weekly gaming news

[Nitrous]

meh dunno why I thought of that thread title but maybe this could be the start of somthin good, who knows. If it is then a sticky could be of help Anubis lol

Lets kick things off with this:
Sonic: Yes it looks as if Sega havn't given up on the little blue guy just yet.
http://www.sega-europe.com/en/News_Story/322.htm < offical link

meh only reason I want to the site was coz I might buy Sonic Mega Collection for the Xbox or PS2 somtime soon.... Sonic was a classic for me and the first games I ever played ;o

oh I also have it on good word that HL2 WILL make the cut 2 the current Xbox...
Woot!

[Laguna Loire]

Heh, cool news mate...

Let's see...Well, this is for Halo 2 fans, although mainly for those who play it on X-Box Live; there will be an expansion pack for Halo 2 being released sometime for the UK on 28 June. It'll probably be released earlier in the US...This pack will contain nine new multiplayer maps and some behind-the-scenes footage about Halo 2 from the guys at Bungie. It should be priced at £14.99...

---

If you're a fan of Project Gotham Racing, Halo or Fable, then that's all the more reason to buy the X-Box 2 when it's released! It has been confirmed that Halo 3, a sequel to Fable and Project Gotham Racing 3 will be released on the X-Box 2. Aparently, Forza Motorsport and Jade Empire will also be released on the X-Box 2, even though neither of them have not yet been released on the X-Box 1...
---

I'll try and dig up some more news later I guess...

[Nitrous]

Nice one LS... sounds about right that coz I had the same info but forgopt to post it... never mind I got somthin to hit back at ya with lol

Two versions of Xbox 360 at launch!
[20/04/05 12:10]

And the basic incarnation of the console apparently won't be backwards compatible The latest word on Xbox 360 is that - as previously reported - there will be different versions of the machine available at launch.

As well as the standard console, an additional $100 will bag you a hard drive (which is said to fit into a port near the top of the machine), WebTV and, intriguingly, backwards compatibility - meaning that the basic Xbox 360 won't be able to play current-gen Xbox games.

It's being reported that graphics company nVidia still owns patents on some of the original Xbox components, meaning that Microsoft has to pay royalties in order to implement backwards compatibility in Xbox 360. The $100 add-on is, in part, supposedly designed to offset the additional costs of allowing Xbox 360s to play Xbox titles.

As for the WebTV element, this will provide internet and email access via your TV, as well as streamed music and video channels.

oh and don't forget, MTV shows behind the scenes stuff about the Xbox 2 on Thursday 12th May at night for the US and Friday the 13th May at 8pm for the UK...

[cHilli]

Stuck, and for everyone else..

This Thread is information based only, please do not reply with comments, simply news only, thanks.

[DayleJ]

Need For Speed: Most Wanted will be released 1st November 2005.

Here is a little Review:
Need for Speed Most Wanted delivers a unique, fast-paced and gripping ride in the racing genre as players build up their Rap Sheet and street cred to move their way up the Black List to become the most wanted racer on the streets. Players will go head-to-head with the top drivers on the scene as well as strategically evade more than half dozen cops at any one time. Add in a dynamic open world, new gameplay and customization as well as tuners, supercars, muscles and sports cars and Need for Speed Most Wanted will be on every gamer's "must-have" list.

Info is just a little scarse at the moment.

[TK 421]

HALF LIFE 2-xbox
little info:
the new game being made for xbox will cope so dont worry bout making a fuss about the new xenon. the textures and other features will not be as high with an exception to the lighting and shadowing effects having been upped because of the GPU or something like that in the xbox.

xbox:
ppl not wanting to get the xenon/xbox 360/xbox 2 rehjoice as more games are going to be realeased later after the xbox2 comes out so dont fret!!! i did at first!!! and no, there will be no expansion pack for halo2. if u saw that in the OXM it was an april fools joke. they mention it in the latest one

[Antownee]

confirmed Xbox 360

[TK 421]

xbox 360-
the xbox 360 name has been confirmed. it has also been confirmed (and thankfully and very much welcome) that it will be backwards compatible with xbox games.

[Nitrous]

Not really gaming news but more thread news. Consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have all been shown of at E3... The consoles designs from Nintendo and Sony might not be final but the Xbox 360 images we have already seen is and will be out before chrimbo...

