The iMP Pro Store Case is a great option if you want to protect your DS from scratches but don’t really want an extra bag to have to carry. The case acts as a shell around your DS that you never have to take off; you can play games while its on without much more than a slightly heavier weight to hold - which isn’t a problem unless you’re playing stylus based games where you don’t hold the DS vertically like The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass or Geometry Wars: Galaxies. Some might even find the added layer of polycarbonate makes the DS Lite easier to hold as it may fit their hands better.

In addition to the protection the case provides, there is also some storage space - below the bottom half of the DS the case has a little tray that pops out when you pull on it. This tray is able to hold 3 DS game cartridges and a stylus - in fact you have to store your stylus here as the case covers over the original stylus cavity. The tray is both fun and functional, and the whole package, including a stylus, comes in red, pink and black for just R99. The iMP Pro Store Case is available at ToyZone, AnimeWorx, Kalahari and Take 2.

I haven’t often seen information about sales on PSN, XBLA and Wii Ware, so any news about it is good news. According to the developers blog, the game is estimated to have sold around 55000 in its first week. That sounds like an excellent number to me assuming sales are not completely front-loaded, and the post says “the sales didn’t just die after the first few days, as they do with some games”.

You might ask why I care? Well, Braid is awesome, mindbendingly so. It’s also different, being a 2D platformer with some very unique mechanics, and one of the most interesting games on XBLA. So, I’m keen to see it succeed in the hope that more of these indie, experimental games might get produced. The post says, in this developer’s case, that “it looks like I will be able to make the next game, without needing to get a job that would interfere with that.” Great success!

If the premise of this game intrigues you then you should buy it and play it. There’s not much that needs to be said – I can’t recommend it enough if you’re in the least bit interested in action/adventure movies. In fact, this is an Indiana Jones or National Treasure experience in game form, and arguably does just about everything better than those movies do. As such, it’s an advertisement for where gaming could take us, and shows the potential for it to be a more engaging form of storytelling.

Nathan Drake is an everyman, a sort of reluctant hero. He’s a bounty hunter out to make a quick buck by helping a documentary film-maker called Elena Fisher find Sir Francis Drake’s coffin and an interesting story. Being an opportunist, when he finds a notebook left by Drake he ditches Elena and flies off with his friend and business partner Sully to find the treasure Sir Francis mapped. Of course, it’s not so simple; Drake’s notebook is really just a set of clues that send Nathan all around the Caribbean in search of El Dorado (what else would a bounty hunter be searching for?)

Continue reading El33tonline’s review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Previously announced for Japan as Rhythm Tengoku Gold, Nintendo of America announced today that Rhythm Heaven will be released on the Nintendo DS in the USA. The release date is currently undetermined, but it is likely to be released later this year as the Japanese version is coming out later this month.

One of Nintendo’s very last titles for the GBA was a little rhythm game called Rhythm Tengoku. It combined the simple one-button mini-game mechanic found in the WarioWare games with catchy music to produce a truly brilliant rhythm game that anyone can play. It was a title that sadly did not make it across the Pacific or the Japan Sea other than to those who imported, but happily Nintendo has seen fit to bring the DS iteration over.

According to Nintendo, if you can tap your finger in time to music, you can get the hang of Rhythm Heaven. To play, you hold the Nintendo DS sideways like a book and tap or slide your stylus on the touch screen to the rhythm of the music. Meanwhile, some off-the-wall characters and animations take place, assisting you with your cues and providing feedback on your success. The music is all composed for the game by TSUNKU♂, spelt just like that.

Being one of the three platform holders, Sony’s press conference at the E3 Media and Business Summmit is always an anticipated affair as historically it has been the platform used for big announcements in the industry. Being in the middle of a console generation, however, no hardware announcements were anticipated, so Sony simply show-cased their 2008 line-up, a few future titles and their bid to be every household’s media hub.

Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, began his talk explaining that the original PlayStation was planned to have a 10 year product lifecycle, and that this same strategy is being followed in the PlayStation 3’s case. He backed up his statement about the relative infancy of the PlayStation 3 by saying that seminal games of that generation, such as Final Fantasy VII, Gran Turismo and Tony Hawk were still on the horizon at this stage of the original PlayStation’s lifecycle. Next, as seems customary at these press conferences, Tretton boasted about one of Sony’s biggest achievements this generation - Blu-ray triumphing over HD-DVD. He also pointed out that the Cell processor is being used by IBM to power some of its latest supercomputers, and how the PS3 Folding@home project has in fact spawned the most powerful distributed computing system in the world according to Guiness.

Post continues, click to read more…

The most surprising announcement from the Microsoft Press Conference held today at E3, video gaming’s biggest expo, was the news that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the Xbox 360. Square-Enix’s next installment in one of the most successful franchises of all was previously to be released on the PlayStation 3 only.

