As Fall approaches, more info on exciting games are starting to trickle in. That, and Jonah talks about how he’s going to Power Morphicon to cover stuff for his upcoming new show.
Otherwise, the news this week includes:
Let us know what you think.
One of the greatest things Nintendo has done was allowing the DS to be unlocked for regions. This allowed gamers around the world to share their favorite games from all cultures and countries with just a click of the “buy” button at an online store.
The DSi loses this great freedom by locking it down to a region. “Nintendo DS software is region free so you can play any DS software on DSi from any region. You can also browse the internet on your DSi wherever you are in the world and exchange your photos with friends from around the world,” says Nintendo (CVG).
Much like the US Entertainment Industries need to lock down everything and contribute to global piracy, Nintendo follows suit with their hand-helds, tis a sad day indeed. Of course Nintendo reasons it all away by yelling parental controls and making it easier for regions to access their own content.
“DSi is region locked because DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region. Also because we are including parental control functionality for Nintendo DSi and each region has its unique age limit.”
Specifically tailored for each region is a nice way of saying that each region has to pay the penalty of not being “first” (second, or third) to get some cool new features. Although Nintendo could put emphasis on the region the gamer lives in with complete access out of those bounds if they wanted, they’ve chosen to use this as a crutch to lock users out of content.
Users will get their content, of course. It just means more home brews, software hacks, hardware hacks and workarounds for the system. If that’s what Nintendo is trying to inspire, then they’ve done their job right.
However, wouldn’t it be great if they could just come out and say “we don’t want certain people accessing specific content until we say you can.”
Why release a single block buster game with a two week pop when you can simply lower the price of your console and boost sales by 100%? That’s a question Sony may be asking themselves right now, as Metal Gear Solid 4‘s hype may have lasted years but the sales and console unit sale boots lasted a month.
Gamers show how they feel about costly consoles with their wallet. With 100% increases in sales, it’s clear that many gamers have been holding out from the “next-generation” of consoles because the price was too high. Now, Microsoft can report huge sales numbers this quarter with a special thanks to their price cut. Imagine the sales boost the PlayStation 3 would have if it was competitive in price?
Microsoft could have kept the savings of manufacturing costs to themselves but they chose to pass savings onto the consumers. The increase in unit sales means more households own the product and newly released games will probably see larger spikes now that people have invested in the 360 console.
End result, developers will want to produce games for the Xbox 360 because they’ve got a larger audience and publishers will be less likely to pick Sony as an exclusive because the 360‘s got sway in the market. It might not be a Wii in total sales records but it’s not half bad!
(Thanks, gamasutra)
The Castlevania series was born in Japan on September 26th back in 1986. That knowledge in hand, you can imagine the demographic of 30+ year old gamers who would kill to get an old school franchise title on a new graphic intensive console.
We’ve had many new Castlevania releases since 1986 including releases on the Nintendo DS in 2006 with more titles arriving with the Castlevania branding. However, we’ve not seen a true “full blown” Castlevania title in some time. As a retro style gamer, I’d love to hear news that this would be a 2D game with “next generation” graphics.
There are far too few really great 2D side scrolling platformers for this generation of consoles. Outside of Nintendo, most side scroller systems become “arcade” titles in XBLA or PSN. Over the last fifteen years we’ve had plenty of 3D games with jumping and crazy camera work. Lately, we’ve had some new titles arriving that are 2D platformers like Little Big Planet and the recently released Mega Man 9.
More than likely, Konami will follow the flow and design yet another old franchise with new 3D graphics. Given the demographic for this franchise it would almost seem like a selling point to jump back to a 2D world view.
What would you like? A 3D or 2D Castlevania title on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3?
