We’re guessing that if you ever though of buying an arcade cabinet it was only briefly, and you decided against based on the difficulties of moving and finding a place for such a large and heavy item. You could go the opposite way and build a controller for a MAME box, but for some, there’s no replacement for the real hardware. This Christmas gift is the best of both worlds, a JAMMA box which uses traditional hardware in a more compact cabinet.
[Majtolycus'] boy friend is a sucker for a game of Battle Balls. She looked around for an original logic board and after several weeks of searching had to settle for the Japanese version of the game called Senkyu. To patch into the board she also picked up a JAMMA harness, power supply, RGB to VGA video converter, speaker, and some Happ arcade controls. The whole thing goes into a wood box which connects to a VGA monitor (or the VGA port on your HDTV).
The system is easier to store than a full-sized cabinet, and if a deal comes along, you can buy additional JAMMA logic boards to play.

http://hackaday.com/2011/12/26/arcad...ze-your-space/ ...

[Chris'] family made the mistake of giving him a hackable Christmas gift. We’d bet they didn’t see much of him for the rest of the day as he set about rooting this Android wristwatch.
This thing has some pretty powerful hardware under the hood. It’s sporting an OMAP3 processor running at 600 MHz along with 256 MB of RAM. [Chris] needed to get his hands on a firmware image in order to look for security holes. He found a way to spoof the update application in order to intercept an upgrade image from the Internet.
He dumped the firmware locations and got to work searching for a way to exploit the device. Details are a bit scarce about want exactly he did, but you can download his modified image, letting you root your own Motorola Actv using the Android Debug Bridge.
We’ve embedded a demo video after the break. The OS is pretty snappy on the tiny device. We’re not sure what will come of this functionality, but we assume [Chris] was really only interested in the challenge of rooting process itself.

http://hackaday.com/2011/12/27/rooti...id-wristwatch/ ...

Hacking has been one of the hottest stories of the year. From Wikileaks uncovering Government documents, to News of the World journalists breaking into the phones of celebrities, the story of security breaches has dominated the headlines.
But A-listers and political bodies weren’t the only victims – the games world was rocked by hackers throughout 2011.
In April hackers retrieved the login data and passwords of 77m users of Sony’s PlayStation Network. It was the most high profile hacking, but there were multiple security breaches that hurt the industry this year.
Anonymous hacking group LulzSec took responsibility for a host of security-breaching distributed denial-of-service attacks, which besieged notable platform holders and publishers, including Nintendo, Bethesda, Epic Games and BioWare.
Websites, forums and even video games themselves were affected. Popular online titles such as Minecraft and EVE Online were taken down in an instant, and millions of usernames and passwords were snatched at the click of a keyboard button.
But LulzSec insisted it was hacking some systems with good intentions. It highlighted security gaps in the NHS’ online infrastructure and handed the stolen details of 200,000 Brink players back to Bethesda.
Still, try telling that to Codemasters, whose website is still down. Or Valve, who just last month confirmed that its Steam network was hacked and a database of personal user information was obtained.
Eventually, the police moved in and LulzSec ended its activities. But this was a warning to the global games industry. And it was all too easy for hackers.
The games industry is moving towards digital and online business models. COD Elite and EA’s Origin service the latest to join the fray.
It’s now down to games publishers and companies to act to ensure their online infrastructures and the security systems that protect them are watertight. Because today, the safety of user information is more important than ever before.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/2011-...ked-off/088829 ...

We all know which games you liked the most this year – we only have to look at the charts to figure that out. But what about the people that make up the games industry?

MCV asks a number of recognisable games from publishing and journalism what their top picks were over the last 12 months?

