DCEmu Homebrew Emulation & Theme Park News
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by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:45- Categories:
- DCEmu
US radiologists claim to have shown for the first time that playing violent videogames has an effect on parts of the brain that control emotion.
The study, carried out by the department of radiology and imaging sciences at Indiana University School Of Medicine, split a group of 22 men aged 18 to 29, none of whom were regular gamers, into two. The first group played a shooter for 10 hours in a week, then refrained from playing at all in the second week. The other group played no violent games at all.
MRI scans were carried out at the beginning, middle and end of the study while the participants completed two tests, one assessing emotional interference and the other cognitive inhibition.
The scans showed that after a week of playing a violent game, the gamers "showed less activation in the inferior frontal lobe during the emotional task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the [second] task." At the end of the second week, in which no games were played, the effect was diminished.
Yang Wang, assistant research professor in the department of radiology and imaging sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine, said: "For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent videogames at home.
"These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behaviour… These findings indicate that violent videogame play has a long-term effect on brain functioning."
Except, of course, they don't appear to indicate that at all: even the Daily Mail notes that frontal lobe activity is affected when we learn any new skill. Michael Lipton, of Albert Einstein College Of Medicine in New York, told Medical News Today: "There have been a lot of studies that expose patients to novel behaviours, and you see changes in brain activity that then go away over time. The problem is, how does that translate into real-world functionality?"
It's a tiny sample, too: why only 22 people, and why only violent games? Why only men? If the change in brain function diminishes after a week, in what way does the research prove any long-term effect? It's a report that poses more questions than it answers - questions we'll be putting to its authors.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/study-c...brain-function ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:43- Categories:
- PS3 News
Bethesda's latest patch for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim contains a bug that breaks resistance - and has caused some dragons to break with tradition by flying backwards.
Resistances are enchantments that reduce the damage the player takes from certain attacks. Players have found that not only are their enchantments having no effect on the damage they take after installing the patch, but it applies to every NPC, creature and enemy in the game.
It's embarrassing stuff for Bethesda, which has been working on patches to fix technical issues present in all versions of the game since its launch earlier this month. The Xbox 360 version hadtexture scaling problems; PS3 players experienced severe framerate drops when their save files exceeded 5MB in size; andPC players complained of freezes of several seconds in outdoor areas.
So inundated was Bethesda with complaints from gamers demanding fixes that the publisher's VP of PR and marketing, Pete Hines, took to Twitter to tell players: "Patches/updates take a little time. We can't turn it around quite that fast. It's been three days.Calm down, we're working on it."
While the speed at which Bethesda has issued fixes - the latest patch coming just 19 days after launch, far quicker than the platform holders' certification processes typically allow - is commendable, it's deeply disappointing that such an obvious error wasn't picked up before the patch was submitted.
Players can choose not to install the update when prompted, but will be signed out of Xbox Live or PSN as a result.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/skyrim-...aks-resistance ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:41- Categories:
- Nintendo 3DS News
Circle Pad Pro, the attachment which adds a second analogue pad and set of shoulder buttons to Nintendo's 3DS, will be released in Europe on January 27.
The add-on, revealed alongside Monster Hunter 3G in September and set to launch in Japan next month, will be available either on its own or bundled with Resident Evil: Revelations, which is released on the same day.
The upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D, Ace Combat 3D Cross Rumble, Dynasty Warriors Vs, and Kingdom Hearts 3D will also be compatible with the attachment.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/3ds-cir...leased-january ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:38- Categories:
- DCEmu
The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the new number one in the Japanese all-formats software chart.
Link's Wii swan-song sold almost 195,000 copies in its first week on sale, comfortably beating two PSP new entries, 7th Dragon 2020and Saint Seiya Senki, which have to settle for second and third respectively.
It was a busy week for new releases, with eight of the top ten making their debuts. 3DS was once again the best-selling hardware of the week, with 120,920 units sold, beating sales of all other platforms combined.
