If you had any inclination that PSP Minis would be as big and cool as iPhone games, take a step back and literally fuck your own face. Sony’s great idea has made a turn into the land of the dumb. According to Justin Cooney, a senior account manager for SCEA at the Game Developer Conference in Austin, Minis won’t be allowed to include any wireless multiplayer, have DLC, or even be patched. Seriously?
Cooney told Gamasutra that “When you look at it from a testing perspective, you have to do more QA. [Allowing those features] would defeat the purpose of having a dedicated service for smaller content. It increases the barriers.”
So let’s compare, shall we? iPhone games get patched when problems are pointed out (which inevitably happens). They get updated for new content. They have online play. PSP Minis: none of the above. I can somewhat understand the no DLC argument, but come on Sony, no patches? That’s just plain stupid.
I’m going to be less inclined to drop money on PSP Minis at launch as I am for dropping cash on iPhone games. At least I know that iPhone developers can fix any problems that arise, whereas if you buy a broken PSP Mini, you’re boned hard.
Just when you thought it was safe, Sony drops a hammer. Starting tomorrow on the PlayStation Store, you’ll be able to get some “Premium Themes” that you get to spend money on. Haven’t we established that paying for themes and avatars is a just plain dumb?
The new Premium Themes will have previews so you know what you’re getting. But, seriously, who’s paying for this stuff? I’ll stick to the free themes or just roll my own wallpaper, thank you very much. See that premium theme pic up there? That’s what paying for this type of shit makes me want to do.
Are you going to buy any of these? Please tell me no. Please.
Write this down people: robbing a store in real life puts you in jail. You don’t get to do run around the city like in a video game. Apparently, these six kids of Garden City, New York didn’t get that message. I used to live right around there, so this is a good one. The six kids all dressed up like Niko and tried to rob a couple supermarkets late Wednesday night. During the melee, they were walking down the streets with crowbars and bats while robbing one motorist and smashing up at least one car with baseball bats. Yeah.
Thank God JT is in hot water, or you could imagine the fire-storm he’s cause over this one. Don’t replicate this stuff in real life, people.
Yeah, this is just not good. Both the House and Assembly in New York State passed bills to regulate and restrict the video game industry. This is no good.
The proposed advisory council would examine the potential impact of violent media, make recommendations regarding the ESRB rating system, and establish “a parent-teacher violence awareness program to identify and appropriately assist students who may have a propensity toward violence.”
I’m glad I’m living in a state that wants to restrict what I can do in terms of video gaming. I have a feeling that we’re going to see some lawsuits from the big guns in the video game industry about Constitution violations should this bill get signed into approval by the Governor. I can’t say I’ll disagree either. Bullshit. Total bullshit.
Nintendo is in some hot water over comments made Nintendo of Europe marketing boss Laurent Fischer. Fischer said that only “geeks and otaku” want a hard drive for the Wii. Come the hell on.
After the insane amount of backlash from the internet, Fischer has issued an apology. Good move.
“I have huge respect for those who, like me, share a common passion for Nintendo and want to make it clear that I would never use and I didn’t use this terminology in such a context or way to cause offence,” he said.
“I regret that this misunderstanding has created such offence and disappointment within the community.”
Either way, a comment like this from someone so high up at Nintendo shows me that they really don’t care about expanding the storage on the Wii. Too bad, because they’re losing sales from people like me who are already out of memory.
Do you have more than one person using your PS3? Do you each have your own PSN name and account on the system? You might be a bit upset to hear that Konami is exploiting these users by charging you to create multiple characters for Metal Gear Online.
You get one free character per PS3 and can purchase an additional 3 characters for $6.99. That’s a bit much, in my opinion. Why even have this limit? No other game does anything like this either offline or online. If you have your own system profile and your own PSN name, that should be enough. There should be no penalty to having multiple users of a PS3 in the same house. That’s essentially what this is, a penalty for those people.
So don’t waste your time with the ridiculous Konami ID creation for a second user. If you aren’t ready to shell out even more money than you just spent on the game, you’re stuck with one online character for everyone in your house to use. Bad move, Konami. Bad move.
[Update] For anyone disagreeing that you can have multiple characters per system, check out screenshots stating you can’t here. I also created a new PS3 user account and PSN name as well as a new Konami ID to test this.
As if Gamestop doesn’t do enough things to look stupid… I was picking up my copy of GTA IV Special Edition this morning for PS3 at my local Gamestop. Another guy was there buying the game off the shelf. Both of us got ID’d to buy the game. I look nowhere near 17, but whatever. The guy next to me asks “Are you kidding?” The follow up reply from the old guy behind the counter waiting on me was “We’re not taking any chances with this game.”
Ok, you might say. As soon as the other guy leaves, a kid walks up to the counter to buy a used copy of Call of Duty 4. The kid was no more than 4 feet tall and couldn’t have been older than 13 or 14. Did he get ID’d? Nope. When I asked the guy behind the counter why not, I was told “We’re only worried about GTA.”
Wow. So let me get this straight. Gamestop doesn’t care about the ESRB “M” rating and will sell these games to minors as long as it’s not GTA? What kind of bull is that? I shook my head, took my copy of the game and went home. Still baffled over this one. It’s this kind of crap that fuels people like Chuckles.
Remember how Mario Kart for Wii was only going to have text chat? Time to revise that statement. IGN got an update from Nintendo.
Apparently, gamers will only be able to select from a pre-determined number of phrases that can be sent along as rudimentary texts before matches. Nintendo is clearly playing it safe.
You’ve got to be freaking kidding me. Maybe they should allow full chat and have Chris Hansen monitor everything. Hopefully there’s a text choice there to tell a player to suck my balls.
Time Warner is looking to rape its customers for money for internet usage. According to a company spokesperson, they will be charging customers based on how much data they download starting later this year. It will be a tiered setup based on how much bandwidth you use per month. It will start as a trial run in Beaumont, Texas, after which the company will decide how and when to roll the program out nationwide.
Personally, I find this to be very shitty. With everything going the way of the download, bandwidth usage is on an exponential rise across the board. With Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon all offering movie rental downloads (and some in HD), this will only drive bandwidth needs further for the general public. Online media, from music to movies to games, has grown immensely in the past decade and will only continue to grow at a very fast pace. Time Warner looks to be exploiting that and trying to make a buck on Joe Customer.
They haven’t announced what the bandwidth tiers will be, but I’m expecting the one that falls in line with current pricing won’t be that big. For those of us who game online a lot, download demos and trailers daily and weekly, and rent HD movies online, we can probably expect to see a modest increase in our internet bills in the coming year or so. It’s a pity, really. Other countries see 100Mbps unlimited connections for much less than what we pay for 5-10Mbps.
[via Wired]
This picture is of Attorney Jack Thompson. He is a moron.
He has a documentary coming out regarding (once again) violence in the videogame industry. Now this is nothing new to anyone who has followed this man career, he does this all the time. He’s been demonizing videogames since MK1 and no one has been able to shut him up since. He really, really, really likes to hear himself talk.
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