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Trapped inside the box, yes (well, probably, but that's been unrevealed thus far), but you can add 16TB of external storage via external USB drives.

This time, however, the demo concluded with a demonstration of a real-time iPad app that supports a kind of meta-game - much in the manner of Microsoft's Xbox SmartGlass.

Here players were presented with a wireframe map of futuristic Chicago, drawn in a similar style to the one that used in the press conference demo. The map can be scrolled and zoomed, with pop-up boxes and icons providing real-time information about the game in progress.

"As we said, everything is connected - and we've extended that to mobile devices," said the Ubisoft demonstrator. "We have Chicago in the palm of your hand. Everything that you've seen in the game will be accessible, so different shops - pharmacies, gun shops - will also be available here. You can see everything."

The numbers would be a bit lower if it didn't cost *more than double* in Aus as in the U.S.

A quick google says Tesco in the U.S. for US $38 (AU $40) and here at JB HiFi (one of our decent lower-cost home entertainment shops) for AU $89. Or, AU $98 at a more average shop.

This is a digital product, so someone somewhere is a right wanker. :/

The humour, satire, writing in general is utterly tip top.

As with previous entries in the series (*), there are apparently a lot of subtle references that only people in Scotland (where the game was designed)- or at least Britain- will spot, without alienating everyone else or spoiling the atmosphere.

Such as the fact that the small Scottish borders town of Hawick has had its name "borrowed" for a fictional town with a "drug addict hipster vibe". They aren't too happy about it, apparently...

(*) GTA IV San Andreas apparently included the "Garver" and "Kincaid" bridges which were closely modelled on the Forth road and rail bridges respectively.

Also, there's Jakey's lager. Im not sure how to describe a jakey to someone outside the Scotland (well, for people in the UK "chav" is a good description).

The humour, satire, writing in general is utterly tip top.

As with previous entries in the series (*), there are apparently a lot of subtle references that only people in Scotland (where the game was designed)- or at least Britain- will spot, without alienating everyone else or spoiling the atmosphere.

Such as the fact that the small Scottish borders town of Hawick has had its name "borrowed" for a fictional town with a "drug addict hipster vibe". They aren't too happy about it, apparently...

(*) GTA IV San Andreas apparently included the "Garver" and "Kincaid" bridges which were closely modelled on the Forth road and rail bridges respectively.

If the allegedly underpowered hardware of the Wii U offends you, congratulations – you're not the target audience.

Offend is a pretty strong word, they can put out whatever kind of system they want, and good for them. It's their business, after all.

But, when a seven year old console sells better during your brand new console's launch week, business isn't necessarily booming. Financially, Nintendo isn't doing nearly as well as it did during the days when the Wii and the NDS hit the shelves, so I really do hope their decisions pay off for them. I just have to question the wisdom of it. Yeah yeah, aimchair entertainment empire executive, but it's just a discussion amongst passionate people.

After all, we got to witness the downward spiral of Sonic, one of Sega's biggest properties, after they dropped out of the hardware business. It would be a shame to see Mario go the same route.

Activision were threatening to exclude the Wii U from getting a port of its popular gaming franchise Call of Duty, until Nintendo puked at last minute and agreed to make an Xbox style controller for the Wii U platform.

http://www.videogamer.com/news/wii_u_pro_controller_designed_to_secure_call_of_duty.html

Last night someone claiming to be a member of Anonymous posted what was alleged to be information obtained from 50GB of compromised PSN data, but it turned out the data was the same as that released last year when PSN was hacked. "We've confirmed that the recent claim that PlayStation Network was illegally hacked and that customer passwords and email addresses were accessed is completely false," assured Sony in a statement.

As of end of Q1 FY2012, Crysis 2 sold 3 million copies ( http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=594196 ). Hoping we can infer from the first week sales the general proportions of sales, PC accounts for about 14% ( http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/crysis_2/news/crysis_2_is_eas_biggest_launch_of_the_year_so_far.html ).

