MORE NEWS from the gaming world, but first some more UT3 news, shortly after the beat demo was leaked on the PC

Midway has confirmed that Unreal Tournament III will be released on PC in November, reports Eurogamer.

Although it has no concrete date, it will apparently be very close to the freshly announced 15th November Australian release.

However, it will no longer launch alongside the PS3 version, which according to Australian distributor Red Ant has been pushed into 2008 with the 360 offering.

In other PC news (and console formats), Elite IV had a passing mention by Frontier Development's David Braben.

A slide in a presentation by the man behind Frontier, had a list of current projects, one of which was "Elite IV, PC, PS3, Xbox 360". Interesting stuff, lets hope it doesn't just fall into vapourware status.

Xbox 360
Xbox360fanboy has uncovered an Xbox 360 in the wild with IPTV features.

The site has quite a few pictures showing the various options for video and TV settings, akin to what one would expect from the expected IPTV update in the fall.

In a statement issued by Microsoft, the Redmond-based company acknowledged that the IPTV features "were inadvertently exposed while the customer's console was being serviced and is unrelated to the Fall Update."

The IPTV features, according to the statement, are part of the Microsoft Mediaroom services and will be made available to service providers by the end of this year, adding that it will be up to them to decide when the service is deployed. More at Joystiq.

After reports of the HD-DVD integrated 360 from Toshiba, the company has quickly come out to suggest the news wasn't as accurate as we'd hoped.

Toshiba spokesman told Stuff that the Toshiba-branded Xbox 360 console with built-in HD DVD rumor was false. "It's got nothing to do with us, " says Tosh, "But we know Microsoft doesn't want to include the HD DVD drive so as not to limit the user's experience."

If you're looking to mod your 360, check out this new Black Knight. Snazzy.

If you get more excited looking at USB hubs, Joystiq has shots of the Rock Band peripheral. Yay.

PS3/PSP
A German tech site (via Gamesindustry.biz) is reporting that the new 40GB PS3 console will include a 65nm version of the Cell processor, thus reducing the system's power usage.

The new system should therefore output less heat and noise, according to the tech site's report. The site also claims that the new console features a smaller heat pipe and a new motherboard.

Computer Base quotes 135W at full load, down from 200W. The site says the console's noise levels are down from 1.3 to 0.5-0.8 sones.

Engadget has shots of the 40GB packaging here.

Operating losses in Sony's video game unit for the year ending March 2008 could potentially exceed ¥100 billion (£422 million) - twice as much as the ¥50 billion (£211 million) originally projected, a Sony spokeswoman told Reuters.

In its recently-announced financial results, Sony posted an operating loss of ¥96.7 billion yen (£405 million) due to the cost of PS3 hardware, even though sales of the console had reached 1.31 million units.

Gaurav Khanna, an astrophysicist working at the University of Massachusetts, has been building his own supercomputer using Playstation 3 consoles.

The professor has been renting time on supercomputers at NASA and the National Science Foundation to run highly complicated calculations on the amount of radiation emitted when a black hole swallows a star, which doesn't come cheap. In an average year, he rents about 30,000 hours, which costs between $20,000 and $30,000, a significant chunk of his grant money.

To ease his supercomputing plight, Khanna turned to the cell chip inside the PS3. By linking eight of them together, he said he gets the same processing power as a supercomputer with 200 processors.

More at Computerworld.

The PSP's Secret Agent Clank will connect to PS3 in 'secret' way, reports Joystiq in another reference to the ongoing convergence between the two devices.

Wii/DS
Good news for those waiting for Link's crossbow training - Nintendo's Wii Zapper will be available across Europe in time for Christmas, the company said yesterday.

It's easily possile that the Zapper will sell more than Resident Evil 4 on the Wii - it's just been an nounced that it's shipped over a million units.

In an interview with Guardian Unlimited, Will Wright gives his opinion on the Wii. Will likes Wii.

Wright believes the Wii is worthy of the "next-gen" moniker because it's getting another generation to play games. "The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement," says Wright. "But the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic."

Nintendo's DS continued to sell more than any other games platform in Japan last week, although units sold dropped over ten per cent on the previous week.

It shifted 70,608 according to data from Media Create, while the Playstation Portable's numbers remained consistent on 58,699.

The Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 both saw their numbers rise week on week, while the Xbox 360 fell back as the effect of the Elite launch began to die away.

The full break-down can be seen at Gamesindustry.biz.

Last week's Eurogamer Wii Virtual Console round-up can be seen here. µ