Monthly Archives: September 2009

Sony plans to make good on its promise to bring a video service to European PS3 users, and according to Kaz Hirai’s keynote at TGS, it will take place next year.

“We introduced a new video distribution service in the US, 300 movie titles at launch and 1200 episodes of TV drama,” Hirai told attendees. “Today we have more than 13,300 TV dramas and 23,000 movies, and this service is going to be expanded outside the US.

“We are planning on rolling this service out to all of Europe by the end of 2010.”

That’s good to hear. Finally Europe is getting some movies. UK will get it by the end of this year, though.

Hit this for the rest of the keynote’s news.

Nintendo’s just confirmed that Wii will drop in price from $249 to $199, as of September 27.

The move concerns American and Japanese markets.

Full press release is below.

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Sony bossman Kaz Hirai has shown attendees at his TGS keynote the new motion controller demoed at E3.

He didn’t demo it, but spoke a bit about it instead, showing a wand with changing colors of yellow, blue, and purple.

“The controller has image recognition and depth perception and it’s accurate and can trace user’s positions,” he told the crowd.

Hirai went on to say that Sony will continue to work closely with devs to help support the motion controller as it can attract “light” users.

He also said it has “a light vibration feedback”. Rawr. Day one purchase.

Hit this for the rest of the keynote’s news.

Photo courtesy of Joystiq.

PSP has now sold 52.9 million units of hardware, Sony boss Kaz Hirai confirmed in his TGS keynote this morning.

Hit this for the rest of the news from Hirai’s speech.

During big Kaz’s keynote at TGS 09, the Sony bossman told attendees that networking is very important for users, as in it creates experiences they can share with others via network communities, like SingStar and LittleBigPlanet.

“These networked communities are new experiences,” said Hirai. “This has made a new business model as well and this will help the game industry expand. The networked communities, that is Games are really the basis, the core, and can be combined with networks to increase the fun.”

“The question is what do we need to develop? We have to open our eyes and be sensitive to what users want.”

Glad to know Sony is listening aren’t you? Hit this for the rest of the news from Hirai’s speech.

LittleBigPlanet now has 2 million user-generated stages, Sony boss Kaz Hirai just said in his TGS keynote.

Players would need to spend six hours a day for 29 years to play every one, said the exec.

Hit this for the rest of the news from Hirai’s speech.

It’s on. Again. Tokyo Game Show kicks off this morning with a keynote from Sony superman Kaz Hirai.

His speech starts at 10.30am local time. That’s 2.30am BST, 3.30am CET, 6.30pm PST and 9.30pm EST. The US timings are for today, obviously.

We don’t have anyone “on the ground,” unfortunately, but we’ll be bringing you all the news as it happens. We’ll update this post with links to all the liveblogs as they appear.

Here you go:

• Eurogamer
• 1UP
• Kotaku
• Joystiq
• G4

Think the Halo franchise finally jumped the shark with ODST? Think again. Straight from Bungie comes word that Halo 3: ODST has roped in nearly one million players in a single day.

As of our last look at Bungie’s page, the exact number of players sits at 958,137. These ODST afficianados have logged a total of 5,740,372 games. In 24 hours. That’s totally bonkers, if you ask us.

No, it’s all right, Master Chief. Keep sleeping. Your exceedingly green presence is missed, but Bungie has a new green giant in its life: a fresh mountain of cash.

Ghostfire Games has announced that its WiiWare title, Rage of the Gladiator, will be the first-ever WiiWare game to support MotionPlus.

The fantasy-themed, first-person fighting game allows players to accurately swing their weapon in either horizontal or vertical attacks using WMP.

You can still play the game without WMP though.

The game is expected sometime this fall.

More over on 1UP.

SCEA boss Jack Tretton has reiterated last week’s news regarding sales of PS3 climbing 300 percent thanks to the price cut.

But because of the popularity, he thinks there may end up being a shortage for the console.

“We are up about 300 percent over where we were pre-price drop,” he told Reuters. “We are up significantly versus last year.

“If things continue at this pace, it is conceivable that there will be product shortages.”

Get ‘em while they’re hot then, we reckon.

More through IGN.

Cowen analyst Doug Creutz has weighed in on the rumor that Microsoft plans to takeover EA, and says that the likelihood of such an event are “inconsequentially low.”

According to the analyst, EA garners over 30 percent of its revenue from PS2 and PS3 and Wii, “which would almost certainly disappear in the event of a Microsoft acquisition, since presumably the whole point of the acquisition would be to secure EA’s products as Xbox 360 exclusives.”

