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It's rumoured that Microsoft's casual racing game Joy Ride is to be reborn as a launch title for the Natal motion controller.

That's according to a "senior retail source", speaking to CVG, who said it had been "completely reworked into a bigger, richer game than before".

The original plan for Joy Ride to be a free-to-play game has been binned, said the source. But the source didn't know if it would still be an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive or appear in the shops.

"The hope for us is that it will be a boxed release - we're still in the dark on that one - but it's definitely for Natal and will definitely be here for launch," CVG's source said.

"They're putting the final touches to it now. The biggest thing for us is that it just works with Natal's racing controls. We're reliably informed it's very intuitive."

Joy Ride, developed by BigPark, was announced at Microsoft's E3 conference last year as a free-to-play Live Arcade game featuring micro-transactions, and starring gamers' own Avatars. It was originally due out before the end of 2009.

It's been missing in action since then, barring a brief confirmation from Microsoft that it had moved to 2010.

Last week, Joy Ride's listing disappeared from Xbox.com, prompting Microsoft to say that it would "bring BigPark's vision to life in 2010".

The unveiling will apparently be at Microsoft's Natal curtain-raiser on Sunday evening in LA. We'll be there.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/jo...al-launch-game ...

THQ has revealed that Red Faction: Armageddon is the name of the sequel to last year's Guerrilla and that it's due out in March 2011 for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

A trailer released on Friday - viewable below - reveals that, years after the events of Guerrilla, mankind has been forced from the surface of Mars into its ancient mines by the loss of the planet's vital terraforming technology.

However, worse is to come for Darius Mason - grandson of Alec Mason and Samanya from Guerrilla - when in his job as a scavenger he accidentally wakes up some of the locals and puts the future of mankind in jeopardy.

Mason will need to save his fellow colonists, reclaim territory, create alien weapons out of artefacts and sort out the stirring fauna.

Judging by the trailer, he will do this in the series' time-honoured tradition of blowing big chunks out of things - no doubt harnessing an updated version of the excellent GeoMod 2.0 tech from Guerrilla.

On top of that we're promised a new extermination mode where four players repel waves of enemies online. Sounds like a regular day at the office to us.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/re...eddon-detailed ...

Some rough off-screen snaps of a game purporting to be MotorStorm 3 have appeared on the net, showing an apparent move in setting to an apocalyptic, collapsing city for the off-road racing series.

French site PS3 Gen (via Kotaku) has the pics, which it calls "stolen".

A title screen shows the MotorStorm 3 logo over a cracked and burning skyline, identified as San Francisco by a sign in the foreground.

A tuned road car is shown racing along streets as skyscrapers collapse ahead of it in scenes strongly reminiscent of Disney's recent action racer Split/Second. Another shot has pedestrians running across the path of the speeding car, and what might be a helicopter on fire.

If genuine, the screens would represent a dramatic change for Sony and Evolution Studios' racing series, which has so far set its anarchic off-road racing in natural wildernesses: an American desert and volcanisland in the two PS3 entries to date, and the Arctic on PSP and PS2.

Sony registered the MotorStorm 3 domain earlier this year.

There's no word from Sony yet on whether these images are genuine and, if so, up to date. If we knew ourselves, we wouldn't be able to tell you. Sit tight for confirmation one way or the other as E3 approaches.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/mo...an-apocalyptic ...

The widely-rumoured deal between graphics card-maker NVIDIA and Nintendo, which was thought to have seen technology from the former company make its way into the forthcoming 3DS handheld, is no longer going ahead.

That's according to a report in videogames tech blog Digital Foundry, which claims that Nintendo has opted for a Japanese partner instead - and that the new platform is "almost certain to be revealed at E3" next week.

"According to our two independent, unconnected sources, the Nintendo 3DS features a design totally divorced from the NVIDIA Tegra SoC (system on chip) initially thought to have been powering the DS successor," it reports. "It's now thought that Nintendo has instead chosen a Japanese partner for the 3D acceleration hardware within the 3DS.

"Sources also confirmed that the 3DS' development codename is 'Nintendo CTR', meaning that this motherboard picture we ran a couple of weeks back, sourced from the FCC website, is indeed something akin to a development or test station for the new handheld.

"This strongly suggests that 3DS does feature a widescreen "glasses free" stereoscopic 3D display, along with a more conventional 4:3 2D display beneath it. Interestingly, it appears that the images of the board published on the FCC website were uploaded in error: they were supposed to have been made public 10 months after the submission in April this year, presumably after the 3DS itself ships."

E3 action itself kicks off next week, with the Nintendo press conference set to take place at 5pm BST on June 15.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...s-dead-article ...

Piracy on the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP formats costs the industry an estimated £28.9 billion ($41.6bn / ¥3.816tn) over five years, according to research by Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association.

