DCEmu Featured News Articles

The year ended well with Vita's release, but Sony's 2011 was defined by the PS3 and PSN hacks.


PlayStation 3

Sony's year got off to the worst possible start with the news that the PlayStation 3 had been hacked. George "Geohot" Hotz, the man who devised the iPhone jailbreak, published the PS3's root key online, opening up the console to mass piracy. Less than a week after telling us it would re-secure PlayStation 3 with a series of firmware updates, Sony filed a lawsuit against Hotz and 100 unnamed members of fail0verflow, a hacking group also credited with the breakthrough.

Sony won the first round - a court granting it a restraining order on the same day a firmware update pushed pirates off PSN - but the case soon got bogged down in an argument over jurisdiction, Hotz arguing his home state of New Jersey, rather than SCEA's California base, would be the better venue. Sony set about resecuring its console and online network, sending an email to those running custom firmware telling them to change their ways or face PSN bans. Sony accused Hotz of "dodging the court's authority" after he went to South America and failed to comply with an order to hand over computer hard drives. Hotz insisted he was on vacation, but the hacking group Anonymous decided it had had enough. Which is where things went from bad to worse.

PSN

First, Anonymous released a statement slamming Sony for its treatment of Hotz and Graf Chokolo, a hacker who was working to restore the OtherOS feature Sony had removed from PS3 in 2010. A splinter group, Sony Recon, began gathering personal information on Sony employees and their families, but Anonymous backed down after an attack on PSN provoked the ire of gamers unable to play online. Days later, Hotz and Sony settled out of court. We like to think it was Hotz's YouTube rap that sealed the deal.

It didn't end there, of course. On April 21 Sony said it had taken PSN offline for maintenance. Then it said it was an "emergency outage." Six days later it admitted that the personal information of 77 million PSN users had been compromised, and that while it had found no evidence of credit card data being taken it could not rule it out. The company's MMOG wing, Sony Online Entertainment, later warned of the potential loss of 24.6 million users' data.

Kaz Hirai apologised and announced the Welcome Back programme, a choice of free games designed at tempting users back online once PSN was back up and running. But with the outage in its fourth week, we revealed that it was beginning to impact on retail, with die-hard online gamers running out of patience and trading their PS3s in for 360s. On May 16, Sony finally began restoring PSN - though the Store itself wouldn't return until June 2, with Japan forced to wait a further month. It was a protracted, thoroughly embarrassing saga, and to see how it all panned out we suggest a look at our PSN attack timeline.

Vita

Sony announced its PSP successor at a Tokyo event in January, smartly held just eight days after Nintendo's European 3DS launch event, codenamed Next Generation Portable. With its 5-inch OLED screen running at four times the resolution of a PSP, dual sticks, front and rear touch pads and cameras, and a quad-core ARM CPU it was clearly a high-end gaming device, but what was most surprising about the announcement was PlayStation Suite. The cross-platform, hardware-neutral framework meant Vita, as well as Sony tablets and other Android devices, would be capable of playing PlayStation Certified content. It showed that, unlike Nintendo, Sony understood how the portable gaming landscape had changed since the release of PSP and DS.

Much was also made of Vita being far easier to develop for than its predecessor, with Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida saying PS3 ports would be easy, Andrew House acknowledging PSP's "development challenges," with both WipeOut 2048 developer Studio Liverpool and SCEE saying it was the most dev-friendly PlayStation yet.

At E3, Kaz Hirai revealed NGP's final name, as well as confirming its US price - $249 for WiFi only, $299 with 3G - though his announcement of AT&T as Vita's 3G provider of choice didn't go down so well. Hirai said the machine would be released in 2011, but Sony spent much of the year managing expectations, warning that a worldwide release was difficult, and even more so following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March.

As such it was little surprise when Hirai confirmed Vita would only be released in Japan in 2011, with other territories to follow next year. The system eventually hit shelves on December 17, and sold 324,000 units - 65 per cent of its launch allocation - in the first two days. The system will be released in the US, Europe and Australia on February 22.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/2011-round-playstation ...

Kinect, the next generation and Indie Game frustration - Microsoft's year in videogame news.


