Portable Gaming Revolution

Go Nintendo received a press release from Nintendo, outlining their upcoming DS games for the next three months… and what a list it is, coming in at 20 games for the first quarter! Of course, Nintendo couldn’t issue a press release without touting the awesome success of their handheld system:

More than 5 million people joined the ranks as Nintendo DS owners in America last year alone,” says Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime. “And right now, they’re all saying the same thing — ‘give me more!’ Fortunately, no matter your taste or experience in gaming, that’s exactly what we’re supplying in the months to come.

Yeah, we know… the DS is officially the fastest-selling game system in the world. But the whole point of this is the games! Check out the titles that are coming our way… I think March is going to be an expensive month!

January
Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Arthur & the Invisibles
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Justice for All
Fossil League DTC

February
Diddy Kong Racing DS
Lunar Knights
F24 Stealth Fighter
Disney’s Kim Possible: Global Gemini
Meteos: Disney Magic
Winning Eleven Pro Evolution Soccer 2007
Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja

March
Wario: Master of Disguise
Custom Robo Arena
Disney’s Herbie: Rescue Rally
Disney’s Meet the Robinsons
Spectrobes
Steel Horizon
Cake Mania
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)

Given the amazing success of titles like Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day and Big Brain Academy for the DS, it’s no surprised that someone out there finally decided to make a similar type of game for the PSP.

Midway Games has announced their intention to release Hot Brain for the PSP (to be voiced by Fred Willard, from Anchorman). In case you were wondering about the title, the objective to the game is to get the highest brain temperature by answering questions correctly and completing certain challenges. Since the PSP has a pretty obvious lack of a touch screen, you will be able to choose your responses via icon selection… this might make it a little harder during time-based challenges!

There are going to be five different categories to make you think: concentration, math, logic, language and memory. If you’re interested in picking it up for a quick little session to get your mind going first thing in the morning… the game will offer 3-minute sessions as well as extended gameplay that will include brain teasers, puzzles, card games, trivia, etc. Multi-player is going to be supported with a couple of different modes: Think Tank (cooperative) and Brain Race (timed competitive multiplayer). The two single player modes include Practice and Test Mode (the official single-player challenge).

Personally, I was a huge fan of the two DS “brain training” games and am looking forward to see how the genre translates onto the PSP! This title is expected to hit store shelves at some point this summer.

NYC2123: Dayender is a six-part graphic novel that is available to read either online or through your PSP. Given that the very first issue was released well over a year ago, with the last segment being released around seven months ago… I figured this might be a good time to point it out again to those of you who might have missed it the first time around.

I’m in the process of reading it for the first time myself… and from what I’ve read so far, the story is set in the distant future… in the year 2123, to be exact. It takes place in Manhattan, which has been mostly destroyed by an enormous tsunami. The remaining citizens are all into body-modifications of the cybernetic kind and there’s all sorts of trouble with the people outside of the actual city. That’s all I’m going to get into, if you’re interested… download it and check it out for yourself! I would highly recommend it! (I can’t imagine having had to wait the month between issues to get caught up on the story!) The language is a little strong though and there’s quite a bit of violence so I’m going to go ahead and give this a rating of M for Mature.

Here are some fairly simple instructions on how to go about viewing the novel on your PSP, written by the folks over at PSP Updates:

• Insert the Memory Stick Duo that contains the files for the issue of nyc2123 you wish to view
• From the PSP main menu, select the “Photo” icon using the X button
• If you saved the images to a sub-folder, scroll to that folder and select the folder using the X button
• Select the image you wish to view (we recommend starting at the beginning with 01.JPG) and press the X button
• Use the L and R “shoulder” buttons, scroll through the pages of nyc2123

Download Issue 1 of NYC2123: Dayender for PSP
Download Issue 2 of NYC2123: Dayender for PSP
Download Issue 3 of NYC2123: Dayender for PSP
Download Issue 4 of NYC2123: Dayender for PSP
Download Issue 5 of NYC2123: Dayender for PSP
Download Issue 6 of NYC2123: Dayender for PSP

After an amazing drought in game releases for both the DS and PSP, we’ve finally got a little something worth mentioning!

The following games are scheduled to be released this week for the DS:

- Hotel Dusk: Room 215
- Inuyasha: Secret of the Divine Jewel

You can also check out store shelves for these PSP games this week:

- The Legend of Heroes III: Song of the Ocean
- Sid Meier’s Pirates!

Happy New Year! The PSP Podcast is back and ready to kick it in the 07. In this episode we talk a lot about the big news that happened over the Holidays. That is Dark Alex bringing us OE-A and OE-B.

That’s not all though, I chat about the PSone downloadable games from the Playstation Store, Sony unveiling the 8GB memory stick, getting YouTube vids on your PSP, and cover all the details of Sony’s January Content pack.

So enjoy episode #59, and stay tuned for more surprises and info. Take care guys.

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Welcome to the WiiSpot Podcast Teaser. Edgar and I got together to record a DS:Life Podcast a month and a bit ago, and ended up chatting about the Wii for an hour and a half!