The group, which organises the Tokyo Game Show, conducted the research between June 2004 to 2009, in cooperation with Tokyo University's Baba Lab.

Research was based on downloads of the top 20 software titles in Japan across 114 piracy sites, according to a translation by Andriasang. Piracy costs the Japanese market ¥953 billion during the period, and assuming the region accounted for 25 per cent of the global software market, the figure was multiplied by four.

The research noted that peer-to-peer networks were not included in the research, and admitted the actual costs to the market could be much higher.

The CESA said that America had the most pirate servers, followed by China, with the two regions accounting for 60 per cent of all piracy servers. The US was the busiest region for piracy, followed by Japan and then China.

Both the PSP and the DS are known to suffer from very high piracy rates, with multiple methods to play hacked software on both machines easily available online and in retail stores.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ver-five-years ...

Apple CEO Steve Jobs today revealed that the iPhone app market has since its birth grossed $1.43 billion in revenues worldwide.
And, since Apple takes a thirty per cent cut on all App Store item sales, Jobs stated that the thousands of iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad developers have together made $1 billion in sales.
Speaking at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Jobs told attendees that the App Store “crossed 5 billion downloads” as recently as last week.
Both statistics arriving at the same time offers an interesting, though somewhat rudimentary, calculation: Based on Apple’s stats, each download on the App Store – including the ones that are free – represent revenues of 20c each to developers.
That figure is no doubt intoxicated from the reams of free content available on the App Store, yet it puts a contrasting perspective to what Jobs said on stage in San Francisco today:

“This next thing is my favourite stat of the whole show,” he said in front of a gigantic screen, resplendent with, presumably, PowerPoint slides.
“You know we give 70 per cent of revenue to developers. So how much have we paid? To date? Just a few days ago we crossed $1b.”

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...s-just-hit-1bn ...

Heralded as the biggest leap since the original iPhone with over a hundred new features, the iPhone 4 was unveiled to huge cheers at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Powered by Apple’s A4 processor, the device is 24 per cent thinner than the iPhone 3GS – making it the thinnest smart phone on the market. It features front and rear facing cameras with an LED flash, a gyroscope as well as the accelerometer, and a micro-SIM slot. Design-wise, it features squared lines and steel edging that serves as an antenna, compatible with Bluetooth, wi-fi, GPS, UMTS and GSM.
The demonstration heavily emphasised the new Retinal Display, so named for having 326 pixels per inch, whereas the human eye can process up to 300 pixels per inch. It features a 960 x 640 display on a 3.5-inch screen, with a 800:1 contrast ratio that is four times better that the iPhone 3GS, and IPS technology for better colour and a wide viewing angle.
Jobs also revealed that the iPad would receive an update later this month, allowing users to view PDF’s, and discussed the App Store’s support for the HTML 5 platform and its approval process, highlighting the reasons for rejection – the app doesn’t do what the developer said it would, the use of private API’s and stability.
A number of other industry faces also joined Jobs onstage. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced the release of Netflix for iPad and iPhone, Mark Pincus, CEO of Zygna, revealed that the hit game ‘Farmville’ will be coming to the iPhone from the end of June, and Activision senior vice president Karthik Bala demonstrated an iPhone version of Guitar Hero.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/33671...e-4GS-unveiled ...

Long-running children's franchise Sesame Street will be making its Wii debut this autumn with two games that use none of the Remote’s buttons. The games – entitled Elmo’s A-To-Zoo and Cookie’s Counting Carnival – will be packaged with plush covers for the controller in the shape of Elmo or Cookie Monster. These will cover all buttons and triggers, making the game more accessible for younger gamers.
“This is the first time anything like this has been developed and licensed for Nintendo,” said Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president of media distribution Scott Chambers.
“We will be the first to introduce such an aid. We’re doing it so that preschoolers can play learn from these Sesame Street games without feeling frustrated with the controller.”

The games will be published by Warner Bros, and will also be available on PC and DS – with a larger stylus for the latter included with each title.

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/302...-Sesame-Street ...

Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock will see the launch of a new, transformable guitar controller,
The new guitar controller will essentially be a standalone neck and fret board, but consumers will be able to customise the device with a range of separate body parts that attach to the central controller.
The first two designs, spotted by Gizmodo, are inspired by rock ‘n’ roll and metal, with the latter currently exclusive to anyone that pre-orders Warriors of Rock at GameStop. They will be available for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii versions of the game.
Activision is expected to release more body parts for the guitar controller in the future, although it has yet to announce pricing for the standalone controller or individual parts. Existing Guitar Hero customers can use any of their previous controllers with the new title.
Warriors of Rock will be released this autumn and shakes up the Guitar Hero formula by introducing a fantasy story mode narrated by Gene Simmons, character powers and a focus on rock ‘n’ roll.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/39319/Tran...aded-to-retail ...