Capcom announced today that Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen will hit retail on April 23 in North American and April 26 in Europe. The game is an expansion, but it includes the entirety of the main game alongside of it with some marked improvements that came about from player feedback.

What about those who already own the original game? Can we just buy the expansion? Unfortunately, that won’t be the case. To help incentivize owners of the original, however, Capcom will be offering a number of bonuses to those who have already completed the game.

Owners of the original Dragon’s Dogma will be able to export their existing characters and all other saved data to continue their journey as the Arisen, and face a new threat that has emerged from the cavernous depths. Players will be able to take their characters to new heights with brand new high-level skills and augments as well as all new weapons and armor sets. Furthermore, owners of the original Dragon’s Dogma will receive 100,000 Rift Crystals, unlimited Ferrystones and the Gransys Armour Pack consisting of six brand new costumes for free, upon purchasing Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen.

Capcom has also released a new trailer showing off the new content that players will find in the depths of Gransys:

If you prefer text over video, here’s all the new content being added to the game:

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen will retail for $39.99 when it launches on April 23. It will be available for Xbox 360 and the PS3. It will also be available via the PSN on April 23.

The latest expansion is dubbed The Sims 3 Seasons. It features “changing seasons with transformateive weather.” Along with the changing weather comes different activities for sims to participate in. Snowboarding, soccer, roller-skating, building snowmen, egg-hunting, pie-eating contests, horseshoe toss, and other events are all included in the expansion.

“The Sims 3 Seasons will offer fans more than just sunny days to tell their stories by dramatically transforming each world from one season to the next,” said Ryan Vaughan, producer for The Sims. “In a first for The Sims, new festival lots and holiday celebrations have added ways for players to truly revel in the spirit of each season.”

The launch trailer below gives a taste of the silliness Sims fans can expect from the Seasons expansion. In addition to expansions for The Sims, Maxis, the developer of The Sims, is currently working on the next generation of SimCity.

Today Sprint announced that it has rolled out its 4G LTE service to four new cities. Subscribers in Baltimore, Maryland; Gainesville, Georgia; Manhattan/Junciton City, Kansas; and Sedalia, Missouri can now connect with faster 4G speeds.

“Our customers are enjoying new applications and devices that increase the demand for mobile data,” said Bob Azzi, senior vice president for network at Sprint. “The network build-out – that today is playing out in four new cities – will provide nothing less than a state-of-the art network platform for the next generation of customers. Customers across the country will begin to experience better 3G service on their devices and will be able to take advantage of 4G LTE on cutting-edge devices as we continue to launch more cities.”

In addition to its LTE rollout, Sprint also announced that customers in Baltimore, Boston, and Washington D.C. have just gotten the company’s improved 3G service. That should come as a relief, as tests earlier this year found that Sprint’s 3G speeds were abysmal in comparison to the other major carriers.

Blizzard announced on the battle.net site that they are about to start beta testing for the new expansion. Those who are eligible for beta invites include annual pass holders, press, fansites, friends and family. There’s also a way to get into the beta through an opt-in system, but more on that later.

Blizzard is quick to point out that there will be no NDA on the Mists of Pandaria beta so players can upload all the screenshots and videos they want. This will make the press’ job so much easier and allow fans to get a good look at what’s coming with the new expansion.

For those who are not in the above mentioned bracket of potential beta testers, Blizzard has created a way for you to opt-in for the beta. You are eligible if you have a Battle.net account and have attached at least one Blizzard game to said account. From there, head on over to your Beta Profile page and apply for the betas you want to participate in. If you’re selected, you will receive a confirmation email from Blizzard.

If you have an annual pass to WoW and aren’t invited in the first phase of testing, worry not. Blizzard says that they will be inviting annual pass holders in waves over the course of the beta. If you aren’t selected for the first wave, just wait until the next one. They will, however, be giving priority to long standing WoW account holders. All annual pass players will be invited though.

If you haven’t been keeping up with WoW lately, check out the trailer for Mists of Pandaria. The ancient China/Panda motif is pretty jarring when set up next to the Western fantasy that is usually associated with Warcraft.

That’s the stance of Boston Analytics, anyway, which analyzed the past, present, and future of mobile value added services in India.  And if anything, Boston Analytics may have taken a conservative approach – James Quintana Pearce believes it significantly underestimated the number of cell phone subscribers.

