via Advanced Media Network

Harry Potter: And the Order of the Phoenix’s website has received a facelift. There’s plenty of new content to keep one busy until the game’s release on June 25th.

You can check out a trailer, specific platform features, story overview, and news concerning the release. More content is on the way, including a flash game. The website can be viewed here.

Harry Potter: And the Order of the Phoenix will be available on June 25 for the Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PSP, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance and PC. ...

via GamersHell

Nintendo today released new screenshots from Final Fantasy VI Advance, a game which will hit the store shelves across Europe on June 29th 2007, exclusively for Game Boy Advance. Final Fantasy VI Advance is a turn-based RPG with gameplay broken down into two distinct phases: exploration and battle. In the exploration phase, players wander through towns or dungeons, sail through the sky or travel across the "overworld" (anywhere outside of a dungeon or town), speaking with the people they meet to gain clues and advance the story. In certain locations, players will get into battles, either randomly (when wandering freely) or by design (when they fight a creature as part of the main story). Players can equip their characters to customize their arms and armor as well as their relics and magic. Press 'read more' for details. ...

via GamersHell

Nintendo today released new screenshots from Final Fantasy VI Advance, a game which will hit the store shelves across Europe on June 29th 2007, exclusively for Game Boy Advance. Final Fantasy VI Advance is a turn-based RPG with gameplay broken down into two distinct phases: exploration and battle. In the exploration phase, players wander through towns or dungeons, sail through the sky or travel across the "overworld" (anywhere outside of a dungeon or town), speaking with the people they meet to gain clues and advance the story. In certain locations, players will get into battles, either randomly (when wandering freely) or by design (when they fight a creature as part of the main story). Players can equip their characters to customize their arms and armor as well as their relics and magic. Press 'read more' for details. ...

via MP3 Newswire

Steve Jobs stated at the unveiling of the iPhone that their goal is to capture 1% of the market by the end of 2008. If the recent poll by M:Metrics is accurate then Apple's new phone will blow past that figure before this year is up.

According to the poll, which was released on Friday and surveyed 11,060 U.S. mobile subscribers, in the US 9% of cell phone users have strong interest in buying the iPhone. That figure was even stronger in the UK where 16% of 5,293 mobile subscribers said they had strong interest. "This data confirms that the iPhone has sparked the imaginations of consumers and is not merely a topic of conversation among insiders and technology enthusiasts," SVP M:Metrics Mark Donovan stated in the company press release. ...

New update of the Nintendo DS emulator for PC. Note: it's a custom build, not from the original Desmume developers.

Changelog:

# Cancelling the restriction of the bundle operation type order of ARM.
# It tries generating the 3D FIFO interruption with super random timing.
# The infinite loop execution time patching function of the cord/code which is done.
# Several URL of the help menu adjustment ...

via Gaming Today

Score one for Xbox owners, who'll soon be able to roll up big balls of stuff to quirky Japanese tunes. It appears the upcoming Beautiful Katamari is now destined to be an Xbox 360 exclusive. The information comes from "a little birdie with good reason to know," according the Level Up, Newsweek's gaming blog. This marks a dramatic change for the series, considering all previous games have been exclusively on Sony systems. Apparently Namco is showing a pattern of trying to build closer ties with Microsoft. I guess the Xbox is on a roll (sorry, couldn't resist).

...

via Tech Digest

And no, that's not just from seven crisp-guzzling geeks in Kentucky with too much time on their hands. Microsoft actually signed up 820,000 Xbox 360 owners for its Halo 3 multiplayer beta test, which means an average of 14.6 hours per participant.

More numbers: in total the beta generated 350 terabytes worth of downloads from Microsoft's server. And particularly popular was the feature allowing players to record their games and send the footage to friends – 580,000 saved films were created by beta testers.

...

via Gamasutra

A top executive at the U.S. unit of Sega Sammy has voiced his skepticism over the long term success of the Wii, suggesting that the PlayStation 3 is still likely to become the most popular console of the new generation, despite currently sluggish sales.

Speaking in a Reuters article, vice president of marketing Scott Steinberg stated, "I am a little concerned about the creative depth of the Wii pool. I'm not sure if they will top out in 2008 or 2007. The Wii will start to look really dated in a couple years when developers get more value from the 360 and learn more and more about the PlayStation 3”.

