This blog will no longer be updated until further notice.

Gaming headlines February 7th and 8

February 8th
David Perry To Receive Honorary Queen's University Diploma

Report: Madden Lead Departs EA Tiburon

DICE: Mizuguchi Talks Artistry And Commerce In Concert

RealNetworks Q4 Games Sales Jump 30 Percent

Wii Pushes DS Into Third Place In Japanese Weekly Hardware Sales

Trinigy's Vision Engine 6.4 To Debut At GDC

Saling The World: Devil May Cry 4 Debuts Strong in Worldwide Charts

NCSoft's Garriott Talks Games As 'Pulp', Art

TV report: video games 'normalize' killing

Kiss your loved ones goodbye: Puzzle Quest 2 confirmed

Activision Bets Against PS3 In US

Studios Falling Over Themselves For BioShock Movie

Crytek Talks Crysis 2, Far Cry Movie and CryEngine 2

EA CEO Calls Spore The Greatest Creative Risk In The Industry

AIAS Award Winners To Get Recognition At GameStops


February 7th
Educational Feature: ‘Designer Advice’

Q&A: SOE, Live Gamer Reveal 'Live Gamer Exchange' Service

Nintendo’s Brawl Smashes Open Japanese Charts

Steam Hits 15m Users, Reports 158% Holiday Sales Growth

Report: Viacom Offering $1.5b For Take-Two

DICE Fight Club: Industry Vets Debate Retail Vs. Microtransations

Vicious Cycle Announces New Next Gen Console Engine


Report: Codebreakers Reveal Twisted Metal Move To PS3

DICE: Microsoft's Kim Takes Tough Questions On Console War

DICE: Team Blizzard On Building Its 17 Year Success

Activision Holiday Quarter Sales Rise 80% To $1.48 Billion

Gaming Headlines February 2nd-6th 2008

February 6th
Critical Reception: Capcom's Devil May Cry 4

New Street Fighter IV Characters Unveiled

Duke Nukem Forever Coming in 2008?

Mass Effect DLC Brings Batarians to the Mix

Screw GameStop - Donate your games to the troops in Iraq!

Midway Announces This is Vegas


Sega Announces English of the Dead

Bungie's next game is like, 'totally different'

Nintendo shares hit 7-month low on recession fears

February 5th
Digital Extremes' Sinclair: PS3, Xbox 360 "Not As Similar As You'd Like"

Metal Gear Solid Collection Confirmed

Pro Evolution Drives Konami Sales, Profit Rise In Third Quarter

THQ Sales Up, Profits Fall In Holiday Quarter

Conspiracy To Publish Wii Exclusive Puzzler Octomania

Future Invests In Games News Aggregator N4G

Foundation 9 Pledges New Quality Initiatives

Firaxis Explains Civilization Revolution Wii Postponement

Sony Confirms Silver PS3, First Greatest Hits Titles

Q&A: Rebel Monkey Talks Casual Space, $1M Funding

Nvidia To Acquire PhysX Developer Ageia

Command & Conquer Announcement Incoming

February 4th
David Jaffe To Keynote GDC 2008 Game Career Seminar

Sony Announces 1 Million Folding@home Users

PS3 Budget Game Line Planned In Japan, Western Version 'Likely'

Release This: Devil May Cry 4, Assassin's Creed DS Arrive Stateside

American McGee Confirms Unreal Engine 3 'Twisted Tale' Project

New Killzone 2 Concept Art

February 2nd
Dr. Kawashima declines $22 million in Brain Age royalties

Gaming Headlines January 31 & Feb 1

February 1st

Saling The World: Smash Bros, DMC 4 Take Over in Japan
DMC4 release date in the U.S is February 5th! :D

EA Reveals European Hardware Estimates

AIAS Announces Dr. Randy Pausch Scholarship Fund

Photo Finish For Hardware Sales In Japan

EA is most of the way there but needs some more time to Master the PS3

Nintendo is demented: Patented diagrams show some awful Wii gimmick ideas

Square Enix plans for world domination, acquisitions

New Playstation Home Pictures

Jim Ward Leaving LucasArts

Gameloft Announces Q4 Sales Of $38.2 Million

Smash Bros Not Working? Quit Smoking

Child's Play Raises Record $1.3M In 2007

January 31

Sony game's division turns a profit

New PS3 SKU practically confirmed by Gamestop

React's Guitar Hero pedals mean you're potentially taking this too seriously

Nyko reveals cord-free adapter for Wii Nunchuck, retrofitters rejoice

Inside Source Reveals the Truth About Xbox 360 "Red Ring of Death" Failures?

