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Sometimes it's easy to hate Sony. Nintendo releases its games on Monday, Microsoft gives us new content every Wednesday, but Sony has to hold off until Thursday to drop any new downloadable games, or demos, or even videos. While it's easy to say that's Sony's choice, it means that when a company like, say, Lucasarts, wants to release a demo on both systems at the same time, we all have to wait until the end of the week.

This is my clever way of saying that a demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is coming to the 360 and PS3 on August 21. That's this week. On Thursday. Thanks Sony!

Owners of NVIDIA branded video cards have waited for a while now for the company to announce its PhysX enabled drivers that will allow higher-end video cards to process physics on the GPU. Today NVIDIA officially announced the drivers that enable PhysX technology -- free on any GeForce eight series or higher GPU.

"It prints money" just isn't going to cut it anymore in conveying Nintendo's cash flow. The House of Mario announced today that in its first quarter the company brought in $993 million (+34%) in profit! Net sales were up 24% to $3.91 billion. The company sold 5.17 million Wii consoles globally (+50%) and 6.94 million DS units, which means the total lifetime sales of the units are 29.62 million and 77.54 million units for the Wii and DS, respectively.

The business quarter encompassing the first half of the summer is typically a tough time for gaming companies, as development costs pile up and software releases are held in preparation for the holiday season. These factors tend to send companies home with low net incomes and occasional losses. However, Sony's gaming division made it through the lull with a strong showing from the PlayStation 3 that pushed its net numbers into the black.

"Star Trek® was never about a single character, ship or even planet; Star Trek was always about an entire universe. And MMORPGs are uniquely suited to create such a thing and allow players to explore every inch.

Star Trek® has been a part of my entire life. Few other of my geeky obsessions can make that claim.

Brainy Gamer has an interesting reflection on old puzzle games and why their style of gameplay seems to be a dying art. According to the author modern gamers seem more interested in combat and seem to have lost the patience for difficult puzzles.

"Despite my fondness for the adventure games of yore, it appears the days of puzzles in narrative games have come and gone. Puzzles - especially the serial unlocking variety found in the old LucasArts games - seem to have become a relic of a bygone era. Where they once provided a necessary ludic element to a—clever and often complex narrative - designed to add challenge and force the player to earn his progress through the story - few modern players have the patience for such challenges anymore."

"A batarian extremist group has hijacked a mobile asteroid station in the Asgard system, setting it on a collision course with the nearby colony world of Terra Nova. Only you, and the hand-picked crew of the Normandy, can save the millions of innocent civilians before the asteroid completes its deadly descent.

This first downloadable content pack further expands the Mass Effect universe and continues the adventures of Commander Shepard and the Normandy crew."

Update 1.01

* added some infrastructure support for additional downloadable content