EA gets another 10 percent of revenue from PSP and DS handhelds, “which would conceivably be at risk in event of a Microsoft acquisition.”

“There is simply no way the math works due to the massive hit to EA’s revenue and earnings post acquisition,” Creutz wrote in a research note. “This is even assuming such a deal would pass regulatory muster, which we find highly doubtful.”

Most of us do too, Creutz.

More over on Barrons.

Thanks, Herlock.

Patricia Ja Lee, the voice actress for Jill Valentine, has revealed that she will reprise her role for the character in Resident Evil 5: The Director’s Cut.

Granted, a Director’s Cut has not been announced despite this being TGS week, and Lee may be referring to DLC instead.

Who knows really. We will mail Capcom and see if anyone bites.

There’s a video of her admission after the break. It happens about seven minutes in.

Thanks, TheDutchSlayer.

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The first gameplay trailer for Dead Rising 2 will be shown on Spike TV tomorrow night at 12:30am EST.

Afterward, it will be posted up on GameTrailers for all the world to see.

There are other games that GTTV will be showing as well, Heavy Rain, Modern Warfare 2, but we’ve seen enough on those.

Give us some zombie killing fun.

Advert video for the show is after the break.

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Sony has announced that the God of War III demo from E3 will be included in the God of War Collection for PS3.

Hell yes.

Each copy of the game will include a voucher code that can be redeemed through PSN on the day of purchase.

This is your chance to experience God of War III before it hits store shelves March 2010.

We are cursing with excitement here.

More over on the US PS Blog.

Thanks to “unsubstantiated” rumors of a Microsoft takeover, stock in EA has climbed 5.24 percent to $19.36.

This rumor has been good for MS as well, as stock in the Seattle corporation has increased by 0.9 percent to $26.

“There’s talk that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring Electronic Arts,”said Frederic Ruffy, options strategist at WhatsTrading.com. “It’s unsubstantiated chatter, but it’s out there.”

A London-based trader told Reuters that similar talk has made the rounds in Europe.

More through the link.

An Xbox 360 peripheral bundle has been posted over on Joystiq, and it contains quite a bit of goodies in a nicely shaped popcorn box.

No popcorn is in it though, just the following:

• Mini Universal Media Remote (the original Pro pack-in!)
• Wireless Network Adapter (apparently not the 802.11n version)
• Xbox Live 3-Month Gold Card
• 800 Microsoft Points Card

While the boxart for the bundle was created for various European territories, pricing and availability have yet to be detailed.

Still, check out the link to see more of it.

Valve has confirmed to Shack that the Left 4 Dead 2 demo announced this morning at TGS will be exclusive to Steam and Xbox 360 preorder customers only on October 27.

Shack also reports that retail outlets claim the demo will go public on November 3, but Valve has not confirmed that bit.

Shame. Preorder people are getting all the goodies as of late.

More through the link.

Good news coming out of the official CD Projekt RED forums has revealed that the voice-over for Geralt ever one heard in the leaked video earlier this week is not the final version.

Good to know. It just did not seem right.

Here is the official explanation from CD Projekt’s CEO Adam Kiciński:

“After seeing the video many of you worried about the quality of voiceovers and the different voices used by lead characters. We’re proud that our team members can imitate native English actors so well that some people would even consider these VOs being part of the final product . However, we are not planning to change RED into the world’s first non-native recording studio for English movies and games by using non-native non-actors. Don’t worry, we’ll stay in our day jobs. The voices in the video are not in any way final, and were only created for the purposes of the video. By the way – personally, I don’t like Geralt’s voice in this movie either .”

Smiley faces were inserted by Adam, not us.

Thanks, TomisH.

Over on Capcom Unity, a screen from Dead Rising 2 has been posted, and it shows someone gouging zomies with antlers…. antlers attached to a football helmet.

Capcom is calling this shot an “exclusive pre-TGS screenshot for Dead Rising 2″.

Who knows what other bits of zany, zombie fun will be shown at TGS.

Stay tuned, as hopefully there will be loads more before the event ends this week.

An unnamed retail source has revealed to MCV that the UK’s current Wii SKU is to be replaced with new bundle that included Will Sports, Wii Sports Resort, and Wii MotionPlus.

However, it is not believed that the new bundle will be less expensive than the current offering.

If the report is accurate, this will be the first time MotionPlus or Wii Sports Resort has been officially bundled with the Wii console.

More through the link.