A blogger over at Seattlepi.com has posted an interview he did with someone who worked on the Xbox 360 project. The blogger claims he should be trusted because he was the one who broke the news about Bungie was leaving Microsoft and had all the details a full week before the official PR announcement. This should be taken as a "rumor" until confirmed.

Q: So what do you think the real failure rate of the Xbox 360 is? Some have estimated it as high as 30%. I got my Xbox in early 2007 and so far so good but what do you think the chance is that it's going to die on me one day.

It's around 30%, and all will probably fail early. This quarter they are expecting 1 M failures, most of those Xenons. Some of those are repeat failures. Life expectancy is all over the map because the design has very little margin for most of the important parameters. That means it's not a fault tolerant design. So a good unit may last a couple of years, while a bad unit can fail in hours. I have a launch unit and have not had a single problem with it. And it's used a lot. But I don't know anyone else with a 360 that hasn't broken, except you now. There's no way to tell when yours might die. But the cooler you can keep it, the longer it will probably last. So stand it up, keep it in free air, etc. :Note : Xenon was the code name for the first Xbox 360 mother board.

Courtesy of Seattlepi blogger, 8bitjoystick also posted on 8bitjoystick.com

Civilization put on hold for Wii

With its remote-controlled pointer simulating a mouse's point-and-click interface reasonably well, the Wii seems like an obvious home for the sort of PC ports that have always had trouble acclimating to a controller -- say, turn-based strategy games, for instance. So it comes as a small surprise that Firaxis has decided to put the Wii version of Civilization Revolution on indefinite hold. The game remains in development for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo DS, however.

"Development for the Wii version of Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution is currently on hold," said a 2K Games spokesperson to IGN. "We are focusing our attention on creating the best possible Civilization experience for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS platforms."

Courtesy of 1Up

Brash announces Saw videogame

A short press release from Brash declares that the title will "pull no punches" delivering "the horrifying suspense and disbelief that has floored fans worldwide!" It also mentions that SAW will be built using the Unreal 3 engine and is currently in development for next-gen platforms only.

A small website promoting the game is currently up at www.whoisjigsaw.com -- though sadly it seems to largely consist of a news signup form and some rotating images right now."

I can only think of how much a horrible game this will turn out to be.

Courtesy of 1UP

Gaming Headlines January 28 & 29th

January 29th

CryENGINE 2 Goes Cross-Platform at GDC

IGA Launches In-Game Ads For EA's Burnout Paradise

Trivia Company Sues SCEE Over Buzz! Trademark

The demo is a lie: Turning Point developers promise the game doesn't suck

Games blogging just got beefier: Christian Cage is GameTap's new columnist

ESRB confirms Phantasy Star II for Wii VC

Animal Crossing and Kirby coming to Japanese Wii in '08

GTA 'Hot Coffee' Class Action Pays Out

Valve Releases Steamworks

Super Spoiler Bros. Brawl: Major leaked roster update, videos & more

Sarah Michelle Gellar really wants to make Alice movie

Rumor: 80GB PS3 to be Replaced by 120-160GB?

Rumor: Cobalt Blue DS to Hit at End of February

January 28th
Training from America's Army Saved a life

AI Taught How To Play Ms. Pac-Man

Wiimote Turns TV into Touchless MS Surface

EA and Marvel no longer BFFs, dissolve relationship

Reserve Crisis Core, snag a piece of faux Shinra history

Kingdom Under Fire Gets an MMO Sequel

Jack Thompson defends Mass Effect

Brian Crecente, an editor over at Kotaku apparently e-mails Jack Thompson regularly. (Why you would want to, I don't know). But supposedly, Jack Thompson has no problems with Mass Effect.

To: Jack
From: Brian
I'm surprised you haven't been looking into Mass Effect.
http://kotaku.com/348692/ea-fighting-mad-about-fox-news-but-still-no-correction?cpage=2#viewcomments

To: Brian
From: Jack
Why would you be surprised. I don't see any problem with it. The guy who shot his mouth off about it had no idea what the Hell he was talking about.

