As you might have guessed, we're really busy guys. As such, we can't be expected to actually play the video games we write about. We dish out thousands of dollars every year to get local work release program participants to handle the grunt work for us -- but if a recent entry in the Mario AI Competition is any indication, we may soon be able to keep that cash in our wallets, opting for computer-assisted gaming instead.

Posted after the break is a video demo of the entry in question -- designed by artificial intelligence programmer Robin Baumgarten, this computer script effortlessly pushes the plump plumber through the hazardous environments of Super Mario World. It handles the game's challenges much better than our prisoner assistants -- and best of all, it definitely won't try to stab us in our sleep.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/13/co...rld-by-itself/ ...

PlayStation 3 owners with a thirst for Trophy collecting are likely familiar with the above. It's the old way of seeing your PS3 e-accomplishments online, something Sony is planning to update with enhanced PlayStation Network Trophies feature on PlayStation.com.

What's changing? The ability to view more detailed info on your Trophy collection online for one thing. Sorting, Trophies comparison against friends and enemies, and a better PlayStation Network Portable ID for three more things.

Eric Lempel, director of PlayStation Network Operations, lays it all out for you.

My Trophies collection is nothing to brag about, so don't expect to see me flaunting my PSN Portable ID around the web.

When can we expect all this? Later this week, according to Lempel.

http://kotaku.com/5336125/sony-enhan...ragging-online ...

Free Radical Design's Haze was not a good game. After being delayed multiple times, the futuristic first-person shooter landed with a thud. Part of that can be attributed to the developer's struggle coming to grips with PlayStation 3 hardware.

It's not an unfamiliar story, but one that may explain why the former TimeSplitters devs faltered with Haze. Free Radical co-founder Karl Hilton, now at new home Crytek UK, explains to Develop how "technical issues" affected the final product.

"We hit a few stumbling blocks on it that meant we spent more time trying get the game running properly and less time to design the game properly," Hilton says, lamenting that Haze "wasn't the game it should have been."

Hilton's still up on the PS3, though, despite Haze's critical and commercial performance. He calls Sony's platform a "powerful machine but a difficult one to get the best out of."

And believe it or not, his new employers will get the best out of it, Hilton says.

"We know the PS3 can do amazing things, and no one has pushed it as far as it can go, but I think the CryEngine gives us a great head start on it," he says.

Blame the hardware, if you want. Blame the developer if that makes you feel any better. Me? I'm blaming Korn.

http://kotaku.com/5336188/haze-devel...ed-game-design ...

Boy, these PS3 Slim rumours are really building up a good head of steam, no? We're averaging one good rumour a day on them, the latest being a fairly sensible one, courtesy of British retailers.

According to trade site MCV, British retailers are currently in the process of "clearing PS3 hardware stock from the channel", with two "leading national retailers" telling the site that there'll be no more PS3 shipments until September.

When, presumably, there will be new shipments. Shipments of a newer, slimmer PS3.

If you're wondering when we'll stop posting these rumours, Sony's GamesCom press conference is next week, and it's widely expected the new machine will be unveiled there. That's when we'll stop.

http://kotaku.com/5336180/latest-har...british-retail ...

The Xbox 360 summer system earlier this week made it possible for users to buy and download titles directly to their console. But don't go looking to digitally import games.

The US Xbox LIVE Marketplace and the Japanese Xbox LIVE Marketplace have different titles.

For work, I have an American Xbox 360 with a US Xbox LIVE Gold account. I use it to download games and write reviews of them. When Games On Demand was rolled out, I wanted to check out the instant gratification service and tried downloading Assassin's Creed and got this message:

This item isn't available from your current location.

I tried downloading Call of Duty 2 and got the same message. I tried downloading LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga and got the same message. Thought this might be third party region coding, but got ditto for Perfect Dark Zero and even Viva Piñata, which is available on the Japanese Marketplace.

However, it was possible to download Xbox title Fable.

The reverse seems to be true as well — meaning, those living outside Japan do not appear able to digitally import Japanese Xbox 360 games on demand.

Region locking: Good for corporations, and for now, bad for Microsoft and developers. These titles are available used in retail shops at lower prices. I shall take my business elsewhere.

http://kotaku.com/5336183/xbox-360-g...-region-locked ...

There's also a custom box creation. French modder darthchris13 whipped up the creation and then compared it size-wise to a SEGA GameGear.

The SNES Portable sports a 2.5 inch screen, and according to darthchris13, the tricky part was getting all the SNES wiring into such a small casing. Nice work.

http://kotaku.com/5336418/snes-porta...op-at-case-mod ...

9/9/09 will not produce any major Sega events commemorating the Dreamcast launch of 9/9/99, but the company is thinking about the future of its last gaming console in one key way.

The head of Sega West, Mike Hayes, told me Wednesday that, despite the pride Sega has in the Dreamcast, it has no formal celebration to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its launch in September.

"Generally we won't be doing anything that's official," he said. The main reason is that Sega has reinvented itself as a software company. And it's important for us to focus on the other platforms that are alive and current."

"Informally, because there are people in the company who were involved in the Dreamcast launch, there will be celebrations," he said, "But as a company, publicly, that's going to be something we're going to be pretty low key about for obvious reasons. We're effectively a different company."