PS3 Info direct press news from E3
http://www.cheatingdome.com/forums/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=19925

Nintendo Revolution news from E3...
http://www.cheatingdome.com/forums/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=19926

And well there isn't anythin really new on the Xbox 360 but we do have a few threads on it which could be sorted out and combined for 1 sticked info thread.

[cHilli]

Nintendo will release a new Gameboy this autumn

''Pocket gaming

In an attempt to grab some of the media attention surrounding Microsoft and Sony's new consoles, Nintendo talked up its accomplishments in the world of gaming.

In a event packed with fans at the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the Japanese games giant emphasised how it "owned the portable gaming space".

Nintendo GameBoy console
The new GameBoy will fit in the tightest jeans, Nintendo promises
Nintendo surprised many by unveiling a new version of its best-selling GameBoy, called the GameBoy Micro, due to go on sale in the autumn.

The tiny game player is just slightly bigger than an iPod Mini, but two-thirds the weight.

"No matter how tight your jeans are, the GameBoy Micro will fit in them," said Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's executive vice president of sales and marketing. ''

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41156000/jpg/_41156931_gameboy_micro203_.jpg

[Nitrous]

http://www.cheatingdome.com/forums/showthread.php?p=236964#post236964
Just a little info about when the new nintendo console is out for anyone intrested not much more news avalible to me until at least friday now....

[Vipershark]

I'm not sure if this is true or not but it has been said that the Halo 2 expansion will come with Xbox 360 here in america.

[Nitrous]

^ Not true, the Halo 2 expansion is out this week in the UK and we get games after both the US and Japan and as the expansion is basicaly just 10 multiplayer maps that can be taken online via Xbox live I wont be bothering to get it.

Other news this week: Part 1 :P
The PS3 will NOT have a built in Hard Drive like the Xbox 360 but there will be an exsternal hardrive which will be 80G in size designed to make full use of PS3's Media software. The cost of this HD is un known as yet...

Other news this week: Part 2:
Lara Croft is back and is now under the wing of the orginal developers hoping to put the game back on the map.. YAY

Other news this week: Part 3
The Matrix Path of Neo is out in November on all major current gen consoles! It's got elements from all 3 movies with a tweaked ending due to the rather rubbish ending of the 3rd film. Oh and this time we get to play as Neo! (No you tool not our c/d admin)

[TK 421]

xbox 360 halo3-
good ol' billy coming up with sly little rat tricks. well little ol' bill gates has decided to kick sony up the bum by realeasing halo3 the day the ps3 is realeased(october 2006). hehe perfect.

QUAKE-

just a little bit of info but is now going to be called ' QUAKE PHWOAR' or someone has just had a seizure on the keyboard

[Nitrous]

Small bit of info... not a lot coming out from my soucres at the moment, it's summer so everything slows down until Septemeber but Grazy Frog is being made into some sort of racing video game Oo Out in November, yea I know sad isn't it lol

[Nitrous]

Gaming giant Electronic Arts has confirmed that it will publish the Xbox version of Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source for PC.

The deal will allow EA to sell boxed copies of Valve's console and PC games both now and in the future, although online sales of the titles will continue to be made through the developer's infamous Steam service.

Gabe Newell, Valve's founder and president took a very deep breath and said: "By combining EA's unparalleled operation structure and distribution channel with Valve's award-winning development teams and games community, we've established an awesome combination for delivering great products to console and PC gamers around the world."

The agreement is similar to the already existing pacts that allow Lionhead (Black & White), Digital Illusions (Battlefield 2), Gas Powered Games (Dungeon Siege 2) and Free Radical (Timesplitters 2) to all sell their own third-party games through the world's biggest games publisher.

Half-Life 2 will spread on to Xbox in October while Counter-Strike Source is expected on PC in the winter

YAY carn't wait! So thats it! It's an Xbox game to go along side Doom3 as another good PC to Xbox port... FarCry being another game which is out in september, Xbox is going out with a bang before it gets pushed aside by it's next gen brother...the Xbox 360 :D

Edit: Madagascar lands at number one while Juiced falls behind the slowly advancing Destroy All Humans Official ELSPA Entertainment Top 20 Software Chart (all prices) - week ending 16 July

Dear god! I pitty the people that got Madahascar I really do.

