In an interview with GameSpot, Frank DeLise, general manager of KAOS Studios, talks about the various strengths and weaknesses Frontlines: Fuel of War will have on each platform it will appear on. DeLise talks about the PC-exclusive multiplayer map editor, the use of the PS3's SIXAXIS controller, and the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Server Platform. Read all about the platform details for Frontlines: Fuel of War in the full article.

We just reported earlier about the rather belated news of the expulsion of a Chinese student. He was expelled from Clements High School because he was spotted playing a game of Counter-Strike on a map that, according to the police, was based off of his own high school's floor plan.

Unfortunately, because many facts have been hidden from the media, I, for one, am very skeptical about such a claim. I've searched high and low for more information on the story, but all of it revolved around relations to the Virginia Tech shooting and some executive board members soiling their underpants fearful of another incident. The most specific of facts were hidden, but to what aim? Fairness? Speaking of fairness...

Authorities claimed that hallways in the map were reminiscent of the student's high school's hallways. Granted that may be so, is the high school made up of just those hallways?

It's sad that we ended up drawing speculations here, but because the evidence (the map layout coupled with the high school floorplan) was never revealed to the media, can you blame us for doing so?

But let's take this into another point of view. There are many issues that gamers and some third-party onlookers have raised with this development, just about equally for and against the rash decision of the district board. First is the issue of maps depicting real-life locations and understanding what map making entails.

The second issue that people have had, which includes the 17-year-old senior's supporters, involves blowing the Virginia Tech shooting to proportions way off the "common sense Richter scale." In fact, it either began to look like the budding of another racial stereotype or, as one district board member claimed, the first of probably many overreactions, thanks to the VA Tech shooting and anti-video game activists. But let's tackle these one by one.

Click on Full Article to read more on this opinion piece.

The XNA Game Studio Express may still be in beta phase, but that sure isn't stopping people from checking it out. And thank goodness we have people who go ahead and test the waters, because we get free XNA tutorials (yippee)!

Kurt Jaegers is one of those guys, and he has been giving out some XNA tile engine how-to's for quite some time already. You've probably followed it really closely, so we're going to breeze through the rest and head on to part 4, the latest in the series.

Wait, you haven't yet? We'll give you a really quick lowdown. Basically, this guide is on simple tile-based map engine creation, so if you're wondering how to create character sprites and avatars, then this one isn't for you. Now that it's clarified, go whip out your XNA Game Studio Express Beta and create a new project, and give it a name. According to Jaegers, the code contains three methods:

• Game1 - Named the same as the class, this is the class' constructor. In the project template it contains a single line (InitializeComponent();)
• Update - This routine is run in a continuous loop and is intended to be the place where your game logic is run. Here you can accept player input, update locations of game objects, etc
• Draw - Finally, the Draw method is responsible to rendering the current game state to the screen. It is called by the class as rapidly as the system can handle.

After that, get the tiles that you're going to use for the screen. You can use texture images available online, or make them yourself. When you're done, add the resources that you need in the game, then declare variables.

Okay, since we're going over the previous tutorials really quickly, we're missing quite a lot of details. To get the whole thing, go check out our source for the previous tutorials. Now that it's out of the way, we can get to the blow by blow account of Kurt's fourth tutorial. The fourth tutorial is about creating a simple map editor for loading and saving maps, instead of keeping all of the map code in the game code itself.

Kurt says that you'll learn a couple of new stuff in this part, such as using the mouse pointer to select and edit maps as well as paint tiles; loading and saving streams, as well as tracking a program state.

To toggle between "Play Mode" and "Edit Mode," press E. In "Edit Mode," Kurt says that you guys have to add a box to the lower portion of the screen that displays which tile are you currently painting, and three buttons so that you can choose any layer that you're currently working on. The "W," "A," "S," and "D" keys will be used for scrolling the tileset for current drawing title selection, while arrow keys will be used to move around the map.

And that's a wrap, folks. To access the whole thing, click on "Read." Do keep yourselves creative, and who knows, maybe we'll get to feature your Xbox 360 homebrew game in the near future!