Gaming News

Andromaton · **Andromaton**

Tecmo president Junji Nakamura took a few shots at Sony Computer Entertainment's next generation offerings earlier today during Tecmo's quarterly press briefing in Tokyo. Regarding SCE's push for the PlayStation 3, Nakamura said: "We don't feel the heat." This is in comparison to Microsoft's heated worldwide lobbying efforts for developers to develop product for the next generation Xbox system.

Nakamura's comments didn't end there. "There's no information from Sony. It's very different from Microsoft America," he stated, hinting that MS has been the more open of the two companies with its next generation plans. Getting a bit more up front in his criticisms, Nakamura commented that Sony's cooperation with the home appliance industry gives him the feeling that game functionality is being added as just a part of the picture.

While Nakamura feels that the Xbox is going nowhere in Japan, the next generation Xbox has a different fate in his eyes. Nakamura expects Microsoft to make use of the experience it earned in this generation to make the system a "formidable success" in Japan.

We'd suggest that Dead or Alive fans be in line for Xbox Next on launch day.

Andromaton · **Andromaton**

SPIDER-MAN 2 director, Sam Raimi, will remake THE EVIL DEAD. The 1981 movie helped launched Raimi's career. He wrote, directed, and produced the original DEAD.

Sam Raimi will not direct the remake. He is looking for someone to reinvent the franchise before a script is written.

The movie is about five friends holed up in a remote cabin who discover a Book of the Dead that raises demons. Two movies, EVIL DEAD II and ARMY OF DARKNESS, spawned from the original, which all starred Bruce Campbell as the demon-fighting Ash.

This could be bad... very very bad...

Andromaton · **Andromaton**

Comments by Nintendo's Shigeru Myamoto to Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu have revealed that Nintendo plans to bring its consoles online within the next 3 to 4 years.

The recently launched DS, with its built-in Wifi capabilities, is presumably the first wave of this, and Myamoto said it will be followed by more devices as online gaming becomes more mainstream.

It could be argued that with Xbox Live and the PS2's network gaming capability that online gaming is already mainstream, or is rapidly approaching that state. Nintendo, however, have previously said that they view this technology as merely a niche.

"Most customers do not wish to pay the extra money for connection to the Internet," Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President, told the industry this summer, "For some customers, connection procedures to the Internet are still not easy."
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Briefly mentioned in the Avalon game announcement a few weeks back, Climax today unveiled its next-gen proprietary toolset, Tomcat.

The next generation consoles demand next generation technology, and this is why Climax has developed Tomcat. Designed exclusively for the PS3 and Xbox2, it's the next evolution of the company's current tools and is already proving itself to be a valuable asset in the development of the next generation of hits.

Tomcat is based on High-Level-Shading-Languages and uses small fragments of shader code that are concatenated to produce stunning shading effects. Crucially, Climax has developed a simple way for these small fragments to be created and inserted, which drastically reduces the amount of programming required to create such outstanding visuals.

Tony Beckwith, President of Climax Racing, explained, "Rather than reacting to the issue when it arrives, we've taken a proactive step and developed a unique toolset that allows us to fully exploit the potential for outstanding shading effects. The system we've created allows our artists to create amazing shader combinations faster, and without the need for programmer support."

Beckwith continued, "As soon as we started working on Tomcat, we knew we had something really special on our hands. Even still, the industry's reaction has amazed us. All the major publishers we've shown it to have been blown away and are pushing us hard to let them use it. This is an exciting step for us, and could mean that in the future a wide range of brilliant games built on the Tomcat technology could be filling the shop shelves, not just those developed by Climax."

Built from a stable platform that has proven its worth in several games, some of the current features are: real-time shader combining and preview, normal mapping, bloom and ViViD renderer, online and networking, DYNE physics, and real-time game tweaker. Climax only needs to customize these features for the next generation requirements.

