Games Industry Wire

Ageia hopes to give us some physics that will literally blow us away.
Their chip, PhysX, directly competes with nVidia’s grapics chip. And, some say Ageia’s innovative physics processor is a much better chip than the one created by the people who created the phenomenal Half Life 2 physics engine.
They conclude that nVidia’s chip, because it was expressly created to ‘create graphics’ and not to ‘crunch physics calculations’, will fall short of anything close to the realism the PhysX chip is already showing in tests.
And, investors seem excited by Ageia’s physics chip as well. Even at a hefty price …read more

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Publishing/creating a video game for a new console must be a difficult task; however, I wonder if some publishers are taking advantage of the Xbox 360’s patching capability. In other words, are publishers rushing games out the doors, to meet deadlines, in the hope that they can “fix it later.”
That would seem to be the case with Major League Baseball 2k6 on the 360; because, there is a serious problem in one of the most fundamental places. Whenever you strike a person out, the game freezes on the 360. – This is a big, gargantuan, humongous flaw within the game. …read more

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Sony has officially dropped the price of the Playstation 2; they’ve changed the retail recommendation price from $149.00 to $129.00.
With 101 million consoles sold worldwide, the PS2 has dominated the gaming market since its release, with the Xbox coming in at second place at 20 million consoles sold.
I wonder if Microsoft will drop the price of the Xbox. It would be nice if Microsoft went a head and bumped the price of the Xbox down to $99 to compete with the PS2’s price drop.
It’s funny that Sony, and soon to follow Microsoft, are just now getting down the price of the …read more

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Microsoft is planning on making a game featuring our favorite tv commercial character, the king, the burger king that is. The game will supposedly be a blow-em-up shooter, and a cross between “Halo” and “Destroy all Humans.”
“The games will be created by Microsoft for its popular Xbox systems and will be distributed through its restaurants during a five-week December promotion. They are designed to sell for $3.99 with the purchase of a value meal, a steal for gamers used to paying upward of $60 for a single title.”
I must admit, this is a pretty nifty idea. I don’t mind paying …read more

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Lucent Technologies is suing Microsoft over Xbox 360 patent infringement. Lucent declares that the way in which the Xbox 360 decodes videos actually infringes on a patent they’ve held for decades.
According to Lucent, the MPEG2 decoder used by the Xbox 360 for some of its video functionality infringes on US patent number 5,227,878, which dates from mid-1993 and describes a method for “adaptive coding and decoding of frames and fields of video.”
This patent was tried over a year ago and was found to be in favor of Microsoft but there is more to the story. There was a typo in …read more

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George Fornay, Sony Computer Entertainment France President, has announced that the PS3 will cost between 500 and 600 Euros.
Speaking to radio station Europe 1 in an interview which has now been widely circulated online, Fornay said that the console would be available for “around 500 Euro”, with his expectation being that it will be priced between 499 and 599 Euro.
Before considering the price, however – which does translate to between roughly $600 and $750 dollars – it’s important to bear in mind that European prices are often quoted inclusive of local sales tax, which can be in the region of …read more

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Being April Fool’s day, everyone and their mom has an April Fool’s joke. But, I thought this one was especially funny.
From Bungie.net, here are the Xbox 360 Live acheivments for their next big project, Pimps at Sea. (Click the picture for a better view.)

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It’s a do-over ladies and gents.
Microsoft has officially announced that they’re going to relaunch the Xbox 360 in Japan. The relaunch will take place in late June and may come with different a pricing plan and a different marketing campaign.
Japan was the only country that the Xbox 360 did not sell out at launch. Hmmm… maybe that explains where all the Xbox 360s were at launch in the states.
Is this a surprise? I think not. Microsoft has never had a foothold in the Japanese market, and I think they’ll just be loosing money by doing a relaunch. But, since Bill …read more

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