A bumper crop of circumstantial evidence surrounding the Android-based PlayStation Phone is starting to come together today -- when it rains, it pours, as they say -- and one particularly interesting thread suggests that the ecosystem surrounding the device might be called "Z-System." An astute tipster notes that the term appears in the upper left of one of our shots, which maps to a domain -- z-system.com, naturally -- that's owned by Sony Ericsson. Turns out the company also holds trademarks for Z-System in the US and Benelux trademark offices (among others, presumably) that were filed (and approved) this year, and the filing category includes "software for interacting or playing with electronic or video games," not hardware, so that strongly suggests we're looking at a platform here. We suppose it's possible that this specific device will be called Z-System, but we're going to float the theory that its actually underlying gaming platform that'll bear that name -- possibly a premium game store and set of software libraries that together will earn a device the Z-System badge. As we already saw with the BlackPad / SurfBook / PlayBook fiasco, trademarks don't mean much until a device is actually announced -- but it's something to keep an eye on.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/27/s...ming-platform/ ...

You can try four new games for free on the PlayStation Store today.

These are the new Need for Speed game Hot Pursuit from Criterion; hack-and-slash Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage from Tecmo Koei; strange action adventure starring a big monster as your friend Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom; and on-rails PlayStation Move shooter Time Crisis: Razing Storm.

There are various Halloween celebrations doing the rounds, too. LittleBigPlanet offers a free Halloween mask, Guitar Hero offers three songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Red Dead Redemption gets the Undead Nightmare add-on.

Super Street Fighter IV welcomes an Ultra Challenges pack as well.

Keep an eye on the European PlayStation blog for the PSP Digital Comic Store update plus any PlayStation Home and SingStar gubbins.

Special Offers (available until 10th November)

PS3: Voodoo Dice (was £7.99/€9.99 now £5.49/€6.99)
PS3: Mahjong Tales: Ancient Wisdom: Booster Pack (was £3.49/€3.99 now £0.79/€0.99)
PS3: Cuboid: Level Editor (was £3.19/€3.99 now £0.79/€0.99)
PS3: Cuboid: Booster Pack (was £2.39/€2.99 now £0.79/€0.99)
PSP: Dissidia: Final Fantasy (was £19.99/€24.99 now £15.99/€19.99)
PSP: James Cameron's Avatar: The Game (was £23.99/€29.99 now £15.99/€19.99)
Minis: Alien Zombie Death! (was £2.49/€2.99 now £1.74/€1.99)
Minis: Supermarket Mania (was £3.99/€4.99 now £2.49/€2.99)
PS3 Demos

Time Crisis: Razing Storm
Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage
PS3 Game Content

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare (£7.99/€9.99) (20 per cent off for PS Plus subs)
Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare Collection (£15.99/€19.99) (contains Undead Nightmare pack, Legends and Killers pack, Liars and Cheats pack)
The Sims 3: Online Pass (£7.99/€9.99)
LittleBigPlanet: Halloween Mask (free for one week only)
Dead Rising 2: Sports Fan Skill Pack (£1.59/€1.99)
Super Street Fighter IV: Ultra Challengers Pack 1 (£3.19/€3.99)
PAIN: I, Probot Pinball Level Pack (£1.59/€1.99), Souxxie Character (£0.79/€0.99)
Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock: The Rocky Horror Picture Show Track Pack (£4.39/€5.49), Soundgarden invididual songs
Rock Band Network: 'Cheat On The Church' by Graveyard BBQ (£0.99/€1.49), 'Chiron Beta Prime' by Jonathan Coulton (£0.99/€1.49), 'How We'd Look On Paper' by The Main Drag (£0.59/€0.79), 'Life Unworthy Of Life' by Warpath (£0.59/€0.79), 'Rip'Er' by Lead the Dead (£0.59/€0.79)
PSone Games

Missile Command (£3.99/€4.99)
Minis

Boom Beats (£2.49/€2.99)
PSP Games

PES 2011 (£23.99/€29.99)
Lunar: Silver Star Harmony (£15.99/€19.99)
PSP Game Content

LittleBigPlanet PSP: KillZone Costume Pack (£0.79/€0.99)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...sn-store-today ...

You can try four new games for free on the PlayStation Store today.

These are the new Need for Speed game Hot Pursuit from Criterion; hack-and-slash Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage from Tecmo Koei; strange action adventure starring a big monster as your friend Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom; and on-rails PlayStation Move shooter Time Crisis: Razing Storm.

There are various Halloween celebrations doing the rounds, too. LittleBigPlanet offers a free Halloween mask, Guitar Hero offers three songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Red Dead Redemption gets the Undead Nightmare add-on.

