[Chlazza] let us know about their Xbox hard drive to SATA adapter, allowing the use of an Xbox 360 (original) hard drive on a PC without voiding the drive’s warranty. Looking for a fun and enriching experience read: really bored and inspired by a previous adapter we featured, [Chlazza] set out to make their own and ended up succeeding with a board that costs less than $1 in parts. Of course the drive uses its own Fat32 based file system so there is still some hacking to do if you intended to read the data, but this is a step in the right direction.

http://hackaday.com/2010/07/19/xbox-...adapter-redux/ ...

Crackdown 2 just barely held off Dance on Broadway last week to maintain the top spot on the UK all formats chart for a second week in a row. According to Chart-Track, "Orb Collector 2" sales dropped 36 percent and only sold about 800 units more than Ubisoft's show tune-themed Just Dance successor (the original Just Dance retained a supporting role in the ten spot). Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 and Red Dead Redemption each slipped one spot to third and fourth, respectively. The lone new entry in the top ten was Disney's Toy Story 3 in fifth place.

In hardware sales, although Chart-Track didn't reveal specific numbers, the Xbox 360 Slim (or Short) enjoyed the UK's most successful launch for a "revised" console. The redesigned console surpassed the relaunches of both the PS2 and PS3 slim models and, in its opening weekend, matched the regional launch figures of the Pro and Core Xbox 360 SKUs from back in late 2005.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/07/19/cr...0-s-has-solid/ ...

Budget multiformat game Pure Football has been advertised by Blockbuster for £9.99 – less than two months after it hit store shelves.
The retailer has placed a series of ads in Metro listing the game at £9.99. It is selling copies of Ubisoft’s five-a-side footie title on its website as well as in stores.
Pure Football originally went on sale on May 28th with Xbox 360, PC and PS3 versions retailing for £29.99. It went head-to-head with EA’s 2010 FIFA World Cup which was released a month earlier.
Ubisoft even signed a deal with Liverpool star Steven Gerrard to feature in Pure Football’s box art.
Earlier this year Namco Bandai’s Clash of Titans also received a £29.99 RRP – a price sitting halfway between the traditional budget £19.99 and full £44.99 RRPs.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/40059/Pure...ice-cut-to-999 ...

Guerrilla Games is promising tighter, more responsive controls for the forthcoming Killzone 3.

Writing on the official Killzone site, Guerrilla Game Director Mathijs de Jonge described the difficult decisions the team took in addressing this highly contentious issue. On the one hand, the response from the controls was the subject of much criticism from many gamers. On the other, the sensation of weight and inertia was one of the defining features of the game's primary handshake with the player.

"Our first priority when we started working on the controls for Killzone 3 was to listen closely to Killzone 2's players - what they liked, what they disliked, and how they felt things could be improved," Mathijs wrote. "Accuracy and responsiveness consistently came up as the top issues. At the same time, a lot of players were saying they loved the weighty feel."

Back in February, Digital Foundry took possession of a DualShock 3 controller adapted by legendary modsmith Benjamin Heckendorn. Connected to an LED monitor board, it allowed us to measure the latency between button press and on-screen action, the so-called input or controller lag.

Our result? The simple act of firing a pistol (something you wouldn't expect to have much heft or inertia) took 150ms from button press to muzzle-flash on-screen. In more challenging scenes, with the game dropping frames, latency was even higher. In comparison, most other first-person shooters running at 30FPS tend to weigh in around 100ms to 133ms max, while 60FPS titles like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare can achieve a very respectable 66ms response in optimum conditions.

The official Killzone site talks about the team "going back to the drawing board" in improving controller response.

"Right now it's still a work in progress," Mathijs explained. "But we're definitely getting there. We've recalibrated the dead zone to be more responsive and significantly reduced the input lag, resulting in far better accuracy. Best of all, we've managed to retain that sense of weight that set Killzone 2 apart from other shooters. I can't wait for people to try it out."

We played the E3 demo of Killzone 3 at the event and while clearly a proper analysis wasn't possible within the confines of SCEE's press lounge, there was definitely a sense of an additional crispness to the controls. However, in the pre-alpha demo there was still a somewhat variable frame-rate - definitely one of the significant contributory factors in adding to Killzone 2's controller lag.

Overall impressions were very positive though, and bearing in mind how little has been shown of the full game thus far, we can't wait to see more.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...lag-blog-entry ...

Independent games label Codename has been drafted in by Sony to create new experiences for PlayStation Home.

Four titles are due over the next few months from Codename, which brings together a number of independent developers.

In Duelling Gentlemen, created by Odd Gentleman, players strategize the right moves on a giant stage in Home's Plaza, "to outsmart opponents and win this old-time battle for honour and prestige", says the official blurb (via Kotaku).

Peanut Gallery, winner of the IndieCade 2010 Audience Award, brings Minor Battle, in which two teams run around a cube of four screens to beat each other in a capture-the-flag style platformer.

The wonderfully-named Super Awesome Mountain RPG, created by Codename, is described as a blend of tabletop board games and fantasy RPGs, where players ascend a fantastical mountain in Home's Central Plaza using a custom animated figurine.

And finally, Cogs in 3D multiplayer is a multiplayer version of Lazy8's Steampunk-style game. In Home it'll be a "dynamic public spectacle in the Central Plaza".

"We're thrilled to be partnering with PlayStation Home to create and develop games that step outside the parameters of traditional game development and we're really looking forward to the creative opportunities that lie ahead," said Codename founder Jesse Vigil.

"Our model of pulling together teams of developers and allowing them to make their creative dreams a reality has only one main tenet - any game created for PlayStation Home is graphically and visually entertaining to both play and watch, at the same time."

