Pretty good update this week. I wish they would bring Shiki-Tei & Last Guy to other regions. I want to try those out. Edit: Yay, a The Last Guy Demo

GAMES

► EA Sports Fantasy Football Live Score Tracker ($0.99)

► Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty ($14.99)

GAME DEMOS

► NFL Head Coach 09

► Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

► The Last Guy

GAME CONTENT

► Guitar Hero III
○ Dragonforce Track Pack ($6.25)
♪ “Heroes of Our Time”
♪ “Revolution Deathsquad”
♪ “Operation Ground and Pound”

► Haze
○ Domination Pack (free)

► Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds
○ Kratos ($1.99)

► Rock Band
♪ Devo - “Girl U Want” ($1.99)
♪ Devo - “Through Being Cool” ($1.99)
♪ Duran Duran - “Girls on Film” ($1.99)
♪ Duran Duran - “Rio” ($1.99)
♪ The Janitors - “Get Your Rock On” ($0.99)

PSP GAMES

► Jeanne d’Arc ($22.99)

GAME VIDEOS

► PSN
○ Leipzig trailer

► Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway
○ Making Of #1: Operation
○ Making Of #2: Roll Call

► inFamous
○ Leipzig trailer

► Madden NFL 09
○ Virtual Trainer Trailer
○ Rewind Trailer
○ BackTrack Trailer

► PAIN
○ Clown Toss Mode trailer
○ Hot’n'Cold Mode trailer

► Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
○ Trailer

► The Last Guy
○ Cities Trailer

► Vampire Rain
○ Trailer 5
○ Gameplay Trailer 2

► Warhawk Fallen Star
○ trailer

THEMES & WALLPAPERS

► inFamous - theme
► MotorStorm Pacific Rift - wallpaper
► Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty - theme & wallpaper
► TNA! Impact - wallpapers (3)

GAMES

► Bionic Commando: Rearmed (£6.99 - €9.99) (In case you missed it, it went up Friday)
► Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty (£9.99 - €14.99)
► International Track & Field (PSone) (£3.49 - €4.99)
► Medal of Honor Heroes (PSP) (£14.99 - €19.99)
► Sid Meier’s Pirates! (PSP) (£14.99 - €19.99)

GAME DEMOS

► Star Wars: Force Unleashed

GAME CONTENT

► Buzz Megaquiz - National Geographic Safari Quiz (£4.99 - €7.99)
► Haze - Domination Pack (free)
► Hot Shots Golf 5 – Kratos (£0.69 - €0.99)
► Guitar Hero III - DragonForce Track Pack (£3.99 - €5.99)

GAME VIDEOS

► Bionic Commando Rearmed - Launch Trailer
► Farcry 2 - Ubidays Trailer
► Fatal Inertia EX - Trailer 2
► PlayTV

LEIPZIG 2008 TRAILERS

► Playstation - General
-Leipzig 2008 Sizzle
-PlayStation Network Showcase
-Sony Online Entertainment
-VidZone on PlayStation 3

►GTI Club + Rally Cote d’Azur Trailer
► Heavy Rain
► InFamous
►Killzone 2
►LittleBigPlanet
►MotorStorm Pacific Rift
►Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty
►Warhawk - Operation Fallen Star
►WipeEout HD

MOVEMENT
-New Music Videos

GAMES

► Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty (¥1500)

GAME CONTENT

► Shiki-Tei - Animal Pack B (¥300)

GAME VIDEOS

► Afrika
► Double Clutch
► The Last Guy - Promotional Video

NeoGAF

Another unique PlayStation Eye game called EyePet. It’s a virtual pet you can play with, even draw toys for him to play with. Nice to see more PS Eye games, keep them coming Sony.

Click here for bigger version:

It looks exactly like I expected. An updated version of Indigo Prophecy with dramatically improved visuals and technology. Unfortunately, the trailer highlights the notorious Quick Time Events. Does anyone not dislike those things?

o.O Wow, those Jetpacks look like so much fun. The new level looks amazing as well. And this all arrives along with Trophie support on Aug 28th. Looks like I’ll be getting back into Warhawk again

160GB with Uncharted and a voucher for the PSN game PAIN. $499 this Fall.

I like how they worded this on the official site:

“The 160GB PS3 has all of the same functionality as the new 80GB PS3 that’s popping up on retailer shelves now, but obviously has twice the HDD space”

Translation: Same limitations as the old 40GB unit. No PS2 compatibility whatsoever, only two USB ports rather than four, no integrated flash card reader, and no SACD support. OK, I don’t think anyone cares about SACD support, but many enthusiasts including myself really want the other extras. I know I can buy a separate PS2 and USB extenders and external flash readers, but that sucks. It really does. I assume they are pulling the older 80GB SKUs off the market as well. I can’t complain too much since I still have my near-launch 60GB model (with a 250GB HDD) but I’m less enthusiastic about other people picking up these units.

I’m normally not one to be negative, as the PS3 is awesome overall, and video games are better than ever, but I’m not going to pull punches on this one. This really sucks.

On the bright-side, the new PS3 units have been using the smaller, cooler 65nm process for CPU manufacturing and these new units may be the first to have 65nm GPUs. This isn’t confirmed, but they’ve previously said that GPU manufacture would upgrade to 65nm process this fall so the timing is right.

