Monthly Archives: March 2009

Famitsu’s confirmed that DSi has now sold more than 2 million consoles in Japan.

The handheld revision went on sale last November. It’s sold over 700,000 units in Japan so far this year.

DSi launches in the US on April 5 and in Europe on April 3.

Thanks, Kotaku.

According to this Chosun Online report, Sony is to stop exporting PS3 hardware to South Korea in an effort to stop “reverse importing”.

“We are troubled by ‘reverse-importing’, which is when products exported into South Korea are flown back into Japan,” said a Sony employee.

Thanks to a depreciating South Korean Won and a strong Yen, Japanese punters are increasingly tempted by electronics savings in South Korea.

More on Kotaku.

Q Games’ Dylan Cuthbert’s confirmed that PixelJunk Eden Encore will release next month.

“Eden Encore will be coming out very soon in April,” said the developer on the PS Blog.

“Get ready for zero gravity, mirror worlds, all new music from Baiyon, and we’ve added something extra special at the end which is a Big Secret(tm) and is a present to all the fans.”

Cuthbert’s giving a talk on Eden Encore at GDC this week, but at the same time as the Kojima keynote, unfortunately.

The glitch that prevented Last Remnant PC players from being able to activate their games through Steam has been fixed, Eurogamer reports.

While the JRPG’s PC version was released last Friday in Europe, buyers had been told installation was not possible until the game launched on Steam: on April 9.

Still, all’s well that end’s well. Potentially.

According to this Edge report, Sega sold through 45,000 copies of House of the Dead: Overkill in the US last month.

The game launched February 10.

NPD analyst Anita Frazier said it had placed about 50th in the US chart for February.

The new will be encouraging for Sega, especially as Wii-core brother MadWorld appears to be flopping pretty hard: the Platinum game charted at an eye-watering 34 in the UK last week.

GameSetWatch has posted up some photos from yesterday’s Indie Games Summit at GDC – and here they are.

2DBoy’s Ron Carmel was the star of the show, but you can see Crayon Physics guy Petri Purho and Stardock’s Brad Wardell through there, as well as some pictures of 300 people that want to make millions of dollars by not talking to publishers.

The dream.

OnLive – the just announced cloud-based gaming service – has released the first images of its controller and tiny set-top box. Get them after the break.

The shots claim up to four wireless controllers and four Bluetooh headsets can be used with the system, which lets you play games on a remote server as opposed to using local hardware.

The future? One thing’s for certain: you’re not going to see many SFIV champs hankering over that d-pad.

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OXM tweeted last night that, “Microsoft has some very cool stuff to show you tomorrow.”

If it does, we don’t know what it is. We’re nothing if not honest.

As soon as the very cool stuff appears, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Update: A string of top-end publishers are now confirmed as on board with the service.

OnLive, a service that theoretically allows users to play high-end games on their TVs and PCs without the need for any involvement in the hardware “arms race” at all, has been announced at GDC.

OnLive is a cloud computing service. Your controller inputs are uploaded to a remote server, on which your game is being played. What’s relayed on your TV screen is a video of play.

Lag has been reduced to one milisecond in terms of video encoding, apparently. You’ll need a 1.5mbps connection for SD play, and a 5.0mbps connection is required for 720p.

You can either use virtually any Windows PC or Mac for play, or buy a small dedicated box for your ethernet and controller cables.

Think about it. In theory, OnLive would allow you to play Crysis on a netbook. PS3 and 360? Why?

Think about it some more. Now read this IGN article. There’s a video of OnLive working here.

OnLive will get a closed beta this summer and a launch later this year.

A new console was announced at GDC yesterday, a 3G-enabled box packing a punch somewhere between a PSone and a PS2, according to maker Zeebo. Here’s its home site.

Zeebo plans to launch its “video game console for the next billion” in Brazil next month for $199 and in other countries later this year for $179.

The discless box is aimed at developing countries and is a little larger than a Wii, apparently.

Zeebo CEO John Rizzo said the machine isn’t meant to directly compete with the likes of PS3 and Xbox 360, but rather give consumers in India, China, Brazil and Eastern Europe – those who generally can’t afford the latest high-end consoles, or the games published for them – a bite at the gaming cherry, so to speak.

