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by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:44- Categories:
- Android News
Cries of “I am root!” abound once again with the rooting of Sony’s PRS-T1 eBook reader. The eBook Reader Blog took the original rooting directions and then looked atsome of the things you can do with root access.
This hardware is based around an ePaper display, but we must say that the performance seems to be fantastic. There may be a few missing features from the original user interface (like how pages are turned) that can be fixed with root access, but we think it’s the added Android access that makes this worth it. In the video after the break you’ll see that you can drop through to the Android 2.2 desktop and install any application you’re interested in using. This is a multi-touch display so it’s well suited for navigation although applications don’t work well yet because of excessive screen refreshing. But we’re sure that will improve with time. Of note is the ability to play music through apps like Pandora, and the ability to load content from other providers like Amazon books via the Kindle app.
Every time we write one of these rooted features we can’t help but think back to this I’m a Mac spoof video…. you’ll see why in the last few seconds.
http://hackaday.com/2011/10/26/rooti...droid-goodies/ ...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:41- Categories:
- PC News
Facebook has admitted that the company was caught off guard by its rapid rise as a gaming platform.
Speaking to us at yesterday’s f8 Facebook developer conference in London, Facebook director of platform marketing Ethan Beardsaid: “I think it’s surprised us how quickly games took off on the platform. We built something very general-purpose – we didn’t set out to build a games platform or otherwise, we just built a platform for social applications.
“I think in retrospect, it should have been obvious: games tend to lead the way on new platforms. Whether it’s PCs or phones, the games tend to be there out the front. The other one’s probably porn, but we don’t let porn on the platform!”
Speaking candidly to us about Facebook’s struggle to balance viral game marketing and social news, Beard explained that as games took hold of the wide-reaching network, a natural imbalance between the frequency of game- and real-life-related updates arose.
“Stories of the crops you’ve harvested [in FarmVille] had to compete with your sister getting married,” he explained. “I mean, your sister gets married once or twice in her life. Maybe three times [laughs]. Whereas you harvest crops all the time, every day throughout the day – those things are just miles apart in terms of how you actually surface the relevant information.
“And so we ended up in a world where people weren’t seeing their sister getting married because it was obscured by all this game stuff.”
Facebook has settled on what it sees as the right balance between the two disparate worlds, consigning game updates to the new Ticker feed and keeping users’ main feed clear for less frequent, more meaningful news. But why has it taken so long to get to this point?
“We took some relatively drastic moves to try to be like, ‘Okay, let’s at least carve these things apart,’” Beard responds, making reference to Facebook’s initial decision to entirely remove developers’ ability to post to users’ walls. “It was definitely challenging for the ecosystem for a significant period of time, but then it helped us to understand how to build a platform that has the right technology underlying it and an API that actually works well for both sorts of information.”
These game-focused changes have resulted in collateral benefits for other sectors, too, as Facebook partner engineer Simon Crossexplains.
“There are definitely some features that we built specifically for games which are available to all developers of the platform now. The Fluid Width Canvas, which allows for wider game screens, is now being used by news apps like the Washington Post Social Reader designed for Fluid Width. Same thing with Open Graph - the way we’re solving the distribution problem for games in the news feed now works for everyone, and it’s now what powers Spotify.
“We primarily built these things for games, but everyone benefits from games forging ahead.”
While the social gaming phenomenon was unlikely to have been foreseen at the time of Facebook’s inception, its unsettling of the social network’s natural order has been a wake up call to a company that now appears to better understand not only the importance of games to its users, but also to its own evolution.
Considering the 30 per cent fee that Facebook receives from every Facebook Credits transaction, together with Zynga’s upcoming IPO - expected to value the company at $20 billion – and it’s plain to see just how crucial games have now become to Facebook’s overall revenue.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/faceboo...-new-platforms
...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:37- Categories:
- Playstation Vita News
A memory card is "pretty much a requirement" for PlayStation Vita, according to Japanese magazine Famitsu.
Andriasang brings word that some games - apparently includingUncharted: Golden Abyss - will not even boot up without a memory card inserted into Sony's upcoming PSP successor.
All of which is fair enough - especially for those preferring to download their games from the PlayStation Store rather than buy boxed product at retail - but Sony's decision to use a new proprietary card format means, inevitably, they will come at quite a price.
While worldwide pricing is yet to be revealed, in Japan a 4GB card costs ¥2,200 (£18), 8GB ¥3,200 (£26), and 16GB ¥5,500 (£45), while a 32GB card will set you back ¥9,500 (£78).
