them, as opposed to licensed adaptations.

That focus manifested itself in the release of 2K Games titles like BioShock and Borderlands and, though Mafia II released to mixed reviews, its development was indicative of that philosophy. It's noteworthy that in the future release calendar Take-Two issued on Tuesday, as its fiscal year drew to a close, there is only one licensed title on the list: the critically acclaimed sales winner NBA 2K12, likely the sole survivor of the 2K Sports label.

***

Take-Two said it expects to halve its losses from the Major League Baseball 2K franchise in the coming fiscal year, and completely zero them out in the one following that, indicating abandonment of that product once its license with Major League Baseball expires this year. A carefully worded statement from a Take-Two spokesman didn't outright announce the termination of MLB 2K—there's a show on Spike TV tomorrow about the game's Perfect Game contest, after all. But all signs point to the end of the road.

It would take an extraordinary reversal of corporate posture for Take-Two to end up publishing a simulation baseball title next year, considering the pain and the embarrassment it has caused, and the fact its name conjures so much disappointment for Xbox 360 baseball fans, who have had to suffer MLB 2K's manifold failures while hearing nothing but glowing praise for the PS3-only MLB The Show.

But whatever you think of Major League Baseball 2K, the 2K Games label sprang from the deal that created that series. And it has published some damn good titles. That's not good enough to save a bad game, but it is a legacy, however bittersweet.

The mythology built up around Major League Baseball 2K is that the game could not do anything right. Eight-figure losses and terrible review scores every year are, yes, terminal deficiencies. But its pitching and hitting mechanisms forced the dominant MLB The Show to respond with weak revisions to its controls, and MLB Today—when it worked—was the freshest introduction in a main mode of play since the singleplayer career.

And, if the series is truly finished, there is a still greater legacy Major League Baseball will leave: It created 2K Games.

That's right, 2K Games, not just 2K Sports.

See, the other mythological component of MLB 2K's Greek tragedy is the origin of its hated exclusive license, the one that effectively made it the only baseball game available on the Xbox and, then, the Xbox 360. It was viewed as a desperate, if not spiteful swipe back at Electronic Arts, whose exclusive deal with the NFL killed NFL 2K5, still mourned by gamers with Arthurian longing.

But Sega lost out on that football deal—not 2K Sports, which didn't even exist in 2004. The 2K line of sports video games developed by Visual Concepts was owned and published by Sega until 2005. And Sega's decision to cut the price of NFL 2K5 to $19.99 delighted customers, but offended a league that views itself as anything but a discount brand. And that would prove fatal to one of the last vestiges of Sega as a maker of consoles and games for them—the 2K line had been created for the Dreamcast, after all.

At the end of 2004, Sega was looking to rid itself of an expensive disappointment. Enter Take-Two Interactive, founded by Ryan Brant, heir to a newsprint fortune and barely 32 years old at the time. Though no longer Take-Two's CEO or a member of its board, the company still reflected a young, aggressive, risk-tolerant approach. Take-Two had hit the jackpot when it acquired Rockstar Games in 1998 and, three years later, published Grand Theft Auto III, a landmark title in video gaming.

With the enormous success it had seen, Take-Two was looking to buy in to other segments of the video games market and Sega's sports studios, Visual Concepts and Kush Games, represented a chance for Take-Two to become a true challenger to EA Sports' third-party dominance over sports video gaming. At the time, licensed simulation sports video games were, with only a few exceptions, made either by EA Sports, or by the in-house operations of a console maker (or a former one.)

Sega sold Take-Two the 2K line of sports video games and the two studios for $24 million, creating not only 2K Sports, but 2K Games, on Jan. 25, 2005. That same week, Take-Two inked the now-infamous deal with Major League Baseball. News accounts at the time speculated it was worth $200 million in sum.

This money—nearly a quarter of a billion dollars for the license, the games, the brand and the studios—represented the buy-in to a high-stakes poker game that Take-Two's old management regime would ultimately lose, and lose big. Major League Baseball 2K began life as the centerpiece of not just a specialty label, but of a new games division, which added Sid Meier's Firaxis studio later in 2005.

