Pre-orders for the Nintendo DS mental exercise game Brain Age have soared on buzz of daily training that can keep brains in shape.
On Monday's Amazon.com Computer and Video Games sales charts, Brain Age leaped from #135 to the #5 position.

The game will be released to retail next week in the U.S.

The Brain Age series has sold 3.3M units to date in Japan in a craze that has consumers who normally shy from video games participating in computation, memorization, and identification tests.

Brain Age is inspired by a book written by Professor Ryuta Kawashima. Kawashima explains to players that like a human body, the brain can exercise through quick, simple exercises in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Nintendo will release the follow-up to Brain Age, called Big Brain Academy next month.

http://news.punchjump.com/article.php?id=2276 ...

Two new titles for Nintendo DS™ will extend Nintendo's mental mastery and guarantee Nintendo DS owners will have plenty of ways to keep their brains busy this summer.

Big Brain Academy™ is the second game in the record-breaking brain-training series taking Japan by storm. In Big Brain Academy, players perform a series of fun and mentally stimulating mini-games. The game then assigns them a letter grade and cites a famous person or profession with a similar set of skills. This graphically appealing title measures skills like thinking, memorization, analysis, identification and computation. Big Brain Academy, Rated E for Everyone, launches May 29.

A month later, sudoku fans will find themselves in number-crunching heaven as Sudoku Gridmaster makes its way to Nintendo DS on June 26. The system's touch screen makes choosing or writing numbers easy. Players will find more than 400 puzzles, all of which were selected by the original creators of sudoku.

Sudoku is the most popular puzzle game in the world right now, and Sudoku Gridmaster puts hundreds of puzzles in portable form, just in time for the summer travel season. To satisfy novices and sudoku experts alike, the puzzles come in four difficulty settings: practice, easy, normal and hard. Sudoku Gridmaster is Rated E for Everyone.

For more information about Big Brain Academy or Sudoku Gridmaster, please visit www.nintendo.com. ...

Two new titles for Nintendo DS™ will extend Nintendo's mental mastery and guarantee Nintendo DS owners will have plenty of ways to keep their brains busy this summer.

Big Brain Academy™ is the second game in the record-breaking brain-training series taking Japan by storm. In Big Brain Academy, players perform a series of fun and mentally stimulating mini-games. The game then assigns them a letter grade and cites a famous person or profession with a similar set of skills. This graphically appealing title measures skills like thinking, memorization, analysis, identification and computation. Big Brain Academy, Rated E for Everyone, launches May 29.

A month later, sudoku fans will find themselves in number-crunching heaven as Sudoku Gridmaster makes its way to Nintendo DS on June 26. The system's touch screen makes choosing or writing numbers easy. Players will find more than 400 puzzles, all of which were selected by the original creators of sudoku.

Sudoku is the most popular puzzle game in the world right now, and Sudoku Gridmaster puts hundreds of puzzles in portable form, just in time for the summer travel season. To satisfy novices and sudoku experts alike, the puzzles come in four difficulty settings: practice, easy, normal and hard. Sudoku Gridmaster is Rated E for Everyone.

For more information about Big Brain Academy or Sudoku Gridmaster, please visit www.nintendo.com. ...

Davr has updated his Draw App for the DS, heres the latest news:

Hah! Turned out there were two problems with libpng on the nds:1. png_zalloc(), which allocates memory for zlib, was refusing to allocate any memory, thinking it was too much. I just removed that check and it works. Boy this was annoying to track down.
2. I forgot a FAT_fclose() in there, so the file was 0 bytes (since it never got flushed to disk)

— now no more confusion over .bin or .rle, since it directly spits out png’s!

Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...

Davr has updated his Draw App for the DS, heres the latest news:

Hah! Turned out there were two problems with libpng on the nds:1. png_zalloc(), which allocates memory for zlib, was refusing to allocate any memory, thinking it was too much. I just removed that check and it works. Boy this was annoying to track down.
2. I forgot a FAT_fclose() in there, so the file was 0 bytes (since it never got flushed to disk)

— now no more confusion over .bin or .rle, since it directly spits out png’s!

Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...

PhoenixJ posted this:

Hey! I just finished developing my first GBA game, it’s a simple arcade-style space shootem’up called Microshooter.

The controls:
Start – Pause
Select – Reset game during pause
A – Shoot
B – Bombs
D-pad – Move

More info --> http://gbadev.org/demos.php?showinfo=1277 ...

Apple Computer Inc. never seemed too bothered about whether it made money. Worrying about earnings was for the bean counters at Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc.; Apple was too busy being hip and sexy to fret about its bottom line.

The runaway success of its iPod portable music player, though, seems to have given the company a renewed lust for life. After years in the wilderness as a niche maker of groovy computers and software for designers and musicians, Apple is starting to enjoy mainstream success.

And, just like every other underground artist, Apple faces some tough decisions that will leave it open to accusations of selling out. As the Cupertino, California-based company adds television shows, films and sporting events to its iTunes Internet store, one entertainment category is notable by its absence -- pornography.

