DCEmu Featured News Articles

Every time you play with Kinect - out now in the US and on 10th November in the UK - it will see and it will learn. And in a similar way a baby understands the world so, Kinect creator Alex Kipman believes, will his camera decipher you.

"The Kinect brain works in the same way as your brain, or my brain. Our brains are machines designed to essentially be this massive blob of signal to noise. We push away the noise and very quickly focus in on the signal," Kipman explained to GamesIndustry.biz.

"Imagine we have a fictitious baby," he went on. "She or he is zero years old, you show this baby a human and a lion, and you say, 'Here baby, tell the difference between them.' Turns out that a brand new baby cannot. Time goes by and now this baby has enough reference data, historical data, to be able to predict, next time you show it, the difference between the two.

Kipman added: "Our world works in the same way. Your brain doesn't just know everything that it sees. As you walk through the world, it's using previous historical data to essentially predict, based on probabilities, what you're seeing now.

"Kinect works in the same way, that's the fundamental principle. What we've done is shown it a sample of statistically significant data which allows us to comprehend the world in a way similar to the way your brain operates."

It's this learning that will require Kinect pinches processor time from Xbox 360 CPU or GPU - a single-figure percentage. And it's this learning that will enable Kinect to present less lag than it theoretically should. That's the magical part.

"There's a reason that these kinds of science fiction turned science fact technologies haven't been available before," Kipman said. "And this is where I'll tell you, 'Hey, there's been a breakthrough.'

"Quite a significant number of them," he added.

And don't go worrying that Kinect's demands on the GPU or CPU will make your games run slower: even the most magnificent games leave Kipman plenty of room to manoeuvre.

"The answer is, as much as we like to talk about bits and percentages, you take a game like, I don't know, Call of Duty: Black Ops - there's a significant amount of processing, be it CPU or GPU, that still remains on the table," Kipman revealed. "So after that, when we came to this revelation about games and future games that would be coming to Xbox, we looked at it and we said, 'Is it worth the trade-off to put on-board processing on the device when we think we can create magical, unique, deep, thorough experiences without it?'"

He didn't give an answer. Strange.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ike-your-brain ...

Epic Games and ChAIR Entertainment have officially named their Unreal 3 Engine project for iOS devices as Infinity Blade, and set a release date of holiday season 2010.

The game will feature the same technology used in the two companies' free demo, Epic Citadel, which was the first app to utilise Unreal Engine 3 technology on an iOS device.

"More than one million people have been introduced to the world of 'Infinity Blade' through our free app, 'Epic Citadel,' and soon everyone will be able to play our first fully featured game for iOS devices," said Epic president Mike Capps.

"With 'Infinity Blade,' ChAIR has created an amazing looking, incredibly fun game that really demonstrates the potential of triple-A mobile gaming."

The game will launch on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with a single player mode featuring action-based sword fighting and RPG aspects, but Epic has announced that free updates will bring multiplayer modes and Game Center support.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...infinity-blade ...

The first oral hearings in the Schwarzenegger vs EMA case were made yesterday, with judges appearing critical of the motion to outlaw violent videogames.

"I am concerned with the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech," Justice Antonin Scalia told California attorney general Zackery Morazzimi, who was arguing for a law that would make it a crime to sell violent games to minors.

"It was always understood that the freedom of speech did not include obscenity. It has never been understood that the freedom of speech did not include portrayals of violence.

"You are asking us to create a whole new prohibition. What's next after violence? Drinking? Movies that show drinking? Smoking?"

Morazzimi came under particular scrutiny for his use of the term 'deviant violent videogames' when attempting to qualify what the ban should encompass.

"As opposed to what? A normal violent videogame?" responded Scalia. "Some of the Grimm's fairy tales are quite grim, to tell you the truth... Are you going to ban them too?"

Justice Elana Kagan wielded the key question: "Do you actually have studies that show that video games are more harmful to minors than movies are?" Morazzini referred to a study by Douglas Gentile, presented as evidence in the case.

Gentile, an anti-game campaigner and researcher at Iowa University, has frequently accused videogames of being addictive, causing a lack of concentration and/or aggressive behaviour and reducing empathy for others. His methodology has been subject to significant criticism.

Rejoined Justice Sotomayor, "One of the studies, the Anderson study, says that the effect of violence is the same for a Bugs Bunny episode as it is for a violent video. So can the legislature now, because it has that study, outlaw Bugs Bunny?"

