Friday, December 23, 2011

Street Fighter Four Still An LG Exclusive

Bad news for street fighter fans: Street Fighter 4 HD has bumped its Android unleash back, a minimum of consistent with the sign-up page for the Global Championship 2012 Tournament. Previously the sport had been scheduled for a fourth quarter unleash, however obviously, that’s unlikely to happen at this point. There’s no word on when the game may show up, and unfortunately, it still appears to be exclusive to LG customers: the sole phone verified to induce the sport so so much within the US is AT&T’s LG Nitro HD, though Japanese customers should see it on the Asian equivalent, the LG Optimus LTE.



The game should be ready by at least January 14th, when the qualifying tournament is scheduled to begin. Two tournaments will be offered, one played on the Optimus LTE/Nitro HD, and the other on the Xbox 360. You can enter both tournaments if you wish. Prizes include up to $10,000 for first place on the phone version, but just $5,800 on the Xbox – it’s a tough decision between traditional button controls and an extra $4,200 in prize money. The qualifying tournament will consist of 128 players, with the sweet sixteen matches posted on the web for viewing later.


There’s still no information on a public release, or when the game will see the light of day on non-LG devices. As a promotional vehicle it’s a smart move for LG, especially among gamers, but I can’t help but think that owners of the Xperia Play won’t be thrilled to hear this news. At least there’s plenty of old-school gaming to keep you busy in the meantime: Grand Theft Auto 3, Sonic CD and Oregon Trail all recently debuted on the Android Market.



Via Article

Verizon Galaxy Nexus Modification Will Change The Softkeys & Color



For Galaxy Nexus owners that just picked up their device from Verizon, you may finally have a reason to root your device. Yes, rooting will void your warranty – but it opens a world of latest accessible features. Even though Verizon’s Nexus is fairly new, development has been progressing at an wonderful rate. We recently discussed a battery mod compatible with the Android Revolution HD ROM for the Galaxy Nexus, and now there's a softkey mod that adds a “Search” softkey pictured as a magnifying glass to the right of the underside menu buttons.




The softkeys are also available in numerous colors; personally, I like the ICS blue. It looks wonderful. You can currently expect support for each the 4.0.2 and 4.0.3 primarily based ROMs, and as they are incorporated into future work – I’m positive the project can continue its support. Paired with the battery percentage modification, the Galaxy Nexus couldn’t feel more complete.


However, we tend to haven’t had a chance to check out any of the newly developed kernels yet – and there are masses out there. Most require the user to be on a 4.0.3 base, but till a few a lot of bugs are discovered I plan on keeping a close eye out rather than continuously flashing the latest builds. If any of you are rocking a Galaxy Nexus, be happy to share with the community how abundant higher/worse your battery life has become.


Via Article

Motorola DROID RAZR Update Slicing Onto Handsets

We have a tendency to’ve mentioned the big bugfix and software update for the recently released DROID RAZR additional than some times already. Earlier in the week Verizon released the official documents and update details and mentioned it was rolling out. Most users haven’t seen the update yet but today Motorola themselves have confirmed users ought to have started getting the OTA as of yesterday.



Along with enhancements to that camera and 4G LTE association we have a tendency to have masses of changes. Not to be confused with the recent downtime experienced nationwide by all Verizon customers — the RAZR has had some 3G/4G connection problems and they have been addressed in this update. Here are some of the key vital new features:


Data


Improved 4G data connectivity
Eliminated false SIM error messages
Improved performance for transition between 3G and 4G connections
Improved maintenance of network connection upon completion of a voice call
Enhanced Wi-Fi performance


Phone Stability


Resolved general stability issues in menu access. Browser, Phone Dialer, video playback and music player reducing Force Close errors and lockups.


Other


Improved readability for Lapdock email, SMS and social networking user interface menu items
Updated group message notifications


Motorola says to watch for the notification to hit your device and relish the most recent update. We tend to still aren’t certain if this can break root access or some of the straightforward one-click strategies accessible for whom it might concern. The update should be rolling throughout the holiday weekend but you'll be able to get a head begin by going to settings > menu > about phone > check for updates and give it a go today. Let us know if any issues arise within the comment section below — we recognize Motorola is known for sometimes causing a lot of issues than they fix.

Device Specifications and Information Device Info Announced Date : October 18, 2011Release Date : November 03, 2011Display Screen Size : 4.3 InchResolution : Screen Type : Super AMOLED Advanced qHDDimension & Weight Height : 5.15 InchWidth : 2.71 InchDepth : 0.27 InchWeight : 127 GramsBattery & Power Battery Capacity : 1780 mAhTalk Time : NAStand By Time : 8.9 hoursSoftware Audio Playback: AACAAC+MP3WAVWMAVideo Playback: MPEG-4 (MP4)Cellular Network CDMA Band: 800850900170019002100

Via Article

Friday, December 9, 2011

Nintendo shocker: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto taking smaller role

Shigeru MiyamotoLegendary Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto said he will be stepping down from his supervisory executive role at the company in order to focus on smaller, more personal game projects and allow room for younger designers to advance.

