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Showing posts with label games console. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games console. Show all posts

Saturday, February 01, 2014

New Slimmer and lighter PlayStation Vita Wi-Fi with internal memory card - PS Vita


The new PlayStation Vita (PS Vita) Wi-Fi model (PCH-2000 series) is set to launch in the UK. The new PS Vita Wi-Fi model, featuring a more streamlined form factor and a 1GB internal memory card will become available in the UK on February 7th 2014, at a suggested retail price (SRP) of GBP 180. The PS Vita PCH-2000 series will replace the existing PS Vita PCH-1000 series as stock of the older model is exhausted.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Microsoft Xbox Executive Don Mattrick tell offline games to just buy a Xbox 360 not the Xbox One!



With Xbox One taking so much bad press over the 'always only' you would think their executives would think more before the speak. This video may be removed so watch it quick!

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Real life PlayStation 3 shaped building in Osaka

This office block looks like a PlayStation 3 console. Built in Mamba Parks, Osaka, Japan in 2003, three years before the PS3 release and designed by Nikken Sekkei.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Nintendo Wii sells for £299,995 ($483,573.52) gold and diamond video games console


The Nintendo Wii Supreme is another exclusive only-three-to-be-made project that sees the console smothered in 2,500 grams of 22 carat gold.

There's also 78 diamonds super-glued to the front buttons, in a package that will set you back £299,995.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Vintage console game library now includes 3,200 legally playable games and a free version.

classic video game screensConsole Classix (http://www.consoleclassix.com), has re-launched with an improved user interface, additional video gaming consoles supported and a library of more than 3,000 classic console games. This classic game library includes nearly every game ever released for 10 different systems: Sega Genesis, NES, Super Nintendo, ColecoVision, Atari 2600, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance. Additionally, with the improved user interface it is even easier to browse for your favorite games and the overall experience is more seamless than previous versions.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Nintendo Wii price drop to $199 on Sunday 27th September that's $50 OFF

The screenshot above (from engadget) shows the price cut printed on promotional material.
Nintendojo broke the story last week and it has been confirmed during a conference call with Nintendo.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Where can you get a PlayStation 3 as stocks dry up? PlayStation Slim annoucement and price cut at GameCom?

playstation 3 console image blackA lack of PlayStation 3 stock in retail channels is more evidence that Sony intends to reveal a redesigned console and possible price cuts.

Japanese and UK channels are drying up, with orders on hold until the end of the month.


The retail commentary I’ve seen has come out of the UK. We heard Japanese retail a few weeks ago say they weren’t going to be getting any more PlayStation 3s after August 8, and now we’re starting to hear UK retail say they cannot re-order PlayStation 3s until month-end, that suggest there’ll be a model change.

Next week's Gamecom event is the likely location for a big reveal from Sony, during its press conference to be held on Tuesday evening. As well as price cuts, a 'PlayStation 3 Slim' is also expected.

If Sony’s practice is the same as it was in the past, and the Slim is more of a redesign of the components to drive down cost, then I think we will get a price cut.

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Cost of making PlayStation 3 drops 70% say Sony

playstation 3 console image blackThe manufacturing costs of the PlayStation 3 have dropped by 70 per cent, Sony Corp CEO and executive vice president Nobuyuki Oneda has revealed.

Speaking during a conference call for overseas investors following Sony's Q1 2009 results, Oneda revealed the company is on track to meet its cost reduction forecasts.

"The cost reduction since we introduced the PS3 is very substantial and this is on schedule," said the exec when questioned on the console's manufacturing figures. "We don't disclose how much of the PlayStation 3, specifically the cost deduction, was achieved during the past two years. But that is on schedule."

When pressed further for specific figures, Oneda replied: "About 70 percent, roughly-speaking."

Exact manufacturing costs for the PlayStation 3 haven't been made public by the company, however it was estimated the console originally cost Sony $800 (£485) per unit when released, resulting in a loss on every one sold.

In January 2008, reports indicated that manufacturing costs had been reduced by 50 per cent to around $400 (£243).

