The UpStream

Green Lantern is certainly all over the place right now. We have the Blackest Night comic series, the big screen adaptation coming out Summer 2011 and now a videogame... maybe. Warner Brothers has dismissed the prospect as rumor, but sources inside Double Helix have claimed that the game has been in conception for over a year, but development has actually started moving recently.

It's official, the swine flu has made it to our community. According to the Bangkok Post, an employee of a game parlor in Thailand has died because of the swine flu. Last week, the government of Thailand considered closing the nation's gaming parlors, as they have been identified as hotbeds of disease, but opted against it on Monday, deciding to close the schools instead.

Deputy Public Health Minister Manit Nopamornbodee believes that closing the parlors for the holidays would still be a good idea, and is fighting for that reality. He says,

Last week many news agencies reported that the Prime Minister of Thailand considered shutting down the country's game parlors in an attempt to slow the spread of swine flu in the country. It turns out there was no such order, however they are recommending that they shut down anyway. On the other hand, he did shut down the schools for 2 weeks. School officials have not been happy with this result, saying:

Have you been playing 1vs100 on the Xbox 360? I know we all have! Nick, Adam and I (or some combination thereof) get together with other friends for a night of fun trivia competition with people all over the country we don't know.

Now, here is the situation: it is free... for now. There is a possibility that, in the future, it will no longer be. Tania Chee from Xbox Live marketing said "In the beta season 1 it will be free for our Gold subscribers... Moving forwards we have nothing to announce at this time. We ultimately hope it will be a resounding success so we can move forward into future seasons... I don't know what's going to happen to be honest. It's a test for us to prove the platform will be a success."

That certainly sound like she is actually saying 'If we think we can make money charging, we will.' Would you pay to play, or is it not that much fun?

The good news - someone thinks Twitter is popular enough to write software for. The bad news - the software is a virus.

Koobface, which has already taken over Facebook and MySpace, is now apparently all over Twitter. If you are one of the 13 people who use the service regularly, beware of any message that states "my home video :)." The following link will pwn you hardcore. Twitter is taking care of the issue, suspending accounts of infected users.

If you have already been infected, get the fix from Trend Micro.

Sony's PSP has over 1700 games in its catalog. Nintendo's website currently lists 905 active games in its library (not including DS Download Play). That is a lot of stuff to do when you don't want to talk to your friends at dinner. However, Apple's Touch platform (the iPhone and iPod Touch) currently has over 13,000 titles available to it. That is 5 times as many games as Nintendo and Sony together.