In an interview with Wired.com, the 59-year-old creator of venerable Nintendo franchises including Mario, Zelda, and Star Fox, said he was ceding his supervision of Nintendo’s Entertainment Analysis and Development branch, but would not be leaving Nintendo or quitting game development as a whole.

“What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself,” he said. “Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small.”

By “really small,” Miyamoto said he meant a project that could be both started and publicly shown next year, something that wouldn’t “require a five-year development time” he said.

Miyamoto has been with Nintendo since 1979, when he helped design little-remembered arcade game Sherriff, the start of a career in which he was involved in some way with almost all of Nintendo’s most successful releases. His direct impact on any particular Nintendo game has dwindled somewhat as he’s moved into an executive role at the company, though, spreading his work across high-level supervision of many teams working on high profile releases, including the recent Super Mario 3D Land and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

Still, Miyamoto’s inspiration and guidance for the company are important enough that Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said he’s barred Miyamoto from public discussion of his personal hobbies, for fear rival companies will cotton on to his next inspiration.

Speaking to Wired, Miyamoto stressed his stepping aside was the only way the young developers underneath him would be able to mature into the Nintendo leaders of tomorrow.

“Unless I say that I’m retiring, I cannot nurture the young developers,” he said. “After all, if I’m there in my position as it is, then there’s always kind of a relationship. And the young guys are always kind of in a situation where they have to listen to my ideas. But I need some people who are growing up much more than today.”

Next Story: Apple job posts reveal Siri’s future: API, sleeker interface and more
Previous Story: DEMO Asia is holding auditions — beginning today! Tags: Donkey Kong, Mario, ZeldaCompanies: NintendoPeople: Miyamoto, Shigeru Miyamoto

Article By: Venturebeat

What’s On The Xbox Update For Netflix

Xbox update for nexflixTo go along yesterday’s large Xbox Live updates, Netflix has pushed out a new user expertise for the Xbox 360. The Netflix application has undergone a complete overhaul, providing folks with a fully new look and several new features.

The new Netflix for Xbox incorporates a similar appear and feel to Xbox Live’s new dashboard. The previous scrolling navigation is there, however with a new look that predominantly options stacked rows of movie and TV art, counteracted by class. The new vogue is supposed to boost and improve browsing Netflix offerings with an Xbox Kinect.

Netflix boasts that the updated app displays three times more titles on the screen when you’re browsing and more titles overall within the app. The classes stay largely unchanged; you still see Recently Watched, Queue and every one the strangely specific genres that Netflix thinks you prefer, like “Witty Independent 20th Century Period Pieces.” Once new feature is that once a few seconds Netflix can show a screenshot of a scene from no matter movie or TV show you have selected on the main navigation screen.

Playing videos with the most recent Netflix update has changed. You'll now watch a TV show or episode whereas browsing episodes or reading a description of the video. Once a video has reached its finish, Netflix can show a banner below the video that allows you to play another episode (for TV shows) or end playback. For those acquainted with using Hulu, the banner can seem acquainted, as it's an analogous feel and appear.

If you have got an HD TV and/or a surround sound system, the update ushers in better picture and sound quality with support for 720p HD streaming and Dolby Digital five.one surround sound. This update conjointly brings Netflix to some Latin America Xbox homeowners. Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Columbia will now stream Netflix on a Xbox 360.

While the new Netflix look has delivered significant changes to the look and feel of the app, it's also taken some options away. The ability to watch videos with a cluster of folks on totally different Xboxes, aka the Party feature, is seemingly missing, which has angered some Xbox homeowners. Additionally, while the app shows you on its home screen that buttons to continue the Xbox controller to play a video, there are not any such cues with the banner that appears at the end of a video. I can imagine they designed this with Kinect users in mind, except for those navigating with a controller it can be confusing.

Some folks, myself included, found issues with video playback generally. It might have simply been overloaded servers from the Xbox Live update, but playback was choppy and had issues with freezing.

While this update was meant to seamlessly mix with the new Xbox Dashboard, several have lashed out against Netflix. Over on the Netflix blog you can scan comments of complaints concerning the update, problems with playback and anger over the loss of the Party feature. While the look of the new Netflix is sleek and trendy, it doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of praise.

Article By: venturebeat

OnLive Launches Games App For Smartphones And Tablets

One in every of the pipe dreams of each gamer is to be able to play console-quality games on tablets and smartphones. Well, that day has return, as you'll now use an OnLive app to run full versions of games like L.A. Noire and Batman: Arkham City on an iPad, iPhone, or Android tablets and smartphones.