A further 70 per cent drop on this figure would suggest costs now sit at around $240 (£146) per unit. A figure which could indicate room for the widely rumoured price cut due later this year.

The 80GB PlayStation 3 currently retails for £299.99; $399.99 (£243) in the US.

Source: GamesIndustry

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Go! Go! Rescue Squad! Video game on major consoles and PC

Go! Go! Rescue Squad!‘Go! Go! Rescue Squad!’ will release first as a downloadable PC product in February 2009. The game will be released on iPhone next with mobile formats arriving in April 2009, including Windows Mobile and Android. An Xbox Live Arcade version is in development, and the company is exploring routes to market for a Nintendo DS version later in the year making Go! Go! Rescue a true, multi-platform, brand.

The initial release, as a downloadable PC game, places Go! Go! Rescue Squad! firmly in the casual games sector, an area which Connect2Media Directors have had much success in before. CEO of Connect2Media, Eric Hobson, commented, “The global web release enables us to get the game out to a massive audience from the off. Already there is a community building for the brand on-line and the release will fuel this making it a ‘must play’ title.”

Peter Scott, Connect2Media’s CTO, said “Our experience of the game is that if people play it, they fall in love with it, and so discovery via the web release will be a key part of the strategy for building a major brand. We also feel that this is a perfect product for today’s casual games market having had a number of hits in the past with games that have taken on a life of their own when released online.”

The Go! Go! Rescue Squad! brand is designed to have mass market appeal to both male and female audiences. The game has been developed at the company’s Manchester development studio and sees the player taking on the role of a brave firefighter in order to save ‘Darwins’, the hapless inhabitants of the town. 

The game has a wide appeal combining compelling gameplay, original character and level design and unique gameplay mechanics in 64 puzzle packed levels over six themed districts. Gameplay sees the firefighter squad doing everything they can to save the various Darwins from fire, floods and explosions. The game has a gentle learning curve but its size and variety of levels gives it plenty of depth and hours of gameplay.

Blockbuster to offer mail-order video games rentals for Wii PS2 PS3

blockbuster video games rental
Watch out GameFly - Blockbuster wants in on the mail-order video-game rental biz now.

The company is adding games to its Total Access program, which lets members rent and return movies by mail (or exchange them in stores).

Games for the Wii, PS2, PS3, Xbox and Xbox 360 will be available to a pilot group of users in second quarter a US national roll-out is planned for the second half of the year.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Zeebo download games console launched

zeeboNo consoles are launching in 2009, right? Not so. Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy, most notable outside of South America for its long partnership with Sega and official distribution of its consoles in Brazil, will be releasing an entirely original product called Zeebo.

Centered around downloadable games distributed only over a 3G wireless network, the console is designed for emerging markets, and has high-profile partners and games including Electronic Arts's FIFA, Id Software's Quake, and Namco Bandai's Tekken.

It will save its small, standard definition titles, many of which will initially be BREW mobile game ports, to the system's internal flash memory. This is intended to sidestep the issues of piracy, home internet availability, and retail distribution of game titles.

The company is 57 percent owned by Tectoy and 43 percent owned by mobile tech company and BREW creator Qualcomm. As well as the above-mentioned larger companies who will release games for the console, Zeebo is hoping to attract independent developers as well.

English info on the console is exceptionally rare so far, with no launch yet slated for North America. But there is opportunity here; the firm feels there's potential for a repeat of the indie-led App Store boom Apple is currently seeing with iPhone.

Gamasutra recently had a chance to talk to Zeebo Inc. CEO John Rizzo, who heads up the operations in North America, as follows:

What's the market for the console?

JR: For the moment, our focus is Brazil first, and then Mexico. Then, selected parts of the rest of Latin America. Then a year from now, likely China and/or India. Those are a little bit harder to figure out, because the content in China and India is likely to be very different from content in Brazil. So we need some time to figure out what the content needs to be.

We work with developers in the local countries; I could imagine a Bollywood dance game with a dance pad. That would be fantastic in India, much more sale-able than Prey. Or in China, a game that teaches English as a second language would be really cool and powerful for that market.

