Virgin returns to gaming business

Virgin is set to re-enter the videogame business with a new online-only service planned to debut at E3 in June, reports Tech Radar.

Richard Branson will attend E3 in Los Angeles to announce his return to the videogames business.

He originally set up Virgin Games in 1984, which developed and flourished, growing into the legendary publisher Virgin Interactive Entertainment in the 1990s.

Zynga, an increasingly popular maker of games used on Facebook, has acquired Chinese social-gaming company XPD Media, writes Wall Street Journal.

The deal gives closely held Zynga, which makes the Farmville and Mafia Wars online games, a place in the fast-growing Asian market and boosts its talent in game development. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed.

"As the largest Internet market in the world, China is at the vanguard for virtual goods-based gaming innovation," says Robert Goldberg, Zynga's vice-president of corporate development.

At Google's I/O conference, NVidia showed off a pair of 9-inch tablet prototypes running 3D games, says Myce.

One featured a simple football running play game, which you can see in action on YouTube, and the other is some sort of shooter, appearing in pictures at Gizmodo.

According to Engadget, the devices have 1GB of RAM, a 1GHz ARM Cortex 9 CPU and of course Nvidia's Tegra 2 tablet powering the graphics.