Panic adverted! Yesterday, we brought word that there are currently fewer third party PSP titles — leading some to say devs are "abandoning" the platform. Not entirely so! As Sony's John Koller explains, the reason is that there's a decline is PSP games is that “Decisions made 20-22 months ago from a development cycle perspective are affecting the quantity of titles available today." Oh, so third party companies were abandoning the PSP, but now they're not. Whew. Optimistic, Koller adds:

I think going into next year we’re going to see significant growth. We’re counseling retail to be ready for it. We have a number of very strong franchise games on the docket that will be launching next year. We haven’t gone public with those, and many third-parties have not yet either because they’re concentrating on holiday, but we have a number of very strong titles coming.

There's even been a demographic change for the PSP: Sony research says that over the next 12 months, young mothers will have the "highest propensity" to buy the handheld for their young children. Not exactly the urban hipsters it was originally targeted at.

http://kotaku.com/5054578/heres-why-...sp-games-today ...

Mixed E3 impressions or not, Wii Music is coming out this October. And boy oh boy are Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and resident genius Shigeru Miyamoto excited. Thrilled, actually. In a "Creator's Voice" conversation posted on the game's official site, Miyamoto says, "I haven't really felt the happiness from making other games that I've had felt making Wii Music... I wasn't this excited while making Super Mario Bros."

http://kotaku.com/5054583/it-would-b...with-wii-music ...

With the economy on the ropes and a recession running around like death at the masquerade, it seems inevitable that we're going to be dealing with question eventually, so let's get to it now.

NPR argued yesterday that video games could serve as the mass opiate of this generation's great depression. In the 30s that role was served by nickle movies, but today's audience can perhaps get more bang for their buck, more distraction for their dollar with a game.

So which one will best help people to forget their worldly woes?

The Playstation 3 has theoretical future-proofing in the bag and includes a bunch of built in features that make using it for other purposes (without additional cost) a breeze and of course it has a Blu-ray player. Then again it's the most expensive, and blu-ray movies aren't exactly cheap either.

The Wii is the family friendliest of the bunch, the one most likely to attract reticent non-gamers to it's fold. Of course most of its games aren't as deep and it isn't the cheapest on the market anymore.

The Xbox 360 has the biggest selection of consoles, including the cheapest on the market. It also has the biggest selection of cheap downloadable titles and robust video on demand support, soon to be amplified by Netflix. But tapping into all of the 360's potential features means buying expensive add-ons, like the harddrive.

The arcade. Yes, the arcade. While they are almost non-existent in the U.S. and the likelihood that someone is going to suddenly invest in opening them up, especially now, is crazy, I think arcades are really the closest example of what happened in the 30s with movies. You don't need a television, you don't even need electricity, you just need a quarter and the time to play.

http://kotaku.com/5054621/what-shoul...eat-depression ...

It was only a matter of time before Rockstar's Nintendo DS offering Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars fell under the scrutiny of international anti-everything groups, and what better place to start than with the "ever reputable" UK news stable, The Sun, where the news of GTA DS's drug selling mini-game isn't going over so well.


Darren Gold of charity Drugsline said: “Anything using drug-dealing as entertainment is sending out the wrong message. “Glamorisation doesn’t help our work trying to educate kids of the dangers of substance misuse.”

See? Now that's two things parents should be doing but don't in one statement - educating their children about drugs and keeping them from playing mature video games. I do like the little addition that The Sun reporter slipped in at the end though. "Experts predict the final edition is unlikely to feature explicit criminality. " "Experts" have apparently never played a Grand Theft Auto title.

http://kotaku.com/5054728/and-the-gt...outrage-begins ...

Look, I know that Hawaii is a very laid-back sort of place. Bright sunshine, sandy beaches, news reporters who wear Hawaiian shirts on broadcast television even when not covering a luau, but it can be taken too far. For instance, if you are driving a city bus filled with passengers on a busy street in Honolulu, it's probably not a good idea to break out the PSP and play a couple rounds of Hot Shots Golf.


"With two hands… at times, while he was driving in traffic, yes,” (bus passenger Denita) Waltz said. "And also at the stoplights, and at that point I was very scared."

The driver, an 18-year veteran with The Bus, has been suspended without pay pending further investigation. Not sure what further investigating they need to do here, really. What game he was playing? His high score? Does that affect putting people's lives in danger?

Hell yes it does.

http://kotaku.com/5054748/gaming-and...-kill-a-career ...

