Activision has revealed that the first downloadable content for the best-selling game of 2010, Call of Duty: Black Ops DLC will arrive on February 1.

The multiplayer pack First Strike contains four maps for the online mode, and will sell for $14.99 (1200 MS points).

While Call of Duty DLC's traditional pricing has elicited grumbling from a number of consumers, it has proved little impediment to success - previous add-ons raised a total of 20 million in sales and $300 million in revenue for Activision.

In something of a coup for Microsoft, First Strike will initially be exclusive to the Xbox version of Black Ops.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...rmed-for-feb-1 ...

Nintendo has clarified rumours that its impending 3DS handheld would include regional restrictions.

While not claiming an absolute lock-out for games from other territories, it did confirm in a statement to Eurogamer that "There is the possibility that Nintendo 3DS software sold in one region will not function properly when running on Nintendo 3DS hardware sold in another."

As such, it advised purchasers only used hardware from their own region.

This is apparently because "Nintendo has developed different versions of Nintendo 3DS hardware to take into account different languages, age rating requirements and parental control functionality, as well as to ensure compliance with local laws in each region."

The device will see different hardware for Japan, the US and Europe.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...lock-confirmed ...

As Apple approaches reaching the 10 billion downloads milestone for its App Store, new estimates suggest that an average of 60 apps have been downloaded per iOS device sold.

This is five times greater than in 2008, when estimated downloads were around 10 apps per iOS device. Asymco analyst Horace Dediu arrived at the figure via a combination of official device and software sales figures and estimates.

He calculated that the Store currently sees over 30 million downloads per day, and rising.

He also noted that "if we measure downloads as a function of the number of months since store launch, we can see that Apps reached 10 billion downloads in less than half the time it took songs (31 vs 67 months.)"

With this in mind, he predicted that app downloads would surpass iTunes Music Store downloads "I suspect by March."

While many apps are free, Dediu notes that "as the number of apps attached to any single device continues to increase, apps create increasingly higher switching costs for users" - meaning there may be increasingly reluctance to move to non-Apple devices.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...imated-60-apps ...

As Apple approaches reaching the 10 billion downloads milestone for its App Store, new estimates suggest that an average of 60 apps have been downloaded per iOS device sold.

This is five times greater than in 2008, when estimated downloads were around 10 apps per iOS device. Asymco analyst Horace Dediu arrived at the figure via a combination of official device and software sales figures and estimates.

He calculated that the Store currently sees over 30 million downloads per day, and rising.

He also noted that "if we measure downloads as a function of the number of months since store launch, we can see that Apps reached 10 billion downloads in less than half the time it took songs (31 vs 67 months.)"

With this in mind, he predicted that app downloads would surpass iTunes Music Store downloads "I suspect by March."

While many apps are free, Dediu notes that "as the number of apps attached to any single device continues to increase, apps create increasingly higher switching costs for users" - meaning there may be increasingly reluctance to move to non-Apple devices.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...imated-60-apps ...

Valve is to bring a number of Steam features to the PlayStation 3, the first time the leading PC digital service has featured on a home console.

The PlayStation 3 version of first-person puzzler Portal 2 will feature cross-platform multiplayer gaming, voice chat and cloud storage of game saves.

"We made a promise to gamers at E3 that Portal 2 for the PlayStation 3 would be the best console version of the product," commented Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve.

"Working together with Sony we have identified a set of features we believe are very compelling to gamers. We hope to expand upon the foundation being laid in Portal 2 with more Steam features and functionality in DLC and future content releases."

In addition, PlayStation 3 owners will be able to unlock a Steam Play version of the game for PC or Mac for free by linking PlayStation Network and Steam accounts, when the game is released this April.

"We designed the Portal 2 PS3 experience to be very straightforward for gamers," added Josh Weier, project lead on Portal 2 at Valve.

"PS3 gamers will be able to simply drop the Blu-ray disc in the PS3, link to their Steam account from inside the game, and all their Steam friends (on PC and Mac) will be visible and accessible for chat and game invites."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-playstation-3 ...

The BBC iPlayer boasted more programme requests in December than ever before, helped along by a big jump in PlayStation 3 usage.

According to the BBC, iPlayer show requests from PlayStation 3s shot up 31 per cent month-on-month to top seven million – a healthy chunk of the 145 million total.

In comparison, Wii users posted around four million requests to the BBC's online TV and radio streaming service, despite the console's greater UK install base. That's up from around three million the month before.

