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Of course, Duke Nukem Forever was at the top of the list, but for some reason the link is to part 3 in the series.

Part 1 is here.

What happened to all the people that put money down on that game?

i know its a bit off-topic but i figured i'd clear that up a bit before people start assuming that Obsibian is making Fallout 3

... Rare was kicked out due to not bringing in the cash. I have no idea on the others though - though Silicon Knights are listed as presenting a Gamecube title at E3 with Nintendo as publisher according to IGN's E3 list.

Nintendo have stated (quite recently) that they're not getting out of the hardware business.

... Rare was kicked out due to not bringing in the cash. I have no idea on the others though - though Silicon Knights are listed as presenting a Gamecube title at E3 with Nintendo as publisher according to IGN's E3 list.

Nintendo have stated (quite recently) that they're not getting out of the hardware business.

The fan made NWN module the GameSpy article mentions is based on the Magnamund Lone Wolf world and not based on the manga (the professhunal editor of the article would have caught this error if he actually did some further research). The module is quite good (a hall of famer) and follows your trek towards being a Kai lord.

I know Capcom is releasing the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the Cube (i think it's out for the PS2). But maybe the first 3 or 4 (3 is, IMHO, the peak of the series), it'd be excellent to play those portable. 2 and 3, anyway, they just never get old.

River City Ransom is slated for a May 31, 2004 release over here.

There was a NWN2, BG3 rumor circulating from a probably mis-translated interview with Trent Oster of Bioware not too long ago.

Their official forums have a flat-out denial (Stanley Woo, 1/3rd down the thread). Which is quite a bit more substantive than the standard 'no comment' -- such as Mr Woo gives regarding KOTOR2 in his sig.

Bioware already has 3 titles in development (Jade Empire, and 2 new titles 'based on two new intellectual properties, created and owned by Bioware' -- press release). I understand they've grown a bit over the last decade, but I doubt they have enough staff to do even 4 games simultaneously, let alone 5.

Besides, Bioware has been not-so-slowly backing away from the official campaign for NWN since it released (due the generally 'less positive' reactions of the vocal fans). Note how even the expansions didn't come close to touching that story, or that style of adventuring (hub style). I sincerely doubt they'd be picking that hot potato back up. Not to mention that the extra engineering they did to make their toolset doesn't seem to have earned them a corresponding reward from the market. I think they see themselves as better off spending that time crafting the incredible story and interactions people loved from BG(x) and KOTOR.

If Atari is doing the sequels -- who knows who'd they be tapping for the content work. Particularly since Atari nee Interplay closed Black Isle back in December (killing another sequel in the process: Fallout 3).

It's a total rip off of Resident Evil 4 for Gamecube ... (yes I know it's not out yet, but come on ... it's SO obvious)

http://www.capcom.co.jp/bio4/

http://cube.ign.com/articles/499/499572p1.html

http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/adventure/residen tevil4/screenindex.html

I'm a 25 year old, well-played in Pong, Atari, Commodore, NES and everything since, so I consider myself an excellent video game critic. On behalf of the sanity of gamers everywhere, I can't let the parent get away with praise for "The Killing Game Show."

Honestly, I've never heard of anyone actually "liking" this game, let alone hyping it in this way. I own the Genesis version. This particular game just so happens to be my absolute *least* favorite game of all time. Rock bottom. My mini-review on ign.com which I wrote about a year ago:

"Worst. Game. Ever. Folks, this is ATARI E.T. level bad. Constantly rising lava. No way to learn the escape routes without dying endless times to rising lava. No way to save the game. The game is pure torture. Ironically, the only reason I still have it is because I couldn't manage to sell it."

My Ratings

I'm simply amused that someone out there actually enjoyed this game. Influential? Possibly in "how to torture your players and make them scratch their eyes out and ram their heads into the television"; But, seriously man, it was $19.95 for a reason.

This doesn't answer the question, but the Wireless Adaptor is being packaged with the next lot of Pokemon games. Going back to the kiosks, this article explains it better.

*Cough* Parappa the Rapper *Cough*

This IGN article reveals that the Rio Karma's successor, which Rio was showing to select media at CES 2004, has an SD expansions slot, and rumours are that the slot is for an 802.11b card.

Of course, there is nothing stopping you from plugging your Rio Karma, which is available today, into a wireless hub on top of your stereo, or into a notebook with wireless ability.

Get a Gamecube - his latest psychedelic shooter Unity is soon to be released.

Info and images here.

Nintendo of America may have removed one of the biggest selling points of the series by using standard GBA packaging and carts. Americans won't pay $20 for these games, and the retro appeal that made the Japanese versions collectors items is gone.

