DCEmu Featured News Articles

Zumba Fitness has claimed a ninth consecutive week at number one in the UK software chart, with Ubisoft's Call of Juarez taking second in its first week on sale.

Warner's Cars 2 managed 8th on its debut, with Namco Bandai's well-reviewed EDF: Insect Armageddon in 15th - just below Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters at 13.

There was little movement elsewhere other than the subtle reshuffling which saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 rise back up to third.

Last Week This Week Title
1 1 Zumba Fitness
New Entry 2 Call of Juarez: The Cartel
7 3 Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part 2
5 4 LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean
4 5 Call of Duty: Black Ops
11 6 Dungeon Siege III
3 7 Dirt 3
New Entry 8 Cars 2
12 9 FIFA 11
6 10 LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars
2 11 Transformers: Dark Of The Moon
9 12 Brink
New Entry 13 Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12: The Masters
20 14 LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4
New Entry 15 Earth Defence Force: Insect Armageddon
17 16 Wii Sports Resort
8 17 EA Sports Active 2
New Entry 18 Just Dance 2: Extra Songs
13 19 L.A. Noire
10 20 Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...uk-chart-reign ...

Apple has reportedly set a September 5 US release date for the as yet unannounced iPhone 5.

That's according to a senior executive at Swiss carrier Swisscom, who also reportedly told iPhone Italia under conditions of anonymity that the device will rollout globally a month later on October 5.

According to IBTimes, Swisscom is Apple's partner in Switzerland, together with carriers Orange and Sunrise.

The CEO of US telecoms firm Verizon also confirmed in a conference call with analysts over the weekend that the new iPhone will be released sometime "in the fall".

Last week, after reporting record revenue and earnings for its most recent financial quarter, Apple dropped the biggest hint yet that it's to launch iPhone 5 in the coming months, referring to an upcoming "product transition" set to impact its September quarter.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...e-september-5/ ...

Avatar Kinect has been released worldwide today as part of Kinect Fun Labs, a service launched during E3 which enables users to download and play around with Kinect innovations.

The Avatar Kinect software uses Microsoft's motion sensor to recognise your facial expressions and represent them on screen through your avatar, allowing groups of users to sit around chatting in 24 themed virtual environments.

It's a free, 658.59 MB download you can grab now from Xbox.com. Avatar Kinect will normally require an Xbox Live Gold membership, but to celebrate its release it has been unlocked for all Xbox Live members (free or Gold) from now until September 8.

"Express yourself with your Xbox avatar," Microsoft says. "See your facial expressions and gestures on your Xbox avatar as you chat with friends in our 3D stages and produce your own TV shows.

"The Kinect sensor can record your session with a producer's editorial eye, following your performance, zooming and panning, just like a real TV production. Share your video recording with friends by uploading it to KinectShare.com and downloading it to your computer, and from there, posting it to your favorite social networking sites, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more."

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...nect-released/ ...

Shadows of the Damned director Massimo Guarini reckons there's still a place for single-player-only games in the current market that places much heavier focus on multiplayer elements than ever before.

In an era when games are expected to have vast multiplayer modes as standard, a single-player-only game can find itself the victim of criticism and disappointing sales - even if the single-player offering is essentially high-quality. Shadows of the Damned and Epic's Bulletstorm (which apparently made no money at all for Epic) are to recent cases in point.

But Guarini, who has left Grasshopper since Shadows of the Damned's release to form his own studio 'Ovosonico', says there's still a place for single-player games. "In my opinion, single-player-only games are nowhere close to being doomed," he told GameSpot.

"The problem rather lies in how they're produced, through which channels are sold, and at which price points. I can't see in any way a single-player experience being less engaging or interesting because of the absence of multiplayer. Instead, I can definitely see how players who pay 60 or 70 bucks for a game can be quite sensitive to the lack of additional features that can justify their investment."

Guarini believes the survival of these games depends on massive changes in the way the modern games business works. "Once again, the business model must evolve. We're still selling at incredibly high price points because we're still operating like we were five years ago, with just higher production costs. Instead of changing our perspectives, we're still struggling to pack games with features, extras, bonuses, achievements, in order to barely justify that price tag, which is given by excessively high development and licensing costs. We must learn our lesson from the huge, epic failure the music industry is still suffering nowadays for not being able to adapt to the digital Revolution," he said.

Can we get an amen?

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...om-doomed-dev/ ...

There could come a time on the not-so-distant future when all your games are piped to you over the internet via subscription-based services.

That's according to EA Sports label VP Andrew Wilson, who sees a possible future in which the games industry goes entirely digital.

"If we look at what consumers have pushed other industries for: if we look at what consumers forced the music industry to provide, if we look at what consumers have driven as a result of television and movie subscription, if you look at us - there's absolutely a time somewhere at some point in the future where the consumers say, 'Hey, this is how we want to interact with you: we want to give you a monthly or annual subscription and we want access to everything you make'," said Wilson.


"They get to drive the time and place for it, and a lot of it is technology dependent, but absolutely we can see a future where that might be the way we deliver games," he added.

With regards to the technological boundaries for such a future, Wilson said it's not the consoles that are restrictive but the global internet infrastructure that can't yet come with huge games being served digitally. "It's less about the generation and more about internet infrastructure," he said.

"The thing about consoles [is] that's a lot of content: six, seven gigs of information. Right now there are some places in the world where you can move that size of information around relatively seamlessly; there are a lot of places you can't," he went on.

