Nintendo News:
It appears that Nintendo President Iwata, wants to take a small page from out of Xbox Live Arcade and implement its feature within their own WiiConnect24 online service. As like Xbox Live Arcade, Iwata asks developers to "create a reasonably entertaining game in 2 months with a team of three. And then sell it for about 500 Yen” ($5.00 U.S dollars).
He says he envisions everyone to stay connected to WiiConnect24 from the very moment out of the box, 24 hours a day. He wants everyone to have the ability to download new content from Nintendo for not only the Wii console, but also for the NDS without even having to search for it.
The machine will update itself during gameplay or during sleep mode and inform you (The players) of new updates and/or game demos for both machines by way of a “Blinking information light” on the Wii console.
Nintendo wants to debut their new line of games categorized as the “Touch Generation” games. Currently no new titles have been announced yet, but existing titles such as Nintendogs, Brain games and Sudoku Gridmaster have now brought under this new characterization.
The official Game Critics Awards for E3 06 have finally been released and Nintendo was awarded Best Show for the introduction of the Wii game console. In addition to “Best Show” they also received awards for “Best Handheld Game: Zelda: Phantom Hour Glass”, “Best Hardware: Wii” and “Best Racing: Excite Truck”. Many might have thought that “Best Console Game” would be awarded to Super Mario Galaxy, but Epic's “Gears of War” was crowned that award.
Microsoft News:
An unofficial source from inside Microsoft has informed Joystiq.com
that the announced Xbox live Vision Camera will be bundled with the Xbox live arcade game UNO along with a free month's subscription to Xbox Live Gold. This package deal combo is rumored to retail for $40.00.
Around the same release time, the new 30 foot range wireless headset should be available along with the 256 MB memory unit for about 60 US dollars. There was no additional information about the Gaming Receiver other then it's expected to be released in early 2007.
Internet gaming website Kikizo.com
conducted a one-on-one interview with Microsoft's CEO Peter Moore about the current status of backwards-compatibility with Xbox 1. He had this to say “Nobody is concerned anymore about backward compatibility. More are coming... but at some point you just go "there's enough,' or "let's move on.”
However, days after Moore's interview; inside employees of Microsoft posted within their internal blog and stated "Rest assured, we're not done yet. We are testing for another update to be added within the next few weeks, and it looks like we're hoping to add at least another dozen titles”.
Rumors still continue to fly around about Microsoft wanting to stake their own ground within the Handheld Gaming Market. Still nothing official has been announced, but rumors are more stating within the next 2 years, Microsoft will at least announce that one has been in the works that isn't the past debuted Origami.
It's been also rumored that Apple Computers (Microsoft's main rival as far as Operating Systems), have been searching around experienced game designers and artists for a gaming rig of their own. However, Apple isn't talking about it.
Sony News:
Phil Harrison (President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios) was recently interview by a German based news magazine “Der Spiegel” about a number of issues regarding about the PS3 controller and their online gaming service.
To start off, he was asked about the Tilt-sensing and he it conflicts with Nintendo's own Wii controller remote. He was told that most people believe it's a complete rip-off from Nintendo's idea from the very start. His response was “In some way, I understand why people are saying that, but it's a bit dumb, if you can forgive the expression."
He continues by comparing this situation with past hardware developments between the original Playstation and N64. “When we [Sony] brought PlayStation to the market in 1994, we introduced real-time graphics in 3D for the first time. When Nintendo released N64 in 1996 and it also used real-time 3D graphics, did we say: "Nintendo stole our idea!"? No, of course not. Such innovations are made possible because of the combination of technology, cost and manufacturing capacity. "We've been working on that [motion sensitive controller] for a long time".
When asked to comment about the PS3's online service and how Sony intends to merge all entertainment, Harrison's response was ”We believe that the PS3 will be the place where the users will play, watch movies, surf the web, and use other computer entertainment functionality. The PS3 is a computer. We don't need the PC."
A New PSP firmware update has been released today from v 2.70 to 2.71. The new updates include the ability to download game demos to the PSP directly from its own internet browser as apposed to using a computer and wireless router.
The one other update is a new fix for the existing Location-free player. Now players will see properly displayed video output for when an external tuner is selected.
