Casual gaming to take off in 2005: "Easy-to-play titles that do not require too much time and that are playable online or downloadable to mobile devices will see real growth in the coming year."

I'd certainly agree with that; we have 2 projects on at the moment which tie into this trend... it just makes sense. Mobile is mass market; games which are successful on mobile will be those that fit well into the context of mobile use, and have broad appeal.

Watch this space :)

Nintendo build on the Donkey Konga drums with Donkey Kong Jungle Beat.

Over the Christmas period I was pleasantly surprised by how appealing Donkey Konga was to friends and family who don't normally go for computer games...

The 2005 Edge question: What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

Interesting point from Thomas Maufer: "the growth rate of voice... basically scales with the size of the population, which grows at a relatively slow rate". File under "bloody obvious, why didn't I realise that".

Voice traffic scales with population size. Data traffic has no such limitation.

Modifying The Sims to turn it into a learning environment: "...a modification to the number one selling video game The Sims that intelligently combines game data from the English edition with data from editions of other languages to form a bilingual gaming environment. This exposes learners to abundant L2 vocabulary, yet still provides enough L1 support not to detract from the game."