Chinese regulators are fighting over the right to oversee "World of Warcraft," a popular online game, in a bizarre battle that has thrust bureaucratic rivalry for control of the Internet into the open.

The bureau that licenses publishers said this week the game's Chinese operator failed to obtain required import approval and should stop signing up customers. Its rival, the Ministry of Culture's cultural products department, fired back that it was the regulator of online games and said the Web site's paperwork was in order.

EA is releasing a Bad Company 2 beta for the PlayStation 3, but before then, we risk life and limb to see what kind of action this South American map will offer. When EA released the public beta for Battlefield: Bad Company in the spring of last year, it was limited to the Xbox 360 even though the full game would also arrive on Sony's rival console. For the upcoming sequel, EA is taking the opposite approach. The publisher has decided to spread the love around with the announcement of a Bad Company 2 public beta due out exclusively for the PlayStation 3.

The Left 4 Dead 2 demo features gameplay taken from "The Parish" campaign, set in the New Orleans French Quarter. Playable by 1 to 4 players over local or Internet connections, the demo features new melee weapons and all the new boss infected zombies included in the full product.

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Coming in the wake of the Great Dedicated Server Controversy of Ought-Nine, Infinity Ward has announced another bit of Modern Warfare 2 news that might rile devoted PC gamers. Whereas multiplayer sessions in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare allowed up to 32 players on the PC, Modern Warfare 2's player cap will be reduced to 18, with 9-vs-9 matches just like the console versions. Before you grab your pitchforks, Infinity Ward does have a reason for the decision: "The max number of players on all platforms are 1v1 through 9v9. This is the number of players we focused on when we were balancing map size, perks, classes, challenges, etc.," explained developer Mackey McCandlish in a Best Buy live chat session (via Kotaku).

"Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at suppertime," the old commercial jingle used to declare. "When pizza's on a bagel, you can eat pizza anytime." And while this trailer for Avalanche Studios' Just Cause 2--coming to PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 2010--certainly isn't as catchy, you'll notice that if you replace "pizza" with "grapple" and "on a bagel" with "in the game," the resulting ditty is oddly appropriate.

What do Jigsaw from "Saw," Freddy Krueger, and Jason from "Friday the 13th" all have in common, besides serial killing? Videogames, if the horror stars' latest round of promotions are to be believed.

Horror videogames are having a record year as zombies, monsters, demons, and chain-saw wielding psychos fight against the consoles, making videogames the new home of horror for some.

In a chat with Hexus, AMD's Senior Manager of Developer Relations, Richard Huddy said that Nvidia is apparently abandoning the gaming market to some extent.

Huddy compared Nvidia's and AMD's strategy, saying: "it appears NVIDIA is in a kind of sneering mode towards game players at the moment," adding that it was possible to diversify without abandoning gaming. He went on to say that gamers are good people and "well rounded individuals." We're not sure whether he was referring to their physique or character.

Supporters of dedicated servers for FPS games claim that the current system is necessary to allow for a full gaming experience. Needless to say, the recent news that dedicated servers aren't being supported in the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hasn't exactly gone over well with a lot of the computer gaming community.

After a one-day delay, the PC demo for Left 4 Dead 2 preorder customers has been released. The demo offers co-op or LAN players a chance to check out the New Oreleans-centered "Parish" campaign. The demo will be available for non-preorder PC customers and Xbox Live Gold members on November 3. Last, and most definitely least, Xbox Live Silver members get access on November 10.

To play the demo, visit www.steamgames.com (PC) or Xbox Live (360).

We were surprised to see that customer oriented AMD has decided to leave its all DirectX 9 supporters hanging. According to AMD's support site, its DirectX 9 cards won’t be officially supported under Windows 7.