An FCC filing today by Mitsumi exposed what appears to be a Nintendo DS testing platform. As you can see, the board above has all of the components of a Nintendo DS, including two screens, controller, and camera. However, these components are installed on a spacious mother board, presumably to facilitate testing.

It’s unclear if if this testing board is being used for a new version of the DS, or if Mitsumi is simply updating their existing WLAN card in the current iteration of the DS. It’s also possible that this isn’t a testing board at all and Nintendo is just planning to release a ridiculously large version of the DS. Either way, it’s an interesting look at the DS and the testing process Nintendo’s suppliers go through.

http://www.wirelessgoodness.com/2010...vealed-by-fcc/ ...

Kevin Butler, VP of PlayStation advertising, has teased that his next project will be Gran Turismo 5. The hints raise our hopes for an imminent release of Polyphony Digital's expected masterpiece.

Butler takes on the role of VP of Artistic Modification in his latest ad, presenting the products of his artistic mind in ModNation Racers.

The spotlight features such great lines as "Half horse, half motorcycle, half man, all awesome" and "Tell me more, grown up child actor." That last jibe is targeted at CEO of SCEA, Jack Tretton, who responds with his own witty one-liners as they compete for poll position.


As much as we love ModNation Racers, it's the end of the trailer that grabs our attention. Butler implies that his next advertising and gaming project is Gran Turismo 5, which must be solid evidence for a 2010 launch for the game.

"So pick up ModNation Racers to download my mod and track, then create your own. Maybe I'll take a spin in your epic artistic endeavour. That is if I'm not two busy with my next project. Let's just say it's a little racing game that rhymes with Man Furismo Jive."

A number of US retailers have pinned an October release date on GT5 and with E3 just around the corner, we're not only expecting a full blow-out on the game, but also a solid release date.

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

Warner Bros has announced that the sequel to its 2009 DS hit will be named Super Scribblenauts.
The game was originally announced as Scribblenauts 2 back in March and is due to hit shelves this autumn. It will the structure of the original Scribblenauts, which has sold more than 1.1 million units worldwide.
Once again, players will be challenged to collect Starites by summoning any object they can think of. In addition to new puzzles, Super Scribblenauts features upgraded controls and more options when creating items.
Most notably, gamers will now be able to use adjectives to create more varied objects, allowing them to change the colour, size, style, behaviour and other aspects of their tools.
Creations can range from gentlemanly, flaming, flying zombies to purple, obese winged elephants, according to Warner.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/39023/Warn...lenauts-sequel ...

Heavy Rain's turned out to be a significant win for Sony in Europe this year, achieving a chart position that's bested every Xbox 360 release in 2010 so far.

The data comes by way of Nintendo's end of year financial results, which claim that Heavy Rain charted tenth in Europe - above every Xbox 360 game on the list. This is a surprising win for a game that essentially birthed its own genre.

The Top 30 list was gathered by Nintendo from GfK's data for the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. Although this doesn't represent all European countries, we'd expect these nine nations to comprise around 90 per cent of Europe's video games market.


Three other PS3 releases charted in the top ten. These were Final Fantasy XIII in fourth, Modern Warfare 2 in sixth and God of War III in eighth. The latter achieved a third position in the US according to NPD.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 has to be content with a twelfth position in the chart, with Battlefield Bad Company 2. Modern Warfare 2 comes in at fifteenth and Mass Effect 2 just behind in sixteenth. The discrepancy in chart positions for the two Call of Duty platforms suggests that, unlike in the US, Infinity Ward's game significantly outsold on the PS3 in the last few months.

The top of the chart is dominated by the Nintendo Wii, where Wii Fit Plus, New Super Mario Bros., and Just Dance take the top three positions in that order.

Despite this, the PS3 enjoys the most chart positions with nine of the top 30. The Xbox 360 sits just behind with eight, the Nintendo Wii lags with seven and the Nintendo DS achieves just six. Although the PS3 demonstrates a significant stronghold in Europe, PSP games failed to chart.

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

According to a report on ME Gamers, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption has become the latest game to be banned in the traditionally sensitive territory.
The claims come from a retailer in the region. When asked for confirmation, both Rockstar and distributor Red Entertainment declined to comment.
The game joins a growing list of titles banned from release in recent months. The likes of Heavy Rain, Darksiders, God of War and, a little while back, Grand Theft Auto have all encountered problems thanks to content that is either religiously sensitive or, for want of a better word, rude.
EA pre-empted any possible ban by deciding not to release Dante’s Inferno in the region.
Why Red Dead would succumb to such a decision is unclear for the time being.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/39017/Red-Dead-banned-in-UAE ...

