Every week we do a quick wrap-up of some news items that may have slipped through the cracks. The wrap-ups will be shorter versions of our articles, lumped together to give you an idea of things you may have missed.

Frag for Cancer Auction

Earlier this week at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia the annual charity LAN Party Frag for Cancer was held. Many n00bs were stomped in order to raise money for the Canadian Cancer society, and you can still donate to the cause by visiting their donation page. They hope to raise about $10,000 dollars, and it is a relatively new event so every little bit helps.

The big thing that they are offering right now, though, is a set of really excellent gaming items for auction on eBay. For fans of the Pure Pwnage series, they are offering a Toshiba Qosmio laptop decked out in full, signed by the members of PP. Also Rock Band Special Edition package for the Wii signed by the team at Harmonix (which is a really great item for any collector) and a 3-Day Pro Gamer training coupon. There’s only two days left for the auctions, it’s a great cause, and there’s some really cool swag up for grabs. As of right now, the autographed Rock Band is going for just over $100 (CDN) and is definitely worth that just for a piece of gaming history.

It’s the third annual and going strong. Even for those not on the East coast or even in Canada, please considering making a donation.

Best Buy’s Gaming Invasion ’08

Speaking of third annuals, the third annual Gaming Invasion is taking place this weekend in Toronto, Ontario hosted by Best Buy. The Gaming Invasion is probably as close as most Canadians will get to a major gaming event where you can get an opportunity to play quite a few upcoming games. This year they will be showing off LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Gears of War 2 and quite a few more to the public all weekend, and there will even a performance by Juno winning artist Mobile. Also, all girl gamer group (This update brought to you by the letter G) FragDolls will be there to humiliate you at Tom Clancy’s EndWar.

The event starts this Friday, October 17th at 2PM and will continue onto Sunday. Get a chance to meet a pretty cool band and play some games that don’t come out for a little while before anyone else. It’s a lot of fun, and is being held across from the Eaton Centre at Yonge & Dundas Square. UGTV will be there, previewing a few games and talking to the groups there. We’ll have reports up on the weekend.

See you there!

50 Years of Gaming

Half a century ago, the first video game was built and played in a military research lab using a set of oscilloscopes and a giant set of computers. Tennis for Two was a simple demonstration of the power the equipment had, and was dismantled after a few visitors had a chance to play around with it. Less than 10 years later, the first video game console was developed, and the history of all these consoles wars can be traced back to one simple brown box. The CBC has spent this week going over the history of gaming, dating back to the earliest iterations of console gaming and where the creators came from and where they are today. Sadly, most of the key players have passed on.

Tennis for Two was essentially an accident, but was the inspiration for Ralph Baer’s “Brown Box” which was bought by Magnavox and re-branded as the Odyssey. This brought on the first Atari system and the amazing Pong, which proceeded to take the industry out in full force. Competition, lawsuits, even battles involving Nintendo, and here we are today, with a stack of video game consoles more powerful than most home computers. From a computer lab and now hooked up to high definition TVs in our rooms, the progression of the industry has been very quick, but development of games is continuing to expand demonstrating that we are just witnessing the infancy of the whole era.

Image courtesy of Microsoft/Epic Games