Remember, Xbox Live Silver people, the free Live Gold weekend starts today and runs to April 2.

Meanwhile, I'm thanking God April 1 is a Saturday this year so most of the stupid jokes will be posted on news sites on a day when there isn't much real news to confuse them with.

• Publisher cancels release of workplace shooting cell phone game.
• Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2 to be unveiled at E3. Expect new modes, online play, and a feeling of shame.
• Sony's Connect feature, which allows consumers to pay for full-length movies to download to their PSP, was said to be available in March. With hours left in the day, it's nowhere to be found.
• New Super Mario Bros. delayed again to May 21.
• After two and a half years, the best DOS emulator, DOSBox, has been updated.
• Racketboy presents a list of the best Genesis action platformers.
• The new Castlevania hinted at by Nintendo Power looks to be called Dual Moons.
• You have to speak to them in their language: Video game violence bill gets postponed after senators questioned if the bill would block the sale of games featuring Elmer Fudd and similar cartoon violence.

Posted by Bill at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you need catching up on StarForce, just read this.

An individual named Christopher Spence has filed a class action lawsuit against Ubisoft for using StarForce copy protection in their games. He lays out his reasoning in the suit:

Starforce DRM can compromise Windows operating systems’ security. Any virtus or trojan can control a computer by and through the Stareforce DRM installeed on the computer, despite the security measures taken in newer versions of Windows.

Users receive no notice that removing Starforce DRM is necessary to prevent possible security compromises on their computer systems. Worse, removal of a Starforce Title does not always remove Starforce DRM software.

The software's operation has always been pretty ridiculous -- spyware that installs itself without your knowledge got blown out of the water years ago, and StarForce has squeaked by mainly because it's in games and thus not as big an issue to the general public. But it can be just as problematic as any spyware, so hopefully he wins his case and companies finally learn not to put this crap in their games. Just don't expect any big returns out of the class-action part. Given the number of gamers who would be elligible to sign up, it'd probably come down to something like a dollar per person.

Source: Kotaku

Posted by Bill at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few days ago, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was quoted as saying it wasn't "necessary to do the simultaneous worldwide launch simply because others are doing this." It's a statement that can be taken a couple ways, and unfortunately most news sites took it the wrong way. (I like to think I remained appropriately neutral on the matter.) Many game sites reported the news with the headline "No Global Launch for Revolution", interpreting his statement to mean that Nintendo would not launch the system globally just because others were doing so with their consoles.

Turns out, what he meant was that the system would be launched worldwide, but that they would have done so anyway, regardless of what Sony and Microsoft did. In other words, it was yet another "pfft, I don't even pay attention to those guys" from Nintendo. Whether you want to believe that or not is up to you, but the bottom line is that a worldwide launch is still on for the Revolution.

Source: MCV

Posted by Bill at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I wish I didn't have to write so many headlines with question marks, but such is the way of things.

The May issue of EGM -- for God's sake, it's not even April yet -- is saying that a teaser of Final Fantasy XIII will be shown at E3, before FFXII even comes to America. They say to also expect confirmation that the game will be a PS3 exclusive. I'm sure Sony had no intention of letting that one get away.

Supposedly, rumor has been that FFXIII is actually close to being finished (given that FFXII was due to be out two years ago), and they didn't want to announce the next game in the series before the current game was even out in Japan. Sounds somewhat plausible, but we'll see.

The issue also has news of "a sequel to a popular SNES/N64 franchise for the Revolution (read the mag to find out which it is)." Well I don't think you need to because I'm calling it right now as Pilotwings. It's the only Nintendo franchise I can think of offhand that didn't get a Cube version, and the title was confirmed as being in preliminary development for the Cube a year or so ago. Given the nature of the Revolution controller, it's a natural for the system. And about damned time.

Source: 1up

Posted by Bill at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm putting a question mark by it, but IGN didn't. They flat out stated today that Halo 3 would come out March 2007, according to "a Microsoft source who asked to remain anonymous and a second source close to the company." There's little else one can say (except to wonder, as IGN notes, why they'd release it in March 2007 when the movie comes out in summer 2007), so just take it as you will.

Just imagine if they don't confirm the date at E3 and we have to put up with another year of this.

Source: IGN

Posted by Bill at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If at first you don't succeed...