"But how much value can developers and creative folks get out of this wrist motion two years from now, or 5 years from now, or 10 years from now?", he added. “"How can they design products that aren't too derivative of what's already out there?"

A long time rival of Nintendo during the 8-bit and 16-bit era, since Sega’s move out of the hardware market both companies have worked together successfully. Wii title Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz was a key launch release and the company has also enjoyed significant success with exclusive title Sonic and the Secret Rings.

As well as being one of the strongest third part supporters of the virtual console retro download service, Sega also has other exclusives scheduled for later in the year, including light gun conversion Ghost Squad and crossover Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games.

Despite this Steinberg has predicted that the PlayStation 3 will ultimately enjoy the largest installed userbase at the end of the new generation, saying: “We know the PS3 pool is pretty deep. There's a lot to exploit there”. ...

via PC World

Remember your old elementary school science lessons about potential and kinetic energy? Pull a rubber band taut and you give it potential energy; release it, and that energy becomes kinetic. Not to sound trite, but you might compare that rubber band to the relationship between silicon and software development. If the rubber band is, say, the Xbox 360's triple-core Xenon PowerPC-based processor or the Playstation 3's seven-core Cell CPU, either system manufacturer's software "devkit" becomes the hand stretching that rubber band to different degrees of tautness.

Recall the Sega Saturn, which had eleven processors plus dual CPUs. Sony's Playstation had just three (ah the irony). I remember reading something in (now defunct) Next Generation Magazine around the time the Saturn launched about how powerful the latter system was compared to the Playstation, but also how prohibitively difficult it was for developers to tap into that extra oomph. Sega further confused matters by shipping a devkit with the intelligibility of an underwater toaster. Sure, Sega's "rubber band" was much stronger and more extensible than the Playstation's, but the fingers doing the pulling might as well have been handcuffed thanks to Sega's byzantine development tools. Thus the Saturn failed, despite Sega's prior prominence in the 16-bit market with the Genesis.

Is the Playstation 3 the next Sega Saturn? Both systems were/are radical departures from prior platforms with experimentally complex multi-processor architectures. Compare the jump from Intel's Pentium 4 to its Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors with corresponding chipset upticks, none of which come remotely close to jolting developers to the same extent as jumping from the PS2 to the PS3. (Though it's worth noting that the jump from single to dual-core processing has been a substantial challenge for developers looking to utilize Intel's second core effectively--parallel processing is a paradigm shift that requires significant retooling on any hardware platform.)

Developers were keen to berate the Saturn back in the mid-1990s, but they're staying mum about the PS3 today. GamePro managed to uncover a few semi-illuminating tidbits, reporting on a story in Dr. Dobb's software journal in which the authors claim "Software that exploits the Cell [processor's] potential requires a development effort significantly greater than traditional platforms." In an email to GamePro, Sony's product development group added further:

Since PS3's Cell processor allows more features -- better physics, more complex graphical processing, lighting or sound -- there is inevitably going to be more cost in supporting those extra features... It's not that PS3 is harder to write for, it's just that you can do more with it.

Of course what Sony calls "more you can do with it," most intelligent developers would equivocate with the same sort of learning curve that killed the Sega Saturn. No one's disputing it's more powerful at this point, but wrapping a Honda Civic around a V12 won't win you any races.

Imagine playing a sport like basketball with a certain ruleset, and say you've been playing for years. As a competitive athlete, you have to focus on mastering dribbling, passing, and shooting techniques which explicitly complement those rules. No running out of bounds, carrying without dribbling, etc. Now let's say the league decides to alter the rules dramatically, and I'm not just talking scoring or timing minutia, but--to make the analogy proportional--something radical, say having to dribble two or three basketballs at once. You might be able to do it (hey, plenty of reverse jugglers can!) but think of the practice and utter rethinking involved to do it effectively. Passing around three basketballs might increase your team's chances of landing a shot, but every tactical aspect of the game has to do a one-eighty.

The most damning element in the stack against the PS3, though, may be multi-platform games (mostly contributed by mega-publishers like EA and Ubisoft) which require costly re-engineering when porting to the PS3 architecture. Witness products like Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Spider-Man 3, which run smoothly on the 360 but often jerk conspicuously on the PS3, and occasionally in a way that actually interferes with the gameplay. Add the higher development costs (read: time) to port to the PS3, and you have a situation not altogether unlike the one Sega found itself in slightly more than a decade ago. ...