According to a recent Nikkei report, Nintendo will introduce paid downloadable content to its games for the first time in recorded human history next March, with the release of Fire Emblem for the 3DS. The price of this expansion will apparently be "several hundred yen," and that it -- and other DLC on the company's platforms -- won't make it any easier for players to make their way through Nintendo's games, which probably weren't very difficult to begin with.

Nikkei also reported that the Wii U will also play home to downloadable add-ons, but said nothing about the still-to-come library of the Wii, which -- well, in order to release expansions for something, you first need something to expand upon.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/12/26/ni...w-fire-emblem/ ...

Worried that an OTA update will put a crimp in your Nook Tablet modding activities? Then you may want to follow the lead of xda-developers member Indirect, who has managed to tweak the tablet to block all OTA updates and kindly provided the means for you to do the same. That involves installing a few files on your device (another method is also available that involve tweaking some files), but Indirect says that the process "holds no risk," and that it won't prevent you from buying books from Barnes & Noble. Complete details can be found at the source link below.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/25/x...t-ota-updates/ ...

It's time to show your iPad who's boss -- your iPhone, naturally. The Tizi Remote app is presently available for free via iTunes, letting you use your iPhone to change channels, record shows and pause live TV on iPads connected to the Tizi or Tizi Go TV receivers -- and if you happen to have a 4S, you can harness the power of Siri to change channels for you. Sadly, neither of the aforementioned pieces of hardware are available stateside at the moment, so for now, you'll just have to watch TV shows on your iPad the old fashioned way.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/26/t...te-enlists-si/ ...

It was supposed to be the fight that would define the year. Call of Duty had met its match. For the first time ever, the game was to go up against EA’s long-running Battlefield series.

Although both have had similar lifespans, they had until this Q4 never launched head-to-head.

EA entered the fight with typical over-confident swagger. It kickstarted the PR battle with an early March reveal and snipes from all execs – Riccitiello even said he wanted Call of Duty’ to ‘rot from the core’.

Keen to loosen Activision’s yearly claim of having the world’s most revenue-generative game, EA aimed to halve CoD’s share of the market. It claimed to have retail and media on its side, it cosied up with PlayStation to match the CoD-360 alliance, it even decided to launch two week’s before MW3.

Then Battlefield came out. Critics said they weren’t as keen as they’d hoped, the game briefly topped the charts before nestling in a low Top Ten slot… then Activision turned up with the now typical lavish launch and claimed the title of ‘fastest selling game of all time’.

SO WHAT HAPPENED?

What really happened was that both games won. But they also both lost.

Battlefield 3 showed that you can take on Call of Duty. It shipped out 12m units. The PR storm alone helped raise the profile of the game, franchise and publisher. It truly questioned whether CoD can conquer forever.

At the same time Modern Warfare 3 wowed fans, retailers and non-gamers. The juggernaut crashed through sales targets and estimates to just about top 2010’s Black Ops.

Yet here’s the other side of the argument. Although Activision broke the $1bn barrier faster than ever (just 16 days), it’s still just the ultimate retail game. The franchise is built on a foundation of hype, pre-orders and day one sales. Elite’s additions, although exciting, have yet to be proven. So right now, Call of Duty remains a video game in the very traditional sense.

That’s fine for Activision today. It has always focused on safer bets and quickly cuts its losses (it ditched Guitar Hero earlier this year). But not necessarily fine for Activision tomorrow. No doubt its best minds are working on how it will survive in a world where the console might not exist or where a game has to deploy across browser, mobile and console all at once. If they aren’t, they really should be.

Battlefield has done well but never lived up to the promise – nay, threats – that it would upset Call of Duty. Activision’s title didn’t even blink. Momentum for Battlefleld 3 dropped off early on, retailers and other industry nose-tappers tell us. If you want to judge it on market status right now, Battlefield has been resurging, but only thanks to a price cut and bundling. MW3 has – and will, as all CoD’s do – held its price at around £45. EA’s missile made the ground rumble, but didn’t shake Activision’s foundations.

The bigger lesson is that it’s tough even at the top. Activision and EA had similar games locked up in a pointless battle to gain or protect market share. And in the end, little changed. If that’s all the big boys could manage, think how punishing it would have been if lower-tier publishers were caught in the same battle.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/2011-...-market/088828 ...

The year ended well with Vita's release, but Sony's 2011 was defined by the PS3 and PSN hacks.


