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Another candidate has been added to the list of potential names for Sony's motion controller. Yesterday, Sony filed a European trademark, for use with a control device, for "PlayStation Move." It sounds fitting for a motion controller! (It's application number 008936544 in the European trademark database, if you'd like to see it in its native habitat.)

In addition to that trademark, NeoGAFfer gofreak found another trademark for the logo seen here, which looks more like an A for Arc than an M for Move. We have yet to verify the image ourselves in the trademark database, however.

In any case, we're likely to find out more about whatever this thing is called during GDC.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/10/so...ove-in-europe/ ...

We just got our hands on the Windows Phone 7 during an interview at GDC, and given our unnatural obsession with bolstering our online notoriety, the most prevalent question in our mind was: just how many Gamerscore points can we crank outta this thing? The answer: A beefy 200 Gamerscore points per game, which will be added to your total Gamerscore, as displayed on your Xbox Live Gamertag profile.

We'll be writing up our impressions of the platform, as well as our interview with its creators, later today. For now, rest assured knowing that when you unlock an Achievement in a Windows Phone 7 game, it totally makes that satisfying "bloop-bloop" noise.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/03/10/wi...00-gamerscore/ ...

Taking a cue from the popular PlayStation 3 cross media bar, PlayStation Home 1.35 goes live tomorrow, with an all-new navigation interface that makes getting around easier than ever.

The changes in PlayStation Home version 1.35 focus on speed and ease-of-use, making the experience of logging in to Sony's virtual world as easy as making your avatar do the Running Man.

It all starts when you launch the service. Instead of having to click through message screens, you'll be transported directly to a new intuitive navigation interface, which functions much like the PS3's XMB. There you'll have access to categories that include Favorites, which is self-explanatory; Personal Spaces; Friends, which allows you to quickly find your friends in Home; Explore, which lets you browse everything; and Recommend, where Sony will be pushing the new spaces they'd like you to check out.

It looks like a big improvement over the current interface, being much more organized and a little more attractive to boot.

PlayStation Home 1.35 will be live tomorrow, after a brief period of downtime while Sony works its upgrade magic.

http://kotaku.com/5490201/a-new-way-...aystation-home ...

There's only about a month to go before Apple drops the iPad on the world, and it looks like all those theories about a last-minute camera addition were just fond fanboy wishes -- iPhone SDK 3.2 beta 4 just came out, and in addition to stripping out several video-call related icons, we've been told the docs contain this little tidbit about that Camera tab:
Launching the Photos application under the iPad Simulator will initially show three tabs: Photos, Albums, and Camera. The Camera tab represents photos available via the Camera Connection Kit for iPad, and is not relevant for the Simulator. The Camera tab will disappear after a few seconds.
So much for that, then. In the meantime, we also have some good news -- 9to5 Mac did some digging and found some files indicating that Apple's opening up some new gestures to app developers, namely the long tap currently used to pop up the copy / paste menu and the triple-tap used to flip the display on and off when using VoiceOver. It's a small consolation, to be sure, but at least the iPad, will, um, be a great game machine, right?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/i...t-adds-new-ge/ ...

I spoke to Imagination Technologies—maker of the PowerVR chip that powers smartphones like the iPhone, Droid and many others—and they said, definitively, that you'll have graphics comparable to the PlayStation 3 in 3 years.

They know this because these are the chips they're designing right now. The way the development process works for phones is that Imagination comes up with a chip, which they license, and that works its way through development cycles and people like Apple or HTC, which then incorporate them into their phones, which they in turn have to productize and bring to market. The whole thing takes three years. But in three years, says Imagination, you're going to have a PS3 in your pocket. And that's not just running at the 480x340 resolution that most phones have now, that's PS3-esque graphics on 720p output via HDMI to a TV. Hell, some phones in three years will have a 720p display native.

But there are going to be some interesting things between now and then. Imagination is still working on support for the products out now—the chips in the iPhones and the Droids and the Nokias that use PowerVR. The two most interesting things are Flash acceleration in hardware and OpenCL support, which enables GPGPU computing.