Nobuyuki · **Nobuyuki**

Warcraft' explosive; Blizzard servers swamped

The acronym is fitting. "World of Warcraft" is now the fastest selling PC game in North America, Blizzard Entertainment reports. The massively multiplayer online role-playing game was sold to more than 240,000 customers on launch day, Nov. 23. Additionally, "WoW" broke peak concurrency and account creation records for a MMORPG. Blizzard says that over 200,000 accounts were created on day 1, and that by 5 p.m. PST, more than 100,000 people were playing the game concurrently, filling all the "WoW" servers to capacity. There were so many people signing up that by the end of Thanksgiving weekend Blizzard had to add 40 extra servers. Through Thanksgiving weekend, the total number of copies sold reached 350,000. Robert McKenzie, vp of merchandising at GameStop, said, " 'World of Warcraft' has once again shown that Blizzard consistently delivers the best games in the industry. It sold better than any other PC game this year." (GameDaily)
_________________
"When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."- C.S. Lewis
Wink

"Superman can't be emo. He can't cut himself."-CP

JJc14 · **JJc14**

[Taken from this GameSpot.com article]

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Big Deal: EA and NFL ink exclusive licensing agreement

Five-year contract gives EA sole rights to the NFL, including teams, players, and stadiums. Take-Two reacts, calling it a "tremendous disservice to the consumers."

Electronic Arts has signed the biggest sports free-agent on the market. In a devastating blow to competitors--and in a deal sure to reshape sports gaming--the software giant signed an exclusive agreement with the National Football League and the NFL Players Inc., a subsidiary of the NFL Players Association.

The deal, one EA admits to having lobbied for over the past few years, is an exclusive five-year licensing deal granting EA the sole rights to the NFL's teams, stadiums, and players.

The arrangement encompasses action simulation, arcade style, and manager games made for PCs, consoles, and handhelds (both the DS and PSP, included), giving EA a firm hold on the football gaming market. The deal does not include titles for mobile phones or internet-based games, but does include online features of consoles. With next-generation consoles scheduled for release next holiday season, EA looks to handily dominate the professional football market for the duration of the license.

EA's current roster of NFL games includes the top-selling Madden franchise and the extreme football NFL Street franchise. Given that EA currently has no "manager games" per se, there is clear writing on the wall that the publisher will announce a new sports management lineup of products, though it refused to comment on when.

A source close to the negotiations said it was at a spring, 2004, off-site meeting attended by top NFL officials that the league determined it would take the league license exclusive. GameSpot was told the league put the license up for bid and that EA was among as many as five software publishers competing for it. An EA spokesperson said today, "Obviously, exclusives are more expensive. We are most certainly paying a premium."

In a statement, Larry Probst, Chairman and CEO of Electronic Arts said, "We are excited about the opportunity to further enhance our relationship with the NFL and PLAYERS INC. The five-year agreements will usher NFL fans through the console technology transition with new ideas and innovative game play experiences."

The deal is obviously bad news for EA's competitors, particularly ESPN Videogames, Sega, and Take-Two who stole a respectable chunk of EA's Madden football market with their NFL 2K series and it's budget price tag this year of $19.99.

Arguably, the deal will impact consumers negatively as well. With less choice, theories of competition no longer apply. Some industry insiders speculate the exclusive deal was embraced by the NFL after it saw Take-Two lower the price of its 2K5 product earlier this year. No licensor likes to see a price war being fought with its brand value at stake. At the same time, exclusive licenses in the sports world are more the norm than non-exclusive licenses. The NFL's apparel license is a Reebok exclusive, as is its beverage license with Gatorade.

This afternoon, Take-Two issued the following statement: “While sports games in general are an important part of Take-Two's product diversification strategy, the licensed NFL game we distributed on behalf of Sega this year was not a material contributor to our profitability to date, nor was it expected to be a meaningful contributor in the upcoming year. We remain committed to continued diversification of our product portfolio, including sports.

"We believe that the decisions of the National Football League and PLAYERS INC to grant an exclusive license for videogames do a tremendous disservice to the consumers and sports fans whose funds ultimately support the NFL, by limiting their choices, curbing creativity and almost certainly leading to higher game prices.�?