Apple said last month that iTunes customers were buying about 1 million videos a week, and have downloaded more than 15 million of them since the moving-picture services started in October. Given that Apple has sold more than 1 billion songs, the potential for exponential growth is clear as TV and film executives learn to stop worrying and love the Internet.

It's pretty obvious, if a little dismaying, that adding an adult-video section to the iTunes Web site would generate a ton of new visitors and additional revenue for Apple. If the tiny 2.5 inch screen on the video iPod is no deterrent to people watching ``Desperate Housewives,'' it's not likely to hinder potential viewers of, errrr, desperate housewives.

One More Thing

It's also obvious, though, that porn would sit badly with Apple's self-image. One more thing, says Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs at the next marketing presentation, as the wall-sized video screen behind him fills with fleshy images of bump and grind. It's hard to picture that scene; Apple is all about whiteness and purity, not smut.

Money, though, is the root of all evil, and there's a lot of money to be made from the alleged evil of so-called adult entertainment. Porn is, literally, the Internet's dirty big secret. There are 4.2 million pornographic Web sites, with 372 million porn pages handling 68 million search requests per day, according to TopTenReviews Inc., which analyzes software products and Internet services.

$20 Billion Temptation

The porn industry generates $57 billion in global revenue over the Web, the research firm says, with sales of adult videos contributing $20 billion. Stealing just a sliver of that market would goose Apple's efforts to replicate the success of its music business, which helped generate a first-quarter profit of $565 million on sales of $5.75 billion.

Apple's desire to find additional sources of revenue seems to be increasing. Last week, the company introduced software that lets Apple computers with Intel Corp. chips run Microsoft software -- a tryst that would have been unthinkable in the past.

It's a little saddening that the last maverick in the computer-hardware industry is jumping into bed with Microsoft. It is evidence, though, that Apple is tiring of being an also-ran with just 4 percent of the U.S. market for personal computers. For years, Apple seemed happy just to survive; now, the company seems more willing to compete.

Also last week, the Red Hot Chili Peppers announced that advance tickets for their next concert tour would be sold exclusively through the iTunes store. Whatever the merits of the lawsuit Apple is fighting with the Beatles' music company Apple Corps Ltd. over logos and brand names, CEO Jobs is clearly trying to move beyond just selling digital tunes.

Bundling Bones

Apple is already starting to bundle music videos with songs; it's not hard to envisage a future where anyone who wants a ticket to see the Rolling Stones strut their sexagenarian stuff at Madison Square Garden will have to pay Apple for the accompanying video and album collection, whether they want the package or not.

The mobile-phone market may prove to be a useful test of how Apple is maturing. Internet gossip sites have been awash with speculation that Apple will finally relent and introduce a device that lets you make phone calls as well as listen to your iTunes music collection. The handset market, though, is notoriously fickle. Telephony is intrinsically boring. Apple seems reluctant to risk a screw-up that would disappoint its fans.

Get Yourself Connected

The numbers, though, suggest Apple should swallow that risk. Selling more than 42 million iPods in less than five years looks like success, until you realize that mobile-phone sales climbed to about 795 million handsets last year. IPod fans will pay top dollar for an Apple iPhone; CEO Jobs should provide one.

The same applies to porn. A search on Google Inc. shows a bunch of companies willing to sell the content and software needed to view erotic material on an iPod. Apple may as well grab some of that revenue for itself.

The more ...

Via Gamepro

Rumors of a "PSP 2" sprung up last week on gaming blog ShackNews. Author Chris Remo claimed that a "reliable source" shared inside information with him on Sony's plans to design a successor to the PlayStation Portable.

Remo's report "definitely refers to a brand new system," and is probably not related to seperate rumors of a redesigned PSP model. Remo's piece suggests that the so-called "PSP 2" would skip the PSP's much-criticized UMD format in favor of an integrated hard drive. The hard drive support makes sense, Remo says, because "there is little reason for Sony to stick with [UMD]" given that format's poor sales.

The report concludes that the device "may" appear "in the next three years."

We contacted Sony Computer Entertainment in light of this story, and were informed by a representative that "to date we have made no announcements concerning a new PSP or a HDD." Remo's story had a reaction from Sony's Paul Murphy as well: "As you know, SCEA does not comment on rumors or speculation."

In other words, Sony's not saying.

There may be no way to confirm that Sony is working on a PSP 2, but two recent news stories lend weight to the notion that something is brewing behind closed doors at Sony:

PlayStation 4 Watch: Chipmaker nVidia Lands New Sony Design Deals

Sony, IBM, and Toshiba Working on PlayStation 4 Chip?

Up to this point, the popular theory concerning nVidia's new Sony design deal is that the company was starting work on the PlayStation 4. But it's also possible that nVidia is actually designing technology for a "PSP 2."

Likewise, the recent partnership extension between IBM, Sony, and Toshiba may be focused on shrinking the PS3's Cell chip down to portable size.

Of course, without official comment from Sony, these are little more than theories. ...

MPH has released the sources to his UMD Game Loader and posted this news:

For the moment, i try some new technic to load fully a firmware on 1.00 and 1.50 psp.

The 64k limit is not a problem because size of major crypted prx are still less than 64k and for the multiplayer and sleep mode, i made some research but it's hard to find the bug ;-) ...