Kinect

Microsoft began 2011 buoyed by the immediate success of Kinect. Sales of the Xbox 360 motion sensor soared past eight million units in just two months, dwarfing its internal target of three million. Kinect would soon be named the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time by Guinness World Records, and would help Microsoft set an internal record too: its revenue for the last three months of 2010 came to $19.95 billion.

In the run-up to E3 it became quickly apparent that Microsoft's vision for the Xbox 360 in 2011 centred on repositioning the console as a media hub powered by Kinect. Days before the conference kicked off in June, corporate communications VP Frank Shaw noted that 40 per cent of all Xbox 360 activity was spent doing something other than playing games, saying: "The vision for Xbox is straightforward: all of the entertainment you want, with the people you care about. Made easy."

Yet few were expecting Microsoft's E3 conference to be so thoroughly dominated by Kinect. There were the family-focused titles, of course - Disneyland Adventures, Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster, Dance Central 2 - but Microsoft's Kinect fever had spread to the core, shown off in Mass Effect 3, Fable: The Journey and that risible Kinect Star Wars demo. Only Gears Of War escaped, Epic's design director Cliff Bleszinski saying it would have felt "tacked-on," advice which would have been well-heeded elsewhere.

Peter Molyneux admitted that his decision to only show an on-rails section during his on-stage demo of Fable: The Journey, due to his timeslot being halved, was "a horrendous mistake" after the watching press decided the game was entirely on-rails, and he later admitted Kinect "has some real problems." Gamers who feared the worst after Microsoft's Kinect-heavy E3 presser were far from placated by the announcement of Nuads: Kinect-powered, interactive advertising.

Indie Games

Microsoft has spent much of the year getting on the wrong side of those who develop for its Xbox Live Indie Games service. The company said it would investigate after Cthulhu Saves The World developer Robert Boyd spotted that his game had dropped several places in the top rated chart, while the little-known College Lacrosse: The Video Game had soared up the rankings. The latter game's developer had asked its 175,000 Facebook fans to boost the game's rank by giving it five-star ratings, taking advantage of Microsoft allowing anyone with a free xbox.com account to rate titles on XBLIG.

Fans complied with the request, but also gave low scores to games in the upper echolons of the top rated chart. Microsoft tweaked the rating system in response, restricting it to Xbox Live Gold members, but was unable to roll back suspicious votes. Boyd was putting it mildly when he described the situation as "highly disappointing," but if he and his peers felt unloved by Microsoft, much worse was to come.

Xbox Live mouthpiece Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb trumpeted the Metro dashboard update, with its voice and gesture controls and an integrated Bing search, as "simpler, cleaner and easier to navigate." Unless you're an Indie Games developer, of course; when Metro was rolled out in early December it was quickly found that the Indie section wasn't, well, quickly found. "If I had trouble finding it," Boyd told us, "I can only imagine that few people are going to stumble upon it accidentally." Several other developers shared their frustrations with us, with one, Mommy's Best Games, releasing a co-op shooter, Game Type, satirising the difficulty of finding Indie Games on the new dash.

Next-gen?

While Microsoft continues to insist there is no Xbox 360 successor on the horizon, the news tells a different story. In March it sought to fill three hardware development vacancies; both EA and Crytek were forced to deny claims that they were already in possession of next-gen Xbox hardware, the publisher insisting the report in question was "a total fabrication."

Yet with the console on its last legs in Japan - as our report in August revealed - and even the likes of Braid developer Jonathan Blow saying the current generation's RAM limitations are making porting problematic, a new Xbox can't be too far away. Last month a source told us that Ubisoft Montréal, and other major studios, were already in possession of 'target boxes' approximating the final specs of the Xbox 360's successor. That source went on to insist that Microsoft was planning on pulling the rug out from under Nintendo's Wii U launch by releasing its new console before the end of 2012. With sales of PS3 close to overtaking Xbox 360, we can't imagine Microsoft will accept being in last place for long, no matter how well Kinect performs.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/2011-round-xbox-360 ...

"The Pentagon has approved a version of Android running on Dell hardware to be used by DoD officials, along with the BlackBerry. The approval of Android by the DoD is a major setback for Apple's iPhone. This doesn't mean that DoD employees can use any Android phone. The Pentagon has approved only Dell's hardware running Android 2.2. Interestingly Dell recently discontinued its Streak phone which runs Android 2.2. Dell is now offering Dell Venue which runs on Android 2.2. So, this is the phone which DoD employees can use."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/...ed-by-pentagon ...