German website GameFront is reporting that a press conference will be held by Microsoft in Japan at the end of the week, in which they'll announced plans to "relaunch" the 360 on June 29. That date happens to coincide with the release dates for Sega's Chrome Hounds, Idea Factory's Spectral Force 3: Innocent Rage, AQ Interactive's Bullet Witch, and Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.

Japan was the only territory where the Xbox 360 did not sell out at launch, despite having a smaller allocation than any other market, and in fact the launch underperformed by comparison with the launch of the original Xbox - itself hardly a stellar success story in the region.

The console is currently selling somewhere over a thousand units per week - around the same kind of volumes as are being shifted by the GameCube.

Japan just isn't big on this thing. But I don't know that I can really blame them. Despite a lot of talk prior to the system's release, the 360's library has done little more than the original Xbox did to offer titles that appeal to the Japanese market. Even those titles mentioned above, while developed by Japanese studios, are still of the action and/or shooter variety. Where are the RPGs? Where are the platformers? Where is anything that isn't a shooter or a racer (or a shooter racer)?

Some have chalked up the Xbox line's failure in Japan as due to the country's xenophobia and reluctance to buy an American product of a type they've been traditionally known to excel at (consumer electronics). That may be true to a point, but I think the majority of Japanese gamers are the same as any others; they'll buy a system with games they want on it. And Microsoft isn't offering them anything in that regard.

Source: GamesIndustry.biz

Posted by Bill at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Xbox 360 compatibility list has been updated again, to support a whole three extra titles! Black, Star Wars Battlefront II, and World Soccer Winning Eleven 9 can now be played on the 360. Additionally, these titles have had their emulation improved to fix glitches: Darkwatch, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life 2, Fable, Fable: The Lost Chapters, Forza Motorsport, Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Gaiden Black, SSX 3 Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, kill.switch, and World Series Baseball 2K3.

In other 360 news, a demo of Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter is now available on Live. The demo for Battlefield 2 went up yesterday.

• Silent Hill Collection announced for PS2, new Silent Hill coming to PSP.
• Sony beats out Nintendo and Sony in brand trust survey.
• Subscription-based game service GameTap has lowered its price to $9.99 a month; Also announces GameTap TV featuring several channels of music videos, game previews, and TV shows like Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
• Pre-orders begin April 3 for Atelier Iris 2. Pre-order bonus is a soundtrack disc with 22 songs.
• E3... From the booth babe's perspective.
• Attention world: We do not need a Pac-Man kart racer.
• "GTA Killer" murder case appeal for dismissal is denied, case will go to trial.
• Nintendo's former president is the 410th biggest billionaire in the world. Still a mean old coot.

Posted by Bill at 4:00 PM | Permalink

The Federal Trade Commission released the findings of its "2005 Nationwide Undercover Shop," an investigation into how dilligently stores were following the industry's voluntary guidelines.

The undercover shop saw a decrease in the number of M-Rated video games sold to unaccompanied children. Video games rated "M" by the ESRB contain content appropriate for those 17 and older. Forty-two percent of the secret shoppers - children between the ages of 13 and 16 - who attempted to buy an M-rated video game without a parent were able to purchase one. In the 2003 shop, 69 percent of the shoppers were able to buy one.

So things are getting better. But, as one might expect, it's the national chains that are being quicker to shape up. Local and regional stores (individually owned stores or chains that only exist in a certain region of the country) didn't fare so well, with 63% of the minority-age shoppers able to buy M-rated games.

Source: Game Politics

Posted by Bill at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This shot is taken from a demo video of an upcoming FPS called Cell Factor. The game serves primarily as a demonstration piece for Aegia, creators of the first PPU -- physics processing unit. Just as video cards were created to provide a dedicated piece of hardware to handle graphics, the PPU will come on a card dedicated solely to processing physics, which understandably takes a lot of calculation and has been a major stress on CPUs in games of late.

Aegia says the challenge will be with developers to use the capabilities of the chip, and I'd say that's about right because just watching the video I'm already bored with this game. The physics are indeed impressive from a technical standpoint, but as far as actual gameplay is concerned it's just a lot of junk flying around. When I kill someone in Oblivion and they slump back against a nearby dresser realistically, that adds to the feel of the game. But when you've got that much crap flying around constantly it somehow stops seeming like physics at all. It just becomes noise.