Vita launches in Japan on December 17, and will be released in Europe, Australia and the US on February 22.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/vita-me...ch-requirement
...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:34- Categories:
- DCEmu
The arrival of Battlefield 3 next week doesn’t just mark the culmination of EA’s campaign to unseat Activision’s yearly Call of Duty colossus. It’s a calculated attack on the most lucrative modern games franchise of all time. Grudges between the publishers run deep, and this fight has dragged in not just two banner franchises, but also warring developers, rival distribution systems and opposing console formats. MCV reviews the story so far...
THE FRANCHISES: CALL OF DUTY vs BATTLEFIELD
This year’s Call of Duty-Battlefield face off is the culmination of a tussle between two decade-old franchises that have long tried to assert dominance over the shooter genre.
Battlefield came first with September 2002’s Battlefield 1942. It was followed by three expansion packs. Battlefield 2 didn’t arrive until 2005, but it took the franchise into the present day, and was extensively supported with add-on packs – Special Forces, Armored Fury, Euro Forces and the familiar-sounding Modern Combat. Think of it as a military take on The Sims model, with regular updates.
Certainly, like The Sims, Battlefield has been keen to diversify. There have been two download-only versions: Battlefield 1943 on consoles and free-to-play PC game Battlefield Heroes. There was also a futuristic sequel, Battlefield 2142, and it’s also got a spin-off action-oriented console brand, Bad Company, which has had two retail releases. Across 18 instalments the franchise has sold well over 20m units – but analysts say hype is so strong for Battlefield 3 it could sell at least half that in 12 months.
Call of Duty came a year later and has been a bit less promiscuous than Battlefield. Modern Warfare 3 is only the eighth main game released since the original Call of Duty in late 2003, although three console-only spin-offs were released in the franchise’s more PC-focused beginnings. Most famously, development has regularly switched between two US studios, creator Infinity Ward (formed by a squad of Medal of Honor developers who defected from EA) and Treyarch. Whereas Battlefield has been almost-entirely under the remit of Swedish team DICE.
Treyarch has sometimes unfairly (and sometimes fairly) been branded the ‘B team’ to Infinity Ward. IW has developed the defining instalments CoD and CoD 2 (2005), plus Modern Warfare (2007) and Modern Warfare 2 (2009). But Treyarch’s have been franchise-growing crowdpleasers in their own right – Call of Duty 3 (2006), World at War (2008) and Black Ops (2010). There have been mobile and handheld remakes, but these are footnotes in the franchise, which hasn’t been as milked quite like Battlefield.
While the last ten years have also seen Halo, Half-Life and Medal of Honor grab attention, the tension between CoD and Battlefield as rival shooters has slowly mounted, but never been truly realised. Oddly, major releases in each series have never coincided until this year. So when the first shots are fired, any gains – and any weakness – might just define their futures.
THE PUBLISHER SLURS: ACTIVISION vs EA
Choice quotes from the key execs that have stirred up trouble
“I have only seen Battlefield 3 shown on a PC. I’ve not seen it on a console, which is where the bulk of our business is. If it is just a PC title as it looks like today, that is a very small audience to participate.”
Bobby Kotick, Activision
“Our game is more authentic. It’s definitely going to do a lot of things better. A lot of people bought Modern Warfare more for the coffee table and didn’t play it for two months. There’s sort of that mass audience... they’re going to win there. The question is, ‘So, if the gamer buys our game and the mass audience buys their game, where do the two meet?’ And all I want to do, if you will, is to have them rot from the core,”
John Riccitiello. EA
Recently, a competitor of ours was quoted as saying that he wants to see one of our games to “rot from the core.” Can you imagine the head of Dreamworks coming out with a new animated movie and saying that he wants to see Toy Story “rot from the core”? Or the author of Twilight saying she wants Harry Potter to “rot from the core”? We should all support great content, even if we didn’t create it.
Eric Hirshberg, Activision
“Welcome to the big leagues Eric. I know you’re new in the job but someone should have told you this is an competitive industry. You’ve got every reason to be nervous. Last year Activision had a 90 per cent share in the shooter category. This year, Battlefield 3 is going to take you down to 60 or 70. At that rate, you’ll be out of the category in two to three years. If you don’t believe me, go to the store and try to buy a copy of Guitar Hero or Tony Hawk.”
Jeff Brown, EA
“We [the developers] have a lot of respect for each other. We know how hard each team works, I know the sacrifices they are putting in and their families are putting in, so there is a lot of respect there. I think it’s fought at a different level of ours. So although they may be our competition, I actually view Modern Warfare 2 as the benchmark that I need to aim for.”
