Following its modest chart entrance at number ten two weeks ago, sales of EA's Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince have picked up enough to take the game to the number one position in this week's UK sales chart.

Bolstered by the wizard's cinema success, the game has enjoyed a five per cent rise in sales - enough to snatch the top spot from last week's number one, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, according to the latest Gfk Chart Track figures.

Also enjoying chart rises this week are Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which rose from number three to number two, despite a four per cent dip in sales, and Wii Fit, which moved back up two chart places.

But neither publisher of those titles (Activision Blizzard and Nintendo respectively) can match EA's current chart streak which - including its Harry Potter number one - sees the publisher with five games in the top ten this week. For six of the past seven weeks, an EA title has been at the top of the chart.

Elsewhere, Ubisoft's Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood dropped one place to number six, with a sales decline of 27 per cent, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare continued to outsell newer game World At War, perhaps helped by a lower price point.

Nintendo title Rhythm Paradise saw the biggest sales increase aided by a TV advert starring Beyoncé - up 96 per cent to take it to chart position number 21.

01 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
02 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
03 Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10
04 Wii Fit
05 Fight Night Round 4
06 Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
07 The Sims 3
08 Virtua Tennis 2009
09 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
10 EA Sports Active

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-formats-chart ...

MTV is to launch a Rock Band Network that will enable any artist, signed or unsigned, to have their music featured in the game.

Artists and labels will be able to submit their tracks for programming to a Harmonix-trained freelance developer. The song will then be released to Microsoft's Creator's Club to be reviewed by its online industry community before being made available as downloadable content. The price of this content will be determined by its creator (from 50 cents to USD 3), who then receives 30 per cent of the resulting sales. Because of its reliance on the Creator's Club the new network will launch solely on Xbox 360, but MTV expects to subsequently make popular tracks available on PlayStation 3 and Wii.

"We've figured out how to make it so anybody who owns and controls masters and publishing can put music into [Rock Band] at their own pace," said MTV Games senior VP of electronic games and music Paul DeGooyer. "We're talking about a set of serious professional tools to allow people on the front line of writing and recording songs to completely control their destiny with respect to interactive products and then giving them direct access to the download store."

The system will mean artists and labels not having to deal with Harmonix directly, instead preparing their own tracks for play in the game.

"It's very exciting news to us," Tony Kiewel, Sub Pop Records head of A&R told Billboard. "It's important to participate in every possible revenue stream available. Whatever gets your music heard helps your overall awareness and ability to sell records and downloads."

Currently in closed beta, MTV plans to go into open beta in late August in the US and open it via an online store, separate from the current Rock Band store, before the year's end. The two stores could be merged at a later date if the new program proves successful, says the publisher.

It will be moving slowly to begin with due the anticipated volume of submissions, however. MTV expects delays towards the start of the process until a pool of developers and reviewers has been established.

Once up-and-running however, the publisher is hoping interactive tracks could lure in consumers that wouldn't otherwise buy music, creating a whole new revenue stream for music artists.

"Recorded music on its own no longer leads the charge for artists," commented DeGooyer. "It's now this aggregated value proposition of recorded music, touring, merch, branding, web presence and now videogames

"I can envision a song coming into the Rock Band Network first, getting traction, picking up customers through online play and then being picked up by MTV's programming and showing up there. We've shown we can sell millions of songs in the Rock Band store. So it really does tie into a larger picture."

Microsoft's Creators Club currently reviews around 30-50 games per month, but since MTV and Microsoft expects the number of Rock Band submissions to significantly increase this number, a separate custom club will be created specifically for Harmonix and hosted separately, complete with a custom set of review procedures.

To date, Harmonix has made over 700 additional songs available to play in Rock Band, achieving more than 50 million downloads.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...heir-own-music ...

Here's something nobody wanted: commercials with sound showing up on the Xbox 360 dashboard. As you can see by this video, the ads show up in the normal content windows, but with sound when you scroll past. Annoying!

We've already been assaulted with ads in the 1 vs. 100 beta, which is annoying as it is. But I can avoid that if I just want to play normal games that I, you know, paid for. On the console I paid for, via the service I pay a yearly fee for.

It's not clear if this is showing up for everyone or just non-paying player, but if I start seeing ads on my Xbox when I'm paying for a service, I'm not going to be happy. You already are taking money from me, Microsoft. Don't push it.

Has anyone else seen these ads? Any Live Gold members, specifically? Let us know in the comments.

http://gizmodo.com/5318543/commercia...ashboard-great ...