PlayStation 3

Sony's year got off to the worst possible start with the news that the PlayStation 3 had been hacked. George "Geohot" Hotz, the man who devised the iPhone jailbreak, published the PS3's root key online, opening up the console to mass piracy. Less than a week after telling us it would re-secure PlayStation 3 with a series of firmware updates, Sony filed a lawsuit against Hotz and 100 unnamed members of fail0verflow, a hacking group also credited with the breakthrough.

Sony won the first round - a court granting it a restraining order on the same day a firmware update pushed pirates off PSN - but the case soon got bogged down in an argument over jurisdiction, Hotz arguing his home state of New Jersey, rather than SCEA's California base, would be the better venue. Sony set about resecuring its console and online network, sending an email to those running custom firmware telling them to change their ways or face PSN bans. Sony accused Hotz of "dodging the court's authority" after he went to South America and failed to comply with an order to hand over computer hard drives. Hotz insisted he was on vacation, but the hacking group Anonymous decided it had had enough. Which is where things went from bad to worse.

PSN

First, Anonymous released a statement slamming Sony for its treatment of Hotz and Graf Chokolo, a hacker who was working to restore the OtherOS feature Sony had removed from PS3 in 2010. A splinter group, Sony Recon, began gathering personal information on Sony employees and their families, but Anonymous backed down after an attack on PSN provoked the ire of gamers unable to play online. Days later, Hotz and Sony settled out of court. We like to think it was Hotz's YouTube rap that sealed the deal.

It didn't end there, of course. On April 21 Sony said it had taken PSN offline for maintenance. Then it said it was an "emergency outage." Six days later it admitted that the personal information of 77 million PSN users had been compromised, and that while it had found no evidence of credit card data being taken it could not rule it out. The company's MMOG wing, Sony Online Entertainment, later warned of the potential loss of 24.6 million users' data.

Kaz Hirai apologised and announced the Welcome Back programme, a choice of free games designed at tempting users back online once PSN was back up and running. But with the outage in its fourth week, we revealed that it was beginning to impact on retail, with die-hard online gamers running out of patience and trading their PS3s in for 360s. On May 16, Sony finally began restoring PSN - though the Store itself wouldn't return until June 2, with Japan forced to wait a further month. It was a protracted, thoroughly embarrassing saga, and to see how it all panned out we suggest a look at our PSN attack timeline.

Vita

Sony announced its PSP successor at a Tokyo event in January, smartly held just eight days after Nintendo's European 3DS launch event, codenamed Next Generation Portable. With its 5-inch OLED screen running at four times the resolution of a PSP, dual sticks, front and rear touch pads and cameras, and a quad-core ARM CPU it was clearly a high-end gaming device, but what was most surprising about the announcement was PlayStation Suite. The cross-platform, hardware-neutral framework meant Vita, as well as Sony tablets and other Android devices, would be capable of playing PlayStation Certified content. It showed that, unlike Nintendo, Sony understood how the portable gaming landscape had changed since the release of PSP and DS.

Much was also made of Vita being far easier to develop for than its predecessor, with Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida saying PS3 ports would be easy, Andrew House acknowledging PSP's "development challenges," with both WipeOut 2048 developer Studio Liverpool and SCEE saying it was the most dev-friendly PlayStation yet.

At E3, Kaz Hirai revealed NGP's final name, as well as confirming its US price - $249 for WiFi only, $299 with 3G - though his announcement of AT&T as Vita's 3G provider of choice didn't go down so well. Hirai said the machine would be released in 2011, but Sony spent much of the year managing expectations, warning that a worldwide release was difficult, and even more so following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March.

As such it was little surprise when Hirai confirmed Vita would only be released in Japan in 2011, with other territories to follow next year. The system eventually hit shelves on December 17, and sold 324,000 units - 65 per cent of its launch allocation - in the first two days. The system will be released in the US, Europe and Australia on February 22.

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

Kinect, the next generation and Indie Game frustration - Microsoft's year in videogame news.


Kinect

Microsoft began 2011 buoyed by the immediate success of Kinect. Sales of the Xbox 360 motion sensor soared past eight million units in just two months, dwarfing its internal target of three million. Kinect would soon be named the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time by Guinness World Records, and would help Microsoft set an internal record too: its revenue for the last three months of 2010 came to $19.95 billion.

In the run-up to E3 it became quickly apparent that Microsoft's vision for the Xbox 360 in 2011 centred on repositioning the console as a media hub powered by Kinect. Days before the conference kicked off in June, corporate communications VP Frank Shaw noted that 40 per cent of all Xbox 360 activity was spent doing something other than playing games, saying: "The vision for Xbox is straightforward: all of the entertainment you want, with the people you care about. Made easy."