Glen Schofield, Sledgehammer Games
“We’ve been making Battlefield for 12 years now and we wouldn’t have been able to do it and continuouslygrow if we didn’t focus on our thing. So I’d use the comparison of runners. ...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:29- Categories:
- PC News
Entertainment retailer HMV has reacted with giddy delight to the news that Grand Theft Auto V is very much in the works.
The game was revealed yesterday, with a debut trailer due next Wednesday.
"Any new launch activity involving GTA is bound to be a fantastic development that would inject huge excitement into the games market for fans, retailers and media alike – as we're already seeing,” HMV’s head of games Tim Ellis told MCV.
“Having set the bar so very high with previous releases from the franchise, the developers do face the challenge of delivering another brilliant game that's as good if not better than anything we've seen before, but given Rockstar's outstanding track record I have no doubts they'll achieve that - and we, for one, can't wait to see what they come up with."
Of course, there is one presumption here – that Grand Theft Auto V will be a boxed retail product.
Obviously the chances are very much in favour of this. Indeed, it would be staggering should Rockstar decide to abandon traditional channels with this new release. It’s a guaranteed seller.
But a year ago who would have though that the console version of Crysis would skip retail? Or the new Burnout game? Or the HD Resident Evil Remakes and CCP’s ambitious FPS Dust 514?
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/hmv-g...-market/087006
...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:27- Categories:
- DCEmu
Tonight is the biggest night of the year for the UK's games media as the industry joins for The Games Media Awards 2011, in association with Grainger Games.
Whether you’re going to be there or are observing from afar, MCVuk.com is the only place you need to be to get all the news, gossip and nonsense as it happens.
On this very page (bookmark it!) you can read the exclusive Liveblog that pulls together all the talk about the event from Twitter. You can find it at the bottom of the page.
If you want your thoughts included, simply use the official hashtag – #gma11.
The Games Media Awards 2011, in association with Grainger Games, take place on Wednesday October 26th at the super chic Vinopolis venue near Borough Market. Greg Davies, top stand-up and star of The Inbetweeners, will be the host for the evening.
Grainger Games has signed up as headline sponsor of the event, with other sponsors already signed up including Microsoft, Codemasters, EA, Sony, Ubisoft, Nintendo, OnLive, Namco Bandai, Trion Worlds, Gamescom, Nordic Games, Konami, Sega, NC Soft, Rising Star Games, Green Man Gaming, Games Tribe, 2K Games and Venatus Media.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/games...twitter/087007
...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:24- Categories:
- Xbox 360 News
Konami has at last confirmed a concrete release date for the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection in the UK.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 SKU will be released on February 3rd.
The package will contain HD remakes of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and PSP title Metal Gear Solis: Peace Walker.
Konami has also confirmed that the game will now also include non-HD versions of Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, both of which were originally released for the ill-fated MSX.
A Limited Edition version of the game that also bundles Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is also available for PS3 from Zavvi.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/metal...se-date/087008
...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:22- Categories:
- Apple iPhone
A consumer rights activist has a filed a lawsuit against Apple at a Chinese court accusing the firm of selling refurbished iPhones, according to Shanghai Daily.
He claims the company is trying to pass them off as new at a Beijing store.
The report says Wang Hai is representing two consumers who bought iPhones complete with a one-year warranty in July but upon examination of the serial numbers, the warranties were revealed to expire within six months time.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/apple...iphones/087017
...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:20- Categories:
- Xbox 360 News
Share prices of Take-Two jumped by almost six per cent yesterday following the company's low-profile reveal of a date for the first trailer of Grand Theft Auto V.
Prices closed at $15.22, having risen as high as $15.71 during the day's trading.
Popping up on a splash screen on the Rockstar website yesterday, the announcement puts the date of the first trailer as November 2. No date or platforms for the game itself have been given.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...take-two-stock
...by Published on October 26th, 2011 23:18- Categories:
- PS3 News
Gamers have been reporting problems connecting to multiplayer games of Battlefield 3 on Xbox 360 after its US launch last night, problems which EA and DICE have been hard at work to fix.
Battlefield 3's beta was downloaded, according to EA, by over nine and a half million people across all platforms, but the stress testing of that experience seems to have not prepared the servers for yesterday's load.
Battlefield 3's official Twitter feed reported the problems as fixed over seven hours ago, but many users are still experiencing difficulty in accessing multiplayer sessions.
DICE's community manager Daniel Matros reported a further fix just over an hour ago.
Battlefield 3 launches in the UK and Europe on Friday. For a round up of the game's critical reception, read our summary here.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-under-assault
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Catherine: Full Body’s English translation for the Vita