[The Driver]

Im With You About the Madagascar Bit, Its A Rubbish Game Full Stop...

And Half-Life In October Yay My B-Day Is In October

[Laguna Loire]

^^ Sweet info mate, though CS: Source is already on PC...:P You get it along with HL2 on PC.

[TK 421]

Im With You About the Madagascar Bit, Its A Rubbish Game Full Stop...

And Half-Life In October Yay My B-Day Is In October
i do remember cHilli saying that its a thread just for news?


PS3-
it has been said, that the next generation console from sony will have boomerang controllers and look like its 'supposed to be' prototype(the grey box that looks stupid?JOKE). *sigh* that really sucks.

[Giiga]

Xbox News:

In 2005. NVidia announced that they will cease production of the Xbox's GPU in August of that year, which will almost certainly mark the end of that console's production.

Rare News:
(video game company)

The next generation of consoles is key for Rare. Xbox 360 is reliant on Rare games for its launch, including Perfect Dark Zero, a game originaly planned several years ago for Nintendo 64. If the Xbox 360 sells badly and the Nintendo Revolution is significantly more successful, Rare will find themseleves in a worse position than they ever were with Nintendo.

After supporting the Game Boy Advance they currently have at least 2 secret Nintendo DS games in the works.


all for now. :)

[Nitrous]

Been nothin worth postin in this thread for a while now but here it goes anyway.

Resident Evil 5 is set to land on the Xbox360 and the PS3! Personaly I'd wait for the PS3 version like I did with Resident Evil 4 for the PS2 version... Minior changes with things added for replay value ;)

Thats about it and if anyone happens to know when the next batch of Xbox360's is due in the US and UK then please share lol

[MORSN417]

cool......any word on wat the story is goona be

Edited by Nitrous Oxide:

Nope and this thread is for just posting news for disscusions.. sorry

[Nitrous]

Nintendo News:

Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata has revealed that the Nintendo Revolution will have a retail price under $299, making the console cheaper than both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. In the last few months, Shigeru Miyamoto said there was still another secret regarding the Revolution and it seems we’ll still have to wait to learn about all the features of the next-generation Nintendo console.

Microsoft News:
Will Microsoft Announce a HD DVD Xbox 360 at CES?
Microsoft has denied in several opportunities that it is planning a HD DVD upgrade for the Xbox 360, but last year Bill Gates said that the Xbox 360 video may incorporate in the future the next-generation DVD format developed by Toshiba.

Sony News: Nothing to report

[Nitrous]

*double post* oh well.

Nintendo news: Nintendo maybe planning a re design of the DS later this year. Makes sense as they have re desigend the original GBA twice (SP and Micro)

[Dead Or Alive]

Other news this week: Part 2:
Lara Croft is back and is now under the wing of the orginal developers hoping to put the game back on the map.. YAY

Whens it out??

[-DeViLbOy-]

PSP- There has been a fully working homebrew on PSP 2.0, 2.1, 2.5 and 2.6.
Its called CheatDevice v0.7 its for GTA LCS.
Can i post about PSP?.

[Antownee]

Yeah of course =)

Thanks for contributing

[MORSN417]

*double post* oh well.

Nintendo news: Nintendo maybe planning a re design of the DS later this year. Makes sense as they have re desigend the original GBA twice (SP and Micro)


r they just going to make it smaller??
i dont know how they would do that cause if the buttons were any closer than they r than my fingers would hit two buttons at once

[Nitrous]

No idea how they will re-design.. might not even happen yet oh and can I just remind the n00bies of what cHilli posted on page 1 of this thread (below)

Stuck, and for everyone else..

This Thread is information based only, please do not reply with comments, simply news only, thanks.

[Nitrous]

*copy/edit & paste*

A deal was struck late last night that saw Atari sell off another one of its cornerstone brands to a rival publisher.

Ubisoft has bought the intellectual property and technology rights to Driver, as well as most of the assets and all of the personnel of developer Reflections Interactive.

The cost of the acquisition is 19 million euros, or $24m.
The deal follows Atari's recent sale of Timeshift to Vivendi and Stuntman to THQ.

