Late Night Consoling

Atari seems to be in dire straits, having just posted enormous losses on their fiscal first quarter, which ended June 30. The publisher lost $32.8M on $24.2M in sales, a marked discrepancy from analysts' expected figures of about $13.4M lost on $55.35M in sales. Despite this rather dismal financial update, majority owner Infogrames (who, by the way, is innovation) has no intention of letting Atari fall by the wayside. "Atari is by far the largest asset for Infogrames," said Atari CEO Bruno Bonnel, and the parent company plans to assist Atari financially by any means necessary to keep the company alive.

Somewhat worryingly, the universally panned Driv3r was Atari's best-selling title last year, and Bonnel is warning that the publisher does not have any major titles planned for release during this current quarter. Instead, they are focusing on the holiday season and early 2006.

Blu-ray, the disc-based media standard Sony is adopting with PS3, will be integrating what the Blu-ray Disc Association calls "the most comprehensive content management system ever employed on an optical disc format". The system makes use of various technologies in order to manage its copyrighted content: Advanced Access Content System, Blu-ray's fundamental content management; BD+, which allows the Blu-ray security system to be dynamically improved once security is compromised; and ROM Mark, which guards against mass piracy. Well, Blu-ray, it's a noble effort, I'll give you that.

Well, it seems a day cannot go by without an analyst analyzing something about the Xbox 360. So here's your daily dose:

PJ McNealy, of the firm American Technologies Research, claims that Microsoft's upcoming X05 event, of which they have not revealed the location or date and at which they are expected to fully showcase Xbox 360, will be held in Amsterdam in early October. This corroborates speculation on the part of various sources which have recently pegged the event to occur at the same place and time.

McNealy also throws his two cents onto what is by now a mountain of coins in regards to the 360's pricing and packaging. He seems to expect only one packaged variant of the console to be available at a $299 price point, which seems in accordance to what Microsoft has revealed, but he also claims the 20-gig hard drive will be an option for anywhere between $60-$99. This seems a bit more believable than the stories of two distinct 360 versions being released, but based on the hard facts it still seems most likely that the hard drive will be standard.

As anyone might expect, Pokemon is migrating to DS. The system already has Pokemon Dash and will be hosting the Diamond and Pearl iterations of the series. Before Diamond and Pearl, however, come three spinoff games: Pokemon Torouze ("Get Pokemon"), a falling-blocks puzzler featuring a story mode; Pokemon: Fushigi no Dungeon Blue, possibly an RPG based on the Fushigo no Dungeon series; and Pokemon Rangers, a wildlife preservation action RPG.

Ok, time to clear up a rumor that has been floating around for a few days now. The Richard Simmons we all know and love will not be voicing Tingle in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. "But wait," you cry, "he's credited on the IMDb page!" Well, yes, but click on his name and you'll find the Simmons in question is in fact "Richard Simmons (IV)". The other Richard Simmons, you know, from "Sweatin' to the Oldies", is "Richard Simmons (I)". So there. Sorry to spoil all your hopes and dreams.

Ziff Davis Media has released the results of a study gauging consumer expectations and desires regarding the next generation of consoles. What the results seem to indicate is that gamers are simply filling in all the blanks of the upcoming machines with their opinions about the current ones. To summarize: more of the respondants plan on getting a PS3, more believe the Xbox 360 to have the best graphics, and more believe that the Revolution will have the weakest online component. So...the more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

...and if you have a copy of Wipeout Pure. It seems that Sony and Coca-Cola have partnered to bring cutting-edge downloadable content to the PSP racer: Coke advertisements. Ads and vehicles featuring Coca-Cola branding will be available for Japanese owners of the game as of August 11. It is unknown whether the content will be compatible with non-Japanese PSPs.

Richard Rouse III writes the first part of a GameSpot designer diary for Surreal Software's upcoming The Suffering: Ties that Bind. Rouse serves as Creative Director & Writer on the project.

Burnout Revenge executive producer Matt Webster also brings us a GameSpot designer diary entry for the upcoming Criterion racer.

Finally, Game Informer interviews Q Entertainment's Tetsuya Mizuguchi.