Only rightly, the company that created Mario has been deemed as the top video game publisher by Game Developer. It's amazing how Nintendo still manages to stay on top after all these years.

Sony ranked fifth, and Microsoft blipped on 9th place. Who else made it? Full list after the link.

When you have a video game title as big a behemoth as Halo 3, you need to have an excellent beta testing phase to make sure that all possible issues will be ironed out even before the game is released. Bungie Studios understands this perfectly well, thus, the over 40 million preview games played in just three weeks.

Yup, that's how extensive Bungie and Microsoft want this testing because the title, truth be told, is expected to generate truck loads of Benjamins. Anyway, the image accompanying this article is an example of a "heat map" for Valhalla maps. This graphs show the data samples taken during the testing phase.

 

The red parts of the map represent choke points and hot zones. Bungie refers to maps similar to this to find out where changes to the level's layout, spawn points, or weapon locations need to be made. Think of the red area as blood, meaning a lot of kills have occurred there.

Quite curiously, the heat maps can also be used when balancing weapons. Just like what we said, the said maps also reveal weapon locations and spawn points. With this, Bungie can establish "themes and patterns" of issues with weapons and spawn points.

We all know the next-gen consoles' specs and their games as well as their price tags. Some people just have to compare things on insanely different criteria. Hardcoreware took the liberty of comparing just how much power each next-gen console gobbles up at different states to see of we have any power hogs in the mix. If you don't own any consoles just yet or are in the market for another one, this is not an article that will affect your final pick, but it's still fun to know what drives the meter up.

Also included in the mix was a PC with relatively good specs- enough to match any next gen console in the market. The game machines were tested in these states:

1. During game playback
2. During movie playback
3. While in console mode
4.While on standby

The testers used the new Watts UP? Pro power tester to gather the data needed for the experiment. These are the results:

1. During game playback, NBA Live 2007 was used for the PS3, Gears of War for the X360 and Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess for the Wii. The PC used PREY. We see that the Wii is phenomenally efficient in power, averaging 17.8 watts in half an hour while the PS3 used up an average of 185.9 watts over the same time span.

2. When it comes to movie playback, the PS3 was the leader in consumption with a 173.2 watt average. The 360 eats up significantly less at 125.6 watts. We also included a DVD player in the bunch for reference and comparison.

3. These are the average readings at console mode when no game is inserted but the system is active. The PS3 remains on top with177.15 while the Wii is still efficient at 13.5 watts.

4. The Wii was plugged to the Connect 24 which allows it to stay connected and remain updated through Nintendo's network. The PS3 consumes the least while on standby but the disparity isn't really significant. That's a dollar a month for the Wii and 20 cents for the PS3.

   

So there you have it. Knowing the nature of gamers, this probably wouldn't matter but to your mom, it just might. Click on the graphs above to check the data for yourself.