Xbox 360 users, on the other hand, made zero programme requests – Microsoft is still refusing to host the service on its console. In late 2009, a BBC source told The Telegraph, "Microsoft only wants to offer its users access to platforms it can charge for as this is the model it is pursuing."

"This does not fit with the BBC's model and Microsoft will not budge at the moment. It is really frustrating for those involved on the BBC side who want to make sure iPlayer is rolled out on as many popular entertainment platforms as possible."

In November, UK Xbox chief Steve McGill told Eurogamer, "There are conversations going on. The thing for us is, how do we add some magic sauce to that so that it's different? A lot of people are watching that on their PC. How many people are going to watch it on the console unless we add something different?

"That's one of the things we talked about when Sky came out - how we could make it more intuitive, the social side of things, party mode environments... We put those together with Sky and launched our service. So you should talk to the BBC."

The top five iPlayer programme requests for December panned out as follows:

Top Gear USA Road Trip: 1,294,000
Top Gear Middle East Special: 1,260,000
The Apprentice Series 6 Episode 12: 892,000
The Apprentice Series 6 Episode 9: 849,000
Come Fly With Me Episode 1: 783,000

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-up-dwarfs-wii ...

PattView Wii 0.1 Alpha released by VashGH

Well, it's here everybody! PattView Wii, the long-awaited Wii Homebrew release of the popular Animal Crossing: City Folk (Let's Go to the City!) pattern editing application. Fans of the PC application will find that the experience they're used to is now streamlined for use with the Wii Remote. First time users will find it incredibly easy to hop in and edit all of the game's 316 patterns. More experienced users can use some of the advanced tools to lay out murals and create beautiful works of art without limiting themselves with the built-in palettes.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/PattView_Wii ...

News via http://www.eurasia.nu/modules.php?na...ticle&sid=2718

Mathieulh over at wololo.net has released a whole bunch of cryptographic keys for PSP, including the famous 'Kirk' and 'Spock' keys. I've compiled the info released in this wiki.

http://www.eurasia.nu/wiki/index.php/PSP_Crypto_Keys ...

News via http://dsx86.patrickaalto.com/DSblog.html

For the past week I have been adding the protected mode opcodes for the games I have been using for my tests. The current status of the test games is as follows:

Zone 66 is still on hold, waiting for my implementation of the Virtual 8086 mode.
Jazz Jackrabbit is also on hold, waiting for some improvements to the protected mode segment handling and then for the addition of proper General Protection Fault handling. This is a bit bigger issue so I have not worked on Jazz Jackrabbit any further during the past week.
After putting those two games on hold, I wanted to add a new game to test so that I can hopefully add two different opcodes before testing the new version again. I took Warcraft II as the other game. However, pretty soon I had to put it on hold as well. It turns on the 386 CPU paging system, which is yet another feature that needs a lot of extra work to support. I had thought that only Windows would use the paging (virtual memory) system, but looks like some games do that as well.
Doom is currently progressing fine. It is already in 32-bit protected mode, using the flat memory model, so hopefully it just needs more of the 32-bit opcodes implemented to actually run. Currently it looks very promising, but of course I may encounter something difficult to implement at any moment.

The problem in Doom that I mentioned in the previous blog post, where it jumped to a row of INT 3 opcodes, turned out to be a simple issue. I had forgotten to remove an instruction pointer masking (to a 16-bit value) from one of the jump opcodes I copied from the 16-bit protected mode code, so when Doom attempted to jump to offset 0x00101234 (near the beginning of the extended memory) it jumped to 0x00001234, which happened to have some data containing 0xCC (INT 3) bytes. However, after fixing this issue and adding a few new opcodes, I fought for two days with a problem where Doom suddenly attempted to return from a subroutine to a segment that was not marked executable. Finally after a lot of debugging I found the problem in my LEA opcode handling. I had used the output register as a temporary register in the opcode handler, which was not a smart thing to do when the input and output registers could be the same register! For example, with opcode LEA EBP, [EBP+12], both the input and output register is EBP. I first loaded the immediate byte 0x12 into the output register (EBP), then added the input register (EBP) value to that and finally put the result to the output register (EBP)! After fixing this problem I have been able to add opcode after opcode without any new problems.

Pretty much all of yesterday went to other things besides working on DS2x86. I rearranged the furniture in my appartment, which also meant rerouting all the cabling for my home theater system. That took quite a long time, so I had practically no time left to do any programming. Finally today I have been adding the opcodes that Doom needs, but it keeps encountering new opcodes that I haven't yet implemented for 32-bit protected mode.

That's it for this short update, let's see if I can get Doom actually running by the next weekend! ...