As a huge fan of the Animal Crossing games I could hardly contain my excitement when I got the 'Let's go to the City' game, bundled with Wii Speak. I couldn't wait to get writing about how the new game works out. I'll be blogging my way through the experience on GamePeople - so you can enjoy it too.

As an aside, I'm not entirely sure why the game had to be re-titled for the European market as it's just made it a bit of a mouthful, very difficult to abbreviate and talk about - City Folk just rolls off the tongue far more easily and as it was the name that I'd heard about pre-release, it's what I find myself referring to the game as, so forgive me for that please!

Read whole article: Animal Crossing: Let's go to the City

Surprisingly this Friday we have a decent spread of reviews, but plenty of cases dominating the roundup We got an Antec Skeleton and Overclockers club, with a nice Coolermaster one from the same guys. For something a little different, check out the Acer F-22 at InsideHW.

• Antec Skeleton by Overclockers Club @ 13:04 GMT
• Coolermaster ATCS840 by Overclockers Club @ 13:05 GMT
• Thermaltake V9 by Legit Reviews @ 13:08 GMT
• NZXT Tempest Airflow King by Mad Shrimps @ 13:08 GMT

• Thermalright TRad2 by VirtualHideout @ 13:06 GMT

• ASUS GeForce EN9800GT by Techgage @ 13:03 GMT

• Gigabyte's GA-EP45-UD3R by Bit-tech @ 13:02 GMT
• Socket 775 Mobo Roundup by DriverHeaven @ 13:07 GMT

• IcyDock MB674SPF Multi-bay by Think Computers @ 13:04 GMT
• Acer F-22 by InsideHW @ 13:07 GMT
• Silverstone FP35 Bay Card Reader by NinjaLane @ 13:09 GMT
• AMD Maui Home Theater PC by Hot Hardware @ 13:09 GMT

• Wolfking Warrior Xxtreme by TweakNews @ 13:03 GMT

• Seventeam ST-550P-AG by Hardware Secrets @ 13:06 GMT

• Kingston HyperX DDR3 by Legit Reviews @ 13:09 GMT

AMD have been showing off the performance of their upcoming 45nm Phenom processors, dubbed Deneb, for reviewers in Texas and they were able to overclock it to 6.3GHZ. They were cooled with Liquid Nitrogen, but it's been said that they were able to hit 4GHZ on air, and 5GHZ on dry ice.

The new chips will debut in 2009, and will be under the title of Phenom II. The top one will purportedly come with a clock speed of 3GHZ at stock, though it seems there is plenty of OC headroom.



Read more: AMD Phenom Hits 6.3GHZ [more available]

NASA has successfully tested a new interplanetary, long distance communication platform by sending and recieving messages from a space ship over 20 million miles away. The communication system is based on the internet, and is called "DTN", Disruption-Tolerant Networking.

"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, manager of space-networking architecture, at the NASA HQ in Washington DC.

Read more: Successful test of Interplanetary Communication [more available]

Some new screenshots have surfaced for the upcoming GTA4 Downloadable Content, which will not be released around this Christmas, but will instead be available on February 17th of next year.

The new content will feature a new main character that interacts with the main story of the game.

Read more: New GTA 4 DLC [more available]

Google, one of the biggest giant's in the internet world, has announced that they will be shutting down their "Lively" service on the 31st of December 2008. The Lively service was similar to other MMO-esque chat services, like Habbo Hotel, the PS3s Virtual World, or Second life. The program allowed you to create an avatar and your own room with varied theme. You can then visit, or invite others to the rooms for interactions with other "players."

Read more: Google Shuts Down "Lively" [more available]

A reasonable spread of reviews today, with memory at OCClub, Graphics cards at HardwareSecrets and Hi-techReviews with Bit-tech crapping themselves with many hours of Left 4 Dead reviewing.

• Cooler Master V8 by Legit Reviews @ 12:30 GMT

• Intel Core i7-920 Processor BX80601920 by Benchmark Reviews @ 12:25 GMT
• Intel E7200 2.53GHz by Techwarelabs @ 12:27 GMT

• Antec Skeleton by DriverHeaven @ 12:20 GMT
• Sunbeam Automation Mid Tower by Think Computers @ 12:25 GMT

• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 by Overclockers Club @ 12:23 GMT

• Left 4 Dead by Bit-tech @ 12:20 GMT

• GeForce GTX 260 by Hardware Secrets @ 12:28 GMT
• Sapphire HD 4830 by Hi-TechReviews @ 12:28 GMT

• Thermaltake BlacX SE by Big Bruin @ 12:17 GMT
• Alienware Area-51 m15x by I4U @ 12:22 GMT
• iStarUSA xAGE-902 Dual HDD by TechPowerUp @ 12:27 GMT
• Panasonic Link-to-Cell Phone by Hardware Secrets @ 12:29 GMT

• Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2x2GB DDR3 10666 by Overclockers Club @ 12:24 GMT

Samsung have launched the world's biggest SSD, with their new 256GB model, which apparently not only has a large capacity, but some of the best read and write speeds ever seen in a storage device.

The drive has read rates of 220MB/s and sequential write rates of 200MB/s, and also purportedly comes with erase cycles of 100GBs a minute meaning the drive can be re-written to faster than ever.

Read more: Samsung Launch 256GB SSD [more available]

The new Xbox "experience" is very pretty n' all, but there are plenty of new features too. One of these is that you can install your games to the Xbox hard drive in order to improve load times, and in some games, texture resolution.

That said, a couple of games have actually have increased load times, one of which is Halo 3.

Microsoft's top "Cache Officer" Matt Noguchi explained that:

"The Xbox 360 HDD has a section for games to use called the utility partition. Games can use this section for whatever they want to; Halo 3 uses the utility partition to cache maps as they will load faster off the HDD ... Think of it as an on demand install of Halo 3 to some scratch space on the HDD."

Read more: Bungie Explains Halo 3 NXE Issues [more available]

A strange Fable 2 based facebook group has shown up, called "The Association of Accidental Arsonists" which is a group for those who were unfortunate enough to accidentally burn their in-game family and loved ones to death.

This occurs more often than expected, because a simply slip of the thumb onto the B button on the controller unleashes the powerful fire spell, toasting anything it touches.

Read more: Strange Fable Facebook book [more available]