Quote:While it has not been confirmed by Nintendo of America according to retails Nintendo is to release a new 'bonus disc'. The disc will be offered to those who pre-order Mario Kart: Double Dash.
The disc will apparently contain playable demos and possible video previews of GameCube titles.
Quote:Among other announcements at the Games Convention in Germany, it was stated by Nintendo that 1080°: Avalanche will feature LAN capability. Right now the game is said to support up to 8 players, and as with Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Kirby Air Ride, each player may have their own full screen to view the game. The only obstacle being that each TV will need a GameCube, a copy of 1080°: Avalanche, and a Broadband Adaptor.
Also on display at the convention was video of the new upcoming StarFox game being developed by Namco. This also was revealed to feature LAN capability for its' explosive multiplayer mode.
Quote:The Japanese magazine V-Jump has announced that Square Enix has a surprise title in the works, and that this title will be officially unveiled in the September 20th issue of the magazine.
The surprise title is said to be ready for a release in late 2003 (November/December), but that's the only information given. Rumors are flying around that it's a new Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile or even a sequel to Vagrant Story, but none of this is confirmed.
As soon as we find out what the surprise is, we'll let you in on it.
Quote:- Nintendo of Europe confirmed that a GameCube version of Paper Mario (Super Mario RPG) will be coming out in the first half of 2004.
YESSSS!!! This is some the best news I've heard all year! Paper Mario is one of my all-time favorite RPGs, so if Intelligent Systems is working on the GC sequel I'm going to be the happiest man alive next year.
Nintendojo is reporting that uh... Game Informer is reporting that Nintendo and Konami may do a quick port of MGS2 (hopefully Substance) for release alongside of Twin Snakes. That would be good news for GC-only owners, but I just hope that they sell it for a reasonable price and not charge $40 for a straight port like Capcom did with RE's 2 & 3.
At least two of last week's three fatal shootings outside Kanawha County convenience stores could be drug-related, authorities said Tuesday.
Chief Deputy Phil Morris sent a group of sheriff's deputies to Campbells Creek on Monday to interview residents, and they learned of concerns about methamphetamine use in the unincorporated area where the victims of Thursday's two separate shootings lived and where one shooting occurred.
...
Two Kanawha County Wal-Mart stores have pulled sniper-style video games from their shelves, company spokeswoman Melissa Berryhill said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Bentonville, Ark.
"We have not made a corporate decision to remove these games from our store shelves," she said. "Individual store managers can make a decision based on what they feel is right for the community."
One store is located in Carrier's hometown of South Charleston. The other is located in the nearby city of Nitro.
Both removed the games "Halo" and "Grand Theft Auto Vice City," Berryhill said.
They take away a few games from their shelves but they still sell guns. I love this country. :bang:
Quote:TheDeal has revealed more information on the recently completed auction of bankrupt 3DO's assests. The site reports that JoWood Productions Software got a hold of the Jacked Asset Group for $90,000, while Crave Entertainment snatched up the Army Men Asset Group for $750,000.
Also, 3DO CEO Trip Hawkins himself won a pair of bids—paying $200,000 for a backlist of pre-2001 titles, which included Jonny Moseley Mad Trix, and also acquiring 3DO’s internet patent, described as a business concept revolving around the trade of virtual products, for $205,000.
Patent Purchase Manager LLC also purchased a variety of development tools and IP for $75,000.
The Deal reports 3DO raised a total $4.6 million from the auction.
Just win it looked like the Army Men franchise was going to be buried forever Crave had to step in and buy it. Yay more Army Men games!
A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada.
"On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the (Canadian) Copyright Act dealing with private copying came into force. Until that time, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright, although, in practice, the prohibition was largely unenforceable. The amendment to the Act legalized copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy (referred to as "private copying"). In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use."
The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003.
While hardware vendors whine about the levy, consumers seem fairly indifferent. Why? Arguably because the levy is fairly invisible - just another tax in an overtaxed country. And because it makes copying music legal in Canada.
A year before Shawn Fanning invented Napster, these amendments to Canada's Copyright Act were passed with earnest lobbying from the music business. The amendments were really about home taping. The rather cumbersome process of ripping a CD and then burning a copy was included as afterthought to deal with this acme of the digital revolution. The drafters and the music industry lobbyists never imagined full-on P2P access.
As the RIAA wages its increasingly desperate campaign of litigation in terrorum to try to take down the largest American file sharers on the various P2P networks, it seems to be utterly unaware of the radically different status of private copying in Canada.
This is a fatal oversight, because P2P networks are international. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution.
In fact, you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. "Private copying" is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers.
Every song on my hard drive comes from a CD in my collection or from a CD in someone else's collection which I have found on a P2P network. In either case I will have made the copy and will claim safe harbor under the "private copying" provision. If you find that song in my shared folder and make a copy this will also be "private copying." I have not made you a copy, rather you have downloaded the song yourself.
The premise of the RIAA's litigation is to go after the "supernodes," the people who have thousands, even tens of thousands of songs on their drives and whose big bandwidth allows massive sharing. The music biz has had some success bringing infringement claims under the DMCA. Critically, that success and the success of the current campaign hinges on it being a violation of the law to "share" music. At this point, in the United States, that is a legally contested question and that contest may take several years to fully play out in the Courts.
RIAA spokesperson Amanda Collins seemed unaware of the situation in Canada. "Our goal is deterrence. We are focused on uploaders in the US. Filing lawsuits against individuals making files available in the US."
Which will be a colossal waste of time because in Canada it is expressly legal to share music. If the RIAA were to somehow succeed in shutting down every "supernode" in America all this would do is transfer the traffic to the millions of file sharers in Canada. And, as 50% of Canadians on the net have broadband (as compared to 20% of Americans) Canadian file sharers are likely to be able to meet the demand.
The Canada Hole in the RIAA's strategic thinking is not likely to close. While Canadians are not very keen about seeing the copyright levy extended to other media or increased, there is not much political traction in the issue. There is no political interest at all in revisiting the Copyright Act. Any lobbying attempt by the RIAA to change the copyright rules in Canada would be met with a howl of anger from nationalist Canadians who are not willing to further reduce Canada's sovereignty. (These folks are still trying to get over NAFTA.)
Nor are there any plausible technical fixes short of banning any connections from American internet users to servers located in Canada.
As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.
If American consumers objected -- well, the music biz could always follow Southpark's lead and burst into a chorus of "Blame Canada". Hey, we can take it….We'll even lend you Anne Murray.
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