via Eurogamer


Epic Games' Mark Rein says it's "too early to know" whether Unreal Tournament 3 will hit PS3 this year.

Rein was speaking to Eurogamer via email in light of Australian distribution reports that the PC version is set for mid-November but won't be joined by its console sibling until 2008.

Midway yesterday confirmed that the PC version is down for release in mid-November, although it couldn't be completely specific about the release date.

The publisher recently advised investors that the highly anticipated first-person shooter might miss the pre-Christmas release window and slip to 2008, with Rein later adding that the company had felt obliged to alert investors to the possibility despite a reasonable probability of getting it done this year.

Phew, very exciting eh? For more on UT3, check out our PC and PS3 gamepages, or hook yourself up to the recent beta demo and draw your own conclusions.

An Xbox 360 version is also planned, but will arrive after PC and PS3 due to an exclusivity arrangement with Sony. ...

via Compter and Video Games


The latest Motorstorm update should now be available for European PS3 owners, which adds full DualShock 3 support for the off-road racer. Finally!

This is according to a posting on the Official PlayStation Community forums, which says Version 3.0 brings a number of new features and fixes, including support for rumbling SixAxis.

Other features in the patch include sensitivity settings for SixAxis control schemes (if anybody uses them...) and a new "Gloating Index", whatever that is.

The full list of tweaks and twists is as follows:

* Added vibration support for DUALSHOCK 3 controller with adjustable sensitivity settings.

* Grid order has been randomised for first race in any online lobby.

* Finishing positions in your last race now determine your starting grid position in the next race within the same online lobby.

* On-screen indicator has been added to show whether voice comms are issuing from TV or headset - As before, please press and hold L1 (R1 if using control scheme 'B') to toggle headset output through TV or Headset.

* Sensitivity Settings for SIXAXIS Motion Sensor control have been added.

* 'Gloating Index' has been added to the Stats card - The Gloating index gives guidance as to a racer's online prowess. It takes into account the number of people you've beaten in each race and the number of people that have beaten you. Use the gloating index to spot the players to beat in each race! Try and rank your Gloating Index up to the perfect '10'!

* Several causes for an occasional snagging issue which would destroy vehicles on suspension impact have been addressed.

* Further fixes to prevent the occasional statistics reset issue have been applied.

* Fixed an occasional issue with inaccuracies in Eliminator finishing results.

* Fixed an issue where winners leaving Eliminator before race completed could cause issues for other players in lobby. ...

via Eurogamer


Naughty Dog and Sony will release a playable demo for Uncharted: Drake's Fortune "sometime mid-November" according to AI and animation programmer Christian Gyrling.

Speaking in the comments section of a Sony US blog post (picked up on by Kotaku) about the process of creating the game's characters, Gyrling responded to questions on the subject matter-of-factly:


That would tally with what Naughty Dog's Evan Wells said in the same setting earlier this month: that the team would be creating a demo for PSN and expected it to be released before the US version of the game, which is currently on the chart for 20th November. We should expect to see it here on 7th December, as confirmed by semi-official UK blog Three Speech yesterday. ...

via Games Industry


Sony Corporation has announced its financial results for the second fiscal quarter of 2007, showing an overall revenue growth year-on-year of 12.3 per cent.

However, while the Corporation made an operating profit of JPY 90.5 billion (USD 787 million) during the quarter, up from a loss of JPY 20.8 billion (USD 182 million) last year, the games division's losses doubled in the same period.

Although revenues, largely down to the sales of the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable Slim and Lite, jumped 43 per cent to JPY 243 billion (USD 2.1 billion), last year's operating loss of JPT 43.5 billion (USD 381 million) more than doubled to JPY 96.7 billion (USD 841 million).

Sony attributed the loss primarily to "the strategic pricing of PS3 at points lower than its production cost and the increase in PS3-related inventory write-downs recorded during the current quarter compared to the same quarter of the previous year."

That inventory value now stands at JPY 248 billion (USD 2.2 billion), up 31 per cent on last year, and the result of the "build-up of finished goods inventory following the introduction of the PS3 platform in Japan, North America and Europe."

Additionally, while sales of the PlayStation 3 have now hit 1.31 million units globally during the last quarter, with PS3 software sales reaching 10.3 million units, sales of PlayStation 2 hardware is down four per cent year-on-year, with PS2 software unit sales falling by around a quarter.

The PSP is still going strong, with over half a million units sold this quarter than in the same period last year, although software sales for the handheld dropped by around five per cent in that time. ...

via IGN

Square Enix has reinstated its "Return Home to Vana'diel" campaign, urging Final Fantasy XI players who dropped their online accounts to rejoin the community in time for the release of the multiplatform MMO's fourth expansion pack in November.

Customers who deleted their Content IDs or PlayOnline accounts are now able to rejoin their fellow adventurers in the world of Vana'diel as the Wings of the Goddess expansion ships on Nov. 20.

Square Enix held its first Return Home to Vana'diel event in North America in 2005.

Uniting players in North America, Europe and Japan, FFXI is the first massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game capable of simultaneous communication across multiple platforms: PlayStation 2, PC and Xbox 360. Now in its fifth year of service, the game has a community of more than 500,000 subscribers and more than 1.7 million player characters worldwide.

The Return Home to Vana'diel campaign will run until Feb. 29, 2008. ...

Strmnnrmn has just posted an update on the current status of Daedalus R13! :thumbup:

Here's what he had to say on his blog: http://strmnnrmn.blogspot.com/


R13 close, honestly!

Apologies again for the lack of updates. I know people get nervous when I don't update regularly, but I don't like to post when I have nothing new or exciting to talk about.

I'm very close to releasing R13, I've just been struggling to find the time to add the final finishing touches to the savestate support. I've found it hard to get into a regular working pattern since moving, so what should have been a 1 week job has ended up taking a month. Bioshock and Halo 3 haven't helped either.

Savestates are working very well. The current implementation provides 10 slots which are shared across all roms. You can save to any slot at any time from an option on the Pause menu, or choose to reload a previous savestate. In this way it works just like QuickSave/QuickLoad found in various PC games (I'm tempted to add a special slot for this to the top level of the Pause menu).

I use zlib to compress the savestates, so an 8MiB savestate compresses down to 1MiB (or even smaller if you're running games which don't use the Expansion Pak).

There are just a couple of things I need to finish off now before I can release. Firstly I need to check if the savestate you're loading is for a different rom than is currently loaded. If this is the case I need to scan through your available roms looking for the correct one, and load it. To make this efficient I need to get the RomDB which I use for the PC build working on the PSP.

The second thing I need to do is come up with a decent way of linking some metadata to the savestate so I can show this in the UI. Just simple stuff like the full name of the rom, time the savestate was created and the total time spent playing when it was created. I figure without this information it'll be quite difficult to figure out what it stored in each savestate slot. The alternative is to add a text entry system to the UI so you can name each savestate, but I think this will just delay things even more.

In summary R13 is really close and I've not forgotten about it. Just a few more things to sort out and it'll be ready for release.



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News/release from bboyjcm

...

Feddemaster & Kwastie have just released a simple clone of the game Tic-Tac-Toe. Here's the info from the release thread.


Download And Give Feedback Via Comments
via Kwastie ...

over at gp32x forums MWeston did led it slip that OMAP3430 is confirmed for the new console with this commend
MWeston did let it slip

but some of did thing it was very likely that OMAP is the SOC after craigix made some commends like this
...