"Right now the consoles themselves could facilitate it, but there are other barriers to entry that make getting it from Game or GameStop a viable proposition, at least today."

Sony has already taken a step in this direction with its PlayStation Plus subscription service which allows gamers access to vast amounts of content for a fixed monthly fee.

EA Sports president Peter Moore recently hinted that EA Sports games may soon integrate persistent player profiles that allow users to carry save progress over from one game to another

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...ription-based/ ...

While many question the true graphical benefit a new console generation would bring, Square Enix worldwide technology director Julien Merceron is confident the new hardware will offer significantly more realistic games that will compare more closely to CGI movies.

"I think that we're still going to see a big leap in graphics," he said. "In terms of technology I think we'll see developers taking advantage of physically-based rendering, physically-based lighting. I think people will take advantage of global illumination, or at least some form approximation of global illumination, so that could have a significant impact on graphics quality."

These are techniques currently used by CGI movies, which Merceron says will offer studios the opportunity to take assets directly from CGI flicks and reuse them in next-gen games. "It's going to enable new forms of art direction, but it's also going to enable deeper convergence between multiple media - being able to share more assets horizontally between movies, TV series and games," he said.

He goes on to say realistic-looking games will benefit most from the new advances rather than cartoony style games. "If you take most of the Pixar movies from the last five to six years... do you see a big difference between one that was released five years ago, and one that was released last year? I'm actually not sure we see a huge difference," he explained.

"But if you take a film like Avatar, there's a huge leap in the graphics techniques that are being used and the level of realism. The conclusion I would draw from that is we might end up seeing the difference way more in realistic-looking games, rather than those trying to achieve a cartoony look."

Nintendo's Wii U console compares in processing power to the current-gen HD consoles, but a much bigger generational leap is expected from Microsoft and Sony's next efforts.

But who will jump first? M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon has speculated that the release of a new Xbox may leave the hardcore market wide open for a PS3 clean sweep.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...aphics-square/ ...

You'll be used to reading about Wii dominating hardware sales this generation, but which of the other two consoles will, in the end, come in second place?

While Xbox 360 remains marginally ahead of the PS3 on a global sales basis, PS3 is catching up and analysts note its 10% lead over Xbox 360 sales so far this year.

"The Xbox 360 does have a 5% lead over the PlayStation 3 worldwide, a minimal difference," noted EEDAR's Jesse Divnich, While he says that "the race is neck and neck" considering factors such as Xbox 360's higher replacement rate and PS3 being "a tad bit more future proof", he goes on to note that PS3 is winning this year.

"If one looks at the total amount of sales through the first 6 months of 2011, the PlayStation 3 has sold about 10% more than the Xbox 360, worldwide, so the PlayStation 3 is definitely gaining ground," he told Industry Gamers.

But, he later adds, "the Xbox 360 has increased its velocity without the aid of any price cuts or redesigns over the last year ... The only reasoning that seems plausible is the Kinect or the strength of its software library has reached some sort of tipping point making the Xbox 360 an incredible value to consumers at its current price points."

Colin Sebastian of RW Baird suggests that while Xbox is still holding strong with the launch of Kinect and strong software propping it up, he says "you would never want to count the PS3 out".

"For instance," he adds, "if Sony combined a strong first party lineup (e.g. Uncharted/Resistance) with another hardware price reduction, I believe we would see a nice pick-up in unit sales this fall."

While Xbox 360 is comfortably outselling PS3 in the US, sales data from Strategy Analytics suggested back in April that the global installed base of Sony's console reached 43.4 million at the close of 2010, compared to 42.9 million for Microsoft's system.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...ox-on-a-surge/ ...

After creating quite a stir upon its unveiling last week, the Limited Edition Star Wars Xbox 360 console has been given a £349.99 RRP in the UK.

The highest price Xbox 360 hardware available on the High Street right now is the £299.99 250GB Kinect bundle, though this can typically be found for anything up to £40 cheaper than RRP.

Other SKUs include the vanilla 4GB console (£150), the 250GB standalone (£200) and the 4GB Kinect version (£250).

As reported last week, the Star Wars console itself is styled on charismatic robot RD-D2 with the controller boasting C3PO stylings. The Kinect sensor also boasts an exclusive white finish.

The machine will include a 320GB HDD and includes custom Star Wars SFX for operations like powering on and ejecting discs, plus a copy of both the Star Wars game and Kinect Adventures.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/star-...ost-350/082434 ...

Nothing is too expensive if enough people are willing to pay the price, and Microsoft says that it may not yet have found the price ceiling for titles released over Xbox Live Arcade.

XBLA portfolio director Chris Charla has admitted that the average price of a title on the service has risen, but that sales have not been negatively affected.

"If you look at Live Arcade, and do the math, and look at the publicly available sales numbers, you can see that average prices on XBLA have crept up over the last few years,” he told Games Industry.

“That has been an interesting trend because on some app markets there's been a race to zero as fast as possible.

"We've seen a little bit of the opposite happening. I don't really know where prices are going to go – ultimately, that's set by the market – but it has been really gratifying to see that people are willing to a premium price for digital content."

In 2009 just 21 games out of the 86-strong XBLA release schedule were priced at 1200 Microsoft Points, Last year that rose to 27 out of 85 titles, and already in 2010 we’ve had 20 games charging that top tier price, the site reports.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/xbla-...d-sales/082439 ...