Walmart says its $50 price cut on the 4 GB Xbox 360 with Kinect bundle is temporary, not a permanent “rollback” as advertised. The sale price will be honored until September 5 or while supplies last.

Earlier this week, a maker of computer gaming peripherals named Razer took out a big ad in the Wall Street Journal that claimed PC gaming is not dead. The ad promised to “bring a new age of openness and innovation to all gaming” with a new product unveiling on Friday.

So here we are. Razer’s hyped up product turned out to be the Razer Blade, a $2,799 gaming laptop with a 17-inch display, cutting-edge specs and an eye for design. Inside, there’s a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-2640M processor, Nvidia GeForce GT555M graphics and 8 GB of RAM. The outside is built from a solid slab of aluminum that Razer wants to shave thinner than a MacBook Pro. A customizable touch pad and set of LCD keys are on top, next to green backlit keyboard.

PCWorld’s Nate Ralph got a demo of the laptop and liked what he saw. So did Kotaku’s Joel Johnson, who wrote that the Razer Blade “might not just be the future of PC gaming—it may be the future of PCs.”

Maybe for him. But when I think of the future of PC gaming, I don’t see one that’s dominated by portable gaming rigs with price tags of $2,000 and up. I something completely different.

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When Sony announced a $50 price cut for the Playstation 3, I assumed Microsoft wouldn’t rush to do the same with the Xbox 360. The console is sitting on top of the sales charts in North America right now, so there’s no immediate need to drum up sales by slashing prices.

But that’s not stopping Walmart. A leaked flyer, provided to Joystiq, shows that the Xbox 360 4 GB bundle with Kinect will get a $50 price cut to $249 on August 28. The leaked flyer doesn’t show any price cuts for other Xbox 360 models or bundles.

Microsoft has distanced itself from the rollback. “Walmart made an independent decision to implement this temporary price cut,” the company told Joystiq. “We’ve made no announcements about price drops, and do not discuss our pricing plans in advance.”

I buy the claim that Walmart is acting alone. But while Microsoft calls it “temporary,” Walmart’s circular says nothing of the sort. And if the retailer can afford to roll back the price, I wonder how long it’ll be before other retailers — and Microsoft itself — do the same.

My gut still says that any price cuts on Microsoft’s end will be designed to sell more Kinect units, ahead of a big software push for the motion-sensing camera. New games like Dance Central 2 are on the way, and the Xbox 360 dashboard is getting a redesign with deeper Kinect support.

Gamestop isn’t winning any fans today for its decision to remove a free streaming OnLive copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution from the boxed PC version of the game.

Publisher Square Enix had partnered with the streaming game service OnLive on the promotion. But because OnLive is a threat to Gamestop’s retail business, company management ordered employees to throw away the vouchers before selling the game. “GameStop’s policy is that we do not promote competitive services without a formal partnership,” the company said on its Facebook page. Hundreds of angry comments followed.

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Something’s brewing at Nintendo headquarters. According to Gamasutra, the company is planning a news conference in Tokyo on September 13, with only one topic of discussion: the future of the Nintendo 3DS.

Nintendo’s newest handheld device had a troubled launch, with slower sales than expected. That prompted Nintendo to drop the 3DS price from $250 to $170 earlier this month. In a letter to early adopters, Nintendo said it had to cut the price to boost sales, ensuring that publishers would support the new hardware.

Now, Nintendo is rumored to be planning even bigger changes. French site 01net reports that Nintendo may redesign the 3DS with a second analog stick and a reduced emphasis on glasses-free 3D. This model would launch under a new name in 2012, the site’s unnamed sources said.

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One of my favorite parts of E3 this year was the Classic Gaming Expo, an exhibit packed with decades-old gaming systems and arcade cabinets, many of them playable. The group of collectors that put it together is still seeking a permanent home in the Silicon Valley, under the name Videogame History Museum, and needs about $5,000 more on its Kickstarter campaign to make it happen.

Over the last few months, Electronic Arts and Activision have been fighting a war of words over their respective shooters, Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which are set for a showdown this holiday season.

A small sampling: EA CEO John Riccitiello said he wants Call of Duty to “rot from the core.” Activision’s publishing boss Eric Hirschberg responded by saying EA’s negativity was “bad for the industry.” Most recently, EA spokesman Jeff Brown fired back: “Welcome to the big leagues Eric — I know you’re new in the job but someone should have told you this is a competitive industry.”

The bad blood has been good publicity for both games, I think (although EA’s Battlefield 3 probably needs it more, hence the harsher attacks). But it makes me wonder, where have the good old game console rivalries gone?

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Five years after launching the Playstation 3, Sony has admitted that the system is not technically capable of cross-game voice chat.

Cross-game voice chat is the ability to speak with multiple players at the same time, regardless of what they’re doing on the console. On Xbox Live, it’s one of my favorite features, because allows you to coordinate a play session with a friend with ease or have a conversation while playing different games.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said memory restrictions preclude the PS3 from ever having cross-game voice chat. Games gobble up all of system’s available RAM, leaving none for voice chat at the OS level.

“Once a game gets RAM we never give it back,” Yoshida said. “It’s not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact.”

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Ubisoft already uses some of the worst digital rights management for its PC games, at times requiring a steady Internet connection to play, but this week the publisher made things worse with mixed messages to players.

