Small gaming studios don't stand a chance in today's world, because to create and sell games you need powerful teams, and a lot of money, as well as good distribution channels. Obviously, apart from announcing some interesting titles and being acquired by EA Games or some other giant, a solution for small companies is to unite, and that's exactly what Penny Arcade and Hothead Games have done.

Greenhouse is the name of the distribution platform for indie games created by Penny Arcade and Hothead Games, and here's what Penny Arcade's Robert Khoo says about it:"There are so many great games out there that you don't hear about. They're too niche or too risky in terms of game play for the top publishers to be comfortable with distributing. We want the Greenhouse to be an alternative for these developers."

For now, the only game announced by the Vancouver-based Greenhouse Interactive is "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness", and since their website is still in Beta stage, you can pay them a visit here and help by taking the survey and testing the downloader.

This is it for now, and let's hope we'll hear about Greenhouse pretty soon. The gaming world needs a mouthful of fresh air, and probably small companies are the best source available.

Paramount Pictures Corporation, owned by media congolomerate Viacom, is the oldest running movie studio in Hollywood. Founded in 1912, Paramount entered the movie business one month ahead of Universal Studios. Anyway, Universal entered the gaming world ahead of Paramount, so they got even, especially since yesterday, Paramount announced their intention to get into gaming...

How's that? Well, it's very simple - from now on, Paramount will finance partially or completely various video games, and most of them will be based on the movies in its catalog (why am I not surprised by this?).

For now, no titles or release dates have been made public, but it may be possible to see their first releases later this year. Unfortunately, there may be a little problem for those Sci-Fi fans waiting for a Star Trek game already, because Paramount's biggest franchise is licensed to Bethesda, so...