To: Jack
From: Brian
You mean you're OK with mass effect?

To: Brian
From: Jack
Of course. This contrived controversy is absolutely ridiculous. Report that, why don't you?

Wow... Something must be going wrong, Jack is defending a game... Hot coffee, what? Is the end of the world coming sooner than expected?!

Courtesy of Kotaku

Lawrence Cooper regrets her statements on Mass Effect

In an interview on Friday, Ms. Lawrence said that since the controversy over her remarks erupted she had watched someone play the game for about two and a half hours. “I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke.

Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,” she added. “But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”

Do you think she would be apologizing if her book hadn't gotten bad reviews? I don't think so. Think you should have done your research ahead of time, Ms. Lawrence?


Courtesy of New York Times

New Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Trailer

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Trailer

New video released today. The game will be releasing for both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

Courtesy of Gamevideos.com

Epic VS Silicon Knights: Fight over Access To Engine Code

"The latest battle began with a Silicon Knights protective order that sought to ensure Epic would not be allowed to view Too Human source code to judge how much, if any, Unreal Engine 3 code remained."

"While Epic sought to bring in three in-house employees to review the Too Human code, the court ruled against keeping the identity of two of those employees a confidential, and furthermore ruled that the one identified employee, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, played a role in the case that did indeed constitute "competitive decision making."

Courtesy of Gamasutra

Geoff Keighley talks about his Fox News Appearance

"I sort of felt a little bit like I was on an Onion News Network skit or something like that. It was a little off the wall, but at least I was there to ... represent the industry in a mainstream sense." - Geoff Keighley

Apparently amazon, who had taken down the reviews for Lawrence Cooper's book “The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever” has now put the reviews back up.

Courtesy of Gamedaily

Grand Theft Auto IV Dated

Okay, folks. Set your calendars! Take-two is set to release GTAIV on... April 29th! Much sooner than I would have expected. The game is looking to be pretty good, check out the multiple screenshots that were released this week.


Courtesy of Joystiq.

Best Buy confirms it sold virus-infected Insignia photo frames, no recall in the works

As Engadget noted a week back, Best Buy's house-brand Insignia photo frames are indeed virus-infected, but now it appears Best Buy is doing something about it. Unfortunately, info is still slim at the moment from company lips. Best Buy says it's "connecting with our customers who may have been impacted," and has pulled remaining inventory from the shelves, but there are no plans for a recall of the infected NS-DPF10A, and Best Buy won't specify what specific type of malware we're dealing with. Best Buy seems to think that anti-virus software should have no problem dealing with the old-ish trojan in the frames, and recommends customers plug the frame into a PC and run some current anti-virus software to eradicate the malware. Macs are unaffected, and Apple could be seen on the playground making smarmy remarks about the incident to anyone who'd listen.

Courtesy Engadget

-Jmann, TTGB Editor

Gaming Headlines (Jan 23 2008)

Joystiq.com Promotion, get a free subscription to EGM!
(This is not a scam! Limited supplies.)

Devil May Cry 4 Demo will be releasing tomorrow. (PSN and 360 Marketplace)
Woohoo!

Eriksson freed, Gizmondo returning?
Does anyone really care, I mean, really? :|

Analysts predict games will see $10 billion 2008 Despite Softening Economy

New Real-Time Final Fantasy Versus XIII Screenshots
(Image courtesy of http://finalfantasyversusxiii.net/)

Wii Hits 5 Million Milestone in Japan

Ubisoft Reports $652m Holiday Quarter, Further Delays Haze

Activisions sends Guitar Hero message, forgets to BCC
Spam for the lose!

Super Mario Cupcakes
These are so cute!

Xbox 360 Breaks Down 5 Times In A Row, But Microsoft Refuses To Replace It

-Brukaoru, TTGB Editor

Follow up to the "Geoff Keighley takes on Fox News seXbox seXposé" post yesterday, Lawrence Cooper's book: “The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever” is receiving one-star rating reviews on amazon.com by angry gamers. I myself can't say she doesn't deserve it.

Update: Amazon is now deleting any one-star negative reviews of the book.

