News from theketchupman

hi guys, i'm here to tell you some infos about Vertex racing.

Some new informations and new screenshots of Vertex Origin 3D Car Demo are available ! It's now known as "Vertex Racing" .

MikeMax, and the Vertex Origin Team are still working on this incredible homebrew. No release to download for the moment, but some great improvements and new stuffs will be present in the next release which, we wonder it, will be available soon.

New stuffs added since the last release :

- Code improvements and totally re-organized
- Collisions detections support finished (will cetainly need some improvements)
- Light environment improved
- Multiple car's display routine improved
- Multiplayer support has been started
- HUD Display will be finished soon (started too)

TODO List :- Menus

- Tracks and car's loading at runtime
- Car's physics engine (Jumps, skids ...)
- Collisions physics engine (determining the consequence of a collision)
- finish the multiplayer support (ad-hoc & Infrastructure) + Unix Daemon Developpment for server's side (American and French servers will be available at the beginning)
- Sound and music support
- Cars customization tools
- Track Maker
- ... ...

coldtoiletseat has released a new organiser for the PSP, heres the release details:


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News/release from noobz


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via slashdot

May 15th marks the 40 year anniversary of the first games hooked up to the television. An article on the 1up site tells the story of Ralph Baer, Bill Harrison, and Bill Rusch working at the Sanders Associates company on a little game called Pong. They go into a great deal of detail on the development of the console, going so far as to include a number of the group's original notes on the project.
...

via gibiz

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter has stated that Sony could offer a PlayStation 3 price cut as early as this summer, due to a decrease in manufacturing costs.

The analyst also expects that Sony's PlayStation 2 will be the lead platform for a number of high profile game releases over the next four months, with last-gen software outselling the latest releases for big budget machines.

"It is possible that Sony's cost of production for the PS3 has declined to the point that the company may consider a hardware price cut some time this summer, and we may see a price cut for the PS2 before the holidays," commented Pachter.

"Either of these could serve as a catalyst for sales growth later in the year."

Movie tie-ins will be leading software sales over the coming months, according to Pachter, allowing publishers to reap the benefits of the PlayStation 2's massive user base.

"Over the next four months, we expect the PS2 versions of Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Ratatouille, Transformers and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to sell more units than on any other platforms," detailed Pachter.

The analyst also published his predictions for hardware and software sales for the month of April.

Sales are expected to be up 24 per cent to USD 489 million, with the PlayStation 3 selling 100,000 units compared to the Nintendo Wii's 300,000. ...

via gibiz

Speaking in her keynote at this morning's Nordic Game conference, Paulina Bozek focused on "mass customisation" and how current trends have influenced the development of the PS3 instalment in the SingStar series.

"We are on the cusp of a big shift in media consumption and media production," said Bozek, who is executive producer and game director for the franchise. "We are already living and working in these kinds of conditions and this will permeate our work even further."

Her speech, 'My Everything: From playlists to profiles and virtual worlds, mass customisation and explosion of choice and creativity', focused on the importance of allowing huge amounts of choice to users.

"There have been some big media shifts recently and the landscape of entertainment has changed," she said. "MySpace is really the new MTV. TV is online, music is digital, products are tools and players are becoming creators.

"Clearly there is some kind of a big shift going on. It's a new era of consumer participation."

Bozek showed "the coolest powerpoint in the world" to the audience in Malmo, Sweden, flashing up brands such as Second Life, PlayStation Home, NikeiD, iPod, Starbucks, Facebook, EA's Tiger Woods, and Media Molecule's recently announced PlayStation 3 community game, Little Big Planet. She spoke at length about the “unbundling” of content for users before showing off the new SingStar in action.

"Our major innovations for the next gen platform are SingStore, which is an online store that allows players to create their own playlist by downloading songs of their choice, and My SingStar Online,” she said. “This is a community platform for SingStar fans to upload photos and video and audio to share with friends."

SingStore was shown working, while Bozek laboured the point that many SingStar users are not traditional gamers - so her team was careful to make buying tunes from the service as easy as possible, with the user never having to leave the game.

PS3 Singtar will launch with 350 songs, with more than 100 expected to be added every month. Bozek showed Shut Up by the Black Eyeds Peas and Atomic by Blondie running on SingStore, flicking through tracks by Cindy Lauper, Destiny's Chield, KT Tunstall and Gwen Stafani.