Way to go, Nintendo.

The Nintendo image: http://pocketmedia.ign.com/pocket/image/nescollect ion_032604_000.jpg

I missed labeling the A and B buttons, but other than that, they look pretty similar. I like mine better though :-)

Yes, some people have interpreted the date to mean sometime before 2010, and that's a logical conclusion. But the official slide that just started all the buzz about a Wind Waker sequel says quite clearly "2XXX".

It may not be popular (yet) on PC/Mac/Linux/whatever environments, but portable toolkits do exist in the video game industry. Renderware is an example of a modular toolkit that is used to make a game that can be ported to several consoles. Just recently, Sega's Sonic Team used it for a high-profile cross-platform project you might have heard about, it's called Sonic Heroes :p . This is getting increasingly popular because of market issues. EA, Konami, Namco, Capcom and many others use this kind of cross-platform toolkits because it can cut development time by an order of magnitude when they want their products to be launched to a wider, multi-platform market.

This is also a problem for the console manufacturers, as they want to push their own, proprietary toolkits and get exclusivity for as many important titles as possible. This is why Microsoft is going to push this XNA thing very hard, it wants developers to stay inside the DirectX world.

Cross-platform, feature-complete, strongly supported APIs and toolkits are a big necessity in today's marketplace to comply with the very high standards the video game industry demands.

By the way, I'll start my little rant about OpenGL. I love the thing very much and it used to be great, but I'm really sad to see it's very outdated now and it doesn't reflect current game developers' needs, for example, fragment shaders support is something not well defined yet and it's a market requirement, you can't just port games from Windows and not support fragment shaders. Then there's the thing about OpenGL supporting SO MUCH F'ng more than just games-related functions (the API is still very strong in the professional apps space), remember the API subset some games had during the Voodoo era? This is also a requirement for today's games, a lightweight, full-featured API without unnecessary bloat.

To make matters worse, OpenGL doesn't include equivalent cross-platform audio and input APIs/toolkits, so you need to rewrite these parts for each new platform, or create your own API (and you still need to write support for it in every platform), or maybe look for some of the half-baked efforts out there.

Here's the reason DirectX smokes everybody else: We don't have a good cross-platform alternative to game development.

id Software, however industry-leading it may be, can't sustain our only true cross-platform open API in existence alone forever.

Scheck out 'Chronicles of Riddick' - this one looks pretty good, with dirty stuff, rust, etc.

Screenshots

Two years ago, Eidos not only promoted that the main characters of Fear Effect were lesbian, they even had the really racy ads denied publication by magazines, although, they did use some internationally.

Two years ago, Eidos not only promoted that the main characters of Fear Effect were lesbian, they even had the really racy ads denied publication by magazines, although, they did use some internationally.

I think a t.v. show is quite unlikely considering the budget required to do it well. A movie's been talked about for years, but no movement has happened.

What's most likely is that we see a NeverwinterNights module based on Dragonlance. Think I'm kidding? Take a look at these folks.

My favorite gaming news site, Blue's News, has advertisements from UGO that has advertisements with women as well. Same with IGN. It is not just the hardcopy magazines.

Well the relative worth is negliable, but in Legend of Zelda : Wind Waker you can use(or have someone else use) Tingle, who is called from the GC game and interfaced on the GBA, aside from giving you power ups, it also allows you to find hidden items and areas and hints.

Also, the Pac Man vs. game is pretty cool as well

But that being said, I'll agree that the potential is far from being fully used.

Notable exception to this rule:

- EXTREME Paintbrawl

(there are 9 more under the "EXTREME" series. See "Reviews" under the letter "E", toward to bottom)

By the way, Tecmo recently released Ninja Gaiden exclusively for the Xbox console, but as an added value decided to include the original NES trilogy.

Tecmo must have got a license from Nintendo to emulate the games on the Xbox, using a modified PC emulator or a "clean room" one. The only way Tecmo could get away without a license was to port the original games to the new console, because Nintendo is the holder of many patents related to the technology used back then for the cartridges, including a "lockout chip" (really a hardware dongle), and modifying the games to prevent or trick the code to avoid the lockout chip checking would result in a copyright, patent and/or license violation. I think Tecmo saved lots of time and money and went with the license, otherwise the NES games would've been remade better.

Patenting things related to emulation is simply a way for Nintendo to avoid GBA's and GCN's newly discovered market advantage through legacy games to be dilluted with competitors being able to do the same. Expect the PSP to follow on this strategy with old PSone games.

To think about what all these years at this industry can teach you...