While the judges frequently criticised the proposed law's vagueness, they also pressed EMA attorney Paul Smith hard, and questioned the levels of violence in historically controversial titles such as 2003's Postal 2.

Offered Chief Justice Roberts, "We do not have a tradition in this country of telling children they should watch people actively hitting school girls over the head with a shovel so they'll beg for mercy, being merciless and decapitating them, shooting people in the leg so they fall down, pour gasoline over them, set them on fire and urinate on them. We protect children from that."

The EMA's Paul Smith was impassioned in his defence of the industry. "We do have a new medium here. We have a history in this country of new media coming along and people vastly overreacting to them, thinking the sky is falling, our children are all going to be turned into criminals.

"It started with the crime novels of the late 19th century, which produced this raft of legislation that was never enforced."

Responded Justice Alito, "Your argument is that there is nothing that a state can do to limit minors' access to the most violent, sadistic, graphic video game that can be developed?"

Chief Justice John Roberts also claimed that "any 13-year-old can bypass parental controls in about 5 minutes."

While the judges did not seem unified on the issue of tighter videogame regulation, they frequently appeared unimpressed by Morazzini's arguments.

"Would a video game that portrayed a Vulcan as opposed to a human being, being maimed and tortured, would that be covered by the act?" asked Justice Kagan.

Replied Morazzini: "No, it wouldn't, because the act is only directed towards the range of options that are able to be inflicted on a human being."

Very few recent games were mentioned in the hearings, with Justice Kagan also bringing up Mortal Kombat. Following Morazzini's assertion that it would be a candidate for the ban, she observed that it "I am sure half of the clerks who work for us spent considerable amounts of time in their adolescence playing [it]."

"I don't know what she's talking about," quipped Justice Scalia.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ew-prohibition ...

Free WiiWare demo downloads are returning to the Wii Shop channel as Ninetendo attempts to boost sales of it's downloadable titles.

The demos will be available in Europe from 5 November, 2010 and will operate on a rotation basis, with titles getting a period of demo availability before giving way to new games. The first demos available on the service will be Furry Legends, Jett Rocket, Zombie Panic in Wonderland and ThruSpace.

Historically, WiiWare titles are thought to have achieved much lower sales than their counterparts on XBLA and PSN, despite the huge install base of the console. Some studios have seen success with the service, however, such as 2D Boy, creators of World of Goo, and Zoonami, which created Bonsai Barber.

Zoonami's Martin Hollis spoke to GamesIndustry.biz recently, about his experiences with the service.

"Well, I think it's a very fine thing. The best thing about it is the size of the marketplace you can access," said Hollis.

"There's a huge number of people who have a Wii, and a goodly proportion of those download games from WiiWare - it's tens of millions of people, and it's not overloaded with games, unlike some other app stores I could mention."

Hollis admits to having a slight advantage due to a featuring in a Nintendo TV ad, however, and acknowledges that the competition on the service is still tough.

"Our experience was extremely positive, but our title was a second-party title and it did have some TV advertising with a spot inside a larger advert for Wii. We assume that has to have an impact. As for margins, it's always the case that, if you make a good game you're selling ten or a hundred times as many units as the guy who made a mediocre game, a game that's maybe a little bit sub-par. Not much, but just a little bit. So that factor completely overrides any other."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...iiware-service ...

Alex Kipman, director of incubation at Microsoft and the brains behind Kinect, has told GamesIndustry.biz that the new motion control tech now only uses a single-digit percentage of the Xbox 360's processing power, down from the previously stated ten to 15 per cent.

Speaking in an interview published today, Kipman said that although the sensor bar impinges on system resources more than was originally planned, it shouldn't affect the ambitions of developers, as even the most demanding of games still leave plenty of 360 processing power to be taken advantage of.

"The answer is, as much as we like to talk about bits and percentages, you take a game like, I don't know, Call of Duty: Black Ops - there's a significant amount of processing, be it CPU or GPU, that still remains on the table," Kipman said.

"So after that, when we came to this revelation about games, and future games that would be coming to Xbox, we looked at it and we said - 'is it worth the trade-off to put on-board processing on the device when we think we can create magical, unique, deep, thorough experiences without it?'"

