Sony UK has recently annouced that they will release firmware 2.10 today. The update is available here.

The update adds a few enhancements:
-Ability to choose “Type 3″ as an option under Bitmapping settings.
-DivX (which is the main feature of the update) and VC-1 support
-Some refinements to Blu-ray features

Sony cut the U.S. price of its PS3 with an 80GB hard drive by 17 percent to $499 in mid-October. It started selling a new model with a 40GB hard drive on November 2 for $399 in an effort to ignite demand ahead of the crucial holiday-shopping season.

Sony, locked in battle with Microsoft and Nintendo in the global video game market, suffered a slow start for the PS3 after its launch a year ago because of high prices and a scarcity of strong game titles.

Nintendo sold 519,000 units of the Wii in the United States in October, while Microsoft sold 366,000 Xbox 360 consoles and Sony sold 121,000 of its PS3 machines, data from market researcher NPD released Thursday.

Similar to the PSP update from 2.00 to 2.01, there are no feature releases in this version, but mainly bug-fixes - relating to improving game-play (no more freezes).

You can get the update by using the “system update” feature in your PlayStation 3 if it is connected online. Alternatively, you can download it from the official PlayStation site.

On the face of it, Sony’s Uncharted and Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy can’t be more different.

Uncharted harnesses the PlayStation 3’s graphical muscle to produce a movie-like adventure, while Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii uses cartoonish graphics and simple controls to breathe new life into an aging franchise.

The games also answer challenges facing Sony and Nintendo.

Although Nintendo has been selling as may machines as it can make, players have started to grumble about the lack of must-have titles that offer a more rewarding experience than short minigames.

That’s where Super Mario Galaxy comes in.

A product of Nintendo’s legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Galaxy is being hailed as the most innovative and fun Mario adventure in more than a decade.

The portly Italian plumber once again has to save Princess Peach from the clutches of the evil Bowser, and this time his path hops across an amazing variety of planetoids.

Add in dizzying perspectives, weird gravity effects, and finely-honed motion controls, and you end up with a game that has scored 97 out of 100 on Metacritic.com and is expected to sell 16 million copies worldwide, according to online prediction market simExchange.com.

“It definitely captures the essence of what makes Mario so great,” said Jeremy Parish, features editor at gaming news Web site 1up.com, which scored the game a 9.5 out of 10.

“Some hardcore gamers might be turned off by how cutesy this is, but if you look beyond that, the gameplay is rock solid, it’s incredibly new and inventive,” Parish said.

For Sony, Uncharted is the kind of showcase game it sorely needs to drive sales of the PS3, which has languished behind the Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune puts players on the trail of a hidden treasure of Sir Francis Drake, the 16th century English privateer. It is set in the modern day but crafted in the style of classic adventure movies–think Indiana Jones meets Tomb Raider meets Lost.

Its lush jungle settings and mix of brawling, shooting and exploration set it apart from other popular games this year that feature heavy military or alien-invasion themes.

“There are lots of sci-fi games that are very dark and brown and grey and sort of post-apocalyptic. We wanted to do something more lush and green and vibrant,” said Evan Wells, co-president of Naughty Dog, the Sony studio known for cartoony games like Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter.

“The goal was to create this pulp action adventure and make it very cinematic and make it feel like playing the lead role of a hero in a summer blockbuster,” Wells said.

Uncharted has an average rating of 89 on Metacritic.com, the highest of any exclusive game for the system along with Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, which came out last month.

“It is another solid addition to the library and I’m sure that for some folks that is something that would push them to buy a console this holiday,” said Billy Pidgeon, games analyst for market research firm IDC.

Super Mario Galaxy was released in the United States on November 12 while Uncharted comes out November 19.

The move is part of the company’s effort to broaden the reach of the Xbox 360 to include more families. The company also recently introduced a lower-priced Xbox 360 Arcade model that skips a hard drive, but includes a handful of casual games like Pac-Man and Uno. Microsoft is also working to expand its Viva Pinata title into a franchise of products aimed at younger kids.

“All of those things are starting to make Xbox a much broader gaming world than it was even six months ago,” Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices unit said in an interview.

The move comes ahead of an important holiday selling season, with consoles from Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all now in volume production. Nintendo’s Wii has been the surprise hit, but Sony has dropped the price of the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft is counting on Halo 3 and other titles to help boost its holiday sales.

Bach said the ability to set time limits on children’s gaming should help parents feel more comfortable with having a game console in the house.

“At the same time, I think it does more than just make people feel good,” Bach said. “I think when we talk to parents, when we talk to them about things that would matter to them as a purchase criteria, family settings in general certainly make the list, and time controls has been one of the things people have been talking about for a few years now.”