Major League Baseball 2K5, the last game published without the exclusive license, scored reasonably well but was still outperformed by EA Sports' MVP Baseball 2005, which occupies a space in gamer nostalgia similar to NFL 2K5. The next year, the wheels fell off.

Major League Baseball 2K6 landed with a thud on the PS2 and Xbox, cited for bland execution and a lack of polish, no doubt hurt by the loss of the ESPN presentation gamers had enjoyed in the 2K lineup. On the Xbox 360, it was even worse, savaged by bugs that reflected a studio caught flat-footed by the new hardware generation.

Elsewhere, 2K Games had bloomed into a reasonably robust label, featuring Sid Meier's Civilization series surrounded by licensed adaptations of films like Fantastic Four and The Da Vinci Code, agreements much less expensive compared to the licenses needed in a sports video game. It was also the publisher, for PC and Xbox 360, of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, an enormous success in 2006. More importantly, BioShock was shown at E3 that year, and Ken Levine's dystopian epic figured to be another huge coup for the publishing label.

But 2K Games and Take-Two Interactive still had big problems.

In February 2007, Brant, the founder, pleaded guilty to falsifying business records in a scandal involving backdated stock options. The company also lost nearly $185 million in its fiscal year ending in 2006. Investors, fed up with careless governance and spiraling losses, staged an insurgency that fired five of six members of the board of directors and seized control. Strauss Zelnick, who led the charge, was installed as the board chairman that year. He became CEO in 2010.

By now, MLB 2K was being blamed for $30 million in annual losses, thanks to the hubris of the deal cut by the former regime. Bugs, framerate drops and embarrassing glitches returned in force for 2008, followed by the total collapse of MLB 2K9. Kush Games' closure in 2008 meant Visual Concepts would inherit the project on a nine months' production schedule, and MLB 2K9 reflected the last minute change in design ownership.

Spinoff titles like Front Office Manager failed to draw anything at the cash register, and it was becoming clear that the MLB deal was anchored by a product whose name was now irrevocably tarnished. Zelnick was now openly calling the license a money-loser, the kind of mistake his investor revolt was formed to scrub away. And indeed, the culture of Take-Two and its two labels, Rockstar Games and 2K Games, was now prioritizing wholly-owned franchises and ensuring high-quality releases in them, as opposed to adaptations that required licensing payments and outside creative approval.

That focus manifested itself in the release of 2K Games titles like BioShock and Borderlands and, though Mafia II released to mixed reviews, its development was indicative of that philosophy. It's noteworthy that in the future release calendar Take-Two issued on Tuesday, as its fiscal year drew to a close, there is only one licensed title on the list: the critically acclaimed sales winner NBA 2K13, likely the sole survivor of the 2K Sports label.

***

Take-Two said it expects to halve its losses from the Major League Baseball 2K franchise in the coming fiscal year, and completely zero them out in the one following that, indicating abandonment of that product once its license with Major League Baseball expires this year. A carefully worded statement from a Take-Two spokesman didn't outright announce the termination of MLB 2K—there's a show on Spike TV tomorrow about the game's Perfect Game contest, after all. But all signs point to the end of the road.

It would take an extraordinary reversal of corporate posture for Take-Two to end up publishing a simulation baseball title next year, considering the pain and the embarrassment it has caused, and the fact its name conjures so much disappointment for Xbox 360 baseball fans, who have had to suffer MLB 2K's manifold failures while hearing nothing but glowing praise for the PS3-only MLB The Show.

But whatever you think of Major League Baseball 2K, the 2K Games label sprang from the deal that created that series. And it has published some damn good titles. That's not good enough to save a bad game, but it is a legacy, however bittersweet.

We did it twice (this time and this time). We're doing it again: Ask a video game developer anything...preferably about the world of game-making!

Put your questions in the comments section, please.

In a week or so, Jeremiah Slaczka (5TH Cell creative director! Scribblenauts! Hybrid! Kotaku columnist!) will answer the very best ones in the next installment of his new Kotaku column. Why do I have a feeling a few of these questions will be about E3?

Commenter Make.Sense is in the market for a new video card, but like many PC gamers out there doesn't know if he should go with an AMD, a NVIDIA card, or something from one of those other gaming video card companies that don't really exist. Trick is, he wants everyone to be nice and calm. Let's try our best!