SIMON BYRON - Director of Games, Premier PR

Skyrim (Bethesda)
I really didn’t like Oblivion. Having enemies level up as you did was the oddest game decision of all time. It seemed needlessly fussy in places, and is the only game to unintentionally have ever encouraged me to skip through fields with no trousers on – a feature, I note, which was absent from the Game of the Year edition box. I think I did about three Oblivion Gates before I decided I wasn’t having much fun and moved on – putting my trousers on first, of course.
I thought Fallout was pretty bad too. Yeah, brilliant, it’s all non-linear and that – but I prefer my games more focussed. I don’t want to walk to the horizon just because I can, only to find myself attacked by a mutant dog who wasn’t expecting me until I was 100 levels up or something. Plus, you know, almost by definition, a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland isn’t exactly an escapist’s dream, unless you’re sick of pretty things and people with faces.
I once had a debate with Warren Spector about linearity over non, which concluded when I forgot to respond to him again, proving conclusively that I won. I had to stop playing Demon’s Souls because I couldn’t decide which areas to level up in. I am a man who can get paralysed by choice.
So on paper – particularly if that paper contained the words above, maybe concluding with “Skyrim is not for me” – Skyrim was not for me. Well what do you know, paper? No wonder print is dead.
Skyrim is, I think, the first game I have actually fallen in love with. I think about it a lot. I have had dreamt about it. I would absolutely get off with it. It’s the first game to where I’ve been happy to spend hours literally doing nothing. The main quest? Yeah, I’ll get round to it. But I’ll just pop in here to see – OH HELLO, YOU WANT ME TO DO ANOTHER FETCH QUEST? TOTALLY FINE BY ME SEE YOU AT HOME LYDIA. Its bugs – and there are many – don’t matter. I genuinely think it’s the best game ever made (soz, Ocarina). And the thought of what Bethesda does next actually terrifies me.

Batman: Arkham City (Warner Bros)
This is true: I went to school with Christian Bale (well, he was a couple of years below me). Also true is this: when my careers advisor asked me what I wanted to be, my first answer was “a super hero”. So if anyone should have grown up to be Batman, it should have been me. I knew I should have taken Latin.
So Arkham Asylum was the game I waited 37 years to play. Sure, it benefitted from a low level of expectation (the last licensed game to be actually any good was Robocop 3), but it was an absolute triumph, bettering at-the-time-best Batman game (The Adventures of Batman And Robin, SNES, Konami). Given the frequency of good super hero games, Arkham Asylum would, I believed, remain the best superhero game ever for longer than three years.
I was wrong. Arkham City literally expanded every aspect of Asylum. Far from diluting (it was a concern of mine, I can tell you now), it presented a world in which, finally, I am Batman. A brilliant main mission peppered with stacks of stuff to do around it, Arkham City is the first game I have gone back to after I have completed it. It seems now I finally am Batman, I clearly can’t stop.
Just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, so you shouldn’t judge a game by its Metacritic score – unless it is one you agree with. Anyone who dragged its average down to 96 per cent should be hounded from the games industry.

Pullblox (Intelligent Systems)
If you’re tired of the 3DS, you’re tired of life. That’s what I used to say. Now I say: if you’re tired of the 3DS, you haven’t played Pullblox, and you’re also an idiot.
It’s an odd one. The game was released without much fanfare – plus it’s digital only, so no-one cares. But it’s probably the most inventive block-based puzzle game since Tetris.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know 3DS games shouldn’t actually rely on three dimensions, because that would discriminate against people with the average number of eyes (average, not mode) but Pullblox is unquestionably the best use of the gimmick. The mechanic is so simple – pull a two dimensional shape into a three-dimensional one to create a route to the goal – that any actual game designers reading this should be utterly ashamed they didn’t come up with it. And that, of course, is its beauty – loads of levels, no time pressures or achievements, just enjoy the ride. Add a level editor – which they did – and you’ve got probably the most accomplished 3DS title to date.


JIM STERLING - Reviews Editor, Destructoid.com

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda)
It's terribly predictable to name a game that nobody can shut up about, ...

From Dust was just one of many games delayed in a year that sorely tested PC gamers' patience.


Short Shrift

PC players are gaming's great investors. They outspend their console brethren on regular, iterative hardware upgrades, and put in the hours tweaking settings and downloading large files rather than popping to the shops and returning with a disc. In 2011, PC gamers' patience was stretched to limit with delay after delay to some of the year's biggest games.