In many of these countries, cell phone service is more readily available and cheaper than wired broadband, said Rizzo.

One word: Phantom.

“Launching a new console is not for the faint of heart,” Rizzo said.

Live the dream, dude. Get lots more on Yahoo.

These were knocking about at the weekend, but it’s taken us a few days to get into the “developer” mood, so we didn’t care until now.

Four new WIP screens of Rage have popped up, showing environments and a large fan.

That’s it. This shit gets us up in the morning, you know?

Kombo’s rumouring that DSi’s to get a Virtual Console system for downloading Game Boy and GBA games.

Apparently this has come from Nintendo reps at a US pre-launch DSi event.

The games will be saved to DSi’s SD card and will be limited to first-party Nintendo games, at least initially.

There’s no official word on this yet.

DSi launches on April 5 in the US and April 3 in Europe.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Gamespot’s posted up first impressions and trailer from Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. Watch the video after the break.

The game’s now confirmed as featuring Dead or Alive’s Ayanne as a playable character, and will support online co-op.

The PS3 exclusive’s being shown this week for the first time at GDC. It’ll be out in America and Japan later this year, with a European date unannounced as yet.

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NCsoft’s released a trailer of Aion’s Ishalgen Zone: stream it here.

The Korean MMO’s out in the West this year, and does a good job of looking extremely pretty. Apparently:

The island of Ishalgen is a fragment of Asmodae, slowly being pulled apart by several warring factions. The Ulgorn Bandits have established themselves quite comfortably within the Aldelle Village, claiming both the breathtaking Lake Tunapre as well as the mysterious Munihele Forest as their own. Tensions run high within the Odella Plantation, where the fierce Gray Mane Mau have enslaved the Dundun Skurvs to cultivate Odella. Suspicious by nature, the Ulgorn Bandits have found themselves with even more to worry about, as a strange ship carrying unfamiliar faces has recently shown up along the Anturoon Coast. The Ishalgen Prison Camp with its seething hordes of undead remains one of the few uncontested regions of the island, although it is rumored to harbor a powerful secret.

More on this soon, hopefully.

The PC Gaming Alliance annual report has claimed that the PC is the most valuable gaming format on the market.

“The report provides an overview of the PC gaming market and the growth of the largest single platform for games with annual revenue of about $11 billion,” said the body.

That’s a lot of money. The full thing’s here. Thanks, RPS.

Castle Crashers has won this year’s XBLA Game of the Year award, shocking less than no people.

Hit the link for the full results.

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God of War III director Stig Asmussen has told the PS Blog that his game is “really deep,” despite casual games being able to have “a lot of fun with it.”

There’s a video interview after the break of Asmussen answering questions from the Blog’s readers. Fill your boots.

The title’s out in Sony’s current fiscal year.

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2DBoy’s Ron Carmel just told GDC not to bother with DRM, Gamespot reports.

“Don’t bother with DRM–it’s a waste of time,” he said.

“You just end up giving the DRM provider money. Anything that is of interest gets cracked, and the cracked version ends up having a better user experience than the legit version because you don’t have to input in some 32-character serial number.

“Anybody who wants the game is likely to find it on BitTorrent sites. It’s going to get cracked even with DRM, it’s going to be available very quickly, so we don’t see the point in having DRM. Piracy rates have been released before, and there’s no difference between World of Goo and other games.”

Carmel also detailed how much money was offered to 2DBoy by publishers for World of Goo, and how much the game cost to make. Get all that from Gama.

ngmoco just announced it’s secured $10 million in B-round funding.

The mobile games firm, headed up by ex-EA exec Neil Young, was formed last year by Young, Bob Stevenson, Alan Yu and Joe Keene.

The company is behind iPhone and iPod Touch games Rolando, MazeFinger, Topple, Topple 2, Dr. Awesome, Dropship and Word Fu.

More on Edge.

Hot diggedy shit. Sucker Punch just released two fantastic new videos of inFamous, showing off the now-announced karma system and some radical power-ups. Get them after the break.

The karma stuff looks fun! You can kill people and steal their food, and choose whether you’re a superhero that’s feared or loved.

Most importantly, you get to fry a lot of humans to death with electro-powers.

GDC! InFamous, a PS3 exclusive, is out in June.

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