01. The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Nintendo)
02. 7th Dragon 2020 (Sega)
03. Saint Seiya Senki (Namco Bandai)
04. Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo)
05. Metal Gear Solid HD Edition (Konami)
06. Little Battler Experience Boost (Level-5)
07. Weiss Schwarz Portable (Namco Bandai)
08. Uta No Prince Sama Music (Broccoli)
09. Taiko Drum Master Wii Ultimate Version (Namco Bandai)
10. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Subtitled Version (Square Enix)
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/skyward...japanese-chart ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:37- Categories:
- Android News
Token_Internet_Girl writes with a followup to last week's news about Android developer Trevor Eckhart, who was researching software from CarrierIQ, installed on millions of cellphones, that secretly logged a variety of user information — from button presses to text message contents to browsing data. CarrierIQ tried to silence Eckhart, but later backtracked. Now, Eckhart has posted a video demonstration of CarrierIQ's logging software. From the article:"The company denies its software logs keystrokes. Eckhart’s 17-minute video clearly undercuts that claim. ... The video shows the software logging Eckhart's online search of 'hello world.' That's despite Eckhart using the HTTPS version of Google, which is supposed to hide searches from those who would want to spy by intercepting the traffic between a user and Google. ...the video shows the software logging each number as Eckhart fingers the dialer. 'Every button you press in the dialer before you call,' he says on the video, 'it already gets sent off to the IQ application.'"
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/...tware-on-video ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:35- Categories:
- PC News
NVIDIA has just launched the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores. Though perhaps a bit unimaginative in terms of branding, the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores is outfitted with the same GF110 GPU powering high-end GeForce GTX 570 and GTX 580 cards, but with a couple of its streaming multiprocessors fused off. The card has 448 CUDA cores arranged in 14 SMs, with 56 texture units and 40 ROPs. Reference specifications call for a 732MHz core clock with 1464MHz CUDA cores. 1.2GB of GDDR5 memory is linked to the GPU via a 320-bit bus and the memory is clocked at an effective 3800MHz data rate. Performance-wise, the new GPU proved to be about 10 to 15 percent faster than the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti and a few percentage points slower than the GeForce GTX 570."
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/11...i-448-core-gpu ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:31- Categories:
- Xbox 360 News
EA's CFO Eric Brown has revealed that Battlefield 3 has sold over 8 million copies worldwide, shipping twelve million copies to retailers.
Speaking at the Baird Technology Conference in San Francisco, Brown highlighted the game's continuing healthy sales a month after launch, building on the firm base established by five million week one sales. EA are clearly hoping that this long tail will continue through the Christmas period.
Next month Battlefield 3 will receive its first map-pack update with a bundle of classic Battlefield maps from previous games in a download titled 'Back to Karkand'. Exact dates and pricing have not been announced.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...llion-ships-12 ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:26- Categories:
- Apple iPad,
- Apple iPhone
Extreme discounts on the App Store by large publishers are prompting smaller companies to move to freemium models rather than compete with cheap paid apps and their huge marketing budgets.
Last Christmas Electronic Arts dropped prices for a majority of its branded games on iOS platforms, flooding the top slots in the charts and saturated marketing channels on the App Store.
The practice was criticised by rival publisher Gameloft, but companies like Canadian publisher Fuse Powered saw it as an opportunity to change its entire approach to the mobile games business.
"That's one of the things that motivated us to transition our business model," said CEO Jon Walsh in an interview published today. "That idea that a big publisher can drop prices, take a hit and fill up all those top slots."
"That said two things: paid games are always going to have that risk. The big publisher is basically selling at an extremely low cost to gain market share and if it works for them they are going to continue to do it. So we can either complain about it or make sure our business model works around it. That's where the freemium model works for us."
For Fuse Powered, which has so far published titles such as Dawn of the Dead and Jaws Revenge, the company hopes to build a dedicated network of players by releasing multiple titles on a regular basis. It can then cross-promote its games within its own network. With six titles planned for the next three months, the company hopes to have 24 games out by the end of 2012.
"It also said to us that we need to go towards a publishing model where we have a base of really avid players that are enjoying our games so that when we bring out more stuff we don't need to get into those top 25 positions in the App Store, we can deliver directly to the existing player base," offered Walsh.
"That will be a continued risk for people selling 99 cent games."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ve-to-freemium ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:24- Categories:
- PC News
The Witcher 2 has now sold over one million legal copies, including a well publicised success on Good Old Games.com, and all without any form of DRM. However, developer CD Projekt RED estimates that over 4.5 million copies have been illegally pirated.
Speaking in an interview with PC Gamer, CEO and co-founder Marcin Iwinski spoke about that figure, revealing that it was probably a 'conservative' estimate, but that it would not change the company's position on DRM use.
