Late Night Consoling

Bungie Studios, of Halo and Marathon fame, has found a way to utilize their rather enormous fan community for the purpose of aiding the Katrina disaster. They are selling "Fight the Flood" t-shirts for $19.99, and all profit will go directly to Hurricane Relief by way of the American Red Cross. So if you can't bring yourself to donate directly, do it this way and at least you get a shirt with a picture of the Master Chief kicking an alien.

Somewhat surprisingly, Nintendo UK general manager David Yarnton is "pretty positive" about Sony's PSP launching in Europe. The contrast is almost hilarious when one considers Sony's Phil Harrison recently claiming that the DS is "irrelevant" in terms of competition with Sony. "Whenever someone else has come into the market, whether it be Sony or Microsoft, it's been really good," stated Yarnton, "because what it's done is focused a lot of attention on the industry, and I think it has always grown it a bit more."

Console game revenues are expected to have dropped $37M last month from August 2004. Top sellers should be Madden 06 (PS2, Xbox, GCN, DS, GBA, PC) and Nintendogs (DS). Electronic Arts is also expected to have lost quite a bit of market share from last year, as the other major third-party players (except THQ) all gain it. The list is comprised of Activision, Atari, EA, Majesco, Midway, Take-Two, and THQ. It is particularly striking to note, however, that while EA is predicted to lose about 7% of the market, that still leaves the company in control of 41.7%. Its closest competitor in market share is Take-Two, who is expected to have risen from 4.8% to 7.3%.

Sony has announced that there will be a wireless game demo kiosk at Tokyo Game Show allowing users to download demos directly to their PSPs. Like the demos Nintendo has made available for DS, they can only be stored to the system's onboard memory, so they will be wiped when the power is turned off.

The available demos will be: Konami's Metal Gear Acid 2, Hudson's Rengoku 2 (previously unannounced), Capcom's Rockman Rockman (previously unannounced), Sony's Baito Hell 2000, and Namco's Portable Resort. Metal Gear Acid 2 is known to be coming to North America this holiday season, but it was not specified which of the other games would make it out of Japan.

Good old The Inquirer is reporting that the PS3's Blu-ray drives will cost Sony more than $100 a pop. If true it would certainly be one reason Sony is warning consumers to expect an expensive console. On the other hand, this is The Inquirer and one must take everything they claim with a mountainous grain of salt.

Speaking of The Inquirer, that same site is also reporting that the PS3 will support a mouse and keyboard for use as a game controller (as opposed to the most recent information about Xbox 360, which is that it will use a keyboard for text input only). However, we must again exercise caution when dealing with this news: this is The Inquirer. GameSpot picked up the story in its weekly Rumor Control column, which points out that The Inquirer didn't really specify any kind of source despite this sort of thing not really seeming like ultra-sensitive knowledge. GameSpot declines to offer an opinion on the veracity of The Inquirer's claim, instead choosing to wait it out.

Tired of wasting tons of electricity to power your DS, PSP, or GBA SP? Well, now you can put the power of the sun in the palm of your hand with this handy solar charger. It actually looks very much like the GBA SP itself. The charger, which apparently "can be used in Sunlight or Cloudy Conditions, plus can also be used in artificial (indoor) light," will run you $35.00 plus zero dollars on your power bill!

GamesIndustry.biz's full interview with Nintendo UK general manager Yarnton (from which they extracted their news story linked above) is available here.

GameSpot looks at the History of Mario Sports.

GameSpot goes and interviews producer Shaun Himmerick and creative director Ed Boon about Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (PS2, Xbox).