Hayes said that Sega has reinvented itself as a software company, which makes it more fitting to focus on other company's hardware. "It's not to disrespect the excellent system the Dreamcast was," he said, "Or the innovations that were done on it, which I think were probably a few years ahead of time in terms of the online application. I just think we as a company are multi-format and we want to talk about our first-party platform partners rather than when we were a first-party."

Dreamcast hardware may not the focus of any official Sega efforts, but Dreamcast software still has a future. Sega has aggressively distributed much of its older back catalog of games as digital downloads on home consoles, PC and portable machines. The Dreamcast line-up, comprised of bigger games, less easily brought to current platforms, is not going to be neglected, Hayes said. "I can't give you any details. Suffice to say, there's a lot of technical issues, a lot of licensing issues. But we are very keen to bring [them] to players in the way we've done with Genesis games. We want to do it, but it's hard work to get there. Hopefully we can build on that quite soon."

http://kotaku.com/5336532/sega-will-...ersary-quietly ...

Sony's PSPgo is set to launch with a firmware upgrade featuring new options and tweakables. Expect a full video reveal in a forthcoming Eurogamer TV show, along with fuller hands-on, but in the meantime, check out this complete technical readout of the new, fully armed and operational PlayStation Portable. The pre-release sample of the new hardware arrived with an unreleased firmware revision: 5.70. This may or may not be the system software that ships with the retail unit coming on 1st October, but either way it seems certain new firmware is part of the launch. Regardless, 5.70 does feature a number of changes over the current 5.51 operating system, albeit somewhat slight. Not surprisingly, it's the Settings area of the XMB that gets the lion's share of the changes:
Network Update is now listed as System Update, but, curiously, has the same options.
Video Settings obviously doesn't have the first four UMD-related toggles.
System Settings now has a "Your Birth Date" option (second from top), and a "Display Panel Close Option" toggle, which allows you to set it to either "Standard" (goes to a clock graphic) or "Enter Sleep Mode". Also "Battery Information" seems to be gone, as do UMD-related options, but there's a "Format System Storage" option in addition to the usual Memory Stick format option.
Power Save Settings loses the "Backlight Auto-Adjust" option for some reason.
There's a new "Bluetooth Device Settings" entry, which consists of a toggle for switching Bluetooth on and off and a "Manage Bluetooth Devices" entry.
All other elements of the XMB are identical to the current 5.51 firmware, aside from a new "System Storage" folder similar to the "Memory Stick" one, which, as you might imagine, allows access to the PSPgo's internal flash storage. Hooking up the PSPgo to a Mac via USB, we find that the total available storage available to the user is 14.74GB, formatted in the FAT32 configuration (hence introducing a 4GB file-size limit - unlikely to be a concern to any PSP user). All this gives the PSPgo a marginal memory edge over a 16GB iPod Touch (mine comes in at 14.64GB total capacity). We also measured file transfer times via USB, to the internal flash memory and also to the M2 memory card, using a 699MB file (715,647KB). The M2 transfer came in at 93 seconds, while the copy to the internal flash drive took 95 seconds, so effectively there's next to nothing in it. What is intriguing is that Sony has opted out of using a conventional USB cable format on the new handheld. The PSPgo itself uses a wider, thinner connector for the console, terminating in the standard USB connector. So, similar to the iPhone and iPod Touch, it's proprietary cable time. It also appears as though Sony has moved away from the old AV port that debuted on the PSP-2000 - there's a common-or-garden 3.5mm stereo jack connection for headphones only, not the more traditional extended interface with its support for external remotes and the like. Since the video output settings are still on the XMB, our guess is that Sony is indeed following Apple's lead by consolidating all connections into that new wider, thinner interface, which we strongly suspect will form the basis for an iPod-style dock. All very nice, but it once again emphasises that this is something of a clean break from the old PSP hardware - not only will your UMDs not work, but your component cables are now obsolete in the new order, as are your Memory Sticks: PSPgo uses the newer, smaller, M2 format as found in a number of the Sony Ericsson mobile phones. In terms of other interesting information we picked up... well, we're going to assume that the final production PSPgo hardware won't allow you to flash the firmware with a system update designed for the older handhelds. Bizarrely, the sample apparently does, which resulted in a rather snazzy-looking brick once the PSPgo's previous trustees (who shall remain nameless) had finished with it - a side effect of which is that the rather intriguing-looking Gran Turismo demo included on the flash drive didn't work by the time the unit arrived in our possession, which - as you can imagine - we were really happy about... On the plus side, the hard disk was loaded with a number of other demos, including office favourites WipEout Pulse and Ridge Racer 2, and we'll be commenting on how those feel on the new hardware, and doing our usual tour around and impressions of its exterior and how it works, in next week's hands-on and EGTV Show.

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

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has just announced a voluntary recall on the 4-Dock Battery Recharge Station. This battery recharging station was available from Target, Toys R Us, and Amazon.com under the Psyclone brand, or from Best Buy under the React name and has been recharging batteries, excessively overheating batteries, posing fire risks, and burning the occasional hand since they first went on sale in January, 2008.


Source: GamesIndustry.biz ...