Games! Games! Games!

Nintendo was at the Sundance Film Festival to show off their gaming devices to celebs who visited them.

I found it interesting how many similarities exist between the release of early arcade games like Asteroids and Pachinko, in Japan, and the release of the Xbox 360 game system a couple months ago. Pachinko was noted for creating a Yen shortage in Japan, and even many early arcade games placed in bars in the U.S. drew enormous amounts of people to play them, leaving companies like Atari unable to keep up with the demand. When the Xbox 360 was released late last year, there was almost an instant shortage of game systems, leaving people scrambling around and waiting in long lines, only to be turned down and told that the next shipment wasn’t expected until Feb. 2006 (long after the Christmas shopping season was over). This was surprising to many after Microsoft had assured stores and consumers that it would maintain a constant supply of systems on store shelves after witnessing similar issues with the release of the Playstation 2. I find it unfortunate for Microsoft that they were unable to plan ahead better, leaving many wanting to purchase the Xbox 360 system waiting and without systems. This definitely reminds me of the early days of video games and Atari, when the company was struggling to keep up with an overwhelming demand for games, often times pulling programmers and engineers away from their jobs to help manufacture the actual systems.

I like PS2 for its RPG's (Roll Playing Games). It has better graphics than gamecube and its controllers are okay. Unlike a Gamecube, The PS2 can play DVD's which is very useful if you don't have a DVD player so you can kill two birds with one stone by buying a PS2.

Some of you might be wondering: "Wait a minute… Nintendo DS? I’ve seen people with those. That’s the crazy touch-screen gameboy thingie right? I heard that sucked…"

First off, I have to say this redesigned DS looks slick. It looks like something that would come from Apple. It was rumored that that Nintendo was going to do a redesign of the DS, I just didn’t believe it… I didn’t see any reason why Nintendo would have to update the hardware. It hasn’t even been out for year! I guess they’re just doing what they’ve done for a over a decade: making stuff smaller. Nintendo has had a history of rereleasing consoles/portables in a smaller package. Think about it, Game Boy & Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Advanced & Game Boy Advanced SP & Gameboy Micro. Now this! The DS Lite! The funny thing is? People actually buy these redesigned products even if they already have what is essentially the same thing. The folks at Nintendo are geniuses!

Do you love video game music? Of course you do. Personally I love buying video game soundtracks, but they are often quite difficult to find. Sure you can hope over to Amazon to pick up Halo, Jade Empire, or Kingdom Hearts. But what if you're looking for some best, and most difficult to find, soundtracks of all time?

Absolutely genius. 1UP.com sat some kids down to play classic video games and record their reactions. Ready to laugh your ass off and feel old all at the same time?

4) Right now, people love to speculate that the fight for the first place will be between XBox 360 and PS3. Well, I don't think so. I personally believe that the real battle will be 360 and... Nintendo Revolution. And, not only that, but 360 might have a hard time beating Revolution.

i have successfully acquired an xbox 360. picked up the last one at a random target in Carson yesterday. the night before i watched the last 360 sold right in front of me at my local target. id say if anyone out there wants an xbox 360 keep checking target. they seem to have a steady supply of them and arent the obvious place to hit like best buy. honestly, im pretty happy that my money didn’t go to best buy on this one. freaking bastards. their sales tactics have been really effed.

To play it, you’re gonna need the SNES ROM for Troddlers (available below) and a SNES emulator. I myself use and recommend ZSNES, but Windows users tend to gravitate towards Snes9X. ZSNES might be harder to configure for newbies while Snes9X looks like any other Windows application.

The Sony PSP is a portable gaming device. This cannot be denied. While homebrewed programs open more and more functionality to the PSP, it can never aspire to replace a desktop or laptop computer. It does, however, lower the barrier of entry into mobile content design. As a designer looking for additional skill sets to acquire, the mobile world has always been of interest to me. The strict restraints of a small screen, small file size requirements and the competing mobile standards are all new to a designer used to designing websites and applications for use large monitors. This design primer covers some of the basics of you need to know before designing a PSP compatible website. Note: The following information applies web browser bundled in the 2.0 firmware update.

In browsing IGN PC, I was looking at some of the PC games that people were looking forward to in this new year. I found a few lists of the most anticipated games so I thought I would share a few of them.

Do you guys (fellow pymblians) remember the good old days of obsessively playing pc games on our brand spankin new laptops in year 5? We were introduced to the idea of 'shareware', exchanging exciting fun filled games, and of course deadly viruses as a result. My absolute favourite pc game was Dogz and Catz 3 - a virtual game where you had to take care of your pets which involved feeding them, playing with them, helping them mate, watching them grow, teaching them tricks, and so forth. I religiously played it - keeping track of my family trees and cross breeding to the max to produce beautiful mixed babies :P

“Although we are participating in many CES activities with Sony,we have no new announcements on PlayStation 3 planned at this time.”

Most of you (the ones that actually care) probably already know that not all of the Xbox games work for Microsoft’s latest console. What you may not know are the specifics, so as a public service, here’s the list. If you’ve seen it, good for you. If you haven’t, you’re welcome.

A lot has been made lately about the not-so-great launch of the Xbox 360 over in Japan. The popular sentiment seems to be that the Japanese are just xenophobic and won’t buy an American console over a Japanese one.

I hooked it up to see just how it would look and was much less than impressed. The dashboard looks fine, as do the Xbox Live Arcade games, but when I popped in NBA2k6, I was very dissapointed. I dont know if it’s game specific, but it really looks like a normal Xbox game and in some cases, worse.

Modojo is reporting that iRIVER has announced a new handheld games console to go up against Sony’s PlayStation Portable and Nintendo’s DS as well as pictures of the new device.

For starters, the premium package comes with the xbox 360, 1 wireless controller, 20gig drive (used for saving games and to play older xbox games), a huge power supply (used to power the beast), an entertainment remote to play DVD’s, the headset and a whole lot of ethernet cable.

Basically all the following links are about $ony’s “guerrilla” style marketing campaign for the PSP. Here’s the basic idea. Sony, a major international corporation, paid ad artists, to go around in major cities and paint PSP ads, that look like graffiti. These ads were 1. not paid for 2. painted on other people’s property and 3. vandalism basically. But still i think they figure since they’re a big corporation, they can just go around and put stuff on other people’s property just because they feel like it. This for some reasons sounds a lot like the Sony DRM scandal, which resulted in Sony recalling a whole slew of Sony BMG CDs, because they basically installed a malicious program onto peoples computers and made it hidden, so you wouldn’t even know it was on your computer if you had it. Even more so, removing this thing could break your OS.