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Uno Coming To The Nintendo DS
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Portable/Mobile, Strategy,
It turns out Uno isn’t just for your Xbox 360 anymore. This October Uno, Skip-Bo, and Uno Free Fall will be coming to the Nintendo DS. The collection of Mattel games will be on one compilation cartridge, letting you get your on the go Uno fix quite easily. Not a whole lot of information is available, but we can definitely imagine Uno taking advantage of the DS microphone for calling out Uno before your online opponent. Can the mobile version of Uno be as addicting as the Xbox Live Arcade counterpart? I wonder how many people are playing Uno for the first time on a console, and if a console is the future of card games.
Read More 
| Jack Of All Games
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Red Steel Control Scheme Being Overhauled
Posted by Michael Cardiff Categories: Action, First Person Shooters, Nintendo, Reviews, Wii,
Red Steel is one of those games that Nintendo fans really really want to see succeed. The idea of a first-person game alternately utilizing the Wii to do gun-shootin’ and sword-swingin’ sounded like a dream come true. Unfortunately that dream was shattered (or at least slightly cracked) when E3 rolled around. Red Steel proved to be perhaps the poorest showing in Nintendo’s wildly popular Wii booth, mainly due to a flawed control scheme that made gunplay somewhat jittery and (more importantly) didn’t actually simulate your sword-strokes during onscreen saber battles.
Well blessed be Ubisoft - the company has actually taken the criticism to heart. TheGameFeed.com has reported that Ubisoft recently told the French press they will be making “significant changes” to the game-play before the game hits shelves, presumably sometime around November. Here’s hoping that it will be much closer to the free-form sword swinging we were all hoping for!
Read More | TheGameFeed.com
$8.96 Video Game Clearance At Circuit City
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Hot Deals, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Gamecube, PlayStation 2, PSP, Xbox,
Demolition Man, on the Cheap Ass Gamer forum was able to pull together a list of Xbox, Gamecube, PSP, DS, Gameboy Advance, and PS2 titles included in the newest $8.96 clearance sale at Circuit City. While the sale does not officially start until Sunday July 2nd many people are reporting success picking up games on the list at clearance price. If your local store doesn’t have the clearance games on the shelf don’t yet despair. Some of the Circuit City locations including my local stores have already pulled the clearance games, and are holding them in the back until Sunday.
Xbox:
Burnout Revenge
Far Cry Instincts
Halo Triple Pack
Gamecube:
Batman Begins
Chaos Theory
Dragonball Z Sagas
EA Sports Fight Night Round 2
PSP:
Need For Speed Underground Rivals
Spiderman 2
Tiger Woods PGA
Tony Hawk Underground 2 Remix
World Soccer Tour
Nintendo DS:
Advance Wars
Meteos
Burnout Legends
Star Wars Episode 3 Revenge Of The Sith
Texas Hold Em
Tiger Woods 2005
Gameboy Advance:
Grand Theft Auto
Madden 2006
Mario Golf: Advance Tours
Mario Kart Super Circuit
Mario Party Advance
Playstation 2:
Driver Parallel Lines
Eye Toy
Time Crisis: Crisis Zone
Time Splitters
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland Collector’s Edition
Head over to the Cheap Ass Gamer forums for the full list which includes many more games.
Read More | Cheap Ass Gamer
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DS Lite Sales in UK Somewhat Lackluster
Posted by Michael Cardiff Categories: Corporate News, Hardware, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Portable/Mobile,
Compared with the sales numbers we’ve been seeing in the States and in Japan, the Nintendo DS Lite’s sales numbers in Britain are somewhat disappointing. Nintendo sold 35,000 DS Lites in its opening weekend - about 40% as many as were sold when the original “Fat” DS debuted. Compare that with the US, where the DS Lite sold 136,000 units in its first two days, which was roughly comparable to the performance of the original DS when it came out. Retailers in the area aren’t too disappointed though, especially considering the fact that much of the nation is currently glued to their televisions for the World Cup.
We thought that Europe knew they had a good thing when Nintendo announced the ultra-sleek black DS Lite for that region only! Surprisingly, only about half of the DS Lites sold in the UK were black. You’d think the Brits would at least snatch them up so that they could fetch a pretty penny (or pound) on eBay.
Read More | GamesIndustry.biz
New Castlevania May Allow WiFi Play
Posted by Michael Cardiff Categories: Action, Adventure, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Rumors,
In addition to removing the tacked-on rune-tracing from the new DS Castlevania game, series creator Koji Igarashi has announced that he is looking into whether to include WiFi-based play for the next Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. If he decides to, this would mark Castlevania’s first foray into the online arena.
Says Igarashi:
“It’s not confirmed yet, because I haven’t started work on it. [Laughs] That’s why I can’t confirm. But actually I’m thinking about preparing a special unlockable stage where you can do co-op over WiFi.”
Personally, I’ve never thought of Castlevania as a multiplayer game—I can’t imagine doing battle against another player or anything like that. Still, the possibility of something like co-op play might be a great addition to an already great series.
Read More | Kikizo
EA Confirms No NHL 07 For Gamecube or DS
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Gamecube, Sports,
When EA announced their cover athlete for NHL 07 last week, Nintendo fanboys noticed that there was no mention of a Gamecube or Nintendo DS version. Nintendo followed up with an EA publicist to find out if the list was a final console rundown. EA did confirm that NHL 07 will not be making an appearance on the Gamecube or the DS, however they confirmed support for the DS with other titles and hope to work with the Wii in the future. Let’s hope that EA will kick it up when the Wii is released this fall.