One of my favorite facts of this past year was the proof that China makes almost nothing out of assembling Apple's iPads and iPhones. From the article: 'If you want lots of jobs and lots of high paying jobs then you’re not going to find them in manufacturing. They’re where the money is, in the design, the software and the retailing of the products, not the physical making of them. Manufacturing is just so, you know, 20th century.'"

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/1...table-to-china ...

Just a quick note to say Merry Xmas to each and everyone, may you get all you wish for.

MERRY XMAS ...

It's probably a little late to start your holiday shopping, but GameStop is there for you if you're late to the consumer party. Starting today, the retailer is offering a buy two, get one free special on all pre-owned products. That includes both hardware and software, so there's plenty to choose from. The sale runs through December 28. By the way, if you start your Christmas shopping after Christmas, you're really doing it wrong.

GameStop is also offering an in-store sale on the Skyrim Collector's Edition, knocking the usual $150 price down to a (slightly?) more palatable $100. Finally, you can snag Rage for$30, though we'd be remiss in our duties if we didn't mention it's currently available forjust under $20 on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Rage-Xbox-360/...4655731&sr=8-1

http://www.gamestop.com/INTL/choose_site_all.html ...

Cloud gaming service OnLive has updated its free app for Android devices to support Xperia Play's slide-out controls.
The move enables gameplay of almost all OnLive titles, and makes Xperia Play the first mobile device to play console-performance games using in-built controls."From the moment we launched our OnLive Android app, gamers began asking about Sony Ericsson Xperia Play game control support," said OnLive CEO Steve Perlman. "We listened and delivered.
"Now Xperia Play gamers in the US and UK can play almost all of OnLive's 200 premium titles-including hit AAA games like Saints Row: The Third and Assassin's Creed: Revelations-on their Xperia Play smartphone with a full console-class experience, including multiplayer and social features."
Other Android tablet and smartphone owners can play OnLive demos of 24 games, such as Dirt 3 and Defense Grid Gold, which have been either redesigned with native touch controls or include various virtual gamepads on-screen. Alternatively, they can play nearly every game in OnLive's library using the recently released OnLive Wireless Controller.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...n-xperia-play/ ...

Nintendo has begun rolling out updates for the 10 NES games given free to 3DS Ambassadors earlier this year.
Nintendo had previously promised that the 10 NES games offered in the program will later be upgraded with "additional features" once the games are made available for purchase by the general public.According to reports, The Legend of Zelda has just been updated in Japan to support the creation and loading of restore points - as can be done with currently-released Game Boy Virtual Console titles.
The update has also added a digital manual and a nicer menu icon for the game. Similar updates are expected for the other nine NES games in due course, although there's no ETA on that or when any updates will be issued outside of Japan.
It's worth looking forward to though, considering Nintendo promised some of the NES games will receive added "multiplayer simultaneous play" functionality.
Nintendo set up the 3DS Ambassador program to compensate early 3DS owners after it announced that it will slash almost a third off the console's price - less than six months after its launch. Pre-price-drop owners needed simply to log onto the eShop before August 12, 2011, to qualify.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...-games-on-3ds/ ...

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime is notorious for his ability to say very little with a whole lot of words, but he doesn't bother mincing words when it comes to his feelings on social gaming giant Zynga. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog, Fils-Aime answers a question regarding his thoughts on Zynga's recent IPO by saying, "What's the share price? It will be interesting when it breaks below $9." In case it isn't clear, that's the executive way of saying, "Your IPO ain't shit."

He continues by inferring that Zynga's creating the same titles over and over, presumably referring to the company's many "Ville" games, though he seems more than okay with his own company doing as much with its recent release of the seventh Mario Kart title.

As for the free-to-play business model, however, Fils-Aime is less pessimistic. While he says, "I would argue Facebook is a platform ... I wouldn't expect to see our franchises on other platforms [that aren't owned by Nintendo]," he admits that Nintendo will "certainly" be experimenting with "other forms of monetization." When we'll see that pricing experimentation remains to be seen, however, as Fils-Aime only reveals vaguely that said price "experimentation" is currently taking place across Nintendo's various internal studios.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/23/re...hes-intrigued/ ...