"I really respect them, but the consumer really loses," one analyst told GameSpot. "EA is both evil and really smart."

As for such a deal affecting quality of future football products, EA's vice president of corporate communications Jeff Brown told GameSpot, "The onus is on EA to keep making a better game each year…that's the hurdle you have to clear every year."

Even before the news was released, trading of EA stock had its value spiking north. On trading nearly three times its usual amount, EA stock was up more than $3 today. The stock closed at $57.57, up $3.38, or 6.24 percent, with 16,574,606 shares trading hands on the NASDAQ. In after hours trading, the stock at press time had jumped another $2.88 to trade at $60.45.
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_________________
"Life's a journey, not a destination..." -Aerosmith ('Amazing')
Current RPG(s): (None)

JJc14 · **JJc14**

not exactly gaming news, but worth mentioning:

Beefy · **Beefy**

So, what's to stop people from just keeping their rentals as long as they want? Without late fees, where's the motivation to return what you rented?

Anyway, on to some gaming news: Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3!

dougisfunny · **dougisfunny**

Nobuyuki · **Nobuyuki**

I love this story.
For someone like me who still has 2 C=64's and a C=128D, all of which should still work, it's facinating and heartwarming. Not to mention mind-boggling when looking back to see how far we've advanced... Wink

A Toy With a Story
By JOHN MARKOFF, The New York Times

YAMHILL, Ore. - There is a story behind every electronic gadget sold on the QVC shopping channel. This one leads to a ramshackle farmhouse in rural Oregon, which is the home and circuit design lab of Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer.

Ms. Ellsworth has squeezed the entire circuitry of a two-decade-old Commodore 64 home computer onto a single chip, which she has tucked neatly into a joystick that connects by a cable to a TV set. Called the Commodore 64 - the same as the computer system - her device can run 30 video games, mostly sports, racing and puzzles games from the early 1980's, all without the hassle of changing game cartridges.

She has also included five hidden games and other features - not found on the original Commodore computer - that only a fellow hobbyist would be likely to appreciate. For instance, someone who wanted to turn the device into an improved version of the original machine could modify it to add a keyboard, monitor and disk drive.

Sold by Mammoth Toys, based in New York, for $30, the Commodore 64 joystick has been a hot item on QVC this Christmas season, selling 70,000 units in one day when it was introduced on the shopping channel last month; since then it has been sold through QVC's Web site. Frank Landi, president of Mammoth, said he expected the joystick would be distributed next year by bigger toy and electronics retailers like Radio Shack, Best Buy, Sears and Toys "R" Us. "To me, any toy that sells 70,000 in a day on QVC is a good indication of the kind of reception we can expect," he said.

Ms. Ellworth's first venture into toy making has not yet brought her great wealth - she said she is paid on a consulting basis at a rate that is competitive for her industry - "but I'm having fun," she said, and she continues with other projects in circuit design as a consultant.

Her efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new life inside modern custom chips has already earned her a cult following among small groups of "retro" personal computer enthusiasts, as well as broad respect among the insular world of the original computer hackers who created the first personal computers three decades ago. (The term "hacker" first referred to people who liked to design and create machines, and only later began to be applied to people who broke into them.)

More significant, perhaps, is that in an era of immensely complicated computer systems, huge factories and design teams that stretch across continents, Ms. Ellsworth is demonstrating that the spirit that once led from Silicon Valley garages to companies like Hewlett-Packard and Apple Computer can still thrive.

"She's a pure example of following your interests and someone who won't accept that you can't do it," said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the first portable PC and an original member of the Homebrew Computer Club. "She is someone who can do it and do it brilliantly."

Ms. Ellsworth said that chip design was an opportunity to search for elegance in simplicity. She takes her greatest pleasure in examining a complex computer circuit and reducing it in cost and size by cleverly reusing basic electronic building blocks.

It is a skill that is as much art as science, but one that Ms. Ellsworth has perfected, painstakingly refining her talent by plunging deeply into the minutiae of computer circuit design.

