Media Create, the Japanese market research firm, has released Japanese hardware sales figures for the week ending January 22. While the PSP enjoyed a two week stint at the top spot of the hardware chart, the DS is back to number one after shortage replenishments of the Nintendo handheld have presumably been filled. The DS also managed to sell 8 of the top 10 software titles. Here's how it all went down with the number in parenthesis representing total units sold since January 1, 2006:

DS: 64,515 (210,177)
PSP: 38,271 (228,714)
PS2: 26,271 (146,097)
GBASP: 7,912 (35,338)
GBM: 4,653 (22,813)
GC: 4,490 (23,378)
X360: 3,616 (17,200
GBA: 236 (1,033)
Xbox: 83 (358) ...

The Japaneses can throw some oddly-named parties. Suda 51 (Killer 7, Contact), Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid, Zone of Enders), and Kazutoshi Iida (Doshin the Giant) all attended the "Hopper's Vol. 1 25H Our Party People" event in Tokyo, and made a few interesting remarks during their time rockin' the house.

Suda 51, whose real name is Gouichi Suda, confirmed that his studio has already begun to work on a Revolution title. With a little trimesters to go before the supposed launch of Nintendo's console, could this mysterious game fall within the Revolution's launch window?

There was some love shown for Kojima, whose game Snatcher noted was the inspiration for Suda 51 to create video games. During the talk session, all three aforementioned developers joked about a collaborative effort to make an adventure game. You might be disappointed that the suggestion was merely a joke, but look at this way - if those three developers worked together on a project, the sheer craziness and originality of said title would likely cause more than a few heads to explode. ...

Our friends at Success HK have posted a review of the PSP game Pinball Hall of Fame:

Take a trip through pinball's memory lane in the palm of your hand with this compilation of classic Gottlieb tables for the PSP.
If you want a dose of old-school pinball, there aren't a lot of places you can go. Most of the latest pinball games are buried under a Nintendo license. But for people who like their pinball with a touch of nostalgia, there's the new PSP port of Pinball Hall of Fame, which is a collection of Gottlieb pinball tables.

Pinball actually goes back a lot longer than you may know. In the beginning, there was pinball. And it was good. But then along came video games and, well, rolling a ball around wasn't quite so exciting for a lot of folks. In Pinball Hall of Fame, you'll get to visit a time before pinball had to compete with Pac Man.

Pinball Hall of Fame is a port from other console systems, but it adds three new tables to the already impressive collection for a total of 11 tables, all markedly different from each other. The oldest table in this collection is Play-Boy from 1932. They hadn't even invented flippers yet. It was about as interactive as a slot machine. You just pull the plunger and hope the ball gets stuck in one of the holes on its way down to the drain. And you only get one ball at a time, so Play-Boy has nothing on Pachinko.

Then in the 1957 table, Aces High, you get flippers. Eventually, the tables start folding in more goals, ramps to different levels, and gimmicks like the table-within-a-table on 1981's Black Hole. There's an inset area under glass beneath the main table, but it's tilted in the opposite direction so that the flippers are on top and the ball seems to roll backwards. Very freaky.

As the tables progress, you can see Gottlieb struggling for new ways to make pinball different. In 1983's Goin' Nuts, you use multiple balls at once to build up a timer, which starts ticking down once you've only got a single ball left. The table never actually entered production and there are only ten test models, virtually recreated here for your edification.

This isn't just a bunch of tables crammed onto a UMD. There's a lot of history in Pinball Hall of Fame, which gives it all a touch of class. It has the reverence of a museum, complete with old pictures of the pinball machine factory and scanned promotional materials for each table. The developers at Farsight Studios have created a sort of virtual arcade where you earn credits to play tables until you've unlocked them by beating goals on other tables. You can even spend the credits on arcade gimmicks like a Love Meter and a fortune teller, both of which might earn you additional credits. You can play a tournament mode that tracks your performance on each of the tables for a total score.
The tables look great, lovingly rendered in full 3D with your choice of camera angles. You can play holding your PSP sideways, which isn't nearly as cool as it sounds. For some reason, it's oriented with the analog nub at the top. But you need to use the analog nub to nudge the table, which involves taking your hand off a flipper button and reaching across the screen. Why didn't they just flip it over and use the right and left direction button for the flippers?

Fortunately, with so many options for camera view, the game displays just fine from the default horizontal view. The graphics are lovely and smooth, with the exception of some slowdown in multiball mode on some of the busier tables like Victory and Tee'd Off. The sound is affectionately captured, from the hearty clunk of a free game to the tinny digitized voices.

All told, this is a great package for the PSP that offers discrete slices of fun with every game. It's perfectly suited for five-minute playing sessions whether you're into old-school pinball or not. And it'll let you save your quarters for more important things like laundry and parking meters.

...

Some great news coming from the Snes9xTYL Team, heres the info:

Hi, Received the source from latest version. Yoyo told me about a bug in the mode7 tuning I did. So I need to take a look to it... Yoyo need also to fix some stuff before release. But at least give us some days... We will try to release before two weeks. If you are lucky may be beginning of next week. Yoyo is wondering about which features need to be added to this release. Personnaly I am for game genie feature... Because quite a lot of people requested it. Yoyo talked also about mp3 players feature as it is already available in the other emu. Of course the main event is the sound moved to the Media Engine. and mode7 tuning. See you guys. He he he Its going to rock within two weeks on the forums

Media Engine is a second CPU inside the CPU. We use it as a coprocessor to do the sound generation of the SPC700 (snes sound chip). Now you will have 44 Khz full audio quality at the same speed as "no sound with emulation". The SPC700 CPU is still emulated on the main cpu I believe... the sound GENERATION is done on the ME.

