Sony

Lumines sells like hotcakes. No, the original one. Yeah.

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See, I told you guys the PSP wasn’t dead. This week, Lumines, the damn-near-perfect musical puzzler for the PSP, saw a 5900% rise in sales on Amazon. And all because of a bug. Yes, Lumines is probably the first game in history to become more sought-after because of a minor bug that not even QA’ers can find. Yes, you’ve entered Bizarro World. Welcome.

Over the weekend, PSP homebrew programmers/hackers found an exploit in Q! Entertainment’s puzzler in the form of a buffer overflow. Basically, this allows anyone to run unsigned code on the PSP, which Sony’s been desperately trying to stop. Ya know, so they can actually make money on the thing.

And of course, the underground homebrew scene has already released a downgrader app to bring the PSP’s firmware version back to the coveted 1.50 release. →  A reader is you.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 6.18.07

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Sony announces 9,648,319 games by March 08
Unfortunately, they counted each individual household a game would end up in as a unique game. If you don’t count your copy of God of War 3 as a different game from my copy, then 145 or more PS3 titles are coming.

Sonic RPG on DS being developed by Bioware
Funny, whimsical RPGs can be cool. Mario’s Super Star Saga and the whole Paper Mario series attest to this. Cute, colorful cartoon characters in RPGs can hold their own, too. Kefka may look silly this day in age, but he is still insanely evil. So what is so horrendous about a Sonic RPG? I’m glad you asked.

Sonic is uninteresting in every possible way. →  Virtua Poster 4: Evolution

Sony decides PS3 is making a comeback

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Offering no sales figures or other sales facts, Sony CEO declared, “All the production problems have been solved. We are making a comeback already.” It seems Sony has figured out how important image is and so they’ve decided to take it upon themselves to tell the media what their image is. It would not be at all shocking if the PS3 begins to make a comeback only because an article has printed that it is making a comeback. Microsoft should try this tactic with the Zune.

In other breaking news, videolamer’s popularity is growing beyond all expectations.

Behind the names of our favorite companies and consoles

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Gamers speak the names of companies and systems on a daily basis, but many of us don’t know what these words actually mean nor their origin. And so here is a list of many of the biggest companies and consoles and what information is openly known about their names. I speak absolutely no Japanese and have no new information to add to this planet, but I have not seen all this info neatly compiled in one spot before. Thanks to Japanmanship and others who had already done much research on the topic.

Companies


Microsoft – Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems created the microcomputer Altair 8800 and Bill Gates offered to implement BASIC on their system. Micro is either from the Micro in the MITS company name or the micro in microcomputer, or both. →  Is that an article in your pants, or are you just happy to read me?

How the UMD could have won

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Last week Gamestop had a Memorial Day weekend sale where they sold all their UMD movies for the awesome price of $4.99. And seeing as how I actually own a PSP, I jumped on that one like….well, something that jumps really fast.

For only $50, I got 10, count ’em 10, UMD movies, and all of them are actually worthing of being watched. I’m talking Snatch, The Fifth Element, and one of my all-time personal favorites, Ghostbusters. Now my train rides won’t consist of me reading a book. Phht, like books are ever gonna catch on…

So after having a full week of watching movies on my PSP, I have to say that it’s actually pretty damn cool. The quality of the video, as well as being formatted in a widescreen ratio, makes watching movies on my handheld a very enjoyable experience. →  Reading. Reading never changes.

Review – Metal Slug Anthology

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Old games don’t stop aging, and when they get old enough anniversaries are certain to pop up. These are great opportunities for everyone in gaming. Publishers get a fantastic excuse for re-releasing old games from dead platforms, and despite what message board all-stars will tell you, gamers can also benefit from these “franchise-milking opportunities”. They give some a chance to play a classic they missed out on, or for an old fan to have an entire series on one neat little disc. Good times all around.

Except it is rarely the case where things work out so squeaky clean. Sometimes a company will take it too far, such as Nintendo’s audacity to charge twenty dollars a pop for NES games that had a 50% chance of being tucked away somewhere in Animal Crossing. →  Welcome to the Fantasy Zone.

An even more Smashingly little amount of information to Brawl about: Music

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Recently, the Smash Bros Dojo has opened its doors officially. Though much of the information is not new, updates are guaranteed to be coming every weekday from Masahiro Sakurai himself!
Unlikely to be the last surprise waiting for us inside a box.

Most of the information is stuff any fan of the games would know by now – such as how to play or information about the one stage that has been revealed.

However… if you look at “Music” there is a list of composers that is nothing short of formidable. Absolutely amazing.

The list itself gives examples of games the composers worked on, which is helpful for several names I didn’t recognize. Let’s take a look.

The usual suspects:

  • Koji Kondo
  • Masaaki Iwasaki
  • Minako Hamano
  • Shogo Sakai
  • Toru Minegishi
  • Yuka Tsujiyoko
  • Hajime Wakai

These are all composers who worked on several Nintendo games in the past or recently worked on big-name Nintendo games. →  [send private information]

Paranoid Identity Crisis!

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Fanboys unite! Constant squabbles echo among Nintendo, Sony, and Xbox loyalists, but the real battle is elsewhere. It’s a battle between the different ways people choose to spend their free time and their extra dollars. Games are a big and growing part of this battle and they have taken a bite out of that tasty aged 18-34 male demographic. Can games hold onto it? Do they even want to?

Nintendo has set itself the challenge of trying to hold onto some of gaming’s biggest loyalists while making appeals to nontraditional audiences like retirees. And it’s well known that Sony and Microsoft have had their eyes on a bigger prize ever since they stepped in the ring. They both want to eventually establish their brands and platforms for the mythical must-have TV set-top box. →  I’ll read you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 5.14.07

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Starcraft 2 is coming
Golden Jew was wrong. He is hereby stripped of one hundredth of his massive pile of gold coins, crowns, and swords. I’ll give it back when the Starcraft MMO comes out in two years.

Rare to broaden 360s audience with all age friendly games
But also don’t rule out that they will make mature games, says Microsoft’s Peter Moore. They will or they won’t. They may and they may not. I’m glad Moore cleared that up.

Rare is fascinating because Microsoft seems to think Rare can change the Xbox brand image and because I have a theory that Nintendo makes their second parties what they are. On the first point, Rare will fail. Microsoft is taking the same attitude towards appealing to the mass market as they took when attempting to appeal to the Japanese — “one or two games should do it, now let’s sit back and wait for the money.” →  And so it games…

Fucking Finally – PSP to have iTunes-like Store

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It’s taken Sony two years to finally figure out that there’s gold in them thar downloadable content hills. Sony revealed this week at their Gamers Day conference that they are now actively planning a PSP Store, an online marketplace where handheld users can download multimedia content to their PSP’s.
Matt’s fluorescent beauty.

The real deal that users are getting will probably come in the form of downloadable video content, which is basically non-existent right now. iTunes holds the majority stake for all kinds of content right now, but Sony looks to compete with them in supplying movies, music, and possibly games on their PSP Store. Of course, this is all just speculation, as nothing has been officially announced, other than that Sony will have a store where you can download stuff. →  Lamers so loved the world that they gave their only article, so that everyone who believes in reading won’t perish but will have eternal lives.