Recently she interrupted a conversation with a visitor in her home to hunt in between the scattered circuit boards and components in her living room for a 1971 volume, "MOS Integrated Circuits," which she frequently consults. The book concerns an earlier chip technology based on fewer transistors than are used today. "I look for older texts," she said. "A real good designer needs to know how the old stuff works."

Several years ago Ms. Ellsworth cornered Stephen Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, at a festival for vintage Apple computers and badgered him for the secrets of his Apple II floppy disk controller.

"I was very impressed with her knowledge of all this stuff, and her interest too," recalled Mr. Wozniak, whose fascination with hobbyist computers three decades ago helped create the personal computer industry.

She attributes her passion for design simplicity to her youth in Dallas, Ore., 35 miles south of Yamhill, where she was raised by her father, Jim Ellsworth, a mechanic who owned the local Mobil station.

She became a computer hobbyist early, begging her father at age 7 to let her use a Commodore 64 computer originally purchased for her brother, and then learning to program it by reading the manuals that came with the machine.

In a tiny rural town without access even to a surplus electronics store, her best sources of parts were the neighborhood ham radio operators. She learned to make the most of her scarce resources.

"It goes back to necessity," she said. "It went back to not having enough parts to design with when I was a kid."

Her first business foray came during high school when she began designing and selling the dirt-track race cars that she had been driving with her farther. Using his service station as a workshop, she was soon making so much money selling her custom race cars that she dropped out of high school.

It was fun for several years, she said, but eventually she decided that she needed to get away from the race car scene. A friend had an early Intel 486-based PC and thought they could make money assembling and selling computers. She decided he was right: "I looked at the margins and it seemed like a great way to make money."

They went into business together in 1995, but soon had a falling out and split up. For a short time Ms. Ellsworth considered leaving the computer business. Instead, she opened a store near that of her former partner, then drove him out of business. Ultimately her store became a chain of five Computers Made Easy shops in small towns.

"My business model was to find areas that were far enough away from the big cities where the larger stores were," she said. "I could generate a lot of loyalty and charge a bit more. It worked out well for quite a while."

Eventually, the collapsing price of the PC made it impossible to survive, she said, and in 2000 she sold off her stores.

"When the machines got down to $75 margins, then even putting a technician on the phone to answer a question meant you were almost losing money," she said.

Free from her business obligations, she decided to return to her first love - hobbyist electronics. She was eager to study computer hardware design, but soon found that there weren't many options for a high school dropout.

She moved to Walla Walla, Wash., and began attending Walla Walla College, a Seventh Day Adventist school that offered a circuit design program. Her attempt at a formal education lasted less than a year, however. She was a cultural mismatch for the school, where she said questioning the professors' answers was frowned upon.

"I felt like a wolf in sheep's clothing," she said.

On her own again, Ms. Ellsworth decided to pursue her passion, designing computer circuits that mimicked the behavior of her first Commodore. She turned to a series of mentors and availed herself of free software design tools offered by chip companies.

Her hobby produced a chameleon computer called the C-1. Changing its basic software could make it mimic not only a Commodore 64, but ultimately more than nine other popular home computers of the early 1980's, including the Atari, TI, Vic and Sinclair.

Two years ago she showed it off at the Hackers' Conference, an annual meeting of some of the nation's best computer designers. To her surprise, she received a rousing ovation - and a series of job offers.

One person who took notice was Andrew Singer, a computer scientist who is chief executive of Rapport Inc., a start-up based in Mountain View, Calif.

Mr. Singer contracted with Ms. Ellsworth as a consultant and has since found that she has abilities that engineers with advanced degrees often do not.

"It's possible to get a credential and not have passion," he said. He compared Ms. Ellsworth to Mr. Wozniak and to Burrell Smith, the hardware designer of the original Macintosh. Neither had formal training when they made their most significant contributions at Apple.

Ms. Ellsworth was also discovered by Mammoth toys, which hired her to design the Commodore-emulating chip for the joystick. She began the project late last June and finished, including a frantic last-minute trip to a Chinese manufacturing factory, in early September - a design sprint fueled by Mountain Dew and 20-hour days.

