Late Night Consoling

Hitesh Patel of Maryland retailer Pandora's Cube has been given four months of jail time for selling modified Xboxes in the store, some including preloaded pirated games. The systems were sold for up to $500. Patel pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit felony copyright infringement and violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Hot tip for people planning to sell illegally modified merchandise: don't advertise it openly on your show floor.

Though, as usual, Nintendo will not be making a corporate appearance at September's Tokyo Game Show, president Satoru Iwata will give a keynote address at the event, following Microsoft's Robbie Bach. This will be the second time Iwata has presented a keynote at TGS. It's nice to think he might let out something substantial about the Revolution, but given Nintendo's continued absence from the conference as well as their generally secretive nature, it seems unlikely.

An Electronic Arts press release revealed today that the publishing giant's fiscal first quarter net revenue has dropped to $365M, a 16% decrease from last year's first quarter net of $432M. This year they had an overall net loss of $58M, as compared with last year's net income of $24M. The company was sure to point out that Battlefield 2 and Medal of Honor: European Assault each surpassed one million units, but only having two platinum sellers is unusual for EA.

Electronic Arts is now the owner of development studio Hyponotix, the company behind the Outlaw [Golf, Volleyball, Tennis] games. Assumedly they were lured from Take-Two with the promise of bags and bags of money. Almost all of the team has now signed with EA and has moved to Orlando, Florida as part of EA Tiburon, where they will assume development of EA's upcoming exclusively licensed Arena Football League game.

Sony released version 2.00 of the PSP's firmware in Japan, giving the device web browser functionality, additional audio and video format support, and allowing access to the company's new downloadable video content service. What matters to you is that the update contains an English-language version as well and is freely downloadable from Sony's PSP site. Even without knowledge of Japanese, the pictographic instructions should make it fairly clear how to get it onto your little black box. And once you do, you can take Shack with you wherever you go (except for all those places that don't have wireless routers) thanks to PDAShack. Everybody wins. Except people without PSPs or computers.

A public beta of GCARS-CS has been released. The program acts as a cheat device but more importantly as an online enabler for multiplayer GameCube games that don't support online play (that is, pretty much all of them). You'll need the official broadband adapter for the Cube as well as a way to load files onto the console, such as this. I haven't tried it yet, though the possibility of online Smash and Pikmin 2 causes instant salivation. One might assume that lag might be an issue, as Cube games are clearly not optomized for network play.

A woman who purchased San Andreas for her grandson is so upset that she inadvertently gave the boy an Adults Only game that she is launching a class-action lawsuit on behalf of consumers. The suit accuses Rockstar and publisher Take-Two Interactive of "false advertising, consumer deception, and unfair business practices". Well, another day, another GTA lawsuit.

Ok, bad pun. Anyway, according to many sources on the internet, Sega is developing a sequel to Feel the Magic: XY/XX, the WarioWare-esque DS title. Very few details are available other than the excellent translated title of "Where Do Babies Come From?"

Nintendo too has another DS game in the works, unsurprisingly. All we know is that it might possibly be called "Rotate and Connect Touch Panic". Go figure.

Game Informer has posted an interview with Nick Davies, design manager of Project Gotham Racing 3 for Xbox 360. Digital Media Thoughts has impressions of Xbox 360's media capabilities, gathered by chance at a closed-doors Windows Vista preview. On Computer And Video Games there is an interview with Metroid Prime lead Kensuke Tanabe and Metroid Prime: Hunters designer Richard Vorodi. 1UP brings us an interview with Need For Speed Most Wanted senior producer Larry LaPierre.