Late Night Consoling

All the discussion last night regarding the downloadable games can now come to an end. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told members of the Japanese media that downloadable NES, SNES, and N64 games will not be free. There will be some form of payment required, but they are not yet sure what to implement. However, there may be free download weekends or bonus downloads for when a new game is purchased. In the end, nothing is completely finalized. Iwata then went on to talk about other things, such as all memory cards and controllers for the GameCube will work on the Revolution. As for their online plans, there will be over a thousand locations set up in Japan by the end of the year for players to use with Mario Kart DS and Animal Forest. Aside from that, the only other noteworthy tidbit is that development of the Revolution's controller is not finalized, but its final design will be very surprising, says Iwata.

A day after most of the major movie studios received the Halo movie script (Columbia Pictures didn't as they're owned by Sony), many have revealed their intention to pass on the script. But why? This has HUGE BLOCKBUSTER written all over it. Well, Microsoft has some rather intense demands on the studio that will make the flick. First, MS gets either $10 million or 15% of the profits, whichever is greater. Next, $75 million of the budget must be "below the line," which is basically the entire budget minus the money given to the actors and director. Finally, Bungie will have strict control over development and they have provided a "Halo bible" that must be followed to a tee. Microsoft is also pushing to have the film out by the summer of 2006 to help compete against the launch of the PS3. New Line and DreamWorks have passed, leaving Warner Bros., Fox, and Paramount as the remaining possible bidders.

When Microsoft revealed the Xbox 360's technical specs and announced that the system would be backwards compatible, those in the know wondered how it could be done. Their suspicion was that Microsoft had to be emulating the Xbox hardware and in doing so would be emulating patented nVidia technology. That train of thought was confirmed in the latest analyst report as it was revealed Microsoft will indeed be paying nVidia a royalty on every Xbox 360 sold to allow the ATI chipset to emulate nVidia's technologies. In fact, some games need special patches to emulate properly and the Xbox 360 hard drive will be pre-loaded with them.

Capcom is touting the US sales numbers of Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube: 500,000 units since release. 500,000 is a good number for a GameCube title, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a bit odd to see Capcom thumping their chests over this. It seems like the decision to port RE4 to the PS2 was a wise one.

It appears that Sony will soon introduce a whole line of reading material for the PSP. C|Net discovered that Sony Computer Entertainment has filed multiple trademarks in Japan for PSP Comics, PSP Books, and PSP Magazine. While nothing is official, it would make sense for Sony to go down this path, further exploiting the PSP's wide range of capabilities.

1UP takes a look at the 20 most powerful men behind the PlayStation 3 that will be responsible for their success (at least, that's what they think). EuroGamer chats with Criterion's Alex Ward about Black.