Update: EA Calls Fox Out on "Insulting" Mass Effect Inaccuracies

Credit to copperlawrence.com for the image.

-Brukaoru, TTGB Editor

Cell phone bill on the rise? Check your SMS charges

If you've been paying attention to mobile carriers' SMS pricing lately (and something tells us you haven't) you'd be surprised to discover a fairly disturbing trend amongst providers: price hikes. Over the past year or so, nearly every major carrier in the US has raised their per-price cost of SMS messages, with Verizon and Sprint jacking up the fee from $0.15 to $0.20 a message, and AT&T and T-Mobile adding another nickel to their $0.10 charge. Of course, this trend of rising prices accompanies a major spike in the use of text messages amongst customers, with some surveys marking a 130-percent jump over SMS use since June 2006 -- and telcos are taking it to the bank. What's most insidious about the inflated costs is the fact that SMS data is particularly low-bandwidth, and analysts say that the price increases aren't related to higher operating costs -- these companies are simply gouging customers for a service which they have embraced. Companies say the hikes are meant to encourage customers to go for more expensive "bundles," though we're confident they won't mention it when your Mom uses more messages than her plan allows and unwittingly pays a few extra bucks on her bill -- that stuff adds up, you know?

Courtesy Engadget

-Jmann, TTGB Editor

CSM's Ultimate Gaming rig is pretty potent, cheap... in the UK

Every so often, we get wind of a mysterious gaming rig that's so powerful, so mighty, that the entire world just has to see it. Unfortunately for most, this particular one will remain a pipe dream, primarily due to the UK's impeccably strong pound and America's woefully weak dollar. Nevertheless, those shacked up on the other side of the pond can grab Computer Supermarket's (we know, we know) Ultimate Gaming rig, which is home to an Intel Q6600 quad-core CPU, 8GB of DDR2 RAM, a 750GB SATA II hard drive, NVIDIA's 512MB 8600GT graphics card, a dual-layer DVD burner, 22-inch LCD, Windows Vista, keyboard / mouse and a fairly decent assortment of ports. All this pizazz can be yours for just £938.83 if you're in the right place, but for $1,829, we'll probably look elsewhere over here.

Courtesy Engadget

-Jmann, TTGB Editor

PSP Delays Skype Indefintely?

Odd, after the big fuss and excitement about Skype coming to Sony's PSP, Sony Japan just delayed Skype on PSP services in Japan. The cause of which seems to be Sony's two microphone products -- the single pack PSPJ-15010 and twin pack PSPJ-15011 -- which "did not meet the Skype specifications" and thus failed the certification process. Something you think Sony would have known well before the eve of the scheduled January 24th launch.

Courtesy Engadget

-Jmann, TTGB Editor

Geoff Keighley takes on Fox News' seXbox seXposé

Courtesy of Gametrailers.com

Gotta love how Ms. Cooper Lawrence laughs when Geoff Keighley asks her if she has ever played Mass Effect. Not only does she spat off on Geoff with misinformed statistics (average gamer an adolescent male? Think again, average gamer is a 33 year old male). Than the woman from Fox News saying "I don't understand why this didn't get an adults only rating... ESRB needs to get their head examined." Maybe she should get her head examined. An M rated game is rated for 17 year olds and up, an Adults Only rating is 18 and up. You really think that 1 year difference is necessary to see a sexual scene in a game, when I could go see a similar scene in a movie rated PG-13?! Sounds strange to me.

-Brukaoru, TTGB Editor

iPhone & iPod Touch Gain SNES Emulation!!!

You've waited, you've watched, and now your wildest dreams are about to come true. That's right, someone has coded a native SNES emulator for the iPhone / iPod Touch. Right now, the project is still in the beta / testing phase, but you can be assured that in the very near future, your sweaty hands will be smudging all over a virtual controller during heart-pounding games of F-Zero, Killer Instinct, and Super Metroid. If you absolutely can't wait one more second (Paul Miller, we're looking at you), slip the developers a donation and they'll break you off some beta test action. If you're the patient type, you can enjoy the video after the break, and sit tight till the application goes public.

< Courtesy http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/22/iphone-and-ipod-touch-nab-snes-emulation/ >

-Jmann, TTGB Editor