Ever since the original PlayStation was launched Final Fantasy has been a franchise whose main installments have all been exclusive to the Sony format. This includes Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, X, X-2 and XII. Final Fantasy XI is a massively multiplayer game that has appeared on other formats such as the Xbox 360 and PC. The first six installments were on Nintendo consoles, and the move by Squaresoft to the PlayStation over the Nintendo 64 is said to be one of the factors in the success of Sony over Nintendo in that generation of consoles. In the previous two console generations Final Fantasy has been the third biggest seller after Pokemon and Dragon Quest, so this is a big coup for Microsoft, one sure to rattle gaming forums the world over.

For more information about how it happened, we have posted a summary of the Microsoft press event.

A PSP title was once again on top of the Japanese video sales rankings last week according to tracking company Media Create. Konami’s Powerful Pro Baseball Portable 3 notched up 117 000 sales, a very good result for the series on PSP as the first two sold just 38 836 and 27 213 in their opening weeks. In second place Bandai-Namco’s Endless Frontier, a new Super Robot Wars OG game for the DS, sold 98 000 in its opening week.

The only holdovers on the chart this week were Nintendo’s Mario Kart Wii at 50 000 and Wii Fit at 46 000, and Capcom’s Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G (PSP) at 45 000. In fact, Nintendo’s recent dominance in the charts took a breather this week as no less than eight of the top 10 titles were published by third parties, including a few by smaller companies.

Bandai-Namco’s fitness game for the Wii, Family Trainer, sold 44 000 copies in its opening week. Kadokawa Shoten’s D.C. II: P.S., which looks to be a dating sim of some sort for the PS2 sold 40 000. Valhalla Knights 2 from Marvelous Entertainment was the third PSP entry in the top ten in a week which only featured two DS entries in the chart, with 32 000 copies sold. Finally, Mana Khemia 2: The Fallen School and the Alchemists (PS2) from Gust and Empty Space Training from Benesse for the DS make up the final two spots. If anything this chart has the most interesting game titles of any in quite a while - quite what Empty Space Training is is anyone’s guess!

The hardware chart is posted to tomorrow, and as always we look forward what it holds!

For the second week in a row, Mario Kart Wii topped the Japanese software chart, selling 202 000 copies and bringing its two week total to 795,000 according to video game sales tracking company Media Create. It is rapidly approaching the total sales of Mario Kart’s last outing on the GameCube and should surpass it in next week’s figures.

Another outperformer is Capcom’s Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G which managed another 124 000 sales in its fourth week on the market. As an expanded release of Monster Hunter Portable 2, it has quickly outsold every other PSP title in Japan on its way to 1 714 000 copies sold and at this rate could reach the 2 million mark.

A new release from Nintendo on the DS showed up in third place. It doesn’t have an official English announcement yet, so we’re using a name translated from Japanese as We’re Fossil Diggers (or Collectors). The game managed 35 000 copies sold for the week.

Slow week for new releases

Meanwhile, Wii Fit continues its climb to 2 million, this week selling 32 000 copies for a to-date total for 1 897 000. Koei’s Musou Orochi: The Evil King Returns rounds out the top five on the PS2 with 24 000 copies sold.

Very few new releases showed up this week, the only ones in the top 30 being We’re Fossil Diggers, 2 super-budget releases from the Phoenix Wright series (both being the fourth release of each game, and the third outing for each on the DS), and a Bookkeeping title from Square-Enix on the DS. This means the rest of the top 10 was filled with holdovers - Pokemon Ranger, Beautiful Writing Training DS, Deca Sporta, Super Smash Bros Brawl and Wii Sports. After a fairly inconspicuous start, Deca Sporta has steadily climbed to 148 000 copies sold - an excellent result for Hudson.

The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) has published an up-to-date list of Top 10 Industry Facts about the video game industry. The ESA is a United States research agency, so these snippets only apply to the industry in the US, but they are likely to be somewhat similar to other countries.

So, lets burst the bubbles of peoples that think gaming is for young boys….

It turns out the average game player is now 33 years old, and the average game buyer is 38 years old. In fact, 80% of console game purchasers are over 18. Also, 24% of people over the age of 50 play games.

Now to destroy the male gamer stereotype: 38% of game players are women. More women 18 or over play games than boys under 18.

I do have a couple ideas about these figures, and I’m sure you could come up with more ways of spinning them:

Post continues, click to read more…

So you’re likely waiting for Super Smash Bros Brawl to come out, since what kind of gamer are you if you’re not? I’ll tell you: you’re either Japanese or European, since the Japanese already have the game while the Europeans (that includes us South Africans even though we’re not European at all, in fact, I’m going to say PAL People from now on) are not waiting for the game, we’re waiting for the announcement of the game.

So, PAL People, what should we do while we wait? We could read all the spoilers Sakurai is posting on his Smash Bros Dojo site, but that would suck like knowing the winner of Survivor before watching it. What we could safely do is read the fantastic interview done by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata with the creator of Smash Bros, Masahiro Sakurai.

