Entertainment Weekly is preparing to invade Comic-Con for the fourth consecutive year with a fully loaded arsenal: two highly anticipated panels, a photo and digital studio, a special Comic-Con edition Must List App, a street team offering access to exclusive content, an event sponsored by CBS celebrating the fans, as well as our fourth annual exclusive soirée co-hosted with Syfy.

HONOLULU, Hawaii – When it comes to the Hollywood convergence game, Capcom’s partnership with Impact Pictures on the Resident Evil movies has resulted in the second biggest franchise for Sony Pictures behind Spider-Man. With a fourth movie, Resident Evil: Afterlife, coming to theaters September 10 in 3D, and big budget movie adaptions of Lost Planet, Dark Void, and Onimusha in the works, what went wrong (twice) with the Street Fighter movies? Capcom’s vice president of strategic planning and business development, Christian Svensson, talks about Capcom’s Hollywood game and confirms that the game maker has not abandoned the Street Fighter movie franchise in this exclusive interview from Captivate 2010.

As part of a multi-tiered programming, digital and marketing campaign custom-designed for the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, SHOWTIME announced the launch of Dexter Game On (DexterGameOn.com), an interactive promotional game that will take place simultaneously at San Diego Comic-Con and in five other major cities across the U.S. from Wednesday, July 21 to Sunday, July 25. SHOWTIME has worked with SCVNGR – an iPhone and Android-based application that is all about going places, doing challenges and earning points – to build DEXTER-themed challenges for the game. The collaboration marks the first time that a television network has teamed up with SCVNGR.

The ESA released its annual Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry report. The 2010 survey confirmed that computer and video game play remains widespread, and that game play is an increasingly social activity. Sixty seven percent of American households play computer and video games, and 62 percent of gamers say they play with other gamers in person at least one hour per week. Family play has also grown in popularity, with nearly half of all parents (48 percent) reporting they play with their children at least once per week.

At E3 2010, Sony showed off its new augmented reality game, EyePet. Now Qualcomm Incorporated has unveiled plans to offer an augmented reality platform and software development kit (SDK) to enable a new generation of vision-based augmented reality applications.  Initially available for Android devices, Qualcomm’s augmented reality platform will enable developers to build applications that merge reality and cyberspace.  The SDK will be made available at no charge to developers for use in the development and distribution of commercial applications.  

North Carolina is now home to the next generation of video game development. Joystick Labs announced Tuesday it is accepting applications for the first seed-stage venture fund and accelerator program focused exclusively on the development of digitally distributed video games.  Juan Benito, a veteran executive of the gaming industry, co-founded Joystick Labs to help independent game developers bridge the gap between having a great game idea and producing a game.

The Droid X launch by Motorola (MOT) and Verizon (VZ) this week marks the beginning of better graphics and therefore better games on the Android mobile OS platform. While the Android Market has made giant strides in parity with the iPhone on application quality and quantity, Android still falls far behind when it comes to games. That changes with the Droid X and its 1GHz TI OMAP processor which includes a discreet graphics processing unit (GPU) optimized for OpenGL graphics. Open GL is a graphics standard that game developers can program to for making games look better and more realistic. The iPhone introduced OpenGL acceleration in its last iPhone 3GS launched this time last year.