Games App For SmartphonesOnLive is announcing these days that it can be able to run console-category games on tablets and smartphones by streaming full console games to the devices from net-connected data centers. The service functions abundant like how OnLive streams high-quality games-on-demand to desktop computers and laptops. However now the service has been tuned to work with Wi-Fi or 4G-connected mobile devices, that sometimes have a lot of less capability to run a high-quality game. Tablets supported embrace the iPad 2, HTC Flyer, HTC Jetstream, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom and the Amazon Kindle Fire.

OnLive’s hope is to disrupt the mobile game business, where developers haven’t been creating games at this quality level. Of course, OnLive’s games — accessible at rental, full purchase, or subscription prices — will value a lot more than several ninety nine cent or free mobile games. But these new OnLive games will raise the quality bar way higher than high-finish iPad games such as Infinity Blade II, that just debuted in the App Store. Players will conjointly be able to start out taking part in on a PC, shift to a pill, and then choose up where they left off when they go back to to the PC. The OnLive games are instantly playable; no download is needed.

“Gaming on mobile devices will never be the same,” said Steve Perlman, chief government of OnLive, in an interview. “We are delivering on our mobile vision.”

The games aren’t stripped down mobile versions. They're the console games themselves, formatted to run on the smaller screens. Steve Perlman, chief executive of OnLive in Palo Alto, Calif., said in an interview that it took a considerable quantity of work to make it attainable to run the high-finish games on such low-end computing devices. Not all of the games are bit-enabled, but OnLive is in the process of converting a variety of them thus they will run with bit controls. And it has a wireless controller which will be used to play the games that don’t have touch controls. Full told, additional than a hundred and fifty games are offered for play on OnLive on mobile.


I’ve had a smart examine a number of games, including Defense Grid Gold and Virtua Tennis 2009 with the touchscreen and Unreal Tournament with a wireless controller. They run with fluid motion on the iPad 2.

Perlman said that the free OnLive app will currently be accessible across as several as 500 million iOS (iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone) and Android devices within the U.S. and the United Kingdom. OnLive uses a combination of compression and cloud-primarily based computing power to run games in net-connected servers. Then it sends images from those games at high speeds over the net to the user’s own machine, which will show them on the screen. To the user, it seems like the sport is running on the native machine. In reality, the sport is being streamed as if it were a video. Users will play instantly while not anticipating downloads.

These streamed games have lots of advantages. A user can log into the OnLive service and their saved games from any machine. Publishers don’t have to stress regarding piracy or used games because every user is authenticated via the web affiliation. And also the user will not need a high-finish PC to play high-finish games. In June 2010, OnLive launched in the U.S. for players using PCs, Macs and laptops. In the autumn of 2010, OnLive launched its Micro Console, that allowed OnLive games to be played on big-screen TVs.

In June at the E3 show this year, Perlman demonstrated OnLive working on Facebook pages and on an iPad. But the iPad was only able to display Brag Clips or allow users to spectate. It wasn’t yet ready to reliably games on tablet devices. Users can now rent games for as very little as $1.ninety nine for three to 5 days, or get them for $49.ninety nine, or subscribe to a library of games for $nine.ninety nine a month. Currently, users can take all of the games they ordinarily can get through their rentals, purchases or subscriptions and play them on the mobile devices. In September, OnLive launched in the U.K.

In some ways in which, the mobile OnLive isn’t a surprise. HTC invested in OnLive last year, and Perlman has been showing OnLive running on devices like the HTC Flyer smartphone and also the iPad for a while. However Perlman said that OnLive had to absorb the data from the tests over the past year and rewrite a range of its compression algorithms to make the service run a lot of reliably on every individual tablet or smartphone. A lot of devices can be added over time, and more games too.

The L.A. Noire game could be a coup for OnLive. RockStar games redesigned the interface for L.A. Noire for tablets and touch. The new style creates a a lot of immersive expertise for the user, said Rowan Hajaj, vice president of finance and company development for RockStar, a division of Take-Two Interactive. L.A. Noire, that debuted this spring on the consoles, has highly realistic facial animations and lip sync technology, which ends up in ultra-realistic human characters. The sport will be exclusively accessible on mobile via OnLive as a rental or purchase in the close to future.

“We believe that this will not solely charm to current players of L.A. Noire, but conjointly reach a replacement audience of casual tablet gamers who haven't seen a game close to having the cinematic engagement of L.A. Noire,” Hajaj said. “We see our partnership with OnLive as pioneering a complete new era, and new market, in high-end gaming.”

The load times for the games are literally faster than they're on the consoles. Games such as L.A. Noire can run at 60 frames per second.