Cartridge: Maximum 256 Megabit (32 megabyte)

Granted these numbers include europe, but according to this, Ocarina of Time sold 5,720,000 as of 1999. story

I'm not saying Windwaker was a bad game, I enjoyed playing it, it just wasn't quite as fantastically awesome as some previous Zelda games in terms of gameplay (sailing around and feeding the fish to get maps got pretty monotonous, I kept finding money with no way to spend it, etc...) and while the graphics were impressive in a lot of ways, and I don't have anything against 'toon rendering in general, the whole game felt like it was aimed specifically and exclusively at a young audience (which of course won't stop older people from playing them, it just makes it harder to identify with their on-screen character). I didn't get that vibe from Ocarina of Time (which is my all-time favorite adventure game, so I'm holding Windwaker to a high standard). I don't think games need to be targetted at a particular audience, they just need to be good and people will like them.

-jim

Change your user agent string to one matching the googlebot.... I'm pretty sure many "registration only" websites would magically open themselves...

Indeed. I do exactly this to access the Insiders Only content on IGN. (You'll also need to disable javascript). I'd feel bad about it, but this pricks clearly intend to deceive. I find links to interesting content through Google, but the link leads somewhere else. I don't mind paid content (I pay for two online magazines), but attempting to mislead both Google and visitors is wrong. So I report the abuse, tweak my browser, and head back to enjoy free, free content. (The magic string is "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)". You can try it with one of these links.) I hate sites that try to mislead Google. If you don't want to provide the content to random people, don't provide it to Google. If you want to pimp your product be honest about it and purchase AdWords.

Surprisingly untrue. Read this interview from a few months ago:

Q: What's the definitive version of these films?

JACKSON: The theatrical versions are the definitive versions. I regard the extended cuts as being a novelty for the fans that really want to see the extra material.

Jerry Doyle, the actor who played Security Chief Michael Garibaldi on Babylon 5, said that the first season was filmed for about $950,000 an episode -- he figured it was about $19 million for the whole season.

With B5 doing extremely well in DVD boxset form (Doyle commented that 350,000 boxsets at about $80 apiece would bring in $21 million) he remarked that they could effectively film a season and throw it in a box set and it'll eventually make money.

Obviously, that has some pitfalls -- I'm not going to shell out $75 to $100 for a season of a show I haven't watched any of -- but it does lend credence to what you're saying.

Another example would be Red Vs. Blue. Sure, the episodes are free for download in a low-res form; if you donate money, you can get access to high-res versions of the episodes; at the end of the season, they sell a whole season on DVD, and the best part is, if you basically donate the amount the DVD costs over the course of the season, you get it for free!

Leaving aside the fact that Paramount would bury them in lawyers for basically doing fanfic episodes in the vein of Star Trek: the Original Series, Starship Exeter would be another good example of something that might be entertaining, at $8 - $10 a DVD for two episodes, to pick up once in a while. (I'm not sure how they're making money doing basically fanfic episodes in the vein of Star Trek: the Original Series; I assume it's simply for the fun of it.)

I haven't had cable for over 4 years, and it hasn't hampered my ability to socialize with the world; I get my news from Google News and the local paper; friends will record stuff and loan it to me once in a while (I watched Battlestar Galactica and the SciFi Dune miniseries this way) and if you're good at listening, you can get people to tell you what happened on that show you used to watch. (Oral storytelling takes on a new life...?) I'm thinking of signing up for NetFlix and watching TV shows on DVD that way, at least enough to know whether or not I want to buy the box set.

If the MPAA or the networks or whoever want to try to force me to watch shows their way, on their schedule, they will fail. In fact, I'd say they've already failed, not just with me, but with the demographic that's typically the most lucrative for them as well.

Jay (=

Check out IGN's hands (or maybe "lips?")-on video demos of the game, and their review.

Check out IGN's hands (or maybe "lips?")-on video demos of the game, and their review.

While not exactly a direct answer to your question, IGN posted a list of the 25 most popular unreleased games. Their methodology isn't very clear, but it seems to be based on a variety of things.

In any case, the notable point is that the most popular games are evenely split between 1st and 3rd party, but almost all the games are either exclusive or have some sort of exclusive feature on GameCube.

Yeah, I recall IGN mentioning something about that, too.

;-)

I just read an interview on IGN yesterday with Nintendo of America's vice president of corporate affairs Perrin Kaplan.
He hinted that the DS would have some fancy features other than just the dual screens. Good to see that there may actually be meat behind this little handheld.