PC gamers are upset with Ubisoft over its treatment of From Dust, a strategy game that launched last month for the Xbox 360 and this week for PC. On its forums, Ubisoft first said that the game wouldn’t require an online connection for each play session, as long as players signed in once after installing the game. But then, Ubisoft removed that forum post, and instead said players would have to connect to Ubisoft servers every time they fired up the game.

From Dust players are also reporting crashes, a lack of graphical customization settings and a limited frame rate of 30 frames per second, Rock Paper Shotgun reports. A Ubisoft forum moderator is telling players that they can pursue refunds.

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Nintendo plans to launch a slimmer Wii console in Europe that drops compatibility for Gamecube games and accessories, but it’s not coming to the United States — at least for now.

The Wii redesign will arrive this holiday season, bundled with Wii Sports, Wii Party, a Wii Remote Plus controller and a Nunchuk attachment. The console is designed to sit horizontally, and trims away the controller ports and memory card slots that supported Nintendo’s old Gamecube console. Nintendo will discontinue the old console design in Europe.

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Xbox Live is supposed to be a big hook for Windows Phone, but until now Microsoft hasn’t fully described what the platform’s upcoming “Mango” update will do for gamers. We now have a better idea thanks to a blog post by Microsoft’s Michael Stroh.

Unlike Mango in general, Windows Phone’s fall Xbox Live update isn’t a major overhaul. Instead, Microsoft is filling in a couple of key omissions — in-app purchases and parental controls — and adding wearable avatar badges to reward in-game achievements. Xbox Live will also get “Fast Async,” which is supposed to improve turn-by-turn multiplayer games.

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How bad are things for Nintendo? Well, a Bloomberg story that circulated last week reportedly had investors clamoring for the Kyoto-based gaming giant to start porting its legendary characters over to Apple’s iOS devices. Super Mario Bros on the iPhone? Metroid on the iPad? Sounds too good to be true, right?

Turns out it was. The report took a few Mario-esque giant leaps of logic; most egregiously, the one making it seem like any investors said anything resembling the idea that Nintendo should make games for the iPhone.

But still, there’s a reason that the idea of a Nintendo-Apple team up is so appealing. Frankly, Nintendo’s magic hold on gamers’ imaginations seem to be slipping. The most significant sign is the under-performance of the 3DS, which necessitated a massive price drop for the handheld. Some of the company’s most anticipated recent titles–last year’s Metroid: Other M and this year’s 3DS re-issue of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time–got mixed receptions when they finally came out. And if Nintendo can’t bank on its key franchises for guaranteed hits, where else can they go? Well, they could always go to platforms where those franchises don’t yet have presences, right? It’d be great if Apple’s expertise at user experience design could mate with Nintendo’s whimsical style of game creation in some meaningful way.

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Last week, Google launched its long-awaited online gaming portal as part of its budding social network, Google+.

Like Google+ itself, the big selling point for Games on Google+ is that it respects personal boundaries more than Facebook. Instead of dumping everyone’s game-related status updates into your main timeline, Google+ games are relegated to a separate tab, so your main timeline remains uncluttered.

The less intrusive approach to status updates may be a big lure for some people, but it’s not the hook Google+ games need. And with only 16 titles at launch (albeit with some big names like Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz and Zynga Poker), Google’s social gaming service isn’t catching up to Facebook anytime soon.

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If you haven’t snatched up a 3DS yet (if not, we wouldn’t blame you, given the dearth of interesting games) Nintendo’s sweetening its upcoming price drop with a ‘Flame Red’ version. If red’s your thing—as opposed to “Aqua Blue” and “Cosmo Black”—Nintendo says it plans to offer the alternative color from September 9th, shortly after the handheld’s price plummets from $250 to $170 this month.

Except wait a second, isn’t that supposed to happen this Friday, August 12th? That’s what Nintendo’s said, you know, all official-like.

But according to reports (and pictures of actual sales receipts), it seems some stores are selling the system at the new price already. Like Walmart, where you can reportedly get it for $169.96. (I know, does anyone seriously choose to buy, or not to buy, based on the cheap pennies discount gimmick?)

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Apparently Sony needs more time to prepare for handheld gaming’s last stand, as the Playstation Vita won’t launch until 2012 in America and Europe.

At a press conference in Tokyo, Sony Executive Vice President Kazuo Hirai said the company needs more time to ensure a strong software lineup for the PS Vita. Sony’s not calling it a delay – the company never promised a 2011 release across all regions — but there’s no guarantee that the PS Vita will launch in Japan in time for Christmas, either.

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In a first-person shooter landscape dominated by rehashes and regurgitation, one shooter that did things differently is getting a sequel of its own.

2K Games has announced that Borderlands 2 is in development, and will be released at some point in fiscal year 2013, which begins April 1, 2012. That’s a long way off, so there’s not a lot of details right now, but Game Informer magazine is supposed to have the scoop in its next issue.

The original Borderlands launched in October 2009, and at first I couldn’t shake the feeling that the game didn’t entirely deserve its plaudits. Its post-apocalyptic setting, while intriguing, never fleshed itself out, and nearly every mission followed a similar routine of flushing out a bunch of similar-looking bad guys, collecting some items and/or killing some kind of target.

But as I sank my teeth deeper into Borderlands during a dull stretch of 2010, I realized why the game became an unexpected hit: This is the first-person shooter equivalent of Farmville. Now seems like a good time to explain.

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