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.

David Hayter founds entertainment company – Dark Hero Studios, huh?

Screenwriter, actor and vocal talent for the series Metal Gear Solid, David Hayter has done it all! All except start his own video game production studio, so he just had to make sure he had all his bases covered. Hayter – who voiced Solid Snake throughout the entire Metal Gear Solid series – has been reported to have started a production company that will dabble in various forms of entertainment mediums, such as film, television and videogames. Besides his work with games through voice acting, Hayter is also going to be penning the script for the upcoming Lost Planet film and will make his priority towards writing and directing films for his new studio, Dark Hero. Coming out of Variety, the report is not quite official due to financing issues that are still pending, but it seems to be a done deal.

It’s not quite video game news, but David Hayter has become almost an icon among fans of the Metal Gear series and fans of his work with various comic-adaption movies like X-Men 2 and Watchmen. With Dark Hero being formed under the concept of cross-media, it is a demonstration of the steps that many Hollywood financiers are seeing as the future, considering the growing popularity of games. Hearing Hayter speak regarding story lines in games, he seems to have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t, and given the chance to guide something I imagine it will really be a test of whether or not his ability to write for film can be transferred over to games, as well.

Street Fighter IV outsells Wii Fit… kind of

Nintendo is the reigning champion of selling videogame stuff at this point. Their consoles sell like hotcakes across the entire planet and their software sales often follow suit month after month. February was no different for the company, with the NPD group’s charts showing over 750,000 units sold in North America. That’s up 74% from last year during the same time period and a near 11% increase from the month previous. Considering that we are far removed from the holiday season, and far enough away from Nintendo’s major software push it is a startling number. The DS sold over half a million units, the Xbox 360 managed to move near 400,000 (their biggest non-Halo and non-holiday numbers to date) and Sony’s platforms rounded out the bottom of the chart with the PS3 selling around 275,000, the PSP near 200,000 and the PS2 still holding on with 131,000 units sold.

Software sales saw a familiar crowd with a few notable additions. Killzone 2 – Sony’s latest foray into shooting evil space beings – moved 323,000 copies, a huge number considering it only debuted on the second last day of the month and may bring in those large software numbers that Sony has been salivating over for quite some time. Street Fighter IV made the top 3 twice with the Xbox 360 just topping the PS3 version at 446,000 v. 403,000 games sold. This put them at second and third place respectively behind Wii Fit, which still allows Nintendo to keep their title of King of the Hill with nearly 650,000 units sold. It does mean that Capcom’s popular figher series outsold the Nintendo fitness craze, but only by combining their efforts. Still, a fine accomplishment for Capcom.

Made a controller? Lawsuit. Playing games online? Lawsuit.

Hording patents isn’t an uncommon practice. Having a friend who makes his living off of patent lawsuits, I can tell you that business is always booming, especially when it is easier to lob a lawsuit at a problem rather than having to force restructuring for major economic missteps. It’s easy to take the side of our favourite companies in that regard, when realistically we all have little stake in their legal battles, but when someone makes a patent suit on a piece of technology that is over 6 years old it does seem like a cash-in on more recent popularity gains. A company in Texas filed a lawsuit against Nintendo et al for infringing on a patent for a “low voltage joystick port interface”, a.k.a. an analog stick. This concept was introduced by Nintendo with the N64 for consoles, and the suit claimed that the Gamecube and Wii Classic controllers were the real culprits and attempted to bar Nintendo from even being able to sell the items at all while the suit was taking place. It seems that Nintendo has won that battle and the judge dismissed the case. Nintendo is obviously tickled pink over the development, giving their legal team a pat on the back, and those of us who still may want to run out and try to grab old Gamecube controllers to play some classic games on the Wii are relatively happy, as well.

On the losing side of things, Microsoft has settled its suit with a New-York based company that held patents for “controlling interactive applications over multiple computers”, rendering their online services an infringement. The company, PalTalk, purchased the patents from MPath, who are more well known within gaming circles for their software related to online game chat, something that GameSpy purchased and utilized for their online communication platform. The suit was originally for $90 million, and the settlement went undisclosed, but based on the fact that the original patent owners, MPath, had designed and implemented similar systems there was a level of legitimacy to this claim, although the holdings company seemed to give off an impression of going for the quick dollar by snatching up these patents and going after potential infringements. These cases aren’t uncommon in any industry, but are especially prevalent when it comes to technology considering the wording on many patents tends to be vague enough to cover a wide spectrum of highly utilized systems. So don’t be surprised to see more stories like this become more visible as gaming becomes a bigger target for major news coverage.