With both Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires, Halo Wars) and Pandemic Studios (Mercenaries, The Saboteur) having shut down across the past year, veterans of both took the stage at Game Developers Conference 2010 to explain what went wrong.

ATI video card owners unable to play Pandemic's WW2 shooter The Saboteur might find their Christmas wishes answered by a new beta patch, available now from FileShack.

The beta patch is intended to fix freezing issues for players with ATI Radeon 3000, 4000, and 5000 series video cards on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista. Read more »

Sticking true to the original fall projection, Electronic Arts today announced that the latest entries in the Spore franchise--Spore Hero for the Wii and Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS--are due in North America on October 6 and internationally October 9.

While the Wii entry is described as a story-driven "action-adventure game," the Nintendo DS version centers around combat, with players defeating an "evil force" by besting arena competitions. As one would expect from the franchise, both are heavily focused on character customization, as new parts and abilities are earned throughout the story.

EA has remained pretty quiet about its fall-due Spore Hero games for Wii and DS, but that ended today with a fresh blast of media for the customization-heavy action titles.

A trailer arrived alongside the new shots, but instead of offering any gameplay footage, it's just a short pre-rendered teaser of a Spore creature playing with a Wii Remote. Read more »

During a Spore "State of the Universe" event last night, EA Maxis announced three new Spore games that will hit stores this year, making for a total of four Spore titles to be released in 2009.

The newly announced games include Spore Hero (Wii) and Spore Hero Arena (DS), casual adventure titles that will see players directly controlling creatures as they follow a story arc. It's more action and less creation, all set on a crafted planet--but gameplay details beyond that were scarce. The Spore Hero games will hit this fall. Read more »