[Cid Highwind]

DVDO: The Final Solution to HDTV Gaming-Lag

HDTV gaming-lag is a real and serious problem for gamers making the jump into High-Def displays. We've got a pretty thorough examination of the problem and solutions here, but in short, HDTV gaming-lag occurs when an HDTV spends too much time processing the incoming signals. Signals that aren't the same resolution as the HDTV have to be scaled, and then some other circuitry does some deinterlacing work, and then sometimes some other circuitry does some work to make everything pretty. All that processing takes time, and some HDTVs waste so much time fiddling around with the signal that there is a noticeable delay. Gamers discover this when a button press only shows up on screen half a second later. Obviously, this can make most games absolutely unplayable.



HDTV manufactures have been dismissive of the subject until relatively recently, and home-brew solutions to the problem, like imported Japanese VGA boxes, produce results but are something of a work-around for the problem and can be a pain to get your hands on. As such, we were a bit surprised when we took a look at Anchor Bay Technologies' (ABT) DVDO iScan VP20 and VP30 video scaling processors, products from the first applicable company we've yet seen to specifically address the problem of HDTV gaming-lag and develop a fully-featured solution to the problem.



The company recently announced the addition of gaming mode capabilities for a recently released daughter card add-in for their iScan VP20 and VP30 Scaling Processors. Scaling processors such as these look a lot like regular A/V system selector boxes, able to accept a variety of inputs and switch between them on a single connection to the TV. The VP20 and VP30 do a lot more, however, as they have the uncommon ability to accept the full variety of signals, from 480i, 480p, 720p, to1080i, and convert most to as high as 1080p, if desired, and switch and output all input sources over HDMI. That basically means you could have a 480i console like the PS1, and everything that came before it, upgraded to match your HDTV's native resolution.

Scaling of this sort can do a lot to make Standard-Definition signals look good on an HDTV, as opposed to their natural appearance on a high-resolution display, which is actually worse than on a cheap TV. The particularly exciting news from the gaming perspective, is, however, the fact that ABT has released a new ABT102D Precision Deinterlacing Card for the iScan VP20 and VP30 that performs rapid deinterlacing processing, able to produce less than one frame delay with edge adaptive deinterlacing (Game Mode 1) and less than two frames with edge and motion adaptive processing (Game Mode 2). The add-in card was designed to update the iScan models with ABT's specifically designed deinterlacing algorithms that were designed specifically to allow for the best support of gaming possible.



The practical result of this rapid processing is the ability to play any game console on any HDTV, free of lag, and with a nicely scaled and deinterlaced signal for your HDTV. It's the most direct solution to the HDTV gaming-lag issue we've yet found. Sadly, it isn't a cheap fix. The iScan VP20 and VP30 are high-end video processors that retail for $1,699 and $1,999 respectively. The ABT102D card is $499 add-in, though complete packages of upgraded VP20 and VP30s are available for $1,899 and $2,198, respectively. Such costs put the iScan models somewhat out of the reach of many gamers, however, among high end-home theater fans it is unlikely that a better solution for enjoying retro-consoles on an HDTV lag-free can be found.



We contacted ABT to discuss the iScan models and the general issues surrounding HDTV gaming-lag. Josh Allen answered a variety of our questions, and we'll have the interview available next week. Among our questions, we inquired as to whether ABT has any plans to release its gaming-focused deinterlacing solution at a more accessible price point for the general gaming population. Josh indicated that this was an eventual possibility, and that work in developing a single-chip gaming-oriented deinterlacing solution was underway. That's great news for retro-gamers and anyone suffering with a laggy HDTV.

[HRBEK]

Just thought I'd mention this:

The game Soldier Of Fortune III: Payback has been banned in Australia. The OFLC (responsible for the classifying/ rating of games in Australia) refused to rate the game. They justified this move by saying that the game was simply too gruesome. They said that the detailed dismemberment of limbs (including plenty of blood) was unnecessay gore and hence they refused to rate it. The PS3/ PC game, like its predecessors is a first-person shooter though the graphics in this game have been drastically improved.

As a player of the previous Soldier Of Fortune games, I cannot see what the issue is here. Dismemberment was easily performed in the previous games and although there was less blood involved, the message/ image was the same. There are several videos on YouTube showing the dismemberment involved in the new game.

That's all I guess...

Thanks,
HRBEK.