Archive for June 7th, 2006
Trailer For Cancelled PSP Tomb Raider?
Thanks to John D. for sending us a link to this Tomb Raider trailer that purports to be footage from the canned PSP remake. If this is legit, the game looks good. Oddly enough, it’s all set to Star Wars music… perhaps indicating the first draft of a trailer with some placeholder music canned when the title was.
Of course, why in god’s name would they cancel a sure thing like a Tomb Raider PSP remake?
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Related: Max Media Dock Makes Your DS All PSP-Like
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Wii TIPS RSS feed from 1UP
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PS3 TIPS RSS feed from 1UP
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Amazing Island
What do those darn chests get you? we have the answers.
Fab CliffyB Interview
The 10 Show’s Tina Wood headlocked Epic’s lead designer CliffyB and squeezed answers out of the lad on everything from how he got his start to what he really does at work. I could listen to CliffyB describe what a game engine’s raison d’etre for hours. Eloquent stuff.
More Here [The 10 Show]
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Related: Gears of War Concept Art
Related: Video: Wright, Jaffe, CliffyB, Smith Talk Games
Related: Gears of War “Leaked” MTV Footage
Kutaragi Announces Plans To Confuse PS3 Gamers Even More
This is really Ashcraft’s territory, as he can just flip his brain into reading those insect-like Japanese cryptograms that so confound me, but he’s not around. So I’m trusting the guys at Evil Avatar that this summary of a recent interview with Ken Kutaragi of Japan is more or less accurate. In the interview, Kutaragi said:
- games on PS3 are running on the PS3 with “basic configuration”
- software will have different relationship with hardware (including non-gaming applications) in the future
- software module will be made inside the PS3 (such as OS?) so PS3 will have no problem adopting new hardware parts (this doesn’t mean you can upgrade but just different versions of PS3)
- thus two models of PS3 are actually two different configurations, there might be other configurations in future, such as: enhanced version of CELL, more memory etc. The higher-end model of PS3 might be released in future.
Mind boggling. They are actually planning on techno-schisming the PS3’s user base even more. The advantage of consoles over PCs from a development standpoint lies mainly in the fact that it’s a stable platform with one real configuration. But Sony is basically approaching the PS3 like a computer… a move sure to frustrate developers as much as it confuses gamers.
Ken Kutaragi: Higher-End Playstation 3 Model in the Future [Evil Avatar]
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Related: Ken Kutaragi On The PS3’s Price
Super Great Bollywood Wii Dancing
A Bollywood film subtitled in English by a wise-cracking Spanish-speakers. Love the song, the costume changes, bosom burying and the heart-warming message at the end.
For Our Spanish Readers [YouTube] Thanks, Martin!
Oblivion Patch Released for PC
Huge games deserve huge lists of bugs, and most of the fun of Oblivion is to be had by exploiting those bugs to skirt your way past some bonehead Bethesda design.
So bad news. Oblivion’s first patch is out now for the PC and they’ve done things like fix the infinite gold from corpses and sell equipped items to a vendor more than once while perched atop a horse. Now we’ve got to find new exploits to make Oblivion fun. Slightly better news is the patch introduces an ultra-low quality mode, to appease those gamers whose rigs are spitting up dust.
XBox Live patch should follow sometime today.
Oblivion Patch Notes [Official Site]
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Related: Mehrunes’ Razor Coming to Oblivion
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Blitz: The League
Revamped gameplay options including a flaming ball.
Blitz: The League
Revamped gameplay options including a flaming ball.
Serious Sam II
Seriously go to any level and more.
Port Royale 2
A new vessel for a job well done.
Together At Last: PS2 & GameCube
Kotakuite Kevin sent us this clip of a PS2 and a GameCube on the same display. Or, as we like to say, harmony. Kevin got Gran Turismo 4 and Wario to output Picture-In-Picture on his Toshiba HM195. How’d he do it? The floor is yours, Kevin:
If you want to do PIP between two video inputs, the selected inputs can not be on the same video chipset. Since my cable/ant inputs don’t interfere with the component/composite/hdmi inputs, I just put my gamecube to my VCR’s aux inputs and fed it to the TV via coax. In PIP, my TV will only put the primary picture’s audio to its own speakers, but the secondary pictures audio is still sent out the audio outputs that lead to my receiver. Voila, two audio outputs with PIP!
And yes, both are playable at the same time.
Photo Here [Kevin's Page]
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Related: Sony CEO Skirts PS3 Pricing
How To Milk Those Achievement Points
Not to belabor the obvious, but the reason the 360’s Achievement Points are so great is because it makes doing well in games actually feel tangible again. Points pretty much disappeared in all games except SHMUPs and puzzle games after the mid-90’s, but racking up points in a game gives you an actual metric about how much you rock that you can use to impress ladies. I’m the kind of guy who sulked a bit when id removed points from Doom.
So I love what the 360 is doing with Live and Achievement Points. I care! I want to be one of the top 10 baddest Live gamers in the muddafuggin’ world. Unfortunately, I suck. Luckily, GamesFirst! has put together a guide to milking as many achievement points as possible out of your 360. Unfortunately, a lot of the best games for getting easy points just suck: Peter Jackson’s King Kong, I’m looking squarely at you. Still, for the obsessive Achievement Point Maven, this is an invaluable resource.