I know that graphics cards is a sensitive thing for gamers, and that you have the fanboyism there aswell, or people who prefer one brand over the other very strongly, so please try to keep it as neutral as possible.

Currently I'm on a GTX460, and I'm starting to feel like the card is getting old for me and that I want a new one. I would say I prefer nVidia because every computer I grew up with had nVidia graphics and therefore I've always felt at home with nVidia, but as it was revealed a couple of days back (Read an article from a Swedish site) the GTX660s wont be released for a couple of months, and that was what I was looking to buy.

But then I found out that an HD7950 is about as expensive as the GTX660 is assumed to be (at least here in Sweden), but I've never had an AMD card, but I'm almost ready to take the step right now so that I can get a new card now instead of waiting, but I'm a bit worried about AMD.

So, pros and cons of AMD graphics, what do they do good, what do they do better than nVidia and what do they do worse? Should I just stick with nVidia, maybe go for a 670 or is AMD anything to have?

GameFly's made some interesting moves in the last few months. They jumped into the digital distribution space last year, offering games for streaming in addition to their physical mail rentals. While that moved GameFly's overall offering closer to that of Steam, they still relied on publishers to supply their pipelines with games. That's going to change a bit, at least on the smartphone side.

The company has announced today that it will be funding and publishing mobile games on both iOS and Android. If you're an independent developer who's working on a game, then you might want to take note that GameFly's taking submissions right now and you can e-mail gamedev@gamefly.com. The plan is to launch the GameFly GameStore this holiday season. As for iOS, they've already got an app that points users at good deals but GameFly-funded games will show up on Apple's App Store with GameFly listed as publisher.

This shift represents an interesting alternative to Kickstarter crowd-funding, as it makes both funding and distribution available in one deal. It'll be interesting to see the kinds of games that come through GameFly's new initiative. Here's hoping it's not all Angry Birds clones.

The ongoing legal saga between Activision and former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vincent Zampella continues to bring all sorts of once-secret documents to light. We already learned that Bungie's 2010 contract with Activision guarantees the delivery of four "sci-fantasy" shooter games, called Destiny. But what other details are hiding in that 27-page contract?

Over at Develop, they've compiled a list of all the details. For example, all Destiny and Comet games were to be designed to aim for a "T" rating, and down the line the series was to aim for the next generation of both Sony and Microsoft consoles (the PS4 and Xbox 720, whatever their true names) as well as PC.

But in among all of the standard "who owns what, when" of the business, budgets, and bonuses, a number of other, slightly quirkier terms are outlined in the document as well. For example, the specification about Easter eggs included in any game:

Before commercial release of all games in the contract, Bungie must provide Activision with a list of Easter eggs it has spliced into the game. Activision, following the certification process, must provide Bungie with the same list.

The contract also specifies that "Each Bungie employee will receive two Activision games per year as a gift," and that Valve, Epic, and Gearbox are strictly forbidden from developing any adaptations or conversions of any Destiny or Comet game.

Added to executive equity language clearly designed in the wake of the West and Zampella departure, the contract shows that Activision may have been excited about publishing a decade's worth of Bungie's games—but not so excited that they wanted to risk getting burned.

Revealed: The huge promises and secret stipulations of the Bungie Activision deal [Develop Online]

The plan was to spend a series of four consecutive weeks playing En Masse Entertainment's massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing game Tera, reporting back every Wednesday leading up to the final review. Then all hell broke loose.

Diablo III arrived.

Since I still like to believe I am a single 25-year-old with boundless energy and enthusiasm, I figured juggling the two games would be no problem.

I was wrong.

I am an old man with two infant children. If I don't get to sleep by 2AM I get cranky and start waving my cane around. I am building up a massive amount of crotch, which is probably the wrong word for whatever makes an older person crotchety.

So I didn't get a chance to play Tera at all this week. Why bother even writing about it? Because I missed it. Even as I delved into the darkest depths of hell, part of me longed for something a bit prettier; something a bit less clicky.

I suppose next week's Tera log will be the final one leading up to the review, but it promises to be a big one. The first round of elections kick off on May 25, and things are about to get nasty.

I can't wait. Such plans I have; such succulent plans.