Palm's webOS has never been a platform to stir the interest of the casual gamer. While there are many advantages to being built around HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, those tools don't excite game developers who need direct access to advanced graphics hardware to render animations smoothly. Unfortunately, as described by Craig A. Hunter, a self proclaimed "pretty dedicated iPhone developer" who's been poking around the WebOS SDK, Palm does not provide the environment to develop serious games or the kind of sophisticated apps users now expect from their handhelds. Chief among his concerns is lack of OpenGL access despite the hardware supporting it. Palm also limits devs to a 4Hz sampling of raw accelerometer data, far short of the 20Hz minimum required for games utilizing tilt control. In his summation:
With such amazing software capabilities flourishing on the iPhone, Palm can't afford to wait a year while they make the transition from web apps to native apps in their SDK. Palm might have had a chance against the 2007 Apple SDK, but not the 2009 version. Not even close. With this limitation, webOS will not be taken seriously by consumers who place importance on games or sophisticated third party apps.
Of course Palm, now with its deep Apple roots isn't blind to the issue. In fact, the kids at PreCentral have uncovered a Palm job listing from June 29th seeking Game Frameworks Engineers who will "design, implement, debug, and optimize frameworks for game development." So while the beta release of the webOS SDK might be limited, we'll key on the word beta for now. Remember, Super Monkey Ball wasn't built in a day -- it took a bit more than 365 of them before being offered after the launch of the original iPhone.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/20/w...s-game-engine/ ...

The old home-computing art of hacking elaborate graphics and camerawork into tiny amounts of memory has been lost, right? Not so. The demoscene is keeping ingenious coding skills alive, and TechRadar finds out the latest developments. Winner of the 4kb competition at 2009's Breakpoint party was RGBA's demo 'Elevated', a gorgeous scrolling demo featuring photo realistic landscapes and music, which fits into the memory used by one of your PC's desktop icons. This is really impressive stuff.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07...awork-Into-4Kb ...

2009 marks not only the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11, but also four decades of the iconic, omnipresent Lunar Lander, one of the first simulation games ever written. The first version was written by an Apollo-crazy high school student; among its countless descendants are the classic Atari arcade machine and versions for practically every other platform, from the Apple II to the iPhone. We're celebrating with a look at the game's origins, history, and significance — including an interview with creator Jim Storer, who hadn't given the game a moment's thought since he left high school, and wasn't aware of the phenomenon he spawned

http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/0...f-Lunar-Lander ...

Store specialist predicts segment will reach an early peak this year, and mature in a decade.
The chief executive of the mobile application store Getjar, Ilja Laurs has stated his belief that apps will be “as big if not bigger than the internet.”

Speaking at San Fransisco’s MobileBeat conference, Laurs predicted that they will peak this year at around 100,000 available apps, before seeing a gradual decline in development.


“The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as websites are today with consumers," Laurs told the BBC.

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/33794...e-the-internet ...

There's quite a buzz surrounding this little DS title from 5TH Cell and Warner. You use the touch-screen to help little Maxwell acquire an object in each level by solving a series of puzzles.

Big deal your say? Well the clever bit is that you can jot down the word for any object you can think of to solve the puzzle and it magically appears for you to use.

Maxwell is wearing a top hat attached to a rope, which is attached to a steel block on the roof. The Starite, which you need to bag to complete the level, is suspended in the same manner, but held in a wooden cage. Below Maxwell and the Starite is an empty pool of lava, which will destroy both if touched.

Videos here --> http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=219809 ...

Never doubt the power of the celebrity. Having failed so far to replicate the chart success of the likes of Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training and Professor Layton, Nintendo’s critically loved rhythm action title Rhythm Paradise made a spectacular return to the ELSPA GfK-ChartTrack All Formats Top 40 this week thanks to a helping hand from Beyonce Knowles.
Rhythm Paradise debuted in the UK listings in tenth position in the week ending May 9th this year. It slipped two places the following week, nabbed 20th spot on its third week and then vanished from the All Formats completely the following week, never to return.
That is until this morning, where the latest charts show that it raced back up the table to claim 21st place thanks to a massive 96 per cent sales increase. So why the sudden retail rush? That’ll be thanks to Nintendo’s re-running of its TV ad featuring curvy R&B diva Beyonce Knowles.

Nintendo has pioneered the use of mainstream celebrities in its modern games advertising, employing the services of Nicole Kidman (Brain Training), Patrick Stuart (Brain Training), Jamie Redknapp (Mario Kart), Ian Wright (Mario Strikers) and Joe Calzaghe (Punch Out) amongst others.
Earlier this year EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich estimated that Nintendo had spent $6m on its Rhythm Paradise campaign – a number that’s likely more than the amount it cost to develop the game itself.

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/289...se-UK-fortunes ...