"There are no stats available, but let's make a quick calculation," says Iwinski of the 4.5 million number.
"I was checking regularly the number of concurrent downloads on torrent aggregating sites, and for the first 6-8 weeks there was around 20-30 thousand people downloading it at the same time. Let's take 20 thousand as the average and let's take 6 weeks.
"The game is 14GB, so let's assume that on an average not-too-fast connection it will be 6 hours of download. 6 weeks is 56 days, which equals to 1344 hours; and with 6 hours of average download time to get the game it would give us 224 downloads, then let's multiply it by 20 thousand simultaneous downloaders.
"The result is roughly 4.5 million illegal downloads. This is only an estimation, and I would say that's rather on the optimistic side of things; as of today we have sold over 1 million legal copies, so having only 4.5-5 illegal copies for each legal one would be not a bad ratio. The reality is probably way worse."
But Iwinski is adamant about refusing to bring any DRM measures on board, largely because they are notoriously ineffective, but also because they tend to disadvantage legitimate players even more than they do pirates.
"From the very beginning our main competitors on the market were pirates. The question was really not if company x or y had better marketing or better releases, but more like 'How can we convince gamers to go and buy the legit version and not to go to a local street vendor and buy a pirated one?' We of course experimented with all available DRM/copy protection, but frankly nothing worked. Whatever we used was cracked within a day or two, massively copied and immediately available on the streets for a fraction of our price.
"We did not give up, but came up with new strategy: we started offering high value with the product - like enhancing the game with additional collectors' items like soundtracks, making-of DVDs, books, walkthroughs, etc. This, together with a long process of educating local gamers about why it makes sense to actually buy games legally, worked. And today, we have a reasonably healthy games market.
"In any case, I am not saying that we have eliminated piracy or there is not piracy in the case of TW2. There is, and TW2 was [illegally] downloaded by tens of thousands of people during the first two weeks after release. Still, DRM does not work and however you would protect it, it will be cracked in no time. Plus, the DRM itself is a pain for your legal gamers - this group of honest people, who decided that your game was worth the $50 or Euro and went and bought it. Why would you want to make their lives more difficult?"
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...at-4-5m-copies ...by Published on November 30th, 2011 22:23- Categories:
- Playstation Vita News
PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan has revealed that Sony is planning to offer multiple price-points for Vita software to combat the growing threat of cheap smartphone games to its handheld business.
While the company has yet to confirm details ahead of the console's European launch next February, Ryan toldGamesIndustry.biz: "I think it would be safe to assume we will take a more tailored approach than perhaps we've done in the past."
Speaking in London last week following confirmation of the first-party launch titles in Europe, Ryan admitted it would be "foolish and naïve to ignore what's happening" in the smartphone sector.
"It's our challenge to ensure that the gaming experience that we provide is closer to that TV console experience than it is to your 69p thing that you've downloaded on your iPhone," he added.
If we provide great value on games like Uncharted, I think the possibility to sustain historic console price points is there
Jim Ryan, Sony Europe
"If we do that and we provide great value to the consumer on games like Uncharted, I think the possibility to sustain historic console type price points is there."
One launch title that may be priced lower than premium is the newly-announced MotorStorm RC from Evolution Studios, coming to Vita and PlayStation 3 as a digital download, with cross-platform functionality.
Evolution group game director Matt Southern said: "We've not announced the price yet, but we have announced that for one price you'll get both versions". Later last week, during a panel discussion at Develop Liverpool, Southern added that the studio was in dialogue with Sony over pricing, hinting that a lower-than-premium point was preferred.
Further seeking to differentiate Vita from its smartphone rivals, Ryan said: "Absolutely it does do other things, but it has been designed as a gaming device, and a perfectly logical consequence of that is that the gaming experiences you can have on Vita are superior to what is possible on a device that has other functionality at its heart."
Elsewhere, Ryan admitted that predicting the relative popularity of the 3G and wi-fi only models of Vita was something "we agonise over endlessly internally". However, he said Sony expected the wi-fi model would "just shave it" in numbers.
"But the truth be told, we just don't know," he continued. "This is one area where we're going to have to be very nimble internally and if consumer preference skews one way or another we will adjust very rapidly to meet what the true underlying consumer demand is."
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ftware-pricing ...- Search DCEmu
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