Super Street Fighter IV welcomes an Ultra Challenges pack as well.

Keep an eye on the European PlayStation blog for the PSP Digital Comic Store update plus any PlayStation Home and SingStar gubbins.

Special Offers (available until 10th November)

PS3: Voodoo Dice (was £7.99/€9.99 now £5.49/€6.99)
PS3: Mahjong Tales: Ancient Wisdom: Booster Pack (was £3.49/€3.99 now £0.79/€0.99)
PS3: Cuboid: Level Editor (was £3.19/€3.99 now £0.79/€0.99)
PS3: Cuboid: Booster Pack (was £2.39/€2.99 now £0.79/€0.99)
PSP: Dissidia: Final Fantasy (was £19.99/€24.99 now £15.99/€19.99)
PSP: James Cameron's Avatar: The Game (was £23.99/€29.99 now £15.99/€19.99)
Minis: Alien Zombie Death! (was £2.49/€2.99 now £1.74/€1.99)
Minis: Supermarket Mania (was £3.99/€4.99 now £2.49/€2.99)
PS3 Demos

Time Crisis: Razing Storm
Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage
PS3 Game Content

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare (£7.99/€9.99) (20 per cent off for PS Plus subs)
Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare Collection (£15.99/€19.99) (contains Undead Nightmare pack, Legends and Killers pack, Liars and Cheats pack)
The Sims 3: Online Pass (£7.99/€9.99)
LittleBigPlanet: Halloween Mask (free for one week only)
Dead Rising 2: Sports Fan Skill Pack (£1.59/€1.99)
Super Street Fighter IV: Ultra Challengers Pack 1 (£3.19/€3.99)
PAIN: I, Probot Pinball Level Pack (£1.59/€1.99), Souxxie Character (£0.79/€0.99)
Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock: The Rocky Horror Picture Show Track Pack (£4.39/€5.49), Soundgarden invididual songs
Rock Band Network: 'Cheat On The Church' by Graveyard BBQ (£0.99/€1.49), 'Chiron Beta Prime' by Jonathan Coulton (£0.99/€1.49), 'How We'd Look On Paper' by The Main Drag (£0.59/€0.79), 'Life Unworthy Of Life' by Warpath (£0.59/€0.79), 'Rip'Er' by Lead the Dead (£0.59/€0.79)
PSone Games

Missile Command (£3.99/€4.99)
Minis

Boom Beats (£2.49/€2.99)
PSP Games

PES 2011 (£23.99/€29.99)
Lunar: Silver Star Harmony (£15.99/€19.99)
PSP Game Content

LittleBigPlanet PSP: KillZone Costume Pack (£0.79/€0.99)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...sn-store-today ...

Nottingham's fifth annual GameCity festival gets under way today and runs until Saturday, 30th October.

Various venues across the city will host talks and presentations about videogames. Plus, there will be art exhibitions, tea parties, recitals, big-screen outdoor gaming sessions, LEGO, zombies and lots more. They're weird around those parts.

Highlights include Jonathan Blow talking about how he made Braid and then showing new game The Witness. Nick Burton from Rare will be there talking about the imminent Kinect Sports, too.

There's plenty more besides, including games Crysis 2, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and LEGO Universe.

Eurogamer's Wesley Yin-Poole will be there talking and taking notes.

A full schedule with pictures for light readers can be found on the GameCity website. Most of the festival is free, incidentally.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ival-this-week ...

Nintendo has already revealed that Kirby's Epic Yarn began life without Kirby. Now one of the developers has suggested that Epic Yarn is a strong enough concept that it could continue without him into other Nintendo series.

Technically both revelations came from the same instalment of the unmissably formal Iwata Asks, but the first, news that the game was originally about a chap called "Fluff", was from a partial translation of the Japanese transcript. This week's comes courtesy of the full English translation.

In it, HAL Laboratory's Tadashi Ikegami, who began in sound but worked on Epic Yarn as more of a manager, told Nintendo president Satoru Iwata that when he first saw the Epic Yarn visuals he thought, "they were perfect for Kirby".

"I think there's a lot of potential for expanding this style to other series, like making a game called Mario's Epic Yarn," he continued. "That's how well I thought the foundation had been laid, so I was really happy that from among all the characters available it was Kirby who was chosen."

There's no suggestion that Nintendo will use Epic Yarn beyond Kirby, but it's a nice thought. Elsewhere in Iwata Asks, developers from HAL, Nintendo and principal developer Good-Feel discuss how the project began, floundered and then flourished with the introduction of Kirby. There's also a video of Hirokazu Ando playing a melodica.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...l-beyond-kirby ...

