Howard Stringer, president of Sony Corporation, has said that PSN is "better than ever" following its six-week outage earlier this year.
Stringer cut a bullish figure at a Berlin news conference yesterday, in which he said PSN users and purchases were up, Sony was over its bumpy start to 2011, and even argued that it was better positioned than Apple.
It’s refreshing to discover that, once you strip away all the self-consciously weird stuff (the Gilliam-inspired animation, and the veneer of historical slapstick) Rock Of Ages is still pretty strange. ACE Team’s latest is best categorised as a strategy bowling game – and it’s both as unusual and as instinctive as that suggests.
Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the new number one in the Nordic chart, which combines sales data from Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Last week's number one, Cars 2: The Videogame, falls back to second place, and FIFA 11, which had been number one in seven of the preceding 11 weeks, slips to fourth.
It's mostly business as usual elsewhere, though EA's Crysis 2 climbs ten places to number nine, with Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 rising to fifth.
We played Blade Of Baal and failed to even see Baal, let alone defeat him. Then we played Luck's Mace and didn't get near Baphomet, but we did collect three gold icons. After that, we played Flamberge Of Destiny and guess we didn't stop Loki from invading the Twilight. Tiny Hack is Boing Boing's charmingly presented retro RPG generator in which every game is "the most gruelling and challenging game of 1978."
Take-Two has confirmed that it has let go 40 staff at the Brno offices of Mafia II developer 2K Czech.
Develop claims that Take-Two has also engineered a role reduction, affecting less than ten staff, at 2K Czech's office in Prague.
With both sites holding a combined 200 staff before the layoffs, the move means around a quarter of staff have been let go, but parent company Take-Two insists it will not negatively impact the developer's day-to-day operations.
Sometime around the turn of the century, I was sitting in a conference room, watching an earnest sales rep demonstrating a mobile game. Back then, mobile games consisted mostly of rather primitive and often monochrome applications, a port of Snake to Nokia phones being the most widely played, and of text-based games running on WAP mobile browsers or administered through SMS.
Quarrel DX is gorgeous, fiendish, and by some way Denki's finest game yet. So good, in fact, that if it weren't for the criminal lack of multiplayer – and more on that later – you'd be tempted to delete Words With Friends. Yes, Quarrel DX is serious business.
Business, by the way, is a much better word than Serious – though neither would ever face off in Quarrel. The B's magnetic – five points! Yes, Quarrel gets into your head.
LA Noire developer Team Bondi has been put into administration, documents filed at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission have confirmed.
The Commission's website reveals that the company was put into administration, a last-ditch bid to avoid insolvency, on August 30.
The news brings down the curtain on a troubled spell for the Sydney studio since the release in May of detective adventure LA Noire. While the game received a positive critical and commercial reception, Team Bondi has since been making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
The first stage of the 3DS Ambassador Programme, Nintendo's compensation to early adopters stung by the system's global price drop, is now live worldwide.
Sony has announced the Sony Entertainment Network (SEN), a newly branded platform encompassing the firm’s digital delivery services.
Revealing the new banner at the IFA consumer electronics expo in Berlin, Kaz Hirai, president of Sony's consumer products and services group, billed SEN as a more streamlined way to enjoy online entertainment experiences across Sony platforms.
Sony has announced launch windows and pricing details for its first two Sony Tablet devices.
“Optimised for rich media entertainment” on a 9.4 inch touchscreen display, the single-screen Sony Tablet S will start at £399 when it launches in Europe at the end of September. The release of a Wi-Fi version, which weighs approximately 598g and comes with 16GB or 32GB of storage space, will be followed by the launch of a Wi-Fi/3G model in November 2011.
Monster Hunter Portable 3rd HD, the debut title in the PSP Remaster series, entered the Japanese software chart at number one after selling just shy of 290,000 copies in its first week of availability.
Announced in May, the PSP Remaster promotion brings PSP titles to PS3 in HD with exclusive content and 3D support, and allows for game saves to be shared between the two systems.
Firemint is archetypal indie dev made good. Its twelve-year history contains mostly licenses and mobile ports before 2009, when it released two iOS smash hits – Flight Control and Real Racing. Success like that got bigger fish interested, and Firemint's upwards trajectory culminated in EA taking over the studio in May this year. And so we come to Spy Mouse, Firemint's first new IP since 2009. It's more than worthy of the games that made the studio's name.