I'm not making any drastic judgements on Cell Factor based on this; for all I know they added in a bunch of extra crates and things just for the demo to prove the power of the card. And it does -- again, on a technical level. But beyond that, they've made it look like a hideously generic FPS (with Psi Ops' psychic powers thrown in). You know what video games need? More grey metal and crates. I'm not foretelling doom based on one tech demo, but I can't help but wonder if flying boxes are going to become the new colored lighting.

You can read a summary here of the recent Aegia press conference, where the demo was first shown, and find out more about their plans.

Posted by Bill at 2:36 PM | Permalink

There's been extended outcry over the "Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law" that was passed back in 2001 in Japan that was meant to go into effect at the end of this week. It would ban the sale of electronic goods made before 2001 unless they passed a safety inspection -- with the cost of the inspection sometimes being more than the product's worth. It was meant to help take old and damaged products out of circulation while encouraging consumption of new items to stimulate the economy. Unfortunately, however, it also would've crippled the huge secondhand electronics market in Japan and made retro and vintage items extremely scarce.

It wasn't just gamers, gadget fans and used appliance salesmen who were against the law, however:

Famous Japanese musicians such as Ryuichi Sakamoto led a 75,000-strong petition, stating in the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper that "whether something is vintage or not is not a matter for government officials to decide".

Musicians particularly despised the law because new instruments are almost always beyond the meagre means of budding musicians. Putting secondhand electronic instruments beyond their reach would kill a vibrant music industry. Sakamoto backed this up further in a joint statement with the Japan Synthesizer Programmers Association, saying: "This will greatly hinder the development of Japanese music and artistic culture."

At first the government tried to appease the public by offering free testing for the first six months and making exceptions for vintage instruments. But that didn't do much for the secondhand shop owners, and they still rushed to unload stock before the law came into effect. Thus, last week the law was revised, to make 1989 the cutoff date for "old" rather than 2001, and with many items exempted from needing certification. In effect, the original law was almost entirely reversed.

So good for the Japanese, perhaps less good for the hording American collectors hoping to see a mass export of classic gaming hardware after the law went into effect.

Source: The Guardian

Posted by Bill at 2:22 PM | Permalink

An article in Reuters cites Hollywood sources who say that Wal-Mart is ditching the sale of UMD movies, and that UMD sections in all retail stores is shrinking.

But signs are bad on both ends of the line; Some movie studios are also drifting away from the format. Universal Movie Studios has stopped producing UMD movies entirely, with one executive quoted as saying "It's awful. Sales are near zilch. It's another Sony bomb -- like Blu-ray." Can a format bomb before it's released?

Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment hasn't unequivocally quit UMD production, but rather "evaluates the PSP platform for each title" and releases a film on UMD "if it makes sense for business reasons and the target audience." But as a Paramount exec put it, a little more bluntly, "Releasing titles on UMD is the exception rather than the rule. No one's even breaking even on them."

Other movie studios have drastically cut down their release schedules. Another executive at an unnamed studio says the problem is "It's a game player, period." Well it's not having much luck in that department, either.

Sales of UMD movies were surprisingly strong when the system first launched, with two movies even breaking 100,000 units sold in two months, making the sudden lack of interest even odder. Some suggest there may have simply been too many movies released too fast -- more movies than games, in fact. Others say that the PSP lost out in favor of the recently released video iPod. While still others suggest the novelty simply wore off.

Another attempt for the multimedia all-in-one companies have been trying to make since the early '90s falls on its face. Of course, using a specialized format that didn't work in any other player didn't help. One wonders how this will affect plans for Microsoft's rumored handheld, considering it was supposed to be a similar movie/music/gaming "PSP killer." The PSP seems to be doing a good enough job of that on its own, so is that really the system you want to be patterning yourself after?

Source: Gamecloud

Posted by Bill at 12:47 PM | Permalink

IGN has spoken to several Revolution developers and have gotten their hands on updated specifications for the machine, based on "either official Nintendo documentation or benchmark tests with working Revolution kits."

Insiders stress that Revolution runs on an extension of the Gekko and Flipper architectures that powered GameCube, which is why studios who worked on GCN will have no problem making the transition to the new machine, they say. IBM's "Broadway" CPU is clocked at 729MHz, according to updated Nintendo documentation. By comparison, GameCube's Gekko CPU ran at 485MHz. The original Xbox's CPU was clocked at 733MHz. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 runs three symmetrical cores at 3.2GHz.