Whether or not such a two-sided conflict will actually play out in the larger mobile-phone industry, today Android vs. iPhone is the battle raging in the mind of every fanboy, gadget geek—and software developer. Since it has all the right themes for a Tolkien-esque epic whose outcome largely rests with small, furry-footed but pure-hearted creatures—developers—we asked the developers of popular mobile apps such as Pandora, TuneWiki and Instinctiv Shuffle, mostly people working on both platforms, to tell us whether it's better to write for the no-strings-attached open Android or the more popular but catch-prone iPhone. Android may not be an overnight success, but iPhone had better watch its back.

Android: iPhone's Refugee Camp
While Android's open approach undoubtedly led some developers to pick it over the iPhone from the start, Apple's byzantine approval process and perhaps anti-competitive protection of its own apps—Podcaster and MailWrangler being two of the most prominent—have definitely driven some devs into Android's open arms, or at least made them stare longingly at it.

One such dev was the maker of the ridiculously popular Instictiv Shuffle app for jailbroken iPhones. Currently, iPhone apps aren't allowed to touch a user's music or iTunes functionality in any way. Instinctiv CEO Justin Smithline told us that "the minute we found out about the restrictions of the SDK...we started up an Android effort." Nevertheless it was clear in our interview that they loved the iPhone platform, using the word "amazing" more than once to talk about it.

Free But Not Equal
One of the original dustups around Android was that the 50 finalists in the Android Developer Challenge received early, privileged access to SDK updates that the rest of the developer community didn't get. While it makes sense that Google would want to fast-track Android's potential killer apps in time for the launch, it also goes against Android's atmosphere of openness.

It seems like there is some favoritism—whether it's toward specific devs or just toward the best apps is uncertain. TuneWiki is a finalist and one of Android's 10 most exciting apps. Amidst complaints about the lack of updates to Android's SDK until the recent 0.9 release and Google's secrecy, TuneWiki CEO Amnon Sarig told us that "I cannot say good enough things to say how [Google] treated us. They gave us whatever we wanted. They want us to succeed."

Since TuneWiki looks like it'll be a fantastic app, it's hard to argue with this—why shouldn't Google devote the most resources to the best and brightest, the stuff that'll make its platform shine? Logically, it should, given how much of the platform's success ultimately lies in the hands of developers. Depending on how you see Android's raison d'tre, that might be deeply troubling philosophically, on the other hand.

Nuts and Bolts
One thing that every developer we talked to pretty much agreed about is that coding for Android is not exactly warm robotic apple pie. While it's commonly assumed that Android development is done using run-of-the-mill Java, the developer of BreadCrumbz—a very cool image-based navigation app that's one of the 50 finalists, told us that the Android framework is actually "very different" from a regular Java stack, so that even "experienced Java developers still need to learn." TuneWiki's devs agreed that there's a learning curve, but both said that since it's still Java at the end of the day, it's a short one.

Instinctiv was more down on Android Java, compared to iPhone OS X, when it came to porting their app. When we talked to them before the release of the 0.9 SDK, they said that "Android is a mobile OS unlike the iPhone system, which is really kind of a desktop OS." Because of Java, they lamented that it'll be hard for Instinctiv Shuffle to do any really heavy lifting without bogging the system down, so they didn't think they'll be able to make it "as personalized" as the admittedly outlawed iPhone version.

Access to hardware appears to be much better than with the iPhone SDK, even though BreadCrumbz's Amos Yoffe says that Android "doesn't let you access the hardware directly, you go through Java APIs which are abstracted from the hardware." He still says that it's "pretty good." TuneWiki devs raved that "Android doesn't sandbox you like Apple does, so you have more flexibility." Apps run in the background just fine, battery drain issues aside. And conversely to this freedom, security policies and threats should be interesting (and maybe terrifying for nail-biter types) to watch develop, though at the start, Android seems to strike a good balance between security and freedom (insert current events political joke here).

Flexibility is a huge thing for Android. One of its strongest points—that it's going to run on a ton of phones with a rainbow of specs—might also prove to be one of its weak points, and perhaps the biggest challenge for developers. TuneWiki's Sarig said that since the Dev challenge only provided them with ...

Whether or not such a two-sided conflict will actually play out in the larger mobile-phone industry, today Android vs. iPhone is the battle raging in the mind of every fanboy, gadget geek—and software developer. Since it has all the right themes for a Tolkien-esque epic whose outcome largely rests with small, furry-footed but pure-hearted creatures—developers—we asked the developers of popular mobile apps such as Pandora, TuneWiki and Instinctiv Shuffle, mostly people working on both platforms, to tell us whether it's better to write for the no-strings-attached open Android or the more popular but catch-prone iPhone. Android may not be an overnight success, but iPhone had better watch its back.