So that's 420,000-ish copies on PC. What proportion of those torrents has to be a possible sale lost, for PC to be a viable game platform?

...when WoW was raking in over $1 billion a year on its own.

That's not a market. That's one really rare exception.

In the sense that there's only one WoW, sure. But it's a really big one, and there are lots of lesser MMOGs that make plenty of money.

The PC game market is bigger in money than the console game market...

No, it's not.

Read this.

I admit it's a fuzzy market and it's hard to add up everything. I've also seen numbers of 17 billion and more. Keep in mind that the PC is a single platform, whereas there are 3 major console platforms. Maybe if you add them together, they're bigger than the PC market, but individually they're smaller.

You need to ignore quite a lot of the market in order to maintain the position that console games are more popular.

Speaking of that, very few companies are making money in the PC market.

Poor Blizzard and Valve. How will they ever survive? How about the many indie developers? It's only a handful of stupid self-destructive companies that manage to lose money on the PC.

That's why virtually all the games involve you being behind the sight of a gun.

On consoles perhaps. On PC you have a lot more variation than that.

http://www.videogamer.com/news/pc_gaming_markets_annual_revenue_is_11_billion.html

http://www.videogameszone.de/screenshots/original/2009/10/Risen_PC_vs_Xbox_360_10.jpg
http://static.videogamer.com/videogamer/images/pub/misc/masslarge14.jpg

Oh and no console is capable of running Crysis, a 2 year old PC game.

Well according to David Braben hardly anything said online about Elite 4 is true... argh... damn cock tease

"Braben did, however, allay fears that Elite 4 may never see the light of day by confirming it is in development.

âoeThere is absolutely tons of stuff about Elite online,â he said. âoeHardly any of it's true! Some of it is, but I'm not going to say which. We are working on it and it's very exciting.â"

http://www.videogamer.com/news/hardly_any_elite_4_online_info_is_true_says_braben.html

They're not going to get much appreciation, because while custom levels are a nice thing to have, they're not high on the list of problems people have with L4D1. There's a good Yahtezeeism from his review of Little Big Planet that drives this point home:

If a game that stands up by itself wants to release level design and modding tools, than Brillo Bananas: good modding communities are the sprinkling of cinnamon on a delicious trifle and hence relying on user made content is like eating heaped spoonfuls of cinnamon right from the jar. I don't want to have to wade through waste-high rendering runoff to get to the good levels, especially when I can do that by just playing the story mode: you know, the levels designed by professional fucking level designers. If I buy a house, I want an architect to design it. If I design it myself, it may have a more personal touch, but it's going to fall over very fast and even if it doesn't the giant fiberglass breasts on the front will be very tacky and the neighbors will complain when the gingerbread garage starts to smell.

L4D1 is not yet "a game that stands up by itself" like HL2 or TF2 are. It was $50 and shipped short of content that was promised by Valve but instead rolled in to L4D2. Most people don't want modding tools at this point, they want enough professionally developed content to finish the game - something that satisfies players' baser needs. Then, if the game were finished, the modding tools would be a great addition to get even more out of the game.

So no, you're not going to find a ton of appreciation for Valve releasing the SDK. User made content is not a replacement for true professional content, particularly content Valve said they were going to give out long, long ago.

What I get for copying the link straight from Steam. Here's the proper one.

Didn't you?

Gabe Newell (gaben@valvesoftware.com) reads all his mail. If you are upset about the failure to treat L4D as more than a tech demo, send him an email discussing your concerns. At the least, he'll respond, and who knows? It might help.

Be polite, be reasoned, and make sure to explain why you're upset. At the risk of making it sound form-letterish, I'd quote what he said as mentioned by this article:

http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/left_4_dead/news/valve_details_post_left_4_dead_launch_plans.html

Basically Valve broke their promise from last year and is now officially a greedy developer. If they intended to have Left4Dead be a technology preview all along, they should've gone and called this paid beta-testing as the Prologue version, like Gran Turismo 5.

