The PSP has finally been released in the UK and Australia after months of delay. Sony are expecting to shift 100,000 in the UK today, though most of these are likely to be from pre-orders. Though The Register is reporting that the Aussies don’t seem to be quite as excited:

According to the Australian newspaper, some 25,000 AUD400 PSPs were on pre-order ahead of the launch, with Sony anticipating some 15,000 further sales across counters and online during the first four days of availability. ®

One night nostalgia took over and I got the urge to play Super Mario Bros. on the original Nintendo system.  Holding down “B” and forward, Mario ran quicker than I could remember.  I was hooked on making Mario go fast but wasn’t prepared to find out there is a decades old community of “speed runners” doing the same.

Speed running is the sport and game of completing video games as quickly as possible.  According to Twin Galaxies, an online score tracking community, the current world record for Super Mario Bros is a run of 5:09 completed by Trevor Seguin.  The run is theorized to be as good as it gets but Andrew G, who tied, believes he can shed an extra second on it.  It is that attitude of always better, Meliora as my university motto puts it, that makes speed running so addictive. 

Before trying speed running, I watched Trevor’s record video.  It documents the execution of near-perfectly timed jumps.  Mario’s moves seemed like they were choreographed.  The route probably took literally thousands of tries to hone and get just right. 

What if you could be a better Super Mario Bros. speed runner?  In the first world, 1-1, Trevor’s…
(Continue)

Yay!

So we just spent two great hours playtesting Infected for the PSP. It’s a third-person action shooter from Planet Moon Studios (creators of Giants: Citizen Kabuto.) And it rocks!

First the setup. You may or may not know that I am an active member of a group of PSP owners in NYC (NYCPSP.) A couple of weeks ago, one of our members advertised our group on a PSP site, and our Organizer got a call from Majesco (publishers of Infected) inviting us to come out to their offices in NYC to get a sneak peek at the game.

Of course we were happy to.

So earlier this evening, we show up at their offices. We get escorted to a conference room. Sitting on the table are 8 PSP dev kits. Nachos, chips and sodas nestle in the corner for the grabbing. A few boxed Xbox dev kits are stacked in the other corner. A producer from Majesco is there. So is a guy with a videocamera. Yummy.

First a bit about the PSP dev kits. These things are pretty cool. The main unit is a mini-tower PC enclosure, about the size of the old-school PS2, standing on its end.…
(Continue)

In a 30-minute long show on MTV last night, Microsoft finally unveiled the much-anticipated next-generation Xbox videogame console. The console, named Xbox 360, will play a variety of media including next-generation Xbox games, music CDs, DVD movies and more, and is set to launch worldwide by the end of the year.

The console will pack a triple-core PowerPC CPU running at 3.2GHz, with each core carrying two hardware threads. Video is courtesy of a custom ATI solution offering 48 shader pipelines. By contrast, current top-of-the-line PC video cards offer 22 shader pipelines. 512MB of GDDR3 RAM, a 12x DVD drive, a removable 20GB hard-drive, 3 USB2.0 ports and Dolby Digital 5.1 support round out the hardware package.

As with the current Xbox, the Xbox 360 will be network aware, with a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port and support for 802.11a, b and g provided through an optional wireless adapter. This will enable the console to access the Xbox Live service, as well as enable its built-in Media Center Extender functionality.

Input will come courtesy of a wireless game controller loosely modeled after the existing Xbox Controller S but with some changes; the black and white buttons have been replaced with shoulder…
(Continue)

For the past week, EA has been making a big splash over their “Madden Next-Gen” product, set to debut on Xbox 360 this christmas. That culminated in an ad they showed during the NFL draft this past Saturday.

The only problem is the ad doesn’t show any in-game footage. It only shows a pre-rendered “artistic sample” of what the next-gen Madden might look like. According to this preview by GameSpot, the final game will look better than this preview.

I find that exceedingly hard to believe, considering the source. EA is going to have to work a lot harder to regain gamers’s trust after a long string of sub-par games. This video isn’t going to do much to help EA’s cause.

But it will make sure Madden sells millions come December. And I guess that’s all that matters.