Archive for September 5th, 2006
North American, Japanese PS3 launch limited to 500,000 units
Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Business
Apparently the blue laser diode shortage that has delayed the PAL launch of the PS3 will also be affecting the North American and Japanese launches of the console. Sony Computer Entertainment Chief Ken Kutaragi told reporters that far fewer units will be available for the U.S. and Japanese launches, with the U.S. to be allocated 400,000 units, and Japan getting 100,000. As a result, Sony has now lowered its estimate of 4 million PS3s shipped by the end of 2006 to a more realistic 2 million.
Kaz mentioned this exact estimate reduction a couple of weeks ago in a Gamespot intervew (which was quickly retracted), so it appears as if the company has known about the production issues for a while. Thanks to these production issues, trying to bag a PS3 at the suggested retail price before Christmas is going to be game in and of itself.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
European launch of PlayStation 3 delayed until March 2007
Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Business
Sony has officially confirmed that the European launch of the PlayStation 3 has been delayed, citing “production issues with the blue laser diodes needed for the Blu-Ray drive”. Originally planned for a simultaneous global release in November, the PAL territories of Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, and Australasia will now have to wait until March 2007 to get their hands on a PS3. Plans to launch the PS3 in North America and Japan this November remain unchanged.
According to the announcement, “the PAL market is the most complicated region in which to launch the system, and is therefore the most pragmatic choice to bear the brunt of a shortage of components”. Everyone outside North America and Japan is used to getting a bum deal when it comes to console launches, so this broken promise is certain to leave a bitter taste in the mouths of gamers everywhere. That price premium pill just got a little harder to swallow, too.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Free indie games “magazine” launches
A new online magazine launched. Before we say something nice about it, a gripe:
What’s up with formerly usable websites deciding to bundle their content in user unfriendly PDF and chop it up in such a way that it must be printed in order to be understood and enjoyed? Instead of creating friendly layouts that are legible online, some websites instead perversely encourage readers to print out all of these web pages. What gives? It’s annoying for us, and lethal for our leafy cohabitants. Plus, those of us who rely on RSS for our news usually can’t even get at all the content once it’s been stuffed into a PDF. Argh!
Awful and abusive format choice aside, we welcome and congratulate the staff of Game Tunnel Magazine on a successful inaugural issue. There are some nice touches here: the scoring system for game reviews sports refreshing simplicity. The breadth and depth of the magazine also impress.
Still, as with all first efforts, there are some rough edges. For instance, the nifty game scoring system is grafted like a Frankenlimb to rather pedestrian, wordy game reviews. The scores would work better at the end of snappier, more pithy reviews. (Advice for fixing this issue: less IGN-style writing, more Pitchforkmedia.)
Game Tunnel’s best feature is its mere existence: more writing on and about indie games can only bring much-needed positive attention.
[Via EFYtimes]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
UMDs Flying Off The Shelves In Japan (No, Really)
Just when Sony’s UMD format seemed to be dead as disco, Warner Bros. comes along and shows how it can be profitable. Warner Home Video originally announced discounted UMD movies, selling for 980 yen (US $8.50) a piece. However, the company decided to remove the limitation and hoped that would mean higher sales. They were right. Over ten times as many UMD movies have been moved since the permanent sale began. So far, titles include:
The Last Samurai, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, Enter the Dragon, Batman Begins, The Island, Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Black Diamond, The Goonies, Tom and Jerry, the Harry Potter movies and The Matrix trilogy.
I’ve always thought the idea that UMDs should be priced the same as DVDs to be, well, dumb. And, Warner is showing that there is a market for the format as long as the price is right. I’m totally going to pick up Enter the Dragon, Batman Begins and The Goonies. Here’s hoping other companies follow suit.
More Here [PSP Vault]
The “Impossible” Happened: DS Phat Cracks
Whenever we’d report of DS Lite hinge cracks, original DS owners would smugly say how happy they were they didn’t purchase a Lite. In a post-Far Cry: Vengeance interview, VGM Daily announces:
I have a DS Phat. My hinge on my original DS has cracked in much the same way and fashion as the DS Lite hinge.
And like that, every DS Phat owner’s smug grin was just wiped off their collective face in one fell swoop.