To be fair to Microsoft, a lot of the blame for that can be pinned on the Xbox bombing in Japan. But nonetheless, the figures show: the GameCube is in front of the Xbox.

To be fair to Microsoft, a lot of the blame for that can be pinned on the Xbox bombing in Japan. But nonetheless, the figures show: the GameCube is in front of the Xbox.

This is what I was referring to...

Different processors, different architecture. They probably will be seeing lots of ports of PS1 and PS2 games, but none of that translation will be mechanical. One contains a 33 MHz R3000A, while the other contains a pair of R4000s at 333 MHz. One has a math co-proc capable of 66 MIPS, the other a whopping 2.6 Gigaflops. The PSP's graphics card is theoretically 100 times as powerful as the Ps1's (not counting screen size differences), and there is 3x the available memory.

Honestly, this thing beats the pants off of the old PS1, and isn't that far behind the PS2. The point, however, is that if someone were to translate an existing game for this new architecture, it would be a fully involved porting process... The kind you would see porting a game from the PS2 to the XBox. The process always takes longer than expected, and requires a lot of work.

Personally, I can't wait for a PSP version of Karaoke Revolution. The people on the Subway will love that one.

How does that improve things? So Sony can move in and start their own monopoly? So we can have Sony tell third parties what they can and cannot publish? Care to take a guess at which company has blocked and required editing of more games during the last five years?

Well, you can get number 3 for Xbox in May...

As far as software goes, Office v.X runs better on my PB than Office XP on my universities new 2.4Ghz Dells. I suppose most people wouldn't notice the difference, but I've been using Office since its Win3.1 days and I notice the little things. For music software, I pretty much only use iTunes right now, but Garageband looks sweet and I'm going to be buying a new guitar and some new M-Audio gear soon, so I'll know more in the future.

For Safari, I should point out that I have Jaguar 10.2.8 and Safari 1.0.1, I don't notice any slow downs with SSL sites, but I do notice heavy slowdowns on flash intensive sites, like IGN (who has become worse over the years instead of better). Most of the time for that website, I use Mozilla or OmniWeb 5 Beta 2 and it loads much much faster. I suspect that the Flash in Safari is much faster since the release of Panther. I decided that I would just wait until 10.4 before I upgrade because 10.3 came out a few weeks after I bought my PB and Apple didn't give me a free upgrade (I think I missed the cutoff by a week or so), and 10.2.8 works well enough.

Hope this helps. At this point, I'd say just wait until the new rev. is released. It shouldn't be too much longer. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me.

Amigori

Source 1

Source 2

Here ya'll go! Free Ultima Online to mourn the loss of OSI with.

For those unknowing (the websites don't really cover this.)
There is a nice FAQ about the NGage here

N-Gage Specifications

CPU: 104Mhz ARM processor 12-bit CPU
Maximum Simultaneous Colors: 4096
Resolution: 176 x 208 pixels
Size: 133.7 x 69.7 x 20.2 mm
Weight: 137 g
Operating System: Symbian OS with Java 2 Micro Edition support
Memory: 4MB internal


N-Gage Features

High performance mobile 3D gaming
Gaming-optimized design and functionality
Bluetooth
Digital music player and recorder
Stereo FM radio
Nokia Audio Manager PC software
New design concept, new UI experience
Multimedia messaging
Full email support (IMAP4, POP3, SMTP, MIME2)
Content with XHTML browser
Tri-band EGSM 900/GSM1800/GSM 1900
Series 60 UI enabling application multitasking
Slave USB 1.1. for digital music download from PC
MP3, AAC, Midi, WAV ringing tones
WAP over GPRS

The author of this was: Scott Tsukamoto

A GameStop store here has a copy of Ogre Battle for the N64 for 25 bucks but has no box or manual. Complete versions are avalable on Ebay for nearly twice that much.

You are pretty uninformed, no offense. :)

These games were already ported to the Xbox and/or GC for America - that is why there is controversy. These ports won't be released in Europe because Sony paid money to ensure that.

And the Xbox has done pretty okay in Europe. Almost a million more sold than the GC. Why you would think it would sell like it does in Asia is beyond me - are Europe's tastes generally closer to America (where Xbox is currently #2), or Japan?

ps: that pac man game got canned.

What, you mean this Pac-Man game?

Project Gotham Racing 2 on X-Box (X-Box Live) is great because you CAN see what the other players do from the comfort of your own couch.

In any of the single player events, you can download a ghost of any of the top ten players worldwide at that event. You can then watch the ghost, or race against it.

It's great seeing how people can accumulate 50,000+ kudos in one race... or millions of kudos if they "cheat".

Slagheap

The New Bard's Tale