Gaming News Round-Up: December 2nd, 2004

Today's wrap-up include news of the Nintendo DS winging its way onto televisions nationwide, a new way to play fiendish German board games online, and some U.S. prisoners who will now be resorting to Pokemon and Mario in their leisure time. - Nintendo officials have hinted that the new DS system may have official online support eventually, but in the meantime the system's wireless capacities seem to have connected in an unexpected way. Forumgoers at GameCube 'tunneling' product Warp Pipe's message boards have discovered the DS's strange ability to transmit its video signal to regular television antennas over the VL band. The images seen are unclear and fuzzy, but unmistakably visible as superimposed images over regular programming. Amid fanboy speculation that this means something for future DS capabilities, it seems most likely that it doesn't, but it's still a neat little curiosity, albeit one that the FCC may want to hear about. - GameTable Online, a new venture from Joe Minton, CEO of Cyberlore Studios, has online versions of board and hobby games available for play. Several popular card-based games and strategy games normally only found at hobby shops are currently available to subscribers: several games from the Cheapass stable, including Kill Doctor Lucky and Lord of the Fries, are represented, as is Tigris and Euphrates from German designer Reiner Knizia. New subscribers get two free weeks of play, after which they'll pay a fee of $10 per month for unlimited access to all games. - Surprising as it may be that inmates are allowed video games in the first place, it comes as little shock that prison officials at Missouri's Jefferson City Correctional Center have pulled some of the more violent titles from the library. Though the center's officials believe that nonviolent games are effective in occupying prisoners' time in harmless ways, some games such as Hitman: Contracts slipped through when the games available weren't scrutinized closely enough. More than 35 of the 80 games in the JCCC library were pulled for violent content.