The average iPhone app has sold 101,024 copies over a lifetime of 261 days, according to new research published by former AppVee boss Alex Ahlund.
The company surveyed 96 iPhone developers, big and small, about their apps' sales performance.
The average app sells 387 copies a day, and the average price is $5.49. If that seems a bit high, be warned that Ahlund's research included one $49.99 app, which skewed the price.
The average app costs $6,453 to develop, and gets 3.89 updates.
However, Ahlund also warns that when you remove the top 10% of apps from his figures, you get an average sales figure of 11,625, with 23% of apps selling less than 1,000 downloads.

And the key to success? "Developers can either find a niche and get extremely lucky, or produce a fantastic product with high production values," writes Ahlund. "In the end, the latter is the safer route to success."

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...ded-100k-times ...

App industry expert Alex Ahlund broke-down the iPhone app sales market to determine the ins and outs of succeeding in an increasingly competitive arena
Alex Ahlund, former CEO of AppVee and current adviser to Appolicious, has published a detailed breakdown of recent iPhone app sales on startup profiler site TechCrunch.
The survey utalises detailed financial information from 96 developers, with Ahlund looking at the success rates of market applications from major studios and single-person authors “ranging in price from 99 cents to $79.99.”


“This mining of data was intended to cover the entire iPhone app industry as a whole, without allowing outliers to skew the data too much in one direction,” Ahlund said.
On the general cost/sales results, Ahlund found that:
“The average total number of units sold [per App] was 101,024 within an average period of 261 days. The average number of units sold per day was 387.”
“The average price was $5.49, although the data skews due to the $49.99 outlier. In most cases, the price point was $0.99. The average number of updates released was 3.89, with the average total development cost amounting to $6,453,” he added.
Ahlund qualified these results by noting that “several developers omitted development costs and most did not include their personal time in these figures.”
“It is safe to assume the cost would be at least five or ten times more when using a contracted team,” he said.
“But on average here, iPhone developers are seeing a return of more than 15 times their initial, albeit small, development costs.”
Ahlund went on to note that when the top 10 per cent of the most successful apps were removed from the data, the numbers skewed much lower.
“In this scenario, the average sales were 11,625 total units, averaging 44 copies/day. Approximately 23% of apps sold less than 1000 units from launch,” he noted.
“56% of apps sold less than or equal to 10,000 units, while 90% sold less than 100,000 units, with the remaining 10% achieving sales of 127,000 – 3,000,000 units.”
Other interesting discoveries included finding out that application updates do far less to boost sales than previously thought.
“Some developers reported that updating the app gave only a small—and brief—spike in downloads,” Ahlund said.
“What did seem to have a larger impact on sales was a drop in price, although this also tended to taper off quickly.”
Having an app featured by Apple was discvered to be a much greater sales-boosting event for studios.
“The level of Apple promotion reflected what sort of increase the developer would see. Areas such as ‘New and Noteworthy’ produced slightly less gains than ‘Staff Favorites’ or ‘What’s Hot’,” Ahlund said.
“Generally, it is safe to assume a 2-20X sales spike following being featured, with the effect lasting roughly a week before returning to average numbers.”
Ahlund went on to breakdown the most ‘traditionally’ succesful marketing techniques, with an emphasis on social networking sites seeming the surest route for developers to take.

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/301...ent-costs-6453 ...

Newly released for Pandora:



Giana’s Return aims to be a worthy UNOFFICIAL sequel of “The Great Giana Sisters”. There is an official sequel for Nintendo DS named “Giana Sisters DS” ( http://www.giana-sisters.com/ ) and also has slightly more levels than Giana’s Return. In other words, it’s worth the money

Download Here ...

Elaborating on an item previously mentioned among last weekend’s Cornell final projects list, this time with video:

For their ECE final project, [Adam Papamarcos] and [Kerran Flanagan] implemented a real-time video object tracking system centered around an ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller. Their board ingests an NTSC video camera feed, samples frames at a coarse 39×60 pixel resolution (sufficient for simple games), processes the input to recognize objects and then drives a TV output using the OSD display chip from a video camera (this chip also recognizes the horizontal and vertical sync pulses from the input video signal, which the CPU uses to synchronize the digitizing step). Pretty amazing work all around.

Sometimes clever projects online are scant on information…but as this is their final grade, they’ve left no detail to speculation. Along with a great explanation of the system and its specific challenges, there’s complete source code, schematics, a parts list, the whole nine yards. Come on, guys! You’re making the rest of us look bad… Videos after the break…

http://hackaday.com/2010/05/15/human...crocontroller/ ...