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The release date for Halo Wars got a bit more specific today as Microsoft announced the Xbox 360 exclusive RTS will be released worldwide in February. Naturally, given that it's a Halo game, you'll get to dish out some extra cash for the Limited Collector's Edition which is full of Halo goodies. Just don't expect anything quite as substantial as a helmet for a small, cat-sized animal of your choice.

A great new blog from IMVU cofounder
I recently have been reading a new blog by Eric Ries, one of the founders of IMVU. The URL is http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com and the RSS feed is here. I’ve found it to be a great source of thinking around both games and metrics, two of my favorite topics. It’s quickly become one of my favorite blogs.

For those of you guys who haven’t spent much time looking at IMVU, here’s a good summary from GigaOm, including the statistics below:

• About 1.7 million user-generated items have been uploaded to the IMVU catalog
• Users create most content offline with industry-standard modeling tools such as Maya and Blender
• Individual content creators can take their earnings and sell them on third party web sites
• As with Second Life, IMVU users retain intellectual property rights to content submitted to the IMVU catalog
• About 100,000 users are registered to be IMVU content creators, but the number of consistent creators is in the tens of thousands
• IMVU users often sell their credits to other users via third-party web sites — also fine with Cary. “We observe it sort of casually,” he said.
• Demographic: Largest cohort is teens; 60 percent of users are female, 60 percent are American
• 50-70K concurrency is typical, with peaks in the high 70s
• IMVU areas are more like virtual rooms restricted to 10 avatars or fewer; Cary estimated 90 percent of those room interactions are person-to-person, anyway.

Eric has already written some great articles from his experience at IMVU, including articles on:

• common distribution models for online businesses
• gaining distribution advantages on the iPhone
• doing market research for product feedback
• a/b testing products

I’d encourage you to read more games+web+metrics goodness.

KP beefing up on games
Another interesting note is that it looks like KP has recently been beefing up their games focus. These days, Eric is a venture advisor for Kleiner Perkins, after 4 years at IMVU. He also joins the recently made partner Bing Gordon, a cofounder of EA, who quickly went on a tear making investments in games companies like:

• Facebook social gaming powerhouse Zynga
• mobile games company Ngmoco (from EA veterans)
• GoGii (from the Jamdat founders)

They also have Chi-Hua Chien, who sourced the Facebook for Accel Partners, and who is obviously a great resource for the intersection of social web and games.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the blog!

Join this browser game to fight zombies, fight Digg related monsters, and fight other players from Digg! Brain Chef is a fun game to duke it out against your online friends [[and enemies]] at Brain Chef! First make your character... Then fight NPCs.... Then fight other Digg users!

Unholy Island is a strategy game where you play the role of an dead skeleton pirate who has been cursed by the Kraken to be stuck on an island. Unfortunately other “live” pirates have found the island and now you must use the weapons at your disposal and spawn minions to protect it. Its a very well built game but has a few minor issues such as the barrels being hard to grab at times. But despite a few minor glitches, it is still a good strategy game that deserves some play time.

Think you play too much World of Warcraft? Compared to "Prepared," you don't. In a case of game addiction gone officially bananas, gaming blog Joystiq reports on what is surely the biggest Warcraft fan of them all. Known only under the moniker "Prepared," the gamer plays a stunning 36 World of Warcraft accounts on 11 different computers...simultaneously. Stemming from a desire to manage raids -- large-scale gameplay sessions that typically require the teamwork of multiple players -- all by himself, the die-hard gamer seems undaunted by both the financial and lifestyle commitments to such a geeky endeavor.

Everyone has played Donkey Kong at least once, everyone has played LEGO at least once, but how many people have played Donkey Kong with LEGO?

If Google's entry into a field of advertising doesn't legitimize it, nothing can. And that's why the in-game advertising industry just got a huge shot in the arm. On Tuesday night, Google announced the beta launch of its new AdSense for Games program, the search giant's first foray into the video games market, and the long-awaited answer to the question of what the company planned to do with AdScape Media, which it bought for $23 million in February 2007.

So they are called Nintendo points, but they are only kinda Nintendo points. You see the are really Wii Points or DS Points. Because once you activate them for one console, they can’t be used on the other. Even Microsoft lets you use MS Points between the 360 and the Zune for the 5 people that have one. I won’t say this is as bad as say “friend codes”, but once again I feel that Nintendo just doesn’t get us at all.

I remember saying in my review of Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction that I thought it was the best looking game on the PS3 so far. But QFB seems to be more polished and looks better if that’s possible! The game follows straight on from where we left our hero, with Clank taken by the Zoni. To where, nobody knows. But in QFB, Ratchet is trying everything he can to find his faithful friend and sidekick.