The first is obvious. By utilizing a software-based update, phones on the market right now can run Flash acceleration. Imagination's been working with Adobe for about three years now, and they've gotten the acceleration up to about 300% compared to using just software. They think they can do even better. Even still, 300% is pretty damn good for just pushing what you can do with your current phone.

Secondly, there's OpenCL support, which allows devices to utilize the GPU—the graphics chip—to help out in general purpose computing. For a more in depth look on what this means, check out our feature on GPGPUs, but in essence it's going to allow multi-threaded tasks to be executed faster than they would be otherwise.

I also asked Imagination about what's going to be different about their chips that will hit the market one, two and three years from now, and they say one of the big things is going to be focused on multiprocessors. Theoretically you can get about three or four into a phone without going too crazy on power demands, which will help them pull off that PS3-equivalency we talked about earlier.

Keep in mind that this stuff is what's "possible" in three years, based on what hardware is going to be available in the phones released then. A lot of this is still based on phone makers like Apple or HTC or Palm or Motorola to make these features available. But since most of the major phone manufacturers are going to have essentially the same chip, it's in everyone's self-interest to push as much power out from their phones as possible.

But if you're looking forward to what's coming one year from now, check out the screenshots in the post, taken from the demos they had running on sample hardware.

http://gizmodo.com/5490330/you-will-...ket-in-3-years ...

The App Store censorship horse may have been beaten to death, but mainstream German media—whose iPhone applications have been censored by Apple because of its content—are not surrendering. I'm glad. In fact, I hope they win this war.

The censorship problem is not only about the 5,000 titillating apps that fell down in flames after Apple's latest puritanic raid. Except for apps from well known slippery-when-wet publishing houses like Playboy, that raid closed the smutty graphic category entirely. The censorship problem goes a lot deeper than that, and it has affected mainstream publications already.

Freedom of the Press
The polemic in Germany started when Apple took down Stern's iPhone app without notice. Stern—a very large weekly news magazine—published a gallery of erotic photos as part of its editorial content. It wasn't gratuitous: It was just part of the material published in the magazine itself, integrated in their usual sections.

The entire app was taken down, according to the Spiegel, and publisher Gruner + Jahr had to eliminate that content in order for the application to go up to the store again. They learnt their lesson, since they haven't published any other material that may offend Apple's "moral police"—as the German press calls it.

Then came Bild, a large daily newspaper printed by publishing powerhouse Axel Springer AG. Bild also distributes its content through a dedicated iPhone application. This app gives access to its sections from a central springboard. Last December, they released a new mini-app called Bild-Girl, which shows a woman moaning and getting rid of her clothes every time you shake the iPhone with your free hand.

Apple didn't take that well and asked Bild to put a bikini on the girl. Bild complied. But now Apple also wants Bild to censor the naked girl that comes in the PDF version of the printed newspaper, which is accessible from the Bild application too. Apple is trying to force them into censoring their publication, even while the women are pre-emptively censored: Their nipples are pixelated and unrecognizable in the iPhone-distributed PDF document.

That's when the Bild editors went ballistic.



It Can Get Worse
I don't blame them, because I'm going ****ing ballistic at this stage of the proceedings too. How Apple can force Bild to change their editorial content? Or putting it another way: If Gizmodo decides to release an iPhone application tomorrow, would Apple take it down whenever we publish a NSFW post that shows nipples?

Probably they would, if they receive enough complaints. (We receive some from time to time, so it's not out of the question). What about magazines, books, or comic books—like Watchmen and other adult graphic novels—that contain explicit sexual descriptions or graphics? Would those be censored too in the future, if enough people think it's politically incorrect?

What about other content? Like Bild Digital's CEO Donata Hopfen says: "Today they censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content." The Association of German Magazine Publishers agree, and they have asked the International Federation of the Periodical Press to make a complaint to Apple. I agree too: This is just not about the nipples. If Apple had established a firm set of rules about tits and pink beforehand, there wouldn't be any problem. But this censorship is completely arbitrary and unexpected.