Read More | Nintendojo
Microsoft’s In-Game Advertising Strategy
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Corporate News, Nintendo, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360, Xbox Live,
A few months ago when Microsoft purchased Massive, a video game advertisement agency that specializes in serving ads to online games, many wondered what direction in-game advertisement would take. Recently players in PGR3 have seen a new blitz advertising Cadillac cars through in-game models. Gamedaily reports that Microsoft is viewing in-game advertising as an important revenue stream for the next-gen gaming platform. Microsoft is looking to sign up 80 more advertising partners by the end of the year and expects to recognize a “25-30% bump in profitability”. The most surprising fact revealed by Gamedaily was that Microsoft could in the future offer the in-game advertising service to Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft hopes this would ease the trouble of serving up ads 3 different ways for a PS3 version, 360 version and a Wii version. If all of the manufacturers hopped on the Massive advertising train it would in essence create another monopoly owned by Microsoft by locking out the 2 main competitors in online gaming ad delivery. My thoughts about in-game advertising are that, if done unobtrusively, then more money goes to Microsoft and maybe, just maybe the savings will be passed down to me, the gamer. What are your thoughts on game advertisements?
Read More | GameDaily.Biz
Nintendo DS Browser Mini Review
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Hardware, Internet, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Portable/Mobile,
On July 23rd Nintendo is releasing the Opera browser for the Nintendo DS and DS Lite in Japan. The package will retail for about $33 USD and includes a DS “cartridge” with the browser on it and a GBA cartridge which holds memory for the browser. An individual who has some connections in the Opera community was able to score some hands on time with the new browser and has posted his initial reactions.
When I started it up I was browsing in dual screen mode. Basically the page was fit to the width of the screen and the height spanned both screens. With an easy touch of the stylus you can switch into a “zoom” mode where you are presented with a picture of the web page on the top screen and on the bottom screen you can drag a box around to see in actual size what you need to view. You can also simply swap the screens so that you can type in text as needed where fields or check boxes etc. are presented.
Jon answers even more usability questions and includes a lot of other answers about the operation of a browser on the Nintendo DS. Anyone else have trouble reading that browser instead of Bowser? With the naming prowess they have recently shown us I am surprised its not called the Bowser browser.
Read More | Org's Tech Times
TheStreet.com Talks to Sony About Playstation 3
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Corporate News, Nintendo, PlayStation 3, Rumors, Xbox 360,
TheStreet.com interviewed Jack Tretton, co-chief operating officer of Sony Computer Entertainment America, about the challenges that Sony will potentially face this holiday season with the Playstation 3. Overall, Tretton stays within the Sony’s talking points on the PS3 and doesn’t reveal a lot of new information, but does offer some interesting perspective on where Sony sits in the upcoming next generation console battle. Again, the issue of the “disappointing” E3 presentation was tackled, and Tretton, like others at Sony before him, believes that overall the presentation was a success. While consumers and the gaming press may not have been enthused with the information presented, Sony’s stand is that the key stakeholders in the upcoming battle, retailers and third-party developers came away with the information they needed, and from that point of view, their presentation succeeded. Winning over the consumer at this level would have been a great bonus, but Sony believes that their long-term strategy will address the concerns of the average gamer, and didn’t need to be fully addressed at E3.
Part of this comes into play when addressing the price point; Sony’s position is that once the consumer understands the value proposition of the technology included in the PS3 versus the Xbox 360, then $499 will become an acceptable outlay. Whether Sony can successfully message this remains to be seen, but there are still a number of months before the launch, and earnest marketing hasn’t really started yet.
Tretton also believes that the head start the Xbox 360 has on the Playstation 3 is insignificant, stating that if “a competitor gets to 6 to 10 million worldwide, I would not consider that to be a significant advantage or a significant disadvantage as far as we’re concerned.” This is because Sony’s position is that the race is a marathon and not a sprint; their targets are at 100-million units worldwide and 50-million in America alone. However, there must be some point at which a competitor’s lead becomes insurmountable, and Sony has never faced a situation where they’ve ceded that much ground to a competitor before.
Finally, Sony downplays third-party exclusivity, particularly the loss of Grand Theft Auto 4 as an exclusive Playstation 3 title. Tretton believes that ultimately, this will become a losing proposition, that “with the cost of development, not many developers can afford to do exclusivity.” First party games, for Sony, will become the driver of exclusive sales. This is somewhat of an interesting statement; ten years ago, one could have said that the best producers of first-party content were Sega and Nintendo. Sega titles didn’t save the Dreamcast from oblivion, and the hottest first party titles from Nintendo couldn’t elevate the Gamecube above third place in the console wars. This is somewhat turning around in the portable market, with the DS, but from history, this doesn’t seem to be the guarantor of success that Sony believes it to be.
The interview really tackles what the competition is going to be like from a business perspective. It seems like Sony is in a comeback position now, but the company has yet to fail, and the next year in the console wars will certainly be an interesting one.
Read More | TheStreet
Mojodo DS Lite Game Buyers Guide
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Portable/Mobile,
The good folks over at Mojodo have put together yet another Nintendo DS Lite essentials list. The list does a good job of breaking down major DS titles into 3 categories; Buy, Consider, and Skip. The titles are further broken down into touch based games, traditional games and multiplayer offerings. Recommended purchases include Trauma Center, Advance Wars DS, and Mario Kart DS to name a few. The focus on games makes for a great companion to 4 color rebellion’s DS Lite Buyers Guide and well worth checking out for new Nintendo DS Lite owners!
Read More | Mojodo
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