The Apple iPad has finally received a release date today. The much maligned piece of consumer electronics from the company famous for expensive, yet sexy hardware will be releasing the iPad to the unwashed masses of America next month on the 3rd of April.

Well damn, looks like it wasn’t rumor or speculation at all. Turns out that it’s completely true! The guys over at Valve have been sending assets over to MacRumors this whole week teasing them about the whole “will they or won’t they” game that we all used as children to torture others. This is surprisingly good news for all of the people who own Macs and want to use them to play games on Steam.

Well I’ve talked about it before, but it looks like they’ve finally been released into the wild of the Apple App Store. Yes, you too can play Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II on your iPhones and iPod touches for the low low price of $8.99…wait, that’s not low at all! Eh, they still look like they’re worth getting, they sure do look purdy!

Capcom, hoping to make a cashgrab this March, will be releasing the fighter on the iPhone…and subsequently pissing off the iPhone gaming community by not having decent controls.

This made my day, and is the first time I’ve heard of these being ported to the iPhone. To me, the iPhone is officially in competition as King of handhelds now. I hope beyond hope that they bring out FFVI for the iPhone. I’d pay upwards of $20 for that.

This week, there’s not really much of anything that I see as an absolute “must-have” for any one of my gaming systems…though I am leaning towards picking up one game in particular…but you’ll have click that little button right there to see what that might be.

President of Nintendo (Satoru Iwata) in an interview with the New York Times recently commented on Apple’s newest creation, the iPad. Coming from the game company to be the first to really stabilize and sensationalize the handheld market, this could be bad.

Ok, the Apple Tablet, something that a few of us here at MediaWhore are excited about, will be revealed later this month and according to Wall Street Journal (yes, we read smartypants papers) EA will be right there for the unveiling.

I can’t believe that Cave is going to be porting this game (and many others it appears) to the iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for this game to his the App Store, but at the same time I know that it’s not going to be exactly like its namesake.

Not being a PC gamer that much anymore, I’ve never had a chance to play many of PopCap’s great games on the medium they’re normally released for…thankfully they’re good enough to make ports of most of them for the iPhone. Hell, if it weren’t for this fact, I’d never have played Peggle or BookWorm. Now, it seems that I’ll be getting another excellent game on my iPhone soon.

Remember my excitement last week when they announced that some of the classic fighting fantasy adventure game books were going to be making their way to the iPhone/iPod Touch?  Well now thanks to Tin Man Games there’s going to be even more adventure game books coming to the iPhone/iPod Touch in November this year.  Siege of the Necromancer is the first game Tin Man Games have announced with two more books also planned for a November release.  The games will combine elements of the classic choose your own adventure game books with dice rolling elements which you perform by shaking your iPhone which should make for a pretty interesting game play element.  Hit the jump for a few pieces of concept art, what do you think?  Are any of you guys planning on picking up any adventure game books to play on the morning commute?

I’ve been waiting for a Civilization title to rear it’s head on the iPhone for a little while now, it’s the perfect platform for Sid Meier’s popular strategy game and now we’ve finally got a title in the form of Civilization Revolution. I picked up the game this afternoon and have emerged several hours later with a new portable addiction. Hit the jump for my impressions of the game so far.

Apple, good god…why do you keep coming up with ideas that make me want to buy your products? Take for example the new MacBook Touch that’s been leaked to the internet.

This $699-$799 piece of hardware is set to compete with the Netbook market (I was wondering when Mac was going to try to profit off that niche) and has a 10″ touchscreen display and is apparently being suggested by Apple and other websites that this is going to become Apple’s new gaming platform.

I for one applaud my corporate overlords and can’t wait to be an early adopter for this slab of hardware. I know our very own Ryan Wilson will have a few choice words about this new product, but I’m gonna just have to ignore him for the next couple of months.

Expect more as we see it, the MacBook Touch is slated to be released as early as November.

My iPhone has become a great way to waste time at work  and it’s about to become a whole lot better when the Fighting Fantasy Books are released on the platform at the end of the year starting with the original book The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

For those of you that don’t remember the Fighting Fantasy books are split down into small sections and at the end of each section you either had to roll a dice or choose a page so they could continue their quest.  If you made the wrong choice and went to the wrong page, it normally ended in the death or character or putting you into a situation you couldn’t hope to get out of.

This is a pretty cool idea and the iPhone / iTouch is a great platform to release them on,  these’ll keep my occupied on my daily commute to work.   I wonder if any other Choose Your Own Adventure titles will make their way over to the platform is this release is a success.?

Source: VG247

The guys from Telltale Games, the people behind the recent successful relaunch of the Monkey Island franchise, have started griping about the Wii…not just the WiiWare 40mb file-size limit, mind you, but the hardware as well. One of the programmers for TT Games going by the alias of Yare spilled the beans to a ‘zine that the wii, and I quote, “The Wii and DS are extremely underpowered and their popularity doesn’t remove the hardware limitations.”

It’s one thing to hear a blogger rant and rave about the underwhelming Wii and DS, but to hear a person in the industry dare utter the words “…the Wii is just not a powerful console. An iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii, even.” just makes makes my jaw drop to the floor.

I know the iPhone is being considered competiton for the DS here in the US, but I’d never think that it could even rival the strongest (selling) console on the market.

Well, truth be told, I don’t think Nintendo will ever have ANYTHING to worry about when it comes to competition, they did the smart thing by making sure they made profit on hardware AND software, which is a complete stark contrast to what the intial plans for the 360 were and the current model for the PS3.

I’m wondering when the Nintendo backlash will arrive from it’s very vocal and apologetic community.