Late Night Consoling
My Internet connection totally died on me today (curse you, Time Warner!), and while Maarten was ready to take over for tonight, I figured he's got enough to worry about as it is without covering for me, so I put my GPRS cell phone connection to the ultimate test and subjected it to my nightly news scrounging. With only one major exception (*cough*IGN*cough*) it wasn't too bad. Granted it took an extra hour to do, and was painfully, even mind-numbingly slow, but hey, that's how dedicated I am to you guys. There's some big news below, so let's get to it.
| Microsoft Signs Flash Memory Company for Xbox2 Well here you go, the first actual proof that Microsoft's next-generation Xbox may very well ship with no internal hard drive...M-Systems, a company that produces the DiskOnKey flash drives, announced today that they have signed a deal with Microsoft to provide "customized memory units for future Xbox products and services." While the possibility still exists for this to be used for memory cards, CFO Ronit Maor has said these will be significantly higher-capacity than the 8 MB memory cards that currently exist for the Xbox, and he goes on to say, "What we're going to offer for the Xbox doesn't currently exist." |
| PSP Delayed until 2005 ...except for Japan, that is. The latest Game Over column over at CNN/Money broke the news today that Sony will be delaying the release of their PSP handheld system until early 2005 for Europe and North America (it's still planned to launch in Japan this year). This isn't too surprising really, and no major system (as far as I can recall) has had a worldwide global launch. To do so is just asking for limited supplies everywhere. |
| Freaky Super Mario Bros. Record Set Twin Galaxies, the organization that tracks such things, has announced that a new record has been set for a perfect score in Super Mario Bros. for the NES. The time? Five minutes, seventeen seconds. Holy cow, that's fast. Details on how he achieved this inhuman score can be found at Twin Galaxies' site. It doesn't sound like there's a video showing him do it, which is a shame. I'd love to see him in action. On a somewhat related note, here's an image of a cool collector's box Nintendo's offering for people who buy their complete Famicom Mini line of re-releases for GBA in Japan. |
|
| Xbox Dropping Black & White Buttons? Computer and Video Games is reporting that the next-generation Xbox system (which should be announced fairly soon, so we can stop calling it that), will drop the black and white buttons from its controller layout. The two buttons aren't used too often, and they are awkwardly placed, but personally I'd rather see that silly "back" button go away. I mean let's be honest here...have you ever used it to go back in anything? The "select" button on the PS2 controller is similarly superfluous, but its position on the gamepad makes it at least somewhat useful. I don't think I've ever used that back button on the Xbox controller. |
| New Vib Ribbon Announced The first two never made it to this country, but hey, they're cool games nonetheless...Sony Japan has announced Vib Ripple, the third game in the Vib Ribbon series. Where the first game relied purely on music and the second on Japanese calligraphy, this third one uses photographs for its custom-generated brand of rhythm action, and gamers can upload photos from any USB camera or use ones put on the PS2's hard drive. |
| Top Ten Failed Consoles GameSpy has posted an article covering one of my favorite subjects: failed console systems. Actually, their article is "Top Ten Consoles that Never Made It", and that's an important distinction, because some of these (like the Dreamcast and Saturn) lasted for a pretty long period of time. If you're curious about some real disasters, take a read through the article I wrote last year on the subject. |
|
| EyeToy: Groove Coming Stateside No shockers here...SCEA has finally announced that EyeToy: Groove will be released here in North America this spring, following the successful release of EyeToy: Play late last year. |
| New Mario Golf GBA Details IGN is reporting a slew of new details about the upcoming Mario Golf Advance Tour, which will be released in Japan in April. Although no such deal has been announced here, in Japan, the game will come bundled with the GBA Wireless Adapter. Also, the game will be in real-time 3D, with rendered courses, and contain a story mode in which you "raise" characters, which can be traded with other gamers using the wireless adapter. |
|
| Steel Battalion Q&A To celebrate this week's release of Steel Battalion: Line of Contact (and the re-release of the original game), 1UP has posted a Q&A with Atsushi Inaba, the producer of this mammoth 'mech sim. |
|
| Bookworm Hands-on Pocket.IGN has posted a hands-on look at Bookworm, the first of two announced GBA ports of games from PopCap's line of web-based games. As expected, this is a totally bare-bones release, with no multiplayer, and only the only advantage over the free web version is the ability to save your progress. While this will be bargain-priced, if you own a PDA there's a much better deal in the PopCap Games Pack for both Palm and PocketPC for practically the same price. |
|
| Fight Night Interview Team Xbox's Fight Night 2004 interview talks with Kudo Tsunoda, the executive producer of this game that sees EA Sports' return to boxing after a year off. While this is obviously an Xbox-centric site, the game will be released next month for both PS2 and Xbox. |
| Misc. Media/Previews | |
| IGN has posted new shots from Jeff Minter's triptastic Unity and movies from the GameCube version of MVP Baseball 2004. |
|
| GameSpot has posted new media from WWX: Rumble Rose, Neo Contra and MLB 2005 and IGN has new previews of Shadow Hearts 2 and Bloody Waters, new shots and details from Red Dead Revolver and new media from Killzone, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm and The X-Files: Resist or Serve. And while it's not technically a PS2 title, we've got a trailer showing off Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned up at FileShack. |
|
| New shots from Tenchu: Return from Darkness are up at GameSpot tonight, IGN has new shots from Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dawn of Destiny, GameInformer goes hands-on with Tenchu and some final impressions of Ninja Gaiden are up at 1UP. |
|
| Planet GameCube has new shots from Mario vs. Donkey Kong. |
|
| GameSpot has a new preview of NBA Ballers (GC, PS2, Xbox) and a new trailer from Van Helsing (PS2, Xbox) and Team Xbox has new shots from Burnout 3 (PS2, Xbox) and Street Racing Syndicate. |