The new feature, which will be available in a few weeks, is also designed to be easy for parents who may not be as technologically savvy as their game-playing offspring. “It’s really, really easy,” Bach said. “You go to family settings. You go to timer. You say daily or weekly. You pick a number of hours and you are done.”

This is just one of a number of areas in which Microsoft is hoping to make the Xbox 360 attractive to a broader range of customers than its traditional base, which Bach noted tends to be older than those that use rival consoles, such as the Wii and the PlayStation 3. There’s work that can be done in terms of game development, improvements to the console, additions to its Xbox Live online gaming as well as new types of peripherals.

Another thing Microsoft needs to do, Bach said, is find more ways to make the console cheaper to produce. “That’s something we need to do over the life cycle to continue to make the business work,” he said, “so, over time (we can) bring down prices.”

Nintendo’s strategy to offer innovative but easy-to-play games to expand the gamer population has been a smashing success. Nintendo shares have risen more than fivefold in the past two years to make the game maker Japan’s third most valuable company. Asked what Nintendo plans to do with its growing cash pile, Iwata said the company may carry out a new capital policy in the near future, but it did not elaborate. “Nintendo has ample cash, for sure, and you may say we have strong cash-generating power,” Iwata said. “There is a chance that we will need to do something we haven’t done or we haven’t said in the not-so-distant future, in terms of capital policy, if cash keeps accumulating. But it is too early to say what it would be.” Nintendo’s cash and deposits totaled 912.7 billion yen (about $8 billion) as of September 30.

This means that it can affect a whole bunch of stuff - ranging from your “favorite” IE7 (or Firefox for those for hate IE) to other software like Photoshop.

PHP is well aware of the problem for several months, but Microsoft should be the one fixing the problems it accidentally caused. Well, what are you doing Microsoft? Working on Windows Vienna?

According to a Microsoft representative, the company feels that “the timing is right to really focus and turn the spotlight on our family content and, yeah, we feel great.”

Believe it or not, Microsoft has inked a deal with Warner Bros. to bring HD Looney Tunes to the Xbox Live Video Marketplace, and more games designed with children in mind will be coming down the pike with the help of this new console.

Xbox 360 Arcade

(Credit: Microsoft)

While I applaud Microsoft for making the jump to children’s games and attempting to attract the all-too-evasive “nontraditional gamer,” isn’t it playing a game that Nintendo already knows the secret to? And if so, is Microsoft barking up the wrong tree?

It may surprise you, but the answer is simply no. Microsoft is onto something with this new focus and whether or not you are a Nintendo zealot to the end, you need to realize that Microsoft may start attracting the younger crowd more effectively than you think.

Historically speaking, there is no denying the fact that Nintendo has controlled the family gaming market. With such classics as Mario and Donkey Kong (among many others), the company has single-handedly taken control of the casual gamer. And with the release of the Wii, it has enjoyed some success in attracting those “nontraditional gamers” by doing something other companies haven’t been able to do: creating a unique gaming experience.

Regardless of your opinion of Microsoft, it is not a dumb company when it needs to make solid gaming decisions. Realizing it cannot compete with the Wii on purely unique gameplay, the company has found a new way–enlist the help of popular child franchises and offer games that will appeal to the family. And while I’m not a firm believer in this idea of bringing an entire family into the gaming mix, I do believe it can attract at least one or two people in any given family, and effectively take a bite out of Nintendo’s stranglehold on the market.

In essence, Microsoft and Nintendo are trying to appeal to the same market in two distinctly different ways. Microsoft wants to attract consumers by offering well-known franchises and providing the new gaming crowd with a host of fun and entertaining games. Meanwhile, Nintendo’s main selling point this time around is its hardware. If the Wii was just another gaming console with old-style controls, we’d be calling it a Gamecube. And if memory serves me correctly, the Gamecube was quite a flop.

Unfortunately for Nintendo, I simply don’t believe hardware will take the day in the bitter battle for the family. Sure, it has been successful in bringing a unique experience to homes. But as I’ve mentioned before, it simply doesn’t have the software behind it to overcome the rest of the industry.

Microsoft is in an enviable position. With a strong library of games that appeal to mature gamers, it can now focus on the relatively untapped family market. And while I think it’ll be a tough nut to crack, look for Microsoft to make some headway this holiday season and capture market share from Nintendo going forward.

The change will not come overnight. But rest assured, if Microsoft can follow through on its promises and Nintendo remains complacent, look for Microsoft to become the “nontraditional” charmer.

Originally posted at The Digital Home.

The unbricker will downgrade/upgrade your PSP to 3.71 M33 (custom firmware; this firmware works on PSP and PSP slim). You can further downgrade the original PSP (not the PSP slim) using Pandora’s battery. The unbricker makes use of Pandora’s battery.

