PlayStation 3 owners are getting a couple of new toys this week. The official Sony blog has announced that the US will see firmware update 1.90 within the next few days. Gamasutra has further details on the patch, which includes a number of functionality improvements: "Ability to rearrange games on the XMB, Option menu now includes 'eject disk', Press triangle to eject games/CDs/movies in the XMB, XMB backgrounds, Change the folder classification, Emoticons, Change CD output to 44.1/88.2/176.4kHz, Force 24Hz output for Blu-ray over HDMI, Change PS3 video settings in-game, 'Bit Mapping' in the 'Music Setting', Save AVCHD type animations from a Memory Stick, Change settings like upscaling while playing PS and PS2 games, Add bookmarks, Web browser security function in the browser's tool section." Indications are also that a demo for Heavenly Sword will be coming soon. Europe is getting it this Thursday, with no firm word on a US date yet.

You may recall last year's spirited debate touched off by film critic Roger Ebert's assertion that games are not art. He's once again touching that nerve, this time stating that he was too loose with his words. He points out that 'a soup can' can be art; what he meant to say is that games cannot be 'high art'. Says Ebert: "How do I know this? How many games have I played? I know it by the definition of the vast majority of games. They tend to involve (1) point and shoot in many variations and plotlines, (2) treasure or scavenger hunts, as in Myst, and (3) player control of the outcome. I don't think these attributes have much to do with art; they have more in common with sports." The critic goes on to discuss comments from Clive Barker from last year, a gent who took great exception to Ebert's view.

njkid1 writes "GameDaily has up their full E3 interview with Nintendo of America's George Harrison, SVP of Marketing and Corporate Communications. Harrison talks about the move of the company's sales and marketing force, acknowledges that Nintendo may 'lose some purists' while attempting to broaden the audience, and he doesn't rule out a Wii revision: 'It's interesting, console hardware has always historically been on a sort of fixed