Populous Coming to a Japanese DS Near You

With all the focus on SimCity and SimCity2 on the DS, it seems one of my favorite city building games is getting overlooked.

Populous, the finger pointing god game is finally making it's way onto Nintendo's popular handheld! EA Japan already has a website up for the game that looks to have been up for quite a few months.

The site is minimal and all in Japanese, but it does have some small screen shots and such tucked in there for the adventurous clicker. The splash page announces that the game will be released in Japan on Feb. 21, 2008 and something tells me the US version will not be too far behind. At least I hope...

Xbox Live: still up and down ten days later

It's been ten days since we started tracking The Great Xbox Live Outage of Late 2007 -- ten days that the team at Microsoft has spent working 24/7, apparently unable to quash the issues affecting untold thousands (or millions) of users. Things were supposedly looking better until earlier today when they apparently got worse again, resulting in Xbox Live's service status box making a decisive turn towards the apology side of the spectrum. Granted, the whole thing may seem a little gratuitous at this point, especially considering that the issues are still tagged as intermittent -- but at least our informal polling at Engadget HQ has improved, with some of us even able to get on and play a game (slow and sticky though it may be). We suggest everyone get a little extra drunk tonight on behalf of all those at the Xbox NOC who will be ringing in the new year sitting at terminals so we can have our precious Live service back.

OLPC sells 150,000 laptops to public, may do Give1 Get 1 next year

Shockingly enough, Laptop magazine -- of all magazines in print today -- wanted remind everybody that tonight's the last night your hard earned (and increasingly devalued) American currency can be exchanged for an OLPC. But they also got a few words out of NickNeg as to how many OLPC units sold in the decidedly successful Give 1 Get 1 program (150,000+, not counting big buyers like Birmingham, Alabama), and why not continue the program indefinitely ("We are a charity and not a business. If we continued it, it would become 'sales' versus a charitable promotion.") While we kind of take umbrage with that attitude -- isn't it better, after all, to seed as many machines to underprivileged children as possible under any circumstances you can? -- we're hopeful at least that the gang at OLPC will bring back the G1G1 program next year with their v2 hardware. Hopefully by then some sovereign nations will have actually bought some OLPCs of their own.

Mega Drive Portable gets rebadged, available to order

It looks like that Mega Drive Portable we caught sight of a couple of months back is no longer exclusive to retro-happy gamers in Brazil, as a suspiciously similar-looking device has recently turned up for order at Play-Asia.com. As with the TecToy version, this one from AtGames is apparently officially licensed by Sega, and includes the very same line-up of twenty Genesis titles, including Golden Axe and Altered Beast, among other games with decidedly less hacking and slashing. Best of all, this incarnation the handheld is also a good deal cheaper than the TecToy, with it setting you back just $40. According to some early buyers, however, it seems that the emulation isn't entirely faithful to the originals, but at that price it's hard to complain too much.