Note that this unbricker works depending on the extent of bricking. For severe cases where dumping of the original PSP’s firmware is not possible, the PSP still remains bricked. Note that you need an original firmware dump of the PSP; using others will result in a brick. Thus the unbricker should be used with care.

Via QJ, Dark-Alex

They had their own epilepsy-inducing lights, after all. New York’s Halo 3 debut stopped short of pyrotechnics, but it was over the top in just about every other way.

“George Clooney who?” one person near the head of the line joked when he heard the gossip. Like most of the queuers who’d shown up at the Best Buy store for the official launch celebration of the final installment of the Xbox 360 game trilogy, he was young, male and sporting a Halo 3 T-shirt that had been given away as part of the festivities.

“We’re more famous than him tonight,” a nearby line-waiter added, gesturing at one of the many flat-panel TV screens that had been set up in the windows of the Best Buy store, projecting previews of the title, interspersed with live footage of numerous NFL players from the New York Giants and New York Jets inside the store, squaring off against one another on Halo 3. For this crowd, Clooney couldn’t hold a candle to Master Chief, the iconic Halo protagonist who’s been blasting away at bad guys on TV screens since the original title launched in 2001.

An enormous spotlight beamed up over Fifth Avenue, and full-out lighting and sound equipment–along with plenty of enormous TV screens–dominated the ground scene. A team of Mountain Dew minions were walking around with trays of plastic shot glasses containing a seemingly endless supply of samples of its Halo 3-branded energy drink, “Game Fuel.” There was a guy in a Master Chief outfit, of course. Best Buy and Microsoft representatives were giving away T-shirts and other prizes to the fans who were willing to scream the loudest or wave their homemade signs (best one: “MASTER CHIEF IS MY FATHER”). And in addition to the handful of local NFL players, rappers Ludacris and Chingy and R&B singer Bobby Valentino were also on-site to try out the game for the cameras.
Click here to Play

And there were a whole lot of cameras. Microsoft dominated the myriad big-screen TVs with its in-house coverage of the launch, but video and photo crews were around from every local television network, as well as cable channels like Spike TV and G4 that target the Halo demographic. There were also more than a few video bloggers and even Justin.tv lifecaster Sarah Meyers.

At first, it seemed as though the marketing and press were going to overshadow the actual pack of fans. There simply weren’t that many of them in line earlier Monday; with fewer than 12 hours left, the line still stood at about 15 people despite the fact that 28-year-old Uche Nwachukwu, the first person to show up, had been there since 6 p.m. Sunday. Things didn’t really pick up until schools and offices had cleared out for the day, and by about 7 p.m., the line was pretty respectable. By about 10:30 p.m., it stood at several hundred.

‘Mixed reactions, mixed feelings’
All in all, the crowds and the audio-visuals made for a sight that certainly turned heads. “Some people just pass by and say ‘Oh, you’re crazy. What are you in line for?’” said 22-year-old Alex Escobar, who was near the front of the line. “Mixed reactions, mixed feelings, I don’t care. I love my Halo.”

But no one, really, was prepared for the spectacle that the Halo 3 event would turn into with about an hour to go. Best Buy and Microsoft staffers kept their swag giveaways going, insisting that the rambunctious crowds cheer at the top of their lungs in order to get a free T-shirt or bouncy ball thrown at them. The bouncy balls were a bad idea, as the line-waiters proceeded to simply hurl them at one other, but thankfully no legitimate fights ensued. (It made you wonder exactly what was in that “Mountain Dew Game Fuel.”)

Then the Mongooses arrived. With only 20 minutes left before midnight, three camo-clad bikers atop all-terrain vehicles decorated to look like the Halo 3 pimped rides showed up and incited the crowds to cheering as they performed noisy “wheelies” along the block of Fifth Avenue that had, by that time, been completely blocked off from normal traffic. They were followed by a Hummer H2 decorated in Halo 3 logos, from which an armored Master Chief ceremoniously pulled several copies of the game and took them inside for the first few buyers.
Now on News.com
Shining a light on solar power Caltech robot van ready to rumble Photos: ‘Halo 3′ fans initiate play Extra: The Facebook commandments

With the combination of massive, energy-hogging audio-visuals, a Hummer, discarded plastic shot glasses and several all-terrain vehicles, it should be noted that this was embarrassingly far from being a “green” event. But that apparently wasn’t the point.

At its climax, the New York Halo 3 launch resembled some combination of a red-carpet premiere, a wild sporting event and an apocalyptic action movie. The security presence was considerable, considering the energy of the crowd. But when midnight rolled around, it was unclear whether the eager, heavily sugared and caffeinated gamers or the camera-wielding press would be the ones to start some kind of riot. Luckily, no one did.