Yet few were expecting Microsoft's E3 conference to be so thoroughly dominated by Kinect. There were the family-focused titles, of course - Disneyland Adventures, Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster, Dance Central 2 - but Microsoft's Kinect fever had spread to the core, shown off in Mass Effect 3, Fable: The Journey and that risible Kinect Star Wars demo. Only Gears Of War escaped, Epic's design director Cliff Bleszinski saying it would have felt "tacked-on," advice which would have been well-heeded elsewhere.

Peter Molyneux admitted that his decision to only show an on-rails section during his on-stage demo of Fable: The Journey, due to his timeslot being halved, was "a horrendous mistake" after the watching press decided the game was entirely on-rails, and he later admitted Kinect "has some real problems." Gamers who feared the worst after Microsoft's Kinect-heavy E3 presser were far from placated by the announcement of Nuads: Kinect-powered, interactive advertising.

Indie Games

Microsoft has spent much of the year getting on the wrong side of those who develop for its Xbox Live Indie Games service. The company said it would investigate after Cthulhu Saves The World developer Robert Boyd spotted that his game had dropped several places in the top rated chart, while the little-known College Lacrosse: The Video Game had soared up the rankings. The latter game's developer had asked its 175,000 Facebook fans to boost the game's rank by giving it five-star ratings, taking advantage of Microsoft allowing anyone with a free xbox.com account to rate titles on XBLIG.

Fans complied with the request, but also gave low scores to games in the upper echolons of the top rated chart. Microsoft tweaked the rating system in response, restricting it to Xbox Live Gold members, but was unable to roll back suspicious votes. Boyd was putting it mildly when he described the situation as "highly disappointing," but if he and his peers felt unloved by Microsoft, much worse was to come.

Xbox Live mouthpiece Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb trumpeted the Metro dashboard update, with its voice and gesture controls and an integrated Bing search, as "simpler, cleaner and easier to navigate." Unless you're an Indie Games developer, of course; when Metro was rolled out in early December it was quickly found that the Indie section wasn't, well, quickly found. "If I had trouble finding it," Boyd told us, "I can only imagine that few people are going to stumble upon it accidentally." Several other developers shared their frustrations with us, with one, Mommy's Best Games, releasing a co-op shooter, Game Type, satirising the difficulty of finding Indie Games on the new dash.

Next-gen?

While Microsoft continues to insist there is no Xbox 360 successor on the horizon, the news tells a different story. In March it sought to fill three hardware development vacancies; both EA and Crytek were forced to deny claims that they were already in possession of next-gen Xbox hardware, the publisher insisting the report in question was "a total fabrication."

Yet with the console on its last legs in Japan - as our report in August revealed - and even the likes of Braid developer Jonathan Blow saying the current generation's RAM limitations are making porting problematic, a new Xbox can't be too far away. Last month a source told us that Ubisoft Montréal, and other major studios, were already in possession of 'target boxes' approximating the final specs of the Xbox 360's successor. That source went on to insist that Microsoft was planning on pulling the rug out from under Nintendo's Wii U launch by releasing its new console before the end of 2012. With sales of PS3 close to overtaking Xbox 360, we can't imagine Microsoft will accept being in last place for long, no matter how well Kinect performs.

http://www.next-gen.biz/news/2011-round-xbox-360 ...

"The Pentagon has approved a version of Android running on Dell hardware to be used by DoD officials, along with the BlackBerry. The approval of Android by the DoD is a major setback for Apple's iPhone. This doesn't mean that DoD employees can use any Android phone. The Pentagon has approved only Dell's hardware running Android 2.2. Interestingly Dell recently discontinued its Streak phone which runs Android 2.2. Dell is now offering Dell Venue which runs on Android 2.2. So, this is the phone which DoD employees can use."

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/...ed-by-pentagon ...

One of my favorite facts of this past year was the proof that China makes almost nothing out of assembling Apple's iPads and iPhones. From the article: 'If you want lots of jobs and lots of high paying jobs then you’re not going to find them in manufacturing. They’re where the money is, in the design, the software and the retailing of the products, not the physical making of them. Manufacturing is just so, you know, 20th century.'"

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/1...table-to-china ...

Just a quick note to say Merry Xmas to each and everyone, may you get all you wish for.

MERRY XMAS ...