The ATI "Hollywood" GPU runs at 243 MHz, compared to the Gamecube's 162 MHz GPU. On the memory side:

Revolution will operate using 24MBs of "main" 1T-SRAM. It will additionally boast 64MBs of "external" 1T-SRAM. That brings the total number of system RAM up to 88MBs, not including the 3MB texture buffer on the GPU. By comparison, GameCube featured 40MBs of RAM not counting the GPU's on-board 3MBs. The original Xbox included 64MBs total RAM. Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 operate on 512MBs of RAM.

The numbers definitely support the notion that the Revolution will not be in direct comparison with the 360 and the PS3. However, a very strong note of caution should be put up when comparing clockspeeds, as IGN tries to do between the Revolution and the Xbox. The two systems run on entirely different architectures, and how clockspeeds translate to actual performance within those environments can vary widely. You only need to look at the PC world, in which AMD processors at 2.2 GHz compete directly with 3.4 GHz Pentium 4s. That's not to say the Revolution is going to offer 360-level graphics just because they're different architectures, but that you can't guess much from the numbers alone.

Given these speeds and the amount of memory, it becomes much more feasible that the Revolution will debut at $199 or even $150.

Source: IGN

Posted by Bill at 8:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're an American and you think you've got it bad waiting for Japanese releases, check out the NOE Hall of Shame which lists the top 10 wait times for Nintendo games Europe had to endure between our release date and theirs. Of course, they did get Doshin the Giant and we didn't...

• The Quake 4 1.1 patch has been recallled because it may harm monitors using widescreen.
• Kids avoid dying in drive-by shooting because they were inside playing video games.
• Police impound a Mercedes SLR belonging to Stefan Eriksson, the ex-Gizmondo exec who crashed a million dollar Enzo Ferrari last month.
• Shadowbane developer Wolfpack Studios is closing its doors.
• Rumor: TV's Lost coming to consoles?
• All the various photos of the PS3 presentation at GDC have been assembled in one place.
• If you ever felt what Pac-Man was really missing was a boy in a floppy green cap: Zelda-themed Pac-Man.
• Far Cry developer Crytek has released a high definition trailer/tech demo for their upcoming Crysis, and it's fairly impressive. The HD version is here, smaller versions are here.
• 1up claims Call of Duty is heading to the Revolution. Activision won't comment.

Posted by Bill at 4:53 PM | Permalink

At GDC, Namco project manager Kouichirou Taninami gave a lecture about the process of localizing Counter Strike for the Japanese market. A lot of it has to do with player matching and creating a LAN experience, but the most interesting portion of it was about changes to the game itself that were made to appeal to the typically non-FPS-fan Japanese gamer.

The gritty, burly character models Americans love so much just don't fly in Japan, so Namco hired artists to "anime them up" (see here). Further, Taninami decided a game where terrorists can win might not be best in Japan, so they replaced the teams with the factions CSF and NEO, whatever those are. This choice strikes me a bit odd, as I think I've seen worse in Japanese games. You can ally yourself with Satan, kill God, and end the world as you know it in Shin Megami Tensei but you can't let terrorists win a match?

More interesting, though, were the changes to the game itself, beyond simply the look:

There's also the issue that basically all people do in Counter-Strike is shoot each other – which should get boring after a while – so Taninami added a suite of single-person missions and mini-games; completing these modes gives a player special prizes. There are also a number of in-game events timed to various holidays and seasons, such as cherry blossoms that cascade in the spring. As for the game content itself, "we didn't want to change it; we didn't want to ruin it."

The next time you get into that debate about why Japanese games always have these kinds of characters or this kind of gameplay, just remember: Yes, our cultures really are that different.

Source: Gamasutra

Posted by Bill at 3:59 PM | Permalink

I guess I always figured doing the Super Mario Bros. Super Show is the kind of job you'd like to forget about, but apparently at least one guy doesn't mind. Captain Lou Albano played Mario in the live action segments as well as providing the voice of Mario in the cartoon, and he was on hand at a FYE in New Jersey to sign copies of the show which has just been released on a four disc DVD. Go Nintendo has pictures and a report from the scene.

Lou sounds like a really nice guy. And after the Go Nintendo writer mentioned he worked on a Nintendo website, he managed to score an interview with Albano that will appear in an upcoming podcast. So be on the lookout for that, buy several copies of the Mario DVD so they'll have the money to put lots of work into the upcoming Captain N DVDs, and in the meantime hit the link for more about the event and more photos.

Link: Go Nintendo

Posted by Bill at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)