We decided that the Wii is interesting enough to warrant its own podcast, and thought that releasing this as the “genesis” would be a great idea. Enjoy! Oh, and don’t mind the strange predictions that we had.. no the Weather Channel doesn’t have Miis giving us the weather. It should though!

Take care and watch out for The WiiSpot.com Podcast Episode #1 soon!

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So if you are one of the few people who has not purchased Elite Beat Agents? Well now there is no excuse now, Tower Records is having a 25% off all video games. So you can get EBA $22.49. Some other great titles that are also on sale. Head on over there and see if you can pick up some great Nintendo DS love, or even some 360, PS2, PS3, XBox 1, and PSP. Strange enough there are no Wii games in their online store. Anyway, head on over there and save some money and get some of those titles you may have been holding out for.

Visit Tower Records

I’ve never posted about this particular subject before, so I thought I would catch everybody up on the various PSOne games that Sony has made available to download to play on your PSP. From here on in, you can expect more regular posts on this subject as more games are released.

That being said… I figure that I should also mention right away that you do need a PS3 in order to take advantage of this service (Sony has claimed that they are looking into other methods to get the games onto your PSP). Basically, you need to use your PS3 to surf on over to the PlayStation Store and you can go from there. The games aren’t free, but with pricetags in the $5.99 USD range, it’s not too bad!

So far, the list of games that I’ve been able to come up with so far are: (and please let me know if I’ve missed any)

• Cool Boarders
• Crash Bandicoot
• Hot Shots Golf 2
• Jet Moto
• Jumping Flash
• MediEvil
• Rally Cross
• Syphon Filter
• Tekken 2
• Wipeout

I have to say that it’s a rather interesting list of games that Sony has decided to make available for download. I’m not too sure that I completely understand their decision on MediEvil, considering that there already is a game in the series available specifically for the PSP, MediEvil Resurrection. Other than that, the games selected go across several genres, so there should be a little something to keep almost everyone satisfied.

Oh, and one other thing… your PSP needs to have firmware 3.0 or higher.

Just a little heads-up to everyone that Sony has released the PSP content pack for January and it is now available on their website. There is all sorts of fun stuff included in the free download this month, including a couple of wallpapers and whole whack of videos – things like trailers and even interviews.

• Ghost Rider – Screenshots
• January 2007 Wallpaper
• Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters – 8 Min Behind the Scenes Video
• Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters – Trailer
• SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 2 – Trailer 2
• Star Wars Lethal Alliance – Trailer 2
• SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Combined Assault – Trailer 2
• SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Combined Assault – Wallpapers
• PS3 TV Spot – Baby
• PS3 TV Spot – Cell Processor
• PS3 TV Spot – SIXAXIS Wireless Controller
• Fourth Annual Gran Turismo Awards – Part 1 to Part 4

You’re looking at a 178 MB download here, so it’s pretty hefty this month… especially when you consider that the content pack for the past many months was under the 100 MB mark.

Download January 2007 Content Pack

I’ve gotten a little addicted to just randomly surfing around the YouTube website lately, and then came across this handy way to convert those YouTube files into videos that are playable on your PSP! Hmmmmm…. now I just have to decide which ones are worthy of being converted into portable goodness!

1. Get the URL of the video you want.
2. Copy URL into the “FLV Online Converter” at vixy.net
3. Choose “MP4 for iPod/PSP”
4. Wait for the conversion, download file, and then save it to your PSP under the “VIDEO” folder.

The instructions can be viewed in more detail at the Zeropaid Forums, and were shortened to the above version by the folks over at PSP Fanboy.

There has been a lot hype circulating around recently of how well Nintendo is doing (and they really are doing quite well, but that’s not the point) and that Sony is slowly sliding behind in popularity. I mean, a couple of weeks ago I wrote an article, comparing the stocks of Nintendo and Sony and it was a pretty clear picture.

Now, the folks over at PSP Fanboy have gone ahead and put together a comparison chart (shown above) of the sales numbers between the DS and PSP during their first 22 months of being out – the first four months of the DS aren’t shown, it starts comparing numbers from when the PSP was released.

I think the chart is pretty impressive, and I found it a little suprising, too! I wasn’t aware that the sales numbers were quite so close! Of course… this is just North America… you should check out the Japanese version of the same chart… it shows quite a different picture!

As always, the DS:Life podcast will be in it’s own feed, and downloadable from DSLifePodcast.com. Please visit that site to download/subscribe for automatic download.

We are back in the ’07 with episode #009 of the DS:Life Podcast. This one was a long time coming, with the holidays, a strange crystaline entity one of our bodies made for us, and more recently 1 half of our recording being nearly unusable.. we’ve gone through a lot to bring you what you are hearing today. Please disregard the audio quality in parts, we were able to salvage most of the audio we recorded, but some was VERY distorted.

In this episode we chat a bit about all the holiday DS news: Dragon Quest coming to the DS, those damn cool Club Nintendo gifts, a DS version of Halo… and even manage to chat a bit about DS homebrew. This is one packed hour long episode that is sure to be music to your ears.

It’s been a while, but it will of been worth the wait. So until next time, enjoy your DS:Life.

Visit DSLifePodcast.com for downloads and subscription links.