More Here [VGM Daily]
Will Wright at BAFTA
Will Wright’s speeches always leave me feeling equally exhilarated and confused. He manages to both tear down the walls of my current box and stir me to new ways of thinking.
It sounds like his latest speech, at BAFTA, was no different. In it he talks about programming for next generation systems, aka children.
As he points out, the thing developers should really be concerned with is the human experience and how it can be shaped by games.
Game developers are developing for two processors, and the human mind is the one we should be concerned with.
Basically what Wright is saying is that the kids who are growing up now virtually soaking in bandwidth and video games, are going to be much harder to create games for then my generation, which is still easily amused by the process, the idea of gaming.
I look at my 5-year-old son and see a person who finds video games as prevalent and mundane as I found radio and TV. Kinda frightening.
Will Wright Talk @ BAFTA [Functional Autonomy]
Stupidly obvious online safety and parenting tips from NCsoft
We know that companies can never assume anything about their customers for corporate legal purposes, but that still doesn’t keep the stupidly obvious from being funny. Enter NCsoft’s newly released tips and suggestions for their “PlaySmart” program. Here are some of our favorites:
- Parents should review ratings of games to ensure they are age-appropriate (Eureka!)
- Never give out your credit card information
- Never give out personal information such as name or address
- Do not give out passwords or account information
My credit card number is 5764… I live at 1 Joystiq Way, Mushroom Kingdom, and my login information is user: admin, password: 1234.
[Thanks, cringer8]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Clips: Video Game Marching Band
Anyone can play video game theme music, but how about playing video game music while marching in the shape of a video game symbol? Yeah, I didn’t think so. MSU_CokeBoi wrote us to let us know that last Thursday his marching bad performed music from Mortal Kombat, Halo, Super Mario Bros and Zelda throughout the game. The band marched in the shape of the Halo emblem, a goomba, a triforce and, my favorite, a NES controller with moving buttons.
Despite the awesome performance by the 300-plus-band, Mississippi State University lost to South Carolina 15 to zero. Ouch.
Today in Joystiq: September 5, 2006
Joystiquery
R.I.P.: Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin
Readers pick best webcomic (August 27 - September 2, 2006)
News
The biggest game phenom in 20+ years: World of Warcraft
PS-Peeing viral vid for Gangs of London
Classic, non-crappy Bomberman coming to the PSP
New Stranglehold trailer released
PSP Download Service to launch with PS3
Ubisoft CEO confirms girly game: ‘Alive’
PS2 price drop in Japan: now 3,800 yen cheaper
Dreamfall predecessor to be re-released for $10
25-year-old XBLA game delayed by a week
Wii anticipation drives Nintendo stock price to six-year high
Atari appoints new CEO, hopes to avoid pitfall
Rumorangs
Rumorang: Xbox 360 HDMI cable officially yanked
Culture
Video games and Wikipedia, perfect together
The hottest ARG ever: lonelygirl15
Modding about Fallingwater; Frank Lloyd Wright house in HL2
Bringing new gamers into the fold: Is our culture inclusive?
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Atari appoints new CEO, hopes to avoid pitfall
Filed under: Business
David Pierce is one lucky guy. In addition to being given a fancy “CEO” title and $600,000 annual salary, the man has now been placed at the helm of Atari, currently in the process of sailing through stormy seas and various other clichés that amount to a lot failure and not an awful lot of money in the bank. He has over 20 years of management experience, including stints at Universal Pictures, MGM, Sony Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment — perfectly valid evidence to back up the claim that he generally knows what’s he’s doing. Atari stocks went up by a whole penny following the news, indicating that more than one person believes this to be a good move.
The company’s previous CEO and potential Marvel Comics character, Bruno Bonnell, has been shifted into the position of “Chief Creative Officer.” Presumably, that entails coming up with creative ways to get the most out of the stationery and decorating the offices with cost-effective origami and pleasing fingerpaintings. Joking aside, these internal modifications may finally allow this Atari (Infogrames in disguise) to escape its current rut, reap the financial rewards and usher in an all-new video game apocalypse. Will Mr. Pierce be able to plug up that hole in the company’s boat? We’ll have to wait and see (and play).