Futuresource Consulting has estimated that the mobile gaming market will generate $10 billion annually by 2014.

It also predicted significant growth for the sector this year, claiming that smartphone take-up would have risen by 50 per cent come the end of 2010 – meaning 270m units worldwide.

The analyst pegged Apple's iPhone range as covering 30 per cent of the mobile gaming market this year, generating $1.7 billion.

Nonetheless, it saw 'traditional' mobile games as retaining the lion's share of the sector this year, at 60 per cent compared to the 10 per cent accounted for by app stores.

However, Futuresource felt this would change dramatically come 2014, with app-based games comprising 95 per cent of the market by then.

Said Patrik Pfandler, lead mobile analyst at Futuresource, "The growth of in-apps payments is a key ingredient in the commercial success of apps gaming.

" In the short term we'll see the rise of the 'freemium' business model. In the longer run, we're going to see ad-funded apps games start to gain more traction as well."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...SD10bn-by-2014 ...

God of War: Ghost Of Sparta developer Ready At Dawn has claimed PSP development is endangered by the levels of piracy on Sony's handheld.

"It's pretty rampant now all around the world," creative director Ru Weerasuriya told VG247.

"It's getting to the point where it doesn't make sense to make games on it, if the piracy keeps on increasing.

"It's a tough call right now to say what's going to happen to it and where it's going to go, but it definitely hurts a lot of developers out there who are trying to make great games."

He felt the situation was now worse even than on PC. "The PC market has had connectivity and multiplayer, which brings down the piracy.

"A lot of the PC games right now require you to be logged into a specific network – like Battle.Net, when I used to work at Blizzard – that controls it, and has made it easy to curb some of that."

Weerasuriya also expressed concern about the prospects for independent studios such as Ready At Dawn, which had to downsize in July.

"It is hard; it's tough that the industry is not at a very healthy level right now, and especially for the last few independents.

"If you're a developer right now and you're owned by a publisher it's hard enough, so imagine what it's like if you're an independent covering all your costs yourself. I don't think it gets easier at any time, but the last two years have been particularly hard."

Ghost Of Sparta will likely be Ready At Dawn's last PSP game, Weersuriya claimed ("We've done the absolute maximum with it"), with the studio now looking to other consoles and potentially its own IP.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-of-developers ...

Treyarch community manager Josh Olin has confirmed and detailed a number supposedly 'little-known' features that'll be included in Call of Duty: Black Ops' multiplayer package come November 9.

Olin details a 'Custom Games Editor' which allows you to tweak your own custom matches any way you like. "From variables as simple as Time Limit and Score Limit, or as deep as which weapons, Perks, and gear are available. You want a Pistols Only match? Make one! No longer do custom game modes rely on the honor system," he explains.

"Furthermore, any Custom Game you create and configure can be placed in your File Share, for friends and the community to browse, download, and enjoy."

There'll be split-screen support for two-player online play; the second player can sign in as a guest and join the online fun, but any perks they earn are lost when the session ends. A second player can also sign into their own PSN account on the same PS3 and play at the same time.

Standard stuff. Wasn't that in previous games? We never tried.

An in-game friends list will let you "browse Recent Players, Friends, navigate their File Shares, Recent Games, Combat Records", as well as send and receive game invites all via in-game menus.

It'll also feature regional matchmaking, which is changeable by the user. "So, no matter where you're at in the world, you will have the ability to specify whether you want to match with players from other geographical regions, or only those local to you," explains Olin.

As a final note, Olin clarifies that Emblems earned are NOT reset when a player chooses to go Prestige. They will sacrifice XP, COD Points, Challenge progressions, Loadouts and such, but Emblems remain.

All very exciting. Meanwhile Tesco kicked off the price war today, offering Black Ops for £39.90.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...VG-General-RSS ...

EA wants you to buy games new, not second hand. We've all grasped that now, and its campaign continues with Dragon Age 2, for which its offering free downloadable content to everyone who grabs a new copy of the game come March next year.

EA has revealed it will being doing with DA2 something similar to the Cerebus Network offerings of Mass Effect 2, which could be accessed "exclusively by original purchasers" of the game through a single-use unlock code in the box.

"We will be doing that," executive producer Mark Darrah told Joystiq. "We haven't announced what's in it, but it'll definitely be something kind of in that Cerberus vein where there will be additional content," he added, rather vaguely.

Darrah also promised generally better quality DLC for DA2 than there was for Dragon Age: Origins, which was often criticised for its re-use of existing material and environments. "What we're doing with the DLC in Dragon Age 2 is making it larger; so it'll be bigger teams, more unique environments, more unique creatures -- so that it gets the attention it deserves to get," he said.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...VG-General-RSS ...