Late Night Consoling

Outspoken Infogrames Entertainment chairman, CEO, and director Bruno Bonnell has left his position at the Paris-based holding company, which owns New York-based publisher Atari. Bonnell had also intermittently served as CEO of Atari in recent years, as well as chairman and chief creative officer.

According to today's announcement, Bonnell takes leave of the two related companies after executing a significant restructuring of that was formulated after some dire financial developments.

Serving as Bonnell's replacement will be Patrick Leleu, appointed by Infogrames' board of directors to the posts of chairman and CEO. Leleu has served as a director at the company since this January. "I want to thank the Board to put its trust in me," said Leleu. "I am convinced that Infogrames holds the assets, talents and teams to get back into the industrial competition and recover its dynamics of growth."

Bonnell co-founded Infogrames in 1983, and had remained with the company since. "It is with understandable emotions, but also reassured about its future, that I leave Infogrames after 24 years spent to build this group with the support of all its teams," he said. "Together, we have been able to show its strength and capacity to innovate, even in the worst situations. Time for business developers has logically come, after the entrepreneurial period. ItÂ’s now time for Infogrames to conquer and progress on a market as promising as interactive entertainment business."

Surely, in his heart, Bonnell will always know that Infogrames is innovation. Please, if you click only one of the many links in this news item, let it be that one.

Prior to the launch of Wii, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata commented that players would likely be able to augment the system's included 512MB of flash memory with standard USB memory devices in addition to the system's SD card support. Despite his claims, no such option has been available for the system. Today, however, a press release from Tokyo-based engineering firm eSOL suggests that USB storage functionality may be on the way.

eSOL announced that it has partnered with Nintendo to license two embedded middleware produce, its PrFILE2 file system and its PrUSB/Host USB host stack. PrFILE2 supports FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and VFAT file systems, while PrUSB/Host supports the USB1.1 and USB2.0 standards for use with USB flash memory and other mass storage devices. Today's statement gives no concrete indication of future plans for the console, and may be referring only to the existing SD card support and USB ports contained in the system.

"I am very happy that we could take part in the development for Wii, a new game console from Nintendo," said eSOL embedded products executive VP Nobuyuki Ueyama. "I believe that our products were selected because Nintendo highly-valued our long, successful history with many digital consumer products and high-reliability and functionality based on that."

Sony Computer Entertainment America sent word today that an update to Polyphony Digital's PlayStation Network driving game Gran Turismo HD Concept has been released. Version 1.2 can now be downloaded from the PlayStation 3's PlayStation Store. Included in the update is force feedback support for three Logitech-manufactured steering wheel peripherals--Driving Force, Driving Force Pro, and Driving Force EX. Also added are worldwide leaderboards for each car and game mode.