Ubisoft was perhaps the worst culprit. Even putting to one side the publisher's regrettable DRM policy - which we'll be looking at in detail later this week - it delayed three PC releases in the space of a month. Along with Call Of Juarez, there was a month-long wait after the console release for Driver: San Francisco, and a three-week wait for From Dust. When Eric Chahi's god sim eventually launched, users found not only always-on DRM but a terrible, unoptimised port. Facing down a fan backlash, Ubisoft took the highly unusual step of offering refunds to the disgruntled, something EA would also offer to buyers of the dreadful Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, which shipped without a host of promised features and was essentially a reskinned version of the free-to-play Tiger Woods Online.

Warner Bros delayed Batman: Arkham City - twice. The sickness spread to some of PC gaming's most revered developers, with Blizzard pushing Diablo III back to 2012 and Valve delaying the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive beta following feedback from pro players. Call Of Duty: Elite, the social, stat-tracking service that launched alongside Modern Warfare 3 on November 8, is still to launch on PC, despite Activision insisting that one of its employees "misspoke" in a tweet saying Elite might never reach PC at all.

It wasn't all bad, though. Sega made up for its silence on the protracted delay to Avalanche's top-down shooter Renegade Ops by adding Half-Life's Gordon Freeman as a playable character. Id Software eventually made the Doom 3 source code open-source as promised after John Carmack rewrote parts of the code that might have violated a patent. Earlier this month, Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment confirmed that its 2010 Xbox 360 game Alan Wake will be released for PC early next year - seven years after it was originally announced as a PC exclusive.

EA Origin

PC gamers have also had to put up with EA's jostle for increased market share following the launch of its Steam rival, EA Origin. In theory, competition benefits the consumer - and with one report claiming Valve controls 70 per cent of the PC gaming market, EA's intervention appears justified - but the launch of Origin didn't give players another choice: it gave them no choice at all.

First, the EA-published shooter Crysis 2 was removed from Steam, the company later blaming the removal on an exclusive DLC agreement developer Crytek had in place with Direct2Drive. Alice: Madness Returns was an Origin exclusive; so was The Old Republic. Gamers feared the worst when EA omitted Steam from the list of distributors of arguably the biggest PC game of the year, Battlefield 3, and those fears were later confirmed, with EA blaming Valve's "restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content."

EA has a point - Markus "Notch" Persson, head of Minecraft developer Mojang, admitted his game probably couldn't be released on Steam because the platform "limits a lot of what we're allowed to do with the game, and how we're allowed to talk to our users" - but it went about it in the wrong way, ramming the service down people's throats rather than making it an appealing proposition. By contrast, 2011 saw Valve release Portal 2 early on Steam after an expansive ARG, The Potato Sack, was completed. It made one of its most popular games, Team Fortress 2, free-to-play, and gave the Source engine SDK away for free as well. Gabe Newell took the high ground about the EA dispute, insisting Valve wanted the publisher's games on Steam, saying: "I think at the end of the day we're going to prove to Electronic Arts [that] they have happier customers, a higher-quality service, and will make more money if they have their titles on Steam. It's our duty to demonstrate that to them; we don't have a natural right to publish their games."

EA could learn much from Newell, and Valve. More than any other sector, success on PC is dependent on being engaged with your community, by listening and delivering what players want, rather than what you want them to have. Despite this, EA is ahead of the curve in its adaptation from traditional publishing to digital, something we'll be looking at in detail later this week.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/2011-round-pc ...

Wii's swan-song, its successor's unveiling and the fall and rise of 3DS.


Wii and Wii U

It was a quiet year for the Wii, with headlines naturally focused on its rumoured successor. In February, THQ CEO Brian Farrell dropped a heavy hint that new Nintendo hardware was waiting in the wings, telling investors he did not expect new systems from Microsoft or Sony but adding: "It's difficult on Nintendo - we'll let them announce their new hardware."

Soon after, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that sales of seven million units a year in North America alone proved there was no need for a Wii 2, saying: "We'll make decisions about a successor system at the time when software developers cannot offer surprises [on Wii]."