At the beginning of July Home's service director Jack Buser said PlayStation Home has been "a huge success" for Sony despite scepticism among press and consumers. "The proof is in the pudding," he said.

Home has 14 million registered users, according to Sony.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/in...aystation-home ...

Upcoming stab-em-up Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is not Assassin's "2.5", Ubisoft has insisted.

Brotherhood, due out on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November, comes only a year after Assassin's Creed II, which we liked very much indeed.

As a result some fans of the successful open world action series are sceptical about the game, which includes multiplayer for the first time.

Despite having only a year to create Brotherhood, developer Ubisoft Montreal has been able to make a game even bigger than its predecessor, outspoken associate producer Jean-Francois Boivin told Eurogamer.

"It's not a mission pack," he said. "It's not a 2.5. It's set in Rome, which is three times the size of Florence, which technologically is a challenge to do, just memory wise. You have this enormous playground to play with. And you have these new features, these new elements that bring a new twist and a new angle to Ezio's story.

"It's about Ezio teaching others how to become assassins. There are a lot of core features we worked on. We brought a lot of new, deep and vast features – the old Rome upgrade system, the economic system - the Brotherhood is a game in of itself.

"Plus we're bringing everything people loved about Assassin's Creed II. We took each feature and said, 'How can we make that feature better, or give it a bit of spice, a bit of Tabasco, or a bit of baby oil so it flows a bit better?' We will be extremely successful in convincing fans once they have the controller in their hands. Then the question is going to be, 'How did they do it in a year?' That's going to be the question that's fun to answer later on."

Boivin said Ubisoft Montreal was able to develop Brotherhood quicker than previous Assassin's titles because it had already established many of the base tools required to build the game.

"First of all we have extremely stable tools. We've been building Anvil [game engine] for six, seven years now. It's extremely stable. We have loads of tools that work super, super well.

"As you've probably read everywhere, Assassin's Creed 2 had hundreds and hundreds of resources all over the world. But then when you start submitting you ramp down a lot. We didn't do that. We just stayed right up there and kept our production velocity, starting right away.

"We already knew we wanted to do Rome. So the graphics team stayed the graphics team - bang, start building Rome really quickly. We know all our technical and design guidelines. How to build a city so Ezio can do some free running? The AI guys – how you can improve on NPC AI? How can we improve on the horse? How can we improve on the fights? We started working on that right away.

"Then the storyline. We already knew it was Ezio's story, and Patrice Désilets [now departed] already knew what the story was. So it was quick for us to do a story blueprint. Maybe two weeks after the release of Assassin's Creed 2 we already had the story down, and we probably started writing a few pages of script. Casting was already underway.

"The operative word here is velocity. And we still have people helping us. Our Singapore office is still working with us. The studio in Quebec City is helping us. It's a question of keeping going and making a full game in a year."

Boivin's comments mirror those of UK marketing boss Murray Pannell, who told Eurogamer he expects Brotherhood to outsell Assassin's Creed II.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ub...assassin-s-2-5 ...

Ubisoft has made it clear that, although Michael Jackson: The Experience wasn't announced until well after the King of Pop's death, it is not a posthumous cash-in.

UK marketing director for Ubisoft Murray Pannel told GI.biz that - of course - he hoped Jacko's popularity continued, but that Michael Jackson: The Experience was in development well before the superstar's passing:

"The truth is that we were engaged with Jackson and the Jackson family long before his death," he said.

"By all accounts he was very pro-actively looking for a partner that he felt could bring value - and Ubisoft seemed to fit the bill very well."

"So this isn't something that's been jumped on since his death - we've been working on this, despite the fact that we announced it quite recently, for a long time.

"It's well advanced in terms of the formats it's working on - we know how big he is, how loved he is by his fans and how successful he's been as an artist. Hopefully we can bring that to millions more gamers as well."

It seems that Ubisoft had to work hard for the game's rights, however, taking part in an 'intense bidding war' to get its hands on the Jackson name.

The game will be available for Kinect on for Xbox 360, PS3 Move, PSP, Wii and DS this 'Holiday' (Christmas).

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

Elite creator and Frontier founder David Braben has come to the defence of Kinect against those claiming it is hampered by latency issues - telling CVG that the device enables "very fresh" experiences.

Responding to CVG's opinion 'Kinect: Lag? What lag?', Braben agreed that the games media had made too much of perceived latency issues surrounding the device.

Frontier has created Kinectimals for the camera-based peripheral - a family-friendly big cat simulator, which has been dubbed 'Kinect's Nintendogs'.

"I agree that the lag factor has been overplayed," he told CVG. "As I think you hint at in your piece, what Kinect enables feels very fresh too.

"There has been a tendency in our business to knock most new technologies - apart from better graphics perhaps. This is no different."

Early videos of Kinect showed very noticeable latency between the actions of the player and what appeared on the screen in front of them - most notoriously when Jonathan Ross tested the device in February.

However, Microsoft promised that this lag would be greatly reduced by the time the device launches in November.

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

SEGA has announced that it will release exclusive add-on missions for Valkyria Chronicles II as an incentive for pre-ordering the strategy RPG.

The missions will be available as a free PSN download when the game is released for PSP on 3rd September in Europe.

There missions take the form of exercises against two rival classes, one requiring you to destroy all enemies, the other to take over an encampment. The SEGA blog has the details.

Valkyria Chronicles II is the sequel to the excellent PS3 original. It adds co-op and competitive multiplayer to the mix of turn-based strategy, teen soap opera, levelling and baroque, fantasy First World War fashions.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/fr...-chronicles-ii ...