The post-E3 lull in gaming news appears to be officially over. We editors are once again being barraged from all corners with news of all kinds.

　　Our biggest story of the week was the latest skirmish in the Ultima Online players vs. Electronic Arts/Origin Systems dogfight. While we've been the only site to really get to the meat of the matter, the two parties are more than willing to have their side of the story heard. This week, we received the legal documents EA attorneys filed replying to plaintiffs' attorney George Schultz's initial complaint. To say the least, the documents were laden with accusations about Schultz's legal dealings, his clients, and his overall enthusiasm in approaching this lawsuit. Schultz later replied to our article saying that he wouldn't stoop to the same level that EA/Origin had. Just when we thought the legal waters had calmed, this new battle of words begins.

　　One interesting story we read in our local daily, The San Francisco Chronicle, was about a suit that alleged some ex-executives at the now defunct Media Vision had set up a fraud scheme to misreport the company's earnings. And some of the executives have also been hit with allegations that they sold trade secrets about Media Vision to others for profit. If you've been in the computer industry for a few years, you'll remember Media Vision was behind some of the early competition with Creative Labs in the audio card arena (with its Pro Audio and Pro Audio Spectrum line of audio cards). The company eventually went bankrupt, came back with a new outlook on the business, and became Aureal Semiconductor - makers of the A3D technology and Vortex chipsets. With all the suits going on in the industry, the reporters here may have to end up going to law school since Ally McBeal is in to reruns right now.

　　Everyone has played Monopoly at one time or another. Monopoly was one of the first multiplayer board games where friends became enemies and family members used heated language between one another. Now, Hasbro announced that it has launched an area on the official Monopoly site to determine a new game piece to be introduced next year. The choices are a moneybag, a biplane, and a piggy bank. We've also heard that internally at Hasbro there was talk about adding a piece that looked like a computer, but the idea was shot down before the final three were decided on. To get a little more information about the vote, take a look at the article and go vote on the Monopoly site. Only one piece makes it into the game, so choose carefully.

　　For hardware news (my personal favorite), we begin with the latest in video card news. The big comeback for S3 is in the works - it's the company's second wave of 3D acceleration, the Savage3D. So far (and it's early), the board looks to be a great comeback for the company who's last effort, the ViRGE chip, is more often the butt of jokes than a term of high technology. During CGDC, S3 was showing off the new board by running Quake II, Incoming, and a cache of DVD movies.

　　Which brings us to Creative's price drop for the PC-DVD Encore Dxr kit - which is at US$199 (with a rebate). If you haven't played with DVD yet, the technology is great - better images (no more horrible images with the old VHS tape machine), killer sound, multiple language support (in case you speak another language or want to impress friends), and many of the movies will come with a little background history. Creative's second-generation DVD drive technology allows you to read DVDs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs. First-generation DVD drives wouldn't read the recordable or rewritable formats, and many have had to save their old CD-ROM drives to read those disks. DVD games are a little on the slim side right now, but almost every publisher in the industry is talking about releasing larger versions of their games in DVD format soon. If you want DVD and don't want to shell out $600 on a new DVD device for your TV, this is a far cheaper alternative - and you'll have money to spare for DVD movies.

　　If your room is pasted up with photos of Tomb Raider's foxy gun-totting lead, Lara Croft, you'll want to pick up pop-culture author Douglas Coupland's new book, Lara's Story: Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon. Read about it here, first.

　　And here's a follow-up to last week's news that NEC wouldn't be supporting Final Fantasy VII's 8-bit palette textures in its current version of the PowerVR (which seems silly since the PowerVR logo is on the Final Fantasy VII box). NEC will support FFVII with its next version of its PowerVR chipset, the PowerVR Second Generation. Other problems have come up with Eidos' and Square's use of 8-bit palette textures. Owners of both nVidia and Rendition cards do not currently support 8-bit textures, and FFVII will therefore only run in software mode. We've been talking to nVidia who says it has a programmer working full-time on a patch that will alleviate the problem. We also spoke with Rendition who says that it is currently evaluating the code to determine if a patch will be possible. Rendition is also thinking about making a patch that will run on its own API, RRedline. We'll see what happens.

　　In other quick news, Avid has been signing deals with some video card vendors to bring a whole new level of video editing to desktop machines. Avid's products are used as the high-end solution for nonlinear text editing, and as it marries less sophisticated software to new video cards with video input, gamers may want to just keep movies of their skills (or an excellent movie album of people you've fragged). And if you're the user of AMD's newest chip, the 3DNow!, you'll be happy to know that there is a patch available for Quake II that allows the game to use some of the added 3D extensions built into the chip. Anything that enhances your Quake II experience is always a good thing.