I’m not sure if I’ll get this or not. The only game I’d use it with is MGO. And I already have a bluetooth keyboard. It’s out in late November. Maybe just in time for Home? I can see it being more useful there. It’s nice that it has a dedicated friends and message box buttons though.

Click to supersize

Live from Leipzig: North American Hardware Announcements

I’m amazed how good this game is looking. I can’t wait to get my hands on it

I’ve added several more features to the console sales database and chart generator (you need to setup a free Zoho login to create your own charts):

1. Lifetime Cumulative Sales Values
2. Number of Weeks Since Launch. This allows creation of launch aligned charts.
3. More data. Weekly Famitsu data going all the way back to 2000 and MediaCreate data going back to 2003. Full monthly NPD data back to 11/2006 and 360 data going back to launch. Unfortunately, I only have an aggregate total of 360 sales during January through October in 2006. LTD totals will be correct but you can’t see the month by month breakdown during this timeframe and you can see one of the charts below looks a little funny.
4. More Consoles. Famitsu/MediaCreate data for PS1, Xbox1, GameCube, NeoGeo Pocket, and some consoles I’ve never even heard of (SwanCrystal?). I created a separate table called MasterSales that includes both the the obscure consoles and the Famitsu data. The regular Sales table doesn’t have this extra data so as not to confuse new users.

Any new ideas or data links that I may have missed?

Here are three new charts. These links are “live”, which means that when new data is added to the database, these chart graphics will automatically update.

As I said, I don’t have monthly breakdown data for 360 USA sales during Jan-Oct 2006, so that part of the graph looks a little wonky. The LTD totals are all correct however.

Thanks to garaph.info and vgsales.wikia.com for source data.

The online play for this looks great. I’m going to have a lot of fun sniping in this game! They’ll be showing this video at 2008 Liepzig Games Convention event later this week. Follow this link for a HD video.

Those Sony folks are working hard to make sure that music peripherals for different games work with each other, according to Sony’s PS3 Music Peripheral Compatibility Update. Yay!

Sony’s planning to bring the PSN video store to Canada, and I can’t wait.

I recently stopped my Canflix subscription (it’s like Netflix in the States). The service was too slow and I’m having problems with Canada Post eating my movies and Canflix blaming it on me. I had the same problem with Zip.ca. Sheesh.

So now I don’t have a source of a wide range of easily procured movies. I’m a lazy sort and don’t want to go to the local Rogers. And besides, their selection isn’t all that good anyway.

But I read recently about one guy’s effort to rent the movie “21″. He said that there wasn’t any rental option, only purchase. Do any of you in the States have comments as to how many movies are rentals versus buys versus both? HD versus SD? 5.1 surround versus stereo?

Because I’m personally wanting to:

1) Rent, not buy.
2) HD, not crappy SD.
3) In full surround sound, because I have a surround sound system!

Observations, anyone?

PLAYSTATION Store Video Content Update

If you buy anything this week do NOT buy Hannah Montana, lol.

* Camp Rock: Extended Rock Star Edition
* Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
* Justice League: Season One
* The Life Before Her Eyes
* Monster
* Nixon
* Prom Night (Unrated)
* The Proposition
* The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
* Street Kings
* Terminator - The Sarah Connor Chronicles - The Complete First Season

Blu-ray.com

I’ve manually compiled console sales data from NPD and Media Create and loaded it into an online database at Zoho DB.

Anyone can browse the data and view the charts and reports that I already setup. Where this gets really interesting, is if you have a Zoho login (it’s free), you can design your own reports off of the live database. They have some really easy to use drag & drop report designer tools and you can create any type of chart or report you can imagine off of the data available. If you have database experience, you can even write your own custom SQL queries directly against this data.

There are several other video game sales chart + data sites popping up, but most merely let you view pre-made charts or reports. Sites like vgchartz take it a little further and offer very limited report designer capabilities. What I like about this system is that users have full access to the data (even direct SQL) and you can design any type of report that you imagine. Also, all data in this database is flagged with a data source, so users can filter out any untrusted or unwanted sources from their reports. Currently, I only have NPD data and Media Create data, but if I can get more data that might not be as universally accepted, this would be a very useful option.

Currently, I have the following data loaded:

1. Monthly NPD data from the November 2006 to the present. Thanks to vgsales wikia
2. Weekly Media Create data loaded from January 2003 to the present. Thanks to garaph.info

The number one thing that I would like to do is add more data: Older NPD data, and Europe data. I also have access to Famitsu data, but this is redundant with MediaCreate data. It might be worth adding anyway.

(The above reports are a little skewed, as there is more historic data from Japan going back to 12/2004 while NPD data goes back to 11/2006. Unfortunately, I can’t find any data for Europe or other territories. If you know of a good source, let me know!)

UPDATE: Got full MediaCreate data back to 1/2003

I’m tempted to sell my copy of Burnout and get the download version. But it depends how big the game will be. No release date yet, but it will be $29.99. It will include all the free updates so far to.

I’m impressed all the support this game is getting. Now that I’ve finally beat MSG4 I have time for other games, so I’ll be playing this again soon. And there is more updates coming this year.

This is the complete transformation of Burnout. That means you’ll see new game modes, new vehicles including motorcycles, day / night gameplay, weather, a huge new island play area, stacks of new challenges and maybe even aircraft!

Burnout Paradise - coming to PSN