“L.A. Noire is one in all the highest-performance games offered,” Perlman said. “We tend to wanted a headline game for this launch.”

You can play a game on an iPad 2 with a Wi-Fi association. It is playable with as low as 1 megabit per second bandwidth, however 2-three megabits per second is counseled. You'll watch players in spectator mode in the Arena section. You'll read Brag Clips, or videos that record your exploits in games. You can navigate to games and tap “Play Game” to induce started. The visuals ought to be as sensible as what you see on a laptop, gamer PC, or a game console.

About 30 games are playable using a tablet’s touchscreen interface. Some games like L.A. Noire and Defense Grid Gold were either redesigned by the publisher for touch (as “native touch games”) and different games use a virtual gamepad overlay, that has an emulated mouse capability that responds to bit. Games during this class embody Darksiders, Lego Batman, and Lara Croft and therefore the Guardian of Light. A lot of bit-enabled games are returning.

With the $forty nine.ninety nine OnLive Wireless Controller, additional than a hundred and fifty games can be played on the tablets and smartphones. Games that job well with the wireless controller include Batman: Arkham City, Saint’s Row: The Third, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Homefront.

OnLive is revealing compatibility with AT&T and Verizon’s 4G LTE cellular service, enabling full high-definition resolution, low-latency gaming wherever there's 4G coverage. The work with AT&T began a while ago as AT&T invested in OnLive. Devices which faucet the 4G network and run OnLive games are the HTC Jetstream, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Xoom.That means that you'll be able to just about play OnLive anywhere — indoors, outdoors, in the rear seat of a moving car. The Amazon Kindle, which simply debuted, is a cool new device. But it doesn’t have a lot of processing power and it doesn’t work with the wireless controller for now.

On 3G devices, the latency is about one hundred fifty milliseconds, that isn’t playable for several games. That suggests that you ought to play on Wi-Fi when using an iPad or iPad two. But the 4G devices are simply about instantaneous, Perlman said.

The OnLive app is out there as a free download at the Apple iTunes store and therefore the Android Market beginning these days. A year ago, OnLive had solely concerning 20 or 30 games out there. Currently it has additional than a hundred and fifty and will soon be at concerning two hundred. Almost each major publisher has already released games to OnLive or is in the method of doing so, Perlman said. Solely Activision Blizzard is missing from the list at the moment. Perlman hasn’t nevertheless disclosed how several subscribers OnLive has. However he said, “In terms of growth, it’s happening. We have a tendency to are in that adolescent state where really interesting things are coming out. The form of our growth curve is not not like the launch of the Xbox 360.”

In fact, after the tablet and smartphone launch, Perlman said that productivity apps — like Microsoft Office — will launch on OnLive early next year. To recap, OnLive’s investors embrace HTC, AT&T, Belgacom, Warner Bros., Juniper, and Autodesk. Partners embrace Vizio, Dell, GameStart Here, GameSpot, Intel, SRS, ATI Technologies (AMD), Nvidia, and Marvell.

Article By: Venturebeat

Thursday, December 8, 2011

PopCap Splits Mobile Bejeweled Blitz Into Separate Products.

PopCap is moving to unbundle 2 completely different mobile branches of its incredibly popular gem-matching game franchise Bejeweled, splitting the quick-to-play Bejeweled Blitz into a free download separate from the more freeform core game, which can remain pay-to-play.


PopCap Splits Mobile Bejeweled Blitz Into Separate Products.

It shows that, while below the new possession of Electronic Arts, PopCap is adjusting to the changing popularity of business models. Additional games are moving toward free-to-play, where users play for free and pay real money in little amounts for virtual merchandise.

The 2 games were previously offered as different modes during a unified “Bejeweled a pair of + Blitz” download on Apple’s iOS app Store, which was typically sold for ninety nine cents. The separation, being rolled out these days, brings Blitz’s mobile business model additional in line with the free-to-play Facebook version, which makes cash by selling optional in-game “boost” items to over two.five million daily players blitzing through the game’s trademark sixty second bursts.

The mobile version of Blitz, PopCap’s 1st mobile freemium title, uses Facebook Connect to let players compare scores with friends, and offers a new interface and tutorial system over the previous mobile offering. EA offered the same split strategy last week with The Sims. The Sims 3 will remain a premium purchase game, whereas EA can launch The Sims FreePlay with a free-to-play model.

Meanwhile, PopCap can be retiring the most effective-selling iOS version of Bejeweled a pair of in favor of a replacement version, selling for 99 cents, that features improved graphics, game modes and achievements.

PopCap says it's sold forty million copies of the Bejeweled franchise on mobile platforms, putting it second only to the mobile version of Tetris, that is additionally controlled by PopCap parent EA.

Article By: Venturebeat