Yet a sparse Wii release schedule told a markedly different tale. The only Wii game to make headlines in the early part of the year was We Dare, a racy party game from Ubisoft that was actually far tamer than its debut trailer implied. European ratings board PEGI defended the 12 rating it gave the game after famously reasonable UK tabloid The Sun said the game "promotes orgies and lesbian sex to kids as young as 12." Ubisoft eventually cancelled We Dare the day before it was due to launch in Europe, but had a good year elsewhere: Just Dance 2 sold a million units in the UK alone, and was later named the biggest thirdparty Wii game of all time with 14 million worldwide sales.

In mid-April sources told us that the Wii successor was very much real, with Nintendo to unveil the system at E3 in June with a view to a late 2012 release. Shigeru Miyamoto confessed the following week that new hardware was on the way, and by the end of the month Nintendo had confirmed its new console would be unveiled and playable at E3, and launch in 2012.

The official unveiling of Wii U and its divisive tablet controller came during Nintendo's E3 press conference, which our report described as hitting "a sweetspot in the Venn diagram of self-celebration, wry deference, nerdish awkwardness, earnest confidence and creative vigour." Satoru Iwata hailed the system as "a new structure for home entertainment … [that] will let everyone see games in a different way." It certainly let investors see Nintendo in a different way: the company's share price hit a five-year low the following day, and fell a further 5.2 per cent the day after. Iwata said it was all "very strange." He would soon get used to it, with the company taking a battering from investors and analysts as 3DS struggled, and the sickness spread: Square Enix's shares fell ten per cent after it announced Dragon Quest X would be headed to Wii U as well as its predecessor.

Little has been seen of the system since, with Nintendo apparently seeking to address one of the biggest criticisms of Wii U: that it only supports a single tablet controller. A report last month claimed the company was working on multiple controller support, as well as RAM and processor speed. The final version of the console will be shown off at E3 in June.

Nintendo announced a revision of the ageing Wii hardware, designed to sit horizontally instead of vertically, available at a lower price with Wii Sports and Wii Party but no backwards compatibility with GameCube games. That price point no doubt played a part in strong sales of the system in the US - half a million were sold on Black Friday alone - but the biggest factor in Wii's sustained success was The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

It was 2011's sole recipient of an Edge ten, our review hailing the fact that "this ultimate tale of hero-making should see Nintendo's hardware become the console it was always meant to be." It sold 195,000 copies on its debut in Japan, and 535,000 in the US in a little over a week. Nintendo will need to ensure Wii U doesn't have to wait as long for its own Skyward Sword if the console is to succeed, with Microsoft and Sony doubtless at work on next-generation hardware of their own.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/2011-round-nintendo ...

Microsoft's weak share in the mobile phone market can be attributed to its mishandling of industry politics, not inferior technology or features, according to ex-Windows Phone evangelist Charlie Kindel. Microsoft's traditional strategy of going over the heads of hardware vendors to meet the needs of consumers and application developers does not work in the phone market, says Kindel, where the handset makers and carriers have the biggest say in determining the winners (Apple is an exception). Not everybody agrees with Kindel's analysis. Old-timers may remember Kindel, who recently resigned from Microsoft, from his days as developer relations guru for COM/OLE/Active-X."

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/...asnt-taken-off ...

News via http://www.romhacking.net/forum/inde...pic,13729.html





My full SM64 hack, ‘Super Mario Star Road’, is complete. The features are:

• Over 120 stars
• More than 30 nicely designed areas
• Nearly 50 catchy tunes
• Many new objects for Mario to interact with
• Well-polished gameplay
• Lots of goomba stomping
• Mario-style humor

See the project page for downloads, and related URL for the release trailer.
RHDN Project Page
Relevant Link: (http://www.youtube.co...m/watch?v=_JBdxcnyxeQ) ...

Got some Kindle hardware burning a hole in your pile of festive gifts? Well, British bookworms have been given some extra yuletide joy courtesy of Amazon UK which has also started a 12-day sale, focusing on its e-book wares. The site vows to add more digital reads each day and it looks like all the additions will stick with their shrunken price tags for the extent of the sale. Head to the source below for some one-click literary gratification.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=1503253031 ...