"Valve intends to support hotly anticipated zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead post-release with new characters, new maps, new achievements and new weapons in order to grow the community, Gabe Newell has revealed.

Speaking to VideoGamer.com at Leipzig Games Convention, the Valve co-founder and managing director said the developer intended to follow a similar downloadable content policy as it has with Team Fortress 2.

Newell said that Valve's support of the game post-launch will be essential for growing the community.

He said: "One of the things that we're doing is we seem to be in a transition between games as a package product and games more of a service. So if you look at Team Fortress 2, one of things that's really helped grow the community is the continuous updates, where we release new maps, new character classes, new unlockables, new weapons. And we tell the stories about the characters, like the meet the sniper, or meet the sandwich. And that ongoing delivery of content really seems to grow the community."
 
 

source: http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/left_4_dead/news/valve_details_post_left_4_dead_launch_plans.html

Some ps3 game already uses the Cell for video stuff

Co-developed the most powerful consumer electronic chip on the planet along with IBM and Toshiba

Yet can't push out graphics that look any better than the 360.

Help push through the next gen media format BluRay and included it in the PS3

By paying off anybody that used the competing format. So much hassle, I can only imagine how much work went into writing all the cheques.

Massively upgraded their first party developer studio array to over 20 compared to only 10 for Nintendo and, lol, 3 for Microsoft

Yep, this is true - it was the only way they could stop most of the rest their developers going cross-platform. Squenix, anyone?

Developed the incredible and gigantic Home online service

incredible, adj: So implausible as to elicit disbelief. Yep, that about covers it, though I'm sure not in the way you'd like.

Branched out into smaller but high quality game development with PSN games

Wow, and the Xbox 360 has only had that since fucking launch. I bet it took a whole load of effort to copy that 3 year-old idea.

Created at movie download service for sub-HD movie purchases and rentals

Yawn. On the Xbox 360 since 2006 in HD.

Created the console with most enormous graphical power advantage over its competitors ever in console history

Yet nobody has managed to translate that 'enormous advantage' to a game that looks even slightly better on the PS3 than it does on the 360. In fact, GTA4 on the PS3 looks worse .

I'm sure Rockstar are MS fanboys too, of course.

Disclaimer: I don't have a next-gen system. There's a 360 in the house but I'm a PC gamer and I'm staying that way - but, I know bullshit when I read it.

Seriously, so many developers and publishers have been complaining about the huge rate of PC title piracy (e.g. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20567 or http://www.videogamer.com/news/18-10-2008-9693.html) and how much more they love their locked-down consoles. Isn't this move the smartest thing Rockstar could have done?

I mean If I made 400$m with my latest game on the consoles alone and I feared I wouldn't sell as many PC copies as I could have I just make the PC version the shittiest experience you can have. Horrendously high hardware requirements, terrible online components, cluttered with spy/mal/adware. That will turn off as many PC customers as possible and make it less attractive for pirates.

I bet the console sales figures of GTA IV will go up again now that many PC gamers have realized that they'd rather buy this for their console than deal with all the crap. Watch for the spike!

I, for over 20 years, have supported LucasArts and Lucasfilm.

no more.

Their decision not to build a PC version has crossed a line.

the producer in charge of TFU Cameron Suey stated that the game would be a "watered down experience" on anything less than a $4,000 PC. couldn't be more watered down than ps2 or psp or DS! a $699 pc can play crysis warhead on high @30fps, so it ought to be able to smoke the pants off an xbox360 or ps3 running in low resolution.

so I have chosen not to consume lucas made goods or services. I decided not to see the new clone wars movies, and I can say definitively, I won't be buying my son any lucas toys over the next 15 years. I was a loyal fan and customer. It's no surprise they have chosen payday over their fans. They are a business at the end of the day.