The game is "nearly finished," said Bozek, and will ship this summer, but the American fell short of discussing costings for downloading tracks.

"We're going to be announcing our pricing quite soon , but I can't announce it today," she said. ...

via gibiz

Activision is enjoying the benefits of cross-promotion with this week's UK All Formats number one, as sales of Spider-Man 3 jump 26 per cent.

PlayStation 2 units account for 73 per cent of sales, while Xbox 360 makes up 25 per cent of sales for the movie tie-in.

Electronic Arts' Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars has leapt back up the charts following release on the Xbox 360, from number 20 to number two, nudging Nintendo's Wii Play down to number three.

Discounting has boosted sales of Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 6, which jumps up the charts from number 35 to number four, with EA's FIFA 07 also climbing to number five.

505 Games break into the top ten with Cooking Mama for the DS at number six, while Square Enix's Final Fantasy III takes the number seven position and Sony's latest SingStar Pop Hits sits at number eight.

Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion falls to number nine this week, while EA's Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 is at number ten. ...

via gibiz

Telltale executive Kevin Bruner has revealed that his company thinks many games are "too expensive" and too restricted with regard to the choice of content on offer for consumers.

Speaking at the Nordic Game conference Bruner, who is chief technology officer at Telltale, told GamesIndustry.biz: "I think the industry is creating one type of content, which is the thousand-page novel. If you went into a bookstore and every book was a thousand-page novel - not everybody wants that.

"We've gone through five or six years of just one type of game offering - the 50-hour first-person shooter type thing. I think with the Wii and handhelds and the casual games space, we're seeing a lot of consumers who want something different."

Established in 2004, Telltale specialises in producing episodic games such as the Bone and Sam and Max titles. According to Bruner, the company has already beaten financial projections and is seeing a high demand for episodic content.

"All of our games are very story-driven, they're not action games at all, and we think that kind of treatment - that people, if they were offered it, would respond more favourably to that," he said.

"We believe that games are too expensive right now. A lot of not only episodic games but games in general are not priced appropriately. We also think that games are too big."

Telltale Games currently offers individual episodes of Sam and Max at USD 8.95, with all six instalments in the first season available for USD 34.95. Bruner said this model has proved successful, adding, "We think our games are priced correctly."

Tomorrow, Bruner will deliver a speech at Nordic Game titled, 'Why Episodic Gaming is Good for Developers.' He told GI.biz, "I've made a lot of traditional games, and I much prefer to work this way than spend two years making a game that comes out and if you screw something up, there's no opportunity to fix it - you just move on and do something else.

"We really like the [episodic] business model, we like being able to interact with the consumer regularly," he continued.

"I think once you get over the production challenges of creating a game a month then it's a really attractive model to be in." ...

via gibiz

NanaOn-Sha boss Masaya Matsuura has said he believes the reason the Wii is outdoing PS3 in the sales stakes is because Sony's next-gen console is "too big" for Japanese consumer tastes.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview at the Nordic Game conference, Matsuura observed that the PS3 is "currently" lagging behind but added, "Of course they have a chance to recover over time."

He said the problem is not the price or the range of software available for PS3 but simply the size of the machine itself: "It's too big for the Japanese."

Despite such issues the PlayStation 3 is still outselling the Xbox 360 which has yet to secure a solid foothold in the Japanese market.

According to Matsuura, "With Xbox, the problem is not the size of the hardware but of the AC adapter."

So what of the Wii, the most diminutive of the next-gen consoles? Matsuura offered praise for the machine, but said it also presents new challenges for developers.

"Wii is a very good piece of hardware. Many talented people from Nintendo make great ideas for game hardware, of course. Already I've been starting to think about Wii software, but it's very hard sometimes. Because can you keep shaking the controller for hours?

"Players can't spend a long time on gameplay, so this can be tough. So I respect Nintendo's activities, but for software designers like us, it's very hard."

However, Matsuura said he is currently in the planning stages of developing a game for Wii - with work set to officially begin "soon, maybe".

He went on to reveal that NanaOn-Sha has been working on "a very casual, one-button game" - but declined to offer any further details.

"Maybe the publisher will announce the release soon," Matsuura said. "It's a very simple game, but I hope it will be successful." ...