[Thanks cringer8!]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
PSP Download Service Launching With PS3
It looks like the Playstation Portable killer app, a downloadable PSOne library, won’t be hitting the portable until the Playstation 3 launches.
Gamesindustry reports that the new download service will operate via WiFi -enabled PCs and well as the PS3 and will be hitting in November with the console.
The service will also include movies.
Kawanishi Reveals PSP Download Details [GI]
Subverting Advergaming
The New York TImes’ Rob Walker put together a very interesting story that looks at subversive, anti-advergames. Yes, I know, that doesn’t sound like that could be interesting, but Walker found a law professor who is writing a paper about people who subvert the messages of advertising to make them into negative messages. Fordham University law professor Sonia Katyal calls it semiotic disobedience.
As a term and a concept, semiotic disobedience is a riff on two earlier ideas. One, of course, is civil disobedience. The other is “semiotic democracy,” a coinage of John Fiske, a media scholar whose 1987 book “Television Culture” described the ways in which audiences create their own interpretations of mass entertainment. Katyal’s combination, then, refers to the reinvention or subversion of logos and other symbols of commercial persuasion as part of a battle to redefine their meaning in ways that are frankly oppositional. Her research, she told me, evolved out of her interest in the way certain artists alter billboards with antibrand or anticapitalist messages. While this practice (variously referred to as brandalism, subvertising, culture jamming, adbusting, etc.) has gone on for years, it’s often dismissed as a nuisance, agitprop or, of course, a crime.
While Katyal’s upcoming paper doesn’t address video games, Walker does a good job of putting her ideas to work in explaining games like Ian Bogost’s Disaffected.
Gaming the System [NYT]
Bringing new gamers into the fold: Is our culture inclusive?
Filed under: Culture
We love when tipsters write in to shoot the breeze, tell of summer flings, and of course send in rocking tips. Just today via email, Joystiq reader Angie Jernejcic shares her new found love for games: “I’m just getting into gaming, and I’m loving it [cue annoying McDonald's theme here]. Games like Brain Age, Tomb Raider, and Shadow of the Colossus are changing my preconceived notions about games. Before: A waste of time… Now: Completely enraptured.”
In addition, the email’s subject line read: “New gamer, be gentle.” That got this oh-so-deep thinking blogger to ponder: Just how inclusive are gamers to newbies? Do we like to share the mass gore and evil fun that are video games, or do we want to keep the digital, thug lifestyle only with those that “get it?” I personally jump at the chance to have the wife excited about a game (it’s rare, but happens). Why is that?
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Clips: Xbox 360 Vision Cam on Uno
Short and relatively boring video showing the Vision Camera in action during a game of Uno. Kinda not the most exciting pairing, but still sorta neat. Check out my full early impressions of the Vision Camera here.
Wii anticipation drives Nintendo stock price to six-year high
Filed under: Business
Even though Wii has yet to launch (read: unproven), consumer and industry confidence in the console has driven Nintendo’s stock price to a six-year high at just over $26. Investment bank Merrill Lynch raised its target share price of Ninty stock from $25 to $29 last Friday citing high anticipation for Wii as the reason for the price hike. If line graphs, volume charts, and share prices bore you, this basically means that Nintendo stock is rising while peeps wait to see if the company can deliver the motion-sensing goods.
In contrast, Sony’s stock price took a sharp drop in May [enter Sony E3 press briefing joke here] while Nintendo shares experienced a spike and continued growth ever since.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Vision Camera Hands On
Microsoft was kind enough to send me an Xbox 360 Vision Camera on Friday. It’s a cute little thing that plugs into the USB port of your Xbox 360. I had a chance to mess around with it over the weekend, though I’m still waiting for Totemball to come out so I can really put this thing through the wringer.
The camera’s design matches the sleek vanilla look of the console and even has a green ring of light to show when it’s transmitting a signal over the Intertube.
I still haven’t figured out where to put the camera in my entertainment center, but fortunately it has a fairly long cable, so I should be able to put it just about anywhere in my set-up.
After plugging the camera into the console I hopped over to the setting’s blade where I was able to adjust for the type of room and the lighting. After you set up the camera, you can manually fine tune the focus by twisting a ring around the camera lens.