"It worked out tremendously well for our company," said Mr. Landi, president of Mammoth. "It has entirely changed the way we design electronic toys." He said that he has signed Ms. Ellsworth up for a series of design projects, although he would not divulge the financial details.

Old-fashioned video games like the ones on Ms. Ellsworth's product have become less common recently because kids have grown jaded and expect a "wow" factor, like intense graphics or realistic images that older computers could not produce, said Shyam Nagrani, principle consumer electronics analyst for iSupply, a market research firm based in El Segundo, Calif. He added, however, "The parents are likely to pick this up and say, 'Why not? The kids may like it.'"

When the C64, as the joystick is called informally, appeared on QVC last month, Ms. Ellsworth watched with obvious pride.

"It was one of one of the best projects I've ever done in my life," she said. "It was a tribute back to the computer that started it all for me."
_________________
"When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."- C.S. Lewis
Wink

"Superman can't be emo. He can't cut himself."-CP

Beefy · **Beefy**

The next Tekken game uses ideas from the Dead or Alive series.

counterparadox · **counterparadox**

I feel like, with so many people on this board having just recieved Metroid Prime: 2, that a thread should be made on the subject. Would that be warrented, or just stupid?
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anime is teh s uck

Play City of Heroes/Villians? Look me up, Pinnacle server, @C Paradox

John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo · **John_Bono_Smithy_Satchmo**

Warrented.
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This space left intentionally blank.

ROBRAM89 · **ROBRAM89**

dougisfunny · **dougisfunny**

Half Life 2 Demo released on ATI Get in the Game subsite.

the sw33t! Very Happy

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The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

Nobuyuki · **Nobuyuki**

U.S. release date set for PlayStation Portable
1 million units available in first week
The Associated Press
Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET Feb. 3, 2005

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Sony Corp. said Thursday it will release the PlayStation Portable in North America on March 24 and have 1 million units ready for sale in the first week.

The PSP machine, a challenger to Nintendo Co.'s long-standing grip on the handheld video gaming market, will be sold as a "value pack" for $250 in the United States and for $300 Canadian dollars. It will include numerous accessories and -- for the first million sold -- a copy of the "Spider-Man 2" movie on the new Universal Media Disc format that Sony designed for the PSP.

Sony said it has already shipped 800,000 PSPs in Japan, where it went on sale on Dec. 12 for about $190.

By comparison, Nintendo's newest product, the Nintendo DS sells for $150. It was among the must-have Christmas gadgets, with more than 2.8 million sold worldwide since its release in late November.

The PSP is designed, however, with more multimedia features. It can play digital music, movies and display photos on its 4.3-inch color screen, using Sony's proprietary 1.8-gigabyte UMD discs or a Memory Stick.

With the PSP, the Tokyo-based electronics giant is targeting a wider consumer base and not just young gamers.

"It has gaming at its core, but it's not a gaming device. It's an entertainment device," Kaz Hirai, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc. said in an interview.

In addition to working with its own Sony Pictures film division, Sony is in discussions with other movie studios to support the new UMD format for future releases of movies, Hirai said.

Sony said 24 game titles will be available around the time of the launch with prices starting at $40 each.

According to market research firm DFC Intelligence, the DS and PSP are expected to drive the global portable games market from $3.9 billion in 2003 to $11.1 billion in 2007. The overall global video game industry saw sales of about $23 billion in 2003.

Hard-core gamers will propel the initial sales of the PSP, analysts say. Its unique combination of gaming and multimedia features in a 7-inch by 3-inch device that also has Wi-Fi wireless connectivity, could spur a new market for Sony, however.

"When it comes to entertainment, Sony has advantages over other players in the market," said P.J. McNealy, analyst at American Technology Research. "But success drives imitation, and if this thing is a wildly successful platform, you'll see knockoffs by the holidays in 2006."
Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
_________________
"When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."- C.S. Lewis
Wink

"Superman can't be emo. He can't cut himself."-CP


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