The Halo fans, after all, had only one thing on their minds: go home, log on to their Xbox 360s and load up that new game.

“I feel awesome,” said Chris Camisa, who had been fifth in line, as he traded Xbox Live usernames with some other young gamers whom he’d met while waiting so that they could eventually meet again and blow each other’s Halo 3 incarnations to bits. “I skipped one class today, and it was well worth it,” he said.

Next to him, one of the other early line-waiters held up the limited-edition Halo 3 game that was sold to early adopters, packaged with a Master Chief helmet.

“All right!” he exclaimed, waving the box above his head. “Now I’m going to go play–all night.”

Source

Trivia:
-It is one primary reason why Microsoft is growing despite the Mortgage woes in USA.
-The event held in Singapore is going to be placed in the Guiness book of records for the largest outdoor live screen used in a gaming event.
-It’s probably more hyped-up compared to Halo 2. After all… why do many newspapers talk about it?
-A riot almost brewed because of the event (looks like enthusiasm got out of hand).

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe revealed at the Leipzig Games Convention its joint venture with Sky Broadcasting to provide the PSP in the UK and Ireland downloadable video. The joint venture between the two companies will be branded as “Go!”

Go! will offer similar content to that which is available through Sky Broadcasting, such as sports, entertainment, movies, music, animation and content from third-party channel brands. Also a part of the VOD system will be pay-per-view movies.

Users of the Go! system will be able to choose between downloading content directly onto their PSPs with the Wi-Fi connection or to download first to PC and then transfer onto the handheld.

“Sky and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe have complementary strengths in content, marketing and technology. Together, we’re ideally placed to make portable, on-demand TV a reality,” said James Murdoch, CEO of Sky. “Alongside our existing services for PCs and mobile phones, this is another example of how we’re working to give more choice, flexibility and control to customers. The quality of the PSP’s screen and its substantial reach among 2 million users in the UK and Ireland makes it a natural extension to our multi-platform strategy.”

Just as with the PlayStation 3 PlayTV DVR system, such a VOD feature for the PSP may never make it to North American shores. Phil Harrison of Sony Worldwide explained to Kotaku that PSP VOD would not be possible in the U.S. due to the lack of content delivered over-the-air via subscription.

Source

This unbricker, as its name implies, uses a custom battery [a.k.a. Jigkick battery] that is modified from a normal battery through software. It then utilizes a hidden mode in the PSP to install the firmware. This unbricker would install firmware 1.50. The unbricker works on any PSP [works on TA-82, and of course those bricked ones (since you have almost nothing to lose), unless they have been bricked because of corruption to their IDstorage keys (but those kind of bricks are very rare)], meaning it has the ability to downgrade any PSP [include those that are not bricked and are running an official or custom firmware] to firmware 1.50.

Note that you need a PSP that can run homebrew to create the unbricker, as well as the special JigKick battery (or more formally known as the service mode battery). This battery appears to do more than just power your battery - it contains a firmware within itself (hence its cost). Note that you cannot use the JigKick battery for normal usage of the PSP, hence you need a spare battery. The JigKick battery can be restored to a normal one if you want to [provided you back up the firmware of the battery]. The memory stick used as the unbricker needs to be at least 256 mb in size (you can use the memory stick after using it as a unbricker, that is if you want to [you need to format the memory stick to reset the unbricking memory stick to a normal one]).

You can get the unbricker via Noobz. Although the unbricker unbricks the PSP (and one would thus think what’s more to lose with a PSP that’s almost dead), please always, always read the readme file.

Media Create Co. on Tues. reported that the Wii sold 65,120 units between Aug. 6 and Aug. 12, an increase from a total of 61,498 units the week prior.

Wii ranked three software titles in the top 10 game sales, including Mario Party 8, Wii Sports, and Wii Play. It ranked six titles total in the top 50 game sales for the week.

Nintendo in July recorded record profits on strong Wii sales, increasing its business year shipment forecast to 16.5 million from 14 million.

However, a recent report claims that Nintendo will delay an increase in Wii hardware production due to lack of supply components. Wii has sold more than three million units in Japan to date.

The Core Xbox 360 will retail for £179.99 from 24 August, and the Premium edition, which includes a 20GB hard drive, wireless controller, headset and HD cables, will sell for £249.99.

The price cut follows a similar reduction earlier this month across the US and Canada.

“We are pleased to offer Xbox 360 at a new, lower estimated retail price,” said Stephen McGill, head of gaming at Xbox UK.

The jet black Xbox 360 Elite, which will retail for £299.99, packs a 120GB hard drive and HDMI support.

Source