Next, I hopped over to my Gamertag settings where I was able to take a picture to use as my personal Gamer photo. Again, the process was fairly straightforward. The camera supports two levels of zoom, though by the second one the image is pretty grainy. Instead of just zooming automatically, the software lets you drag a box around the screen to highlight what you want to zoom in on.
After taking the picture, you can add effects to the image. The end result was a fairly grainy image of me. Even after I tried walking up to the camera and taking the picture without the zoom, I found it to be a bit on the grainy side.
I didn’t get a chance to video chat with anybody, but I did play a few games of Uno with the camera on. What this did was replace my normal gamertag picture with a live video stream. While this did make the image a bit bigger, it was still way too small to really see any sort of emotions or such. I mention this because there’s no way you could use the camera as a way of judging if someone is bluffing in Uno. I hope when it’s introduced for poker they manage to clean up the stream and make the image much larger.
The people I was playing with in Uno did say that the video seemed relatively lagless, which was nice, but I’m still unclear why you’d want to have video streaming in a game of Uno.
While I think it will be neat to check out some of the games that Microsoft is going to be releasing specifically for the camera, I sorta had my fill of those with the Playstation 2. What I’m really excited about is the in-game face technology. I didn’t really mess around with that much on the few games that did that with the Eye Toy and I’m assuming the technology has improved a bit since then.
I’m not sure if I would rush out a buy this camera when it hits on Sept. 19 (Oct. 6 in Europe). I think I’d likely wait until a good shooter came along that supported it and perhaps a few of my friends or family got the camera.
The camera is going to come in two flavors: For $40 you get the camera, one-month of Live Gold, a 360 headset and Uno and TotemBall. For $80 you get the same thing plus q year of Gold membership, a copy of Robotron and 200 Microsoft points.
What do you think, are you planning on buying the camera when it hits? I’ll slap up a short video a bit later today showing me annoying people by inability to video myself and play Uno at the same time.
25-year-old XBLA game delayed by a week
Filed under: Arcade, Retro, Microsoft Xbox 360, Action
In a moment that’s sure to elicit a grin or an unstoppable urge to fling your retinas into the back of your head, a game that was released in 1981 has somehow managed to be delayed for a week in the year 2006. Konami’s side-scrolling shooter, Scramble, was all set for release this Wednesday when Microsoft’s elite and possibly overworked team of testers concluded that the game simply wasn’t ready to hit Xbox Live Arcade. The official word reveals that “during the final testing and certification of the title, we discovered some minor issues that should be addressed. Therefore, we are going to take an extra week and fix these items to ensure a high quality game experience for all when the title does launch on its new date of Wednesday, September 13.”
This isn’t the first time the weekly XBLA release schedule has had to make due without a new game — this week’s replacement is a Project Gotham Racing 3 UNO deck priced at 100 points ($1.25 in non-funny money). As exciting as theme decks and picture packs may be, the consistency of game releases has been somewhat shaky so far. Let’s hope future XBLA Wednesdays don’t have more games taking XBLA sick days. Har.
[Thanks Matt!]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
The Anti Bullying Game
How many universities does it take to make a bad video game? It sounds like nine, according to Gamasutra.
The big G reports that a consortium of nine universities led by Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, is working on a game that will teach children how to deal with bullies.
The thing is, it sounds like a very basic game. You know when your lead developer uses the phrase “synthetic character” that you’re in trouble.
Edinburgh University Developing Anti-Bullying Title [Gamasutra]
MegaMan Goes To Wilmamette
On one hand, I deplore any form of humor which mostly involves someone swearing into their microphone for twenty minutes. But this redubbed intro for Dead Rising featuring Frank West as MegaMan does have some moments of genius. “Dude, drop me off where it says ‘H’ for Helicopter” and “Ha! I see what you did there. That was a good line!” amongst them.
Why not a Dual Boot Vista/XP System?
eWeek has a sorta bloated article up about the transition from Windows XP to Windows Vista. It’s two pages long, but essentially it’s just making an argument for releasing Vista on new computers as a second boot option.
David Morgenstern goes on and on about how wonderful Apple is and how they did this with Mac OS X. I’m not Apple fan, but it sounds like a good idea, or at least something that Microsoft should make as an option. But we know that won’t be happening.
Vista Transition: Microsoft Should Take a Lesson from Apple [eWeek]