Originally, Kinect was intended to deal with all of its processing internally, thanks to an on-board processor which waslater dropped by Microsoft to keep down costs.

"That figure of 10 or 15 per cent, we're actually in single digits, but the philosophy is correct," said Kipman. "It's a trade-off... That trade off is easy, it's about the affordability of the device. From the perspective of bringing to market this amazing deal, £129.99 with Kinect Adventures, plus sensor - buy one and have your entire family play, it's a very interesting customer value proposition.

"We can create games which are as rich and thorough and as deep as the games which we have on our platform today and which we will have tomorrow. Then the conversation becomes simple: you start moving into a world which says, why keep something complicated when you can make it simple? We decided to have our cake and eat it too."

Kipman clarified that Kinect functions are modular choices, that they can be included or left out according to developer preference, in much the same way as any other technical option.

"What Kinect brings to the table is a new set of paints and paintbrushes, it broadens the palette and allows you to do different things. Not all features are created equal, you can totally imagine a game that's using practically the entire of the Xbox 360 and still uses identity recognition. You can have a game that uses a small vocabulary of voice recognition that will still have pretty much 100 per cent of the processing. And on and on.

"You can shop, in a way, in the platform by menu, and you can choose the paint colours and paintbrushes you have. This is no different than saying, 'what physics engine, what AI engine, what graphics engine' you're going to be using. I can make the same argument that, hey, I'm going to be using Engine X off the shelf, I'm going to be giving up control over the hardware. There's some amount of resources that I give up for the price of the flexibility and the time to market of using a middleware engine."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...of-the-360-cpu ...

The iPhone version of mobile browser Skyfire has gone live on the App Store a day earlier than expected, following its approval by Apple.
Reports had suggested that the app would be available on Thursday, but it's live in Apple's store right now.
The browser's approval and release is significant, because it claims to be the first iPhone browser capable of showing Flash videos on websites.
Skyfire's technology transcodes the videos into the H.264 codec, to make them viewable on the Flash-averse iPhone.
Another interesting point is that the browser is a paid app for iPhone, costing $2.99 / £1.79 in the App Store.

It joins Opera Mini on Apple's Store as a standalone non-Safari browser for iOS users.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/39324...ve-a-day-early ...

Metal Gear Solid's Raiden will appear as a playable skin in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.

Joystiq sources say the Raiden "outfit" is unlocked by completing all tasks in the Animus' new "virtual training" mode.


You might remember being able to unlock Altair's robes from Assassin's Creed in Metal Gear Solid 4. You had to complete the game with 50+ knife kills, 50+ CQC grabs and trip less than 25 alerts.


Ubisoft announced free PS3-exclusive DLC for AC: Brotherhood yesterday.

The game's out on November 19 in the UK.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...VG-General-RSS ...

The uDraw Wii Gaming Tablet is a new ‘platform’ that has already attracted attention from other publishers, according to THQ.
The firm showcased the product in London to retailers last week. The peripheral and its first titles will arrive early next year.
THQ says it has a five-year plan for the device and is considering proposals from third-parties who are interested in developing for it.
“This is a platform launch, not a one-off proposition,” said UK marketing director Jon Rooke.
“We’re approaching this as a long-term commitment – at least, three to five years – and we believe the software will sell well long after launch.

“We can only create so much software ourselves, so it’s great to have people proposing more products for uDraw. A lot of them have even questioned why Nintendo hasn’t created this device themselves, which is very flattering.
“We’d love uDraw to become part of people’s everyday lives, rather than only being used at parties.”
The announcement of uDraw back in August was well-received, with responses that even surprised THQ.
Rooke added: “We were amazed to hear analysts predicting uDraw could sell up to one million units.
"I hope we do sell that much – on day one. That would
be lovely.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/41625/uDra...form-not-a-fad ...

News via http://retroactionmagazine.com/retro...free-issue-45/

Commodore Free issue 45 has been released. The monthly retrogaming zine covers the Commodore range of computers and is available in PDF, HTML, D64 (C64 disk), SEQ and text formats. Highlights this month includes news, Commodore Programming, Commodore Computer Club USA, Interview with Sean – CCC USA, DotBASIC, The Atari Arcade DotBASIC Project and the return of ‘Back to the Past: Issue 6, March ’07′, written by this very author.

Weblink: http://www.commodorefree.com/ ...