You’ll have to be all underhanded and read it on the Nintendo of America web site even though you’re not American, but I’m sure you can live with that.

Did I mention that I can’t wait for this game?

You will notice this is a console gaming blog and news site (hopefully that much is obvious). Well, it so happens that we were all big PC gamers in the day. Before the advent of the PlayStation, console gaming in sunny South Africa was limited to buying pirate consoles called Family Computer and to get a new game you visited your local Chinese “importer” down some alley in central Durban. These carts typically came with moon-text (since we had no idea what that stuff really was) or hilariously translated Engrish.

So, if you gamed here before ‘96 you were a PC gamer or a true-blue pirate. Most likely you were both.

That all changed for me - consoles are my platform of choice these days. But, I can’t ignore the fact that Steam has these wonderful little puzzle games that just about any PC can play. The latest is Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, and it’s a time-blackhole. At only $20 it’s a very, very good deal. My previous affair was with Geometry Wars, available for the giveaway price of $4.

Anyhow, Valve has just announced that Steam has reached a total of 15 million users, and that their revenue from the digital download service grew by 158% over the Christmas shopping season last year compared with the previous year.

That’s impressive. I mean, it’s bigger than World of Warcraft and Xbox Live. I thought PC gaming was supposed to be dead?

Gamespot posted an interesting interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata today.

The discussion is mainly around what kind of year 2007 was for Nintendo and how the Wii has caught on so remarkably, and a bit about the lack of high profile 3rd party games (the usual questions really). I found this bit quite interesting:

“I’m sad to say that last year, production couldn’t even keep up with Japan, US, and Europe’s demands. The scarcity of Wii units in the US and Europe is particularly serious. This is a result of not being able to build up stock at all over the summer due to the consistently active demand for the Wii throughout the year. If we had branched out into new markets under these circumstances, we wouldn’t have been able to meet demand. That’s why the expansion into new regions will take place this year.”

With that in mind, in South Africa we can be quite happy that Nintendo of Europe got the go-ahead to launch the Wii here last year, taking valuable guaranteed sales from countries like the UK. Then again, for Nintendo to grow further and really tap into the “blue ocean”, they’re going to have to nurture console gaming in places like China, India, Brazil, and then even the smaller developing markets.

South Africa already has an established market thanks mainly to Sony’s efforts (those pirate Nintendo consoles don’t count), so although it’s small (I’m doing a little research, give me time, but it seems to be about the size of a smaller European market), it’s probably a little easier a nut to crack than China or India.

Anyhow, read the interview; Iwata is a really intelligent guy.

I’ve always loved tower defense, ever since I realised Warcraft III was rubbish but was worth buying just for the tower defense maps people would create. I even got the expansion just so I could play the newer tower defense maps.

My coworkers will affirm that for a long time I’ve been saying “when is someone going to make a Tower Defense game properly”. Around these parts playing those flash TD games is something of a tradition, but I think they’re rubbish for the most part.

So Q-games’ PixelJunk Monster, which goes on sale today in EU and US on the PlayStation Network (for about, uh, R75, or 5 GBP) is a wish-fulfillment in the flesh. Ok, I haven’t played it yet, but the video looked great and the write-ups on Sony’s blog have confirmed its expected awesomeness.

I’m not going to repeat Dylan Cuthbert’s posts here, so go read it over there on the PlayStation blog, the first entry is an overview of the game and the latest one tells us a bit about the towers in more detail (plus there’s a video, hoorah!).

Hoorah! too for 2-D games, now I just need a bigger TV so I can see all the cute sprites.

Well, I guess this was inevitable; we were all expecting there to be a new game for the PS3 by the people that made ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. I mean, what other platform would a Sony-owned studio develop for? But it’s nice to know that it actually is happening, and that they’ve made screenshot for us, or at least to attract potential recruits.

One of the SCEI careers pages has been updated, saying some like “The makers of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are working on a PlayStation 3 project,” and that they’re hiring.

The guys over at Team Ico Gamers, who are apparently huge fans of the previous two games, seem to be the ones that noticed first - I guess they were looking for jobs with Ueda’s team.

Kotaku recently posted a hands on preview of the upcoming Advance Wars game from Nintendo, having played three chapters of the game.

It seems like it’s going to be a worthy successor to one of the best DS games, and this time Intelligent Systems and Nintendo seem to have acknowledged the game’s much bigger Western audience relative to its Japanese one and made the war plot more serious and realistic. The art style, while still cartoony is darker and a little more in keeping with a game about blowing your enemies up.

Of special interest to this game is the new Wi-fi Connection features: yes, online battles are in, including voice chat! An even more interesting feature, for my money, is the map sharing component in which you can upload your map designs, and rate and download others.