The Official GamesFirst! Guide to Achievement Points [GamesFirst]
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Related: Xbox 360 Hacked? Like Hacked Hacked?!
Related: Watch The Making of Halo 3
Related: Halo Graphic Novel Sneak Peek
Sony CEO Skirts PS3 Pricing
Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s first non-Japanese CEO, talked PS3 with The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. The company has seen better days and is looking to the Welsh-born Stringer to turn things around.
When chewing the fat about The Da Vinci Code’s success, the CEO pointed out that “It also beat Xbox 3 in Europe in its second weekend.”
“You mean X-Men,” Mossberg corrected.
Stringer started laughing and replied, “There’s an obsession!”
The conversation shifted to the console war, and Mossberg through out this fairly innocuous question: “PS3 is going to be 500 bucks, right?”
The knighted CEO’s response after the jump.
$499, and look it’s got more bells and whistles than a 747… That Cell processor is extraordinarily powerful and you have nine hours of high definition on the Blu-ray disks alone. The reason it’s expensive [is that] instead of concentrating on just the games player, which would have been done in the past, PlayStation 3 is designed to go somewhere else, where it’s the center of the living room… It’s part of the new digital strategy to try and create a new software mentality in Tokyo because because it’s quite clear that we’ve been an analog company migrating to digital with some difficulty.
Wow, the PS3 with all the bells and whistles is $499? I thought it was $699 for the tricked out version and $499 for the “lesser” HDMI-free model. You know it’s expensive when companies low ball pricing. Hey, Howie, don’t avoid the issue. The PlayStation 3 is expensive. Suck it up, because I’m gonna have to when I shell out for one.
Thanks, M!
More Here [WSJ]
Halo 2 Hits Half a Billion
Frankie reports that gamers have played half a biliion Halo 2 games since its launch a year and a half ago. If you’re keeping track, that means Halo 2 beat iTunes to the big Five-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh by six months. Isn’t that how much money Dr. Evil wanted to spare the planet from his tirade?
Half a billion [Bungie]
Sony Ireland Boss Says PS3 Might Lose
The typical Irishman’s natural tendency towards soft-spoken modesty doesn’t really fit in very well with Sony’s “The next generation doesn’t start until we say it starts… bitch” bravado. Niall O’hanrahan, Managing Director of Sony Ireland, has indicated that failure of the PS3 in the next-gen console wars is not outside of the realm of possibility.
“We have a marketing challenge from now until launch. This is not a done deal. It will require a lot of effort from us,” O’Hanrahan said. “We would never say we cannot fail,” he added.
He also added the puzzling observation that the PS3 competes with MP3 players. Also: “We noticed at E3 that games for PCs are back.” Dude. They never went anywhere.
PS3 faces tough competition, says Sony Ireland Boss [GamesIndustry.biz]
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Related: Wii Ship Date Announced Around Sept.
Watch The Making of Halo 3
Game site ScrewAttack was kind enough to upload the Halo 3 making-of onto YouTube so we could all get warm and tingly.
More Here [ScrewAttack]
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Related: Encyclopedia of Halo 2 Multiplayer Glitches
Related: Bungie Bringing Halo 3 Documentary
Related: Marathon Will Live Arcade, Halo 2 Won’t Live Anywhere
Rumor: Smash Bros swaps Ice Climbers for Ridley, others
Filed under: Nintendo Wii, Action, Fighting
We’ve got more new information regarding the Smash Bros Brawl lineup, reportedly from game director Sakurai himself from a Japanese radio program. If LiveWii is to be believed, the Sakurai will be adding Ridley, Bowser Jr., and a Wind Waker era Link. Who gets dropped? Ice Climbers, Game & Watch, and Young Link.
As most / all the online reports seem to come from the linked French-language site, we are trying to corroborate the news and/or find the original Japanese radio program. Until we get more concrete confirmation, take this as a rumor.
[Thanks, martin and cringer8]
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Funsta Lets Turd Game Rip
Do you like playing with excrement? If so, you probably cracked a big, brown-toothed grin when you heard that hot British toy property ‘The Turds’ was coming soon to a crappy flash game near you. And now Funsta has pinched the first one out.
It’s called Donkey Pong & The Adventures of Rimdiana Jones. That’s apparently some British scatological pun, but we don’t get it. Obviously, it’s just a Donkey Kong rip-off and not a particularly good one at that, but after you beat the first level, at least you get to enjoy delicious shit-smeared witticisms like, ‘”Mmm, chilled moneky turds! My favorite!”
Even more exciting, you can expect other execrable knock-offs of gaming’s most loved classics. July 4th brings Poobert, followed by Dungbeetle Rally, Turd Hereos: Men in Cack and, of course, Bogger.
Donkey Pong & The Adventures of Rimdiana Jones [Funsta]
Previously: Codemasters Unleashes A Load of Crap on Gamers
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Related: Codemasters Unleashes a Load of Crap on Gamers