It takes a little longer -- and then, of course, in China there's a ban on consoles, per se, that the seven ministries of the government need to lift -- and that's going to take probably six months to a year for that to happen.

Because our business model is one where we want to get a local partner in the country and put their name brand on it as well, that means it takes a little longer to get that all squared away. So, yes, we're going to those countries as well.

It's pretty much designed for an SD set up, right? Not high definition?

JR: In fact, it's really more designed for the cheapest, most resilient TVs you can find. 

With China especially, MMOs are king. Is it possible to play with other people across the network with Zeebo?

JR: Yeah, it is technically possible, and in fact, Ultimate Chess actually is going to be offered in two versions. It will be offered in a single-player version and a two-player version.

The two-player version is over the wireless connection. The reason that is going to be relatively easy to do, is that when you are playing chess, the only thing being transmitted is the move coordinates.

So, very low data density, you can compute how many times people are going to play chess; they're going to push it three hours a day -- or how many moves they are going to make in three hours. And you can figure out how many megabytes a day you need to buy to make that happen. Then, you simply make the price of the multiplayer game large enough to cover the cost of the data.

But the problem with an MMO game is you don't really know how much traffic there is going to be. And we have to pay for the traffic. So I think we will move into that domain, which is certainly very important, as you mentioned, in China and elsewhere, but it's probably going to be a different pricing model.

Right now, we use prepaid. It might be entirely a subscription model, and the subscription model might be constrained to a certain number of hours per day of play and anything above that, there's a super pack you can buy that jacks that up.

It seems like free to play, pay for items might be a useful model.

JR: Yes. We've got to figure all that and navigate through it. The other thing that's interesting, too, for us, is that I think that there is some percentage of people... I'm not sure if it's the majority or some large percentage, that play in the middle of the night.

And if you play in the middle of the night, with a cellular-based network, the data pipe is empty anyway during the middle of the night.

So, we might be able to work some kind of deal whereby the bandwidth we buy at 2AM is a lot cheaper than the bandwidth we buy at 10PM, in which case we could offer an MMOG that has a different pricing structure, depending on what time of the day you play.

So, you're still working on the business model.

John Rizzo: The remaining thing we're trying to figure out is the business model. Because the way it works technically, right now, is that if you fill the gigabytes in flash, and you go into the UI and say "delete", it will remove the game from flash, but it will leave a tag that says you already bought it.

Let's say six months later you decided that you wanted to download it again. The only question that we are wrestling with at the moment, which we won't solve right away, is whether or not it's free when you download it again or whether we simply charge you for the air time when you download it again because we pay for the cost of the air time -- and so that's the only question we're trying to work out.

In any event, the customer won't have to pay full price, there's no doubt about that. Whether or not they pay a buck or two to download it again is still something we're trying to figure out. and from my perspective, personally, as the CEO of Zeebo, I don't think people should pay for it again, even for the air time. Because if you fill up your Flash memory, that means you've bought 40 or 50 games.

We license the right to manufacture and sell the console in Brazil to Tectoy. So, if they do want to charge somebody to do the re-download, that's within their purview.

How is your model working so far for the publishers? Will developers be able to release stuff directly on Zeebo without going through a publisher, or rather, having Zeebo as the publisher?

JR: So, the interesting nuance of this is that all these things here [displayed on the screen], these are assets that are stored server-side. And we upload them into the console in the middle of the night, and they're cached. And these basically are like banner ads.

So if a publisher comes up with a new title, they can basically place their ad, if you will, on the stage. And the way the stage works is that every click of the paddle, the cylinder [of ads] rotates and, there's four [ads] in this case... as you move through this, so it's like this continuous thing.

So, it's a way for the publisher to directly market to the customer. Over time, as we get enough of an installed base, we might actually consider charging publishers for that access, but you could put videos here, you could put a GIF, you could put bitmaps and stuff...

I figured there would also be a clearer text-based list.

JR: Yeah, at some point, yes. Until there's a huge number of titles, we try to make it more graphically rich. But in this case there's cover art, and then you can sort by [headings such as] favorites, new, genre, and stuff. And then, this is a scroll up and down.