Thanks to miemt11 for the News. ...

Source - GamesRadar

Bethesda Softworks has revealed two new Star Trek games, the often-rumoured RTS Legacy for Xbox 360 and PC, while the action driven Tactical Assault will appear on PSP and DS.

After a messy legal scuffle between Trek license holders Viacom and developer Activision, the rights to produce games from the entire history of Trek has passed to publisher Bethesda, just in time for the 40th anniversary of the TV series.

As shown in these two screens Star Trek: Legacy will drop gamers into an Admiral's chair allowing them to command a task fleet of ships on a number of bold missions spanning stories from the original show right up to the Enterprise era.

With large and small scale battles, the Mad Doc Software developed game will also include numerous multiplayer options, online stat tracking and a lovely range of primary hued jumpsuits.

Less has been revealed about Tactical Assault so far with developer Quicksilver Software promising that the game will feature Federation and Klingon single player campaigns as well as head to head Wi-Fi battles on both formats.

Star Trek: Legacy will engage players on PC and Xbox 360 from this September while Star Trek: Tactical Assault will materialise on PSP and DS later this year. ...

Unscrupulous hackers are managing to lock Animal Crossing: Wild World gamers out of their own virtual villages.

The Nintendo DS game, which was released in the US last year, allows gamers to invite three friends to hang out in their village through the magic of the handheld's WiFi capability, but this can only happen if the DS users are all registered on one another's friends list.

But unsuspecting Animal Crossing fans who have revealed their details on websites have fallen prey to hackers who have managed to remove the gates of any villages they visit. This has left gamers trapped offline if they have saved after the hack has taken place.

Fortunately, any changes the hackers implement can be rectified with use of an Action Replay cartridge, but this hacking demonstrates how cautious DS users should be with their friends list. ...

Source - Gamespot

In Japan, would-be pop stars can now download tunes and practice singing their favorite songs through their PSPs. Taito, one of the country's major karaoke providers, today announced that it has launched a karaoke download service for the PSP on Portable TV, a Sony Web site dedicated to PSP content.

The selection of karaoke songs currently encompasses Japanese pop music, songs from popular anime shows, and TV theme songs. At this time the site offers only about 70 songs, but Taito plans to expand the available selection to more than 10,000 songs by early summer. Each of Taito's karaoke songs can be downloaded for 105 yen ($.93) and can be played back on the PSP for 15 days. ...

Nintendo UK's general manager David Yarnton has reiterated that the company has no plans to announce a redesigned DS unit at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published on the website today, Yarnton said, "If I turned around and said to my staff that we're doing something new they'd probably throttle me."

Pressed on the issue of a possible redesign for the high-flying handheld, which recently broke through the one-million-UK-sales barrier, Yarnton said, "That's been rumoured, I don't know for how long, but we haven't got any plans at the moment. Nothing I know of."

Yarnton also had encouraging words for retailers, speaking at an event at the Science Museum in London yesterday. "You know, we've got plans for long-term that we're going to invest in it and in the past, I wouldn't say it's been neglected, but change is happening.

"I find one of the challenges we have as a company is resource as far as, you know, we've got 16 people at Nintendo UK which I think a lot of people don't realise for the amount of business we do. But we're looking at improving that resource. We don't think we need to grow too much more, it's just being responsive and working closely - as I say we had a trade presentation this morning and we presented to them a number of initiatives as far as simple things like in-store... I mean, we go out to stores and look and we're the poor relation in some respects, so we can't expect them to do that unless we give the more support so we're working in that area." ...

Dismisses rumours of a manufacturing cessation

Microsoft has re-affirmed its continued support for the original Xbox games console, dispelling rumours that hardware manufacturing for the machine has now been officially stopped.

The rumour, which initially appeared on US website Kotaku.com, was sparked by an email from an undisclosed source in the retail sector, suggesting that hardware production of the original machine had stopped and prompting immediate questions regarding the level of support for existing customers, for both first and third-party games.

Microsoft had stated during last year's E3 expo in May that support for the original console would continue in terms of hardware sales and software launches, and it would seem reasonable to accept that the focus of its attention has shifted somewhat recently, in light of the continuing stock issues for its next-generation Xbox 360, which launched in the US in November. However, that change in product launch schedules and hardware support doesn't necessarily translate to Microsoft's outright neglect of its original machine.

Gamesindustry.biz contacted Microsoft to clarify its position on the Xbox, and a company spokesperson told us: "We remain very supportive of the Xbox platform and there have been no announcements about plans to cease or alter production."

"While we do not have other titles to announce at this time, we are committed to providing existing Xbox customers with exciting gaming experiences in 2006. There are 200 Xbox titles expected to ship this year. It is the responsibility of the first party to create genre-defining games for its platform and we are taking that stance with both Xbox and Xbox 360. We feel we have an amazing ecosystem with third parties providing content to Xbox at this time. We have done a great job on the Xbox side with such franchises as Halo, Project Gotham Racing, Fable, and Forza, not to mention our pioneering work we’ve done for Xbox Live," the spokesperson concluded. ...