Late Night Consoling '06

If translated reports are to be believed, Sony will be changing up the standard region encoding with its upcoming Blu-ray media format. Blu-ray discs will apparently be split into three categories: Region 1, including North America, South America, and East Asia not including China; Region 2, including Europe and Africa; and Region 3, including China, Russia, and other territories; and a fourth setting for no region. The implication of course is that since the PS3 will be using Blu-ray, Japanese games would be playable on North American consoles and vice versa. However, Sony could always institute more segmented region encoding for games in particular. There's also the outside chance that the company will forego region encoding in PS3. PSP does not use region encoding for its games, though that might be the result of an expectation in portable gaming--Nintendo's portables do not use region encoding--rather than an indication of changing Sony policy.

It's unlikely anybody will be particularly surprised by translated reports from a Yahoo Japan interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in which Iwata claims that Revolution will launch for a lower price than the Xbox Core system. Nintendo has repeatedly stated that the system will launch at a lower price than its competitors, so saying that it will undercut $300 isn't saying much. The most recent rumor from developers was a $150 launch, and pretty much all of the even vaguely reputable speculation has fallen between $100 and $200. I'd say even $250 would be the upper limit for this machine given Nintendo's broad next-gen strategy..

It seems that over the weekend, the Xbox Live leaderboards for Xbox 360 games were reset. Xbox Live's Larry Hryb (aka Major Nelson) confirmed the issue and also reported yesterday that the scores have been restored for all games except Geometry Wars, whose boards are still having some problems. There has been speculation that the problems stem from user-generated hacks of some kind, but Hryb denied such reports.

A couple details were confirmed about two upcoming DS games. It seems that, as rumored, the upcoming Pokemon Diamond and Pearl (DS) will make use of Nintendo's online service. Director Junichi Mysada claims to be planning for online play and chat (presumably text-based chat) in the game.

The official Intellivision website also notes that the upcoming DS version of Intellivision Lives! (DS, also PS2, Xbox, GCN, PC), a compilation of classic Intellivision games, will emulate the "Intellivision hand controller, featuring a directional disc, action buttons and a touchpad." According to the site, this is the first time the games that used the 1980 Intellivision controller will have been reproduced in their original form.

Every once in a long while, there's another new Dreamcast release, and two of those odd moments are again approaching. Following the already-announced Radilgy to be released in Japan this February, it seems that arcade shooter Under Defeat will also be hitting Japanese Dreamcasts this March. Under Defeat is a helicopter-based top down shoot-em-up that seems to be doing quite well in the Arcades of the Rising Sun. Importers/Dreamcast owners, rejoice.

Xbox Live now has free downloadable demos available for Monolith's Condemned: Criminal Origins (X360) and Raven's Quake 4 (X360, also PC). Let's hope this becomes standard operating procedure on the 360.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Microsoft's online strategy with Xbox Live, questioning whether the costly service is the right move for the company.

GamersReports has a bit of an interview with ATI's Richard Huddy, speaking about what he perceives as the differences between the Xbox 360 and PS3. Interesting stuff, but do bear in mind that ATI did the Xbox 360's GPU, so Huddy is hardly a neutral party in the matter.