When you click on one you get the game description. In this case, this is just [dummy text] in, but the cover, in this case, the parental rating in Brazil, which is required by Brazilian law, and then the number of points required.

If you don't have enough points when you try to buy it, it will say, "Do you want to refill your console?" and you can do that by buying more points with a credit card, that we call a "scratch card". And then you use the joypad to key stuff in to the virtual keyboard.

In the future, we could plug the keyboard into the back, a USB keyboard, and then the publishers themselves, if they want to have a custom store, we could create a custom store that's made for them.

Can you multitask while the system downloads a game?

JR: No, the current limitation, [the system's] fully loaded, it fully occupies [the system, during] most of the downloads. But if you happen to pull the power during the middle of a download, it automatically recovers, so there's no issue with that.

And then, it's like [Amazon digital reader] Kindle. The wireless plan is built in, you don't actually subscribe to a plan, you don't know that a plan exists, the number of points effectively covers the cost of the download as well, and you end up paying for that. Everything is secure.

But to answer your question on the publishers' side... Either we've got a signed agreement in 80 percent of the cases, or a handshake agreement when we just won't do the contract now, [with] six of the top 10 publishers, and if a publisher wants to have us be the publisher, we can do that as well.

If a developer wanted to go directly to you, they could?

JR: Exactly.

I assume, starting out, it is mostly going to be mobile ports.

JR: Good question, good point. That's what we thought. [laughs] In fact, when we started the company we said, "Hey, there's lots of mobile games out there and they are easy to port, and let's do that."

What we discovered is that most of the sources we went to said, "Yeah, we can do that, but what we would rather do is take console content and port it down in Zeebo, because the gameplay experience and the graphics are richer."

So I would say in 60 to 70 percent of the cases it's more console content. If for example, you take the FIFA game from EA, that's an interesting port because a part of it was taken from mobile content. And then the voiceovers, we took from the PC.

In the case of Tekken, would that be a PlayStation port, or is that mobile?

JR: It's not a mobile port, I know that. But I don't know if it's PlayStation or some other platform.

I'm wondering how easy it is to strip down to this architecture, depending on what the time is.

JR: I'll give you a couple examples. In the case of the chess game, Ultimate Chess, it is strictly from a [Glu mobile] BREW port. That took four months. Quake, which was strictly a port from the PC, took about six months.

Some of these other games -- like Prey Evil, I think, is taking seven months, maybe. So I think the best case is three months, the worst case is like nine months. That's reasonably fast.

It's slightly longer than I thought it would be. But I don't actually know what the chipset and the SDK are like.

JR: It's just like BREW. Part of the reason for it, the length of the time here, so far, has been that we really didn't release an SDK to developers until June 1st. And the SDK that we released June 1st really didn't become completely stable and bulletproof until September 1st. So I think the titles starting today are going to be faster, I believe.

Are you encouraging original development over ports, or are you going more for name recognition?

JR: I think at the moment we have enough of the publishers and other brand name titles in the queue that, as we enter into 2009, we are going to start shifting into more originally authored, independent titles.

There is a possibility this becomes like the iPod Touch and the iPhone, where you get people that have never really developed before do so because they can reach a huge market and because the marketing cost is virtually nil. So we hope that's the case.

Full post on Gamasutra here...


Thursday, June 19, 2008

Consoles of the 70s Guide to the grandfathers of gaming


We’re kicking off four days of cartridge-based nostalgia with our guide to the consoles of the 70s. Before you roll your eyes - hey, we saw that - keep in mind these were the first consoles ever created. And without our decrepit forefathers, we wouldn’t be enjoying digital ambrosia with the likes of Mario or the Master Chief on our fancy HDTV. If y

read more | digg story

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Did you win the $4000 Nintendo Wii Bling for playing Super Mario Brothers Brawl



The Wii was given to the winner of the Super Smash Bros Brawl Competition.



Crystal Icing used over 20,000 Swarovski Crystals to create this unique design.

Retail price is $4,000

Check out their other 'bling' games systems.