No More X-men or Batman for PSP

I hope you don’t like reading comics on the PSP, because the Sony is going to discontinue its digital comic book service.  This announcement was made aware to the public July 09^th when they announced their latest Digital Comic patch.

Sony has not made it clear as to why they are discontinuing the service. But they did state and I quote “the Digital Comics Team will continue to work on bringing the comic service to other Sony devices.” With this being said we can expect to see the 4000+ comics available on the PSP, come to the PS3, PS Vita and maybe in the not so far future PS4.

Rockstar Would Never Work With LA Noire Dev Studio Again

After publishing LA Noire for them and witnessing their senior management’s mishaps, Rockstar decided not to do any more business with Team Bondi.

Despite the game’s critical and financial success, tens of LA Noire development team members complained publicly about their oppressive work environment and about not being properly attributed in the game’s credits.

Rockstar’s decision was confirmed by an internal email from a top level Team Bondi employee.

“I've heard a lot about Rockstar's disdain for Team Bondi, and it has been made quite clear that they will not publish Team Bondi's next game,” the internal email reads.

“Team Bondi are trying to find another publisher for their next title, but the relationship with Rockstar has been badly damaged - Brendan [Team Bondi co-founder] treats L.A. Noire like a success due to his vision but I think Rockstar are the ones who saved the project. They continued to sink money into LA Noire, and their marketing was fantastic. Without their continued support, Team Bondi would have gone under several years ago.”

In 2005 Team Bondi announced that they signed an exclusive PS3 publishing deal with Sony, but it was replaced in 2006 with the current publishing deal with Rockstar. The game was originally scheduled for release in 2009, but the release date kept shifting until it was released in May 2011.

“Rockstar also made a huge contribution to the development,”the email continued. “Their producers were increasingly influential over the last two years of the game's development, and overruled many of the insane decisions made by Team Bondi management.”

“At a lower level, Rockstar also pitched in with programmers, animators, artists, QA, etc. Part of the conflict between Team Bondi and Rockstar was due to Rockstar's frustration with Team Bondi's direction, and eventually Team Bondi's management in turn resented Rockstar for taking lots of creative control.”

“It's also worth pointing out that Rockstar used to be very keen on making Team Bondi something like 'Rockstar Sydney' - the more they worked with Team Bondi management, the more they came to understand that this was a terrible idea.”

Taiwanese Report Claims PlayStation 4 Production Starts This Year

DigiTimes, a daily newspaper for semiconductor, electronics, computer and communications industries in Taiwan, claimed that PlayStation 4 production will begin by the end of this year.

DigiTimes’ claims contradict Sony’s public stance that the PlayStation 3 is still midway through its lifecycle and that they won’t consider succeeding it for quite some time.

The full Digitimes report reads as follows:

“Sony will have Taiwan-based partners begin production of PlayStation 4 (PS4) featuring body movement-based control like Kinect at the end of 2011 for launch in 2012, according to Taiwan-based component makers.”

“Foxconn and Pegatron Technology, assemblers of PS3, will undertake assembly of PS4 as well, the sources pointed out. The planned shipment volume of PS4 in 2012 is at least 20 million units, the sources indicated.”

Wii U Will Have Open Multiplayer Network System

According to Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime, the company’s upcoming Wii U will offer “a much more flexible system” for online gameplay where publishers and developers are free to choose the network solution they prefer.

“So instead of a situation where a publisher has their own network and wants that to be the predominant platform, and having arguments with platform holders, we’re going to welcome that,” he told Forbes. “We're going to welcome that from the best and the brightest of the third party publishers.”

This means that it would be possible for Wii U players to play with their PC counterparts if the game developer wishes so. Valve is already eyeing Wii U to host some of its upcoming titles, and if this happens it is likely that they would use their Steam platform for multiplayer.

Reggie refused to elaborate on the subject, saying that it would be better if further details were “to come from the publishers than to come from us.”

U.S. Navy Tricked Into Buying 59000 Chinese Counterfeit Microchips

In 2010 the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in a wide range of its military equipment, varying from missile defense systems to gadgets that tell friend from foe. Those chips turned out to be Chinese counterfeits.

Adding insult to injury, in addition to being cheap knockoffs that could malfunction anytime, the chips also contained backdoors that would allow anyone with access to the code to disable the chips.

The counterfeit chips were discovered by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), who is working now on righting this problem.

The problem of foreign chips has been rising since 2005 as foreign chip foundries started creating chips that rival – and surpass – those of the U.S.’s and American weapons makers didn’t want to limit themselves to American technology only.

News sourced from Megagames.
Related topics located here http://chinhdangvu.blogspot.com/search/label/chinese%20counterfeits

Valve Accidently Makes Source SDK Free

Fortunately for the modding community, Valve decided to run a long with a little mistake which led to the full Source Software Development Kit (SDK) being available for free.

The Source SDK was originally available with the purchase of any Source-based game (such as Half-Life 2 and pOrtal). One of those games is Team Fortress 2 which moved over to the free-to-play-micro transactions-supported model recently.

During that transition, Valve didn’t notice that the Source SDK is available with the game and so they didn’t remove it from the bundle and it became free for all.

Valve decided not to spoil the fortunate accident. “We are in the process of getting it all done. It's a bit messy because we have multiple versions of the SDK, and there are some dependencies we need to shake out,” Team Fortress 2 developer Robin Walker wrote in an email. “But yes, the gist of it is that we're just going to go ahead and make the Source SDK freely available.”

Pitchford: Blade Runner Game Would Have Been The End Of Gearbox

Speaking to the Official PlayStation Magazine, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford revealed that the company put together a list of dream intellectual properties in 2008, and that they managed to get them all except Blade Runner which they deemed unprofitable.

“Blade Runner was on [the list],”he said. “We had it too and we were like, 'No, we can't.' That game would've cost like $40m to make and sold about 600,000 units - and that would have been the end of us.”

“There's no rational business model that would have allowed that to make sense. If we'd made it with a business model that did work, it would not have been the Blade Runner game we all would have wanted.”

Gearbox has already released Duke Nukem Forever to a great financial success despite being disappointing to fans and critics alike. The company has also announced Sega sequel Samba de Amigo and movie tie-in Aliens: Colonial Marines.