On to the data, then.  Boston Analytic’s graphs show India’s per capita GDP going up and mobile call tariffs going down.  Also, mobile revenues appear to be rising, even though the average revenue per user is dropping.  And these trends appear ready to continue for the foreseeable future.

So India’s shaping up to be an even more tempting spot for Google and Yahoo than it has been in the past.  Other American companies – including AOL? – could also try out their mobile products in this market.  (AOL has, by the way, given no indication that it would make such a move, but the company’s ongoing layoffs indicate that it needs to try something, and an expansion into the UK occurred just last month.)

We’ll see where this goes, but as with just about everything, don’t expect much to happen before the beginning of 2008.

These individuals have visited MySpaceMaster.net, CoolMySpaceComments.com, and FreeMySpaceBackgrounds.com (among as many as 110 other sites) in an effort to spruce up their profiles.  comScore’s stats put visits to this “Total Unduplicated MySpace Ecosystem” at 11,928 in September of 2007; in September of 2006, only 8,800 visits were made.

A similar rise occurred in the category of “Duplicated – 2 or More Sites”: the number increased from 3,460 to 5,008 in the span of a year.  These are increases of 36 and 45 percent, respectively; it hardly needs saying, but that’s fairly impressive.

It’s also part of a trend of improvements at MySpace.  In the past few days, we’ve seen the social network launch its first original series, announce a new gaming channel, and plan a huge expansion.  A broader pattern may go against this grain – Peter Kafka notes that “Rupert Murdoch seems to have reduced the web unit’s FY 08 revenue goals” and “[u]nique visitors at MySpace seem to finally have peaked this summer” – but MySpace’s most dedicated users seem unwilling to leave it just yet.

“We’ll run out of people in the U.S.,” DeWolfe told Bloomberg’s Gillian Wee.  “Our goal is to be No. 1 in every market and the biggest Web site in the world.”

Yes.  Well . . . good luck with that.  DeWolfe recently signed a new contract with News Corp., so perhaps he’s just sort of floating along on his new funds; the evidence certainly doesn’t suggest that MySpace is about to dominate the planet.

If nothing else, one has to consider the hype – I see dozens of stories a day revolving around Facebook.  Many of them are positive, and the few articles I come across concerning MySpace are usually less glowing.

Then there’s data from Hitwise indicating that MySpace has already lost its lead over Facebook in the U.K., and isn’t looking so healthy in Australia.  These major English-speaking markets could easily lead a trend; it might be stranger, in fact, if they didn’t act as leaders.

MySpace is far from dead – in many areas, it still has more users than Facebook, and the financial backing of News Corp. should never be underestimated.  Just the same, any sort of balance between existing in seven new countries and being the biggest website in the world, is, in the long term, probably going to lean towards the smaller side.

Hat tip to Jordan Golson.

Europe Braces For Google Buildup

Perhaps I’ve been thinking too much about Ken Burns’s “The War,” yet this news called up images of paratroopers and landing parties dressed in Google t-shirts.  And that’s just in my mind.  Europeans, who may or may not be thrilled with America at the moment, could be even more unnerved.

“We are not seen correctly in Europe,” admitted Nelson Mattos, Google’s European head of engineering in Europe, in an interview with Palmer.  “My impression is that Google is seen as a big US company that is here to make money.  There is a lack of understanding of how we work.  People don’t understand the business model, the new computing environment and the employees in shorts.”

The people who are hired by Google (engineers, by all accounts) will probably be able to get over those concerns, but, as you can tell from Mattos’s comments, the search giant would prefer to generate warm fuzzies.

Nielsen’s NPM panel, currently consists of about 12,000 U.S. households and 35,000 people, it will increase to 37,000 homes and 100,000 people as the company completes the introduction of Local People Meters (LPM) into 56 local U.S. markets.

The larger sample size will help Nielsen to accomplish its objectives of its Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative, which focuses on measuring online video and video on hand-held devices.

"This also has implications for Nielsen’s A2/M2 initiatives, all of which are built around the concept of ‘following the video,’ wherever it migrates," said Scott Springer, Product Leader of Audience Measurement for The Nielsen Company’s Media Segment.

"Our plans for out-of-home viewing, streaming video on the Internet, and ‘third screen’ devices such as cell phones and hand-held video players, are based on integrating these
measurements with traditional television measurement. This much larger national sample creates the necessary foundation for an integrated measurement approach."