How? Imagine Gawker develops an iPod/iPad application, one that gives access to Gizmodo.com, Gawker.com and all its publications—except Fleshbot, for obvious reasons. Now imagine that we get the scoop of the Next Big Thing from Steve Jobs, and decide to publish it in the app. Would Apple send another letter threatening us to take down the app, perhaps? Would Apple have banned an hypothetical Gawker app when Gizmodo uncovered Steve Jobs' health problems?

I don't think that's a crazy thought. In fact, knowing how things work, I think it's entirely possible.

And it doesn't have to be about Apple or tits. There are plenty of applications that have been deemed blasphemous or offensive by Apple, and banned from publication. Would publications showing a caricature of Prophet Mohamed be taken down as well? That would get Phil Schiller plenty of complaint letters.

I don't really know what Apple may do in these cases. And that's the problem. The fact is that they forced Stern and Bild to do change their editorial content decisions, and anyone or anything could be next. Apple is a corporation and they can do whatever they want, after all. In fact, that's the argument of the people who defend these decisions: It's Apple's prerogative to do whatever the hell they want with their store.

But knowing that the Apple iPhone-iPod-iPad triumvirate is the largest mobile application platform in the world—practically owning the category—couldn't that be considered an abuse of quasi-monopoly power? I have no idea. I will leave that question to the lawyers of the Association of German Magazine ...

Quantic Dream co-founder Guillaume de Foundaumiere believes that Heavy Rain's success proves "there is space for innovation".

"I think that Heavy Rain's success is also a very important sign to the industry," de Fondaumiere told our trade-only sister site GamesIndustry.biz.

"There is space for innovation, and we are - to a certain degree - a relatively conservative industry, an industry where it's sometimes difficult to push the boundaries.

"So whenever there's a success such as Heavy Rain, it fuels a lot of hope for all the people out there who try to do things differently, and try to expand the market."

De Fondaumiere was also understandably pleased with the critical response to the game, much as David Cage was when we spoke to him in London recently. But he said the team's satisfaction went further than that.

"The mood of the team is pretty high - we've been working for three and a half years to deliver on a very strong promise," he said.

"As I always say, reviews are important, sales are even more important, but the most important thing for David [Cage] and I was to deliver on the promise."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/he...-a-lot-of-hope ...

Codemasters has announced plans to release F1 2010 for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 this September.

The British publisher has also released the first two screenshots of F1 2010 in action.

F1 2010 promises to include all the official teams, drivers and circuits, including the returning Michael Schumacher and the new Korean International Circuit.

Game modes include an "extensive, innovative" Career mode, plus Grand Prix, Championship and Time Trial.

Naturally there will be competitive multiplayer as well.

As you might imagine, developer Codemasters Studios Birmingham is using Codies' fabulous EGO engine (DiRT 2, GRID).


Hamilton academic?
We're promised a "highly advanced" damage model, dynamic weather and changes to "accurately recreate the unique aerodynamics and handling of 200MPH+ Formula One cars".

Codies also boasts of "unprecedented access" to teams and drivers, but then everyone says that. I had unprecedented access to a sandwich earlier.

We're all fairly pumped about this one though, especially after Codies did such a reasonable job of F1 2009 on Wii. Expect proper impressions of F1 2010 very soon.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/f1...t-in-september ...

EA has restated its "extensive paid digital content plan" for Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

During today's Wedbush Morgan financial conference, lead money-man Eric Brown said game owners will have "multiple opportunities to spend five, 10 or 15 dollars on additional content in the next six months or so".

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was another high-profile champion of Project Ten Dollar - EA's new initiative to provide DLC codes to first-hand buyers, who can redeem them for extra content worth around $10.

Brown said 85 per cent of BFBC2 players had activated their codes.

Brown also mentioned "extensive" DLC plans for Mass Effect 2, another of EA's Project Ten Dollar games.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bf...-paid-dlc-plan ...