Android: iPhone's Refugee Camp
While Android's open approach undoubtedly led some developers to pick it over the iPhone from the start, Apple's byzantine approval process and perhaps anti-competitive protection of its own apps—Podcaster and MailWrangler being two of the most prominent—have definitely driven some devs into Android's open arms, or at least made them stare longingly at it.

One such dev was the maker of the ridiculously popular Instictiv Shuffle app for jailbroken iPhones. Currently, iPhone apps aren't allowed to touch a user's music or iTunes functionality in any way. Instinctiv CEO Justin Smithline told us that "the minute we found out about the restrictions of the SDK...we started up an Android effort." Nevertheless it was clear in our interview that they loved the iPhone platform, using the word "amazing" more than once to talk about it.

Free But Not Equal
One of the original dustups around Android was that the 50 finalists in the Android Developer Challenge received early, privileged access to SDK updates that the rest of the developer community didn't get. While it makes sense that Google would want to fast-track Android's potential killer apps in time for the launch, it also goes against Android's atmosphere of openness.

It seems like there is some favoritism—whether it's toward specific devs or just toward the best apps is uncertain. TuneWiki is a finalist and one of Android's 10 most exciting apps. Amidst complaints about the lack of updates to Android's SDK until the recent 0.9 release and Google's secrecy, TuneWiki CEO Amnon Sarig told us that "I cannot say good enough things to say how [Google] treated us. They gave us whatever we wanted. They want us to succeed."

Since TuneWiki looks like it'll be a fantastic app, it's hard to argue with this—why shouldn't Google devote the most resources to the best and brightest, the stuff that'll make its platform shine? Logically, it should, given how much of the platform's success ultimately lies in the hands of developers. Depending on how you see Android's raison d'tre, that might be deeply troubling philosophically, on the other hand.

Nuts and Bolts
One thing that every developer we talked to pretty much agreed about is that coding for Android is not exactly warm robotic apple pie. While it's commonly assumed that Android development is done using run-of-the-mill Java, the developer of BreadCrumbz—a very cool image-based navigation app that's one of the 50 finalists, told us that the Android framework is actually "very different" from a regular Java stack, so that even "experienced Java developers still need to learn." TuneWiki's devs agreed that there's a learning curve, but both said that since it's still Java at the end of the day, it's a short one.

Instinctiv was more down on Android Java, compared to iPhone OS X, when it came to porting their app. When we talked to them before the release of the 0.9 SDK, they said that "Android is a mobile OS unlike the iPhone system, which is really kind of a desktop OS." Because of Java, they lamented that it'll be hard for Instinctiv Shuffle to do any really heavy lifting without bogging the system down, so they didn't think they'll be able to make it "as personalized" as the admittedly outlawed iPhone version.

Access to hardware appears to be much better than with the iPhone SDK, even though BreadCrumbz's Amos Yoffe says that Android "doesn't let you access the hardware directly, you go through Java APIs which are abstracted from the hardware." He still says that it's "pretty good." TuneWiki devs raved that "Android doesn't sandbox you like Apple does, so you have more flexibility." Apps run in the background just fine, battery drain issues aside. And conversely to this freedom, security policies and threats should be interesting (and maybe terrifying for nail-biter types) to watch develop, though at the start, Android seems to strike a good balance between security and freedom (insert current events political joke here).

Flexibility is a huge thing for Android. One of its strongest points—that it's going to run on a ton of phones with a rainbow of specs—might also prove to be one of its weak points, and perhaps the biggest challenge for developers. TuneWiki's Sarig said that since the Dev challenge only provided them with ...

T-Mobile's just rolled back on their 1GB usage cap on their 3G plans for upcoming G1 Android customers, instead going to a hold-up-while-we-figure-this-out route. The statement they give now states that they can reduce throughput for "a small fraction" of users who are using too much data, but exact terms and limits are still being reviewed before they're finalized.

http://gizmodo.com/5054473/t+mobile-...-android-phone ...

Not satisfied with the amount of boob-touching going on in real life, a Japanese programmer after my own heart created paiTouch (oh wit! pai = slang for boobs)—an iPhone touchscreen version of his much more intensive Flash simulator complete with motion physics algorithms for "realistic" jiggling and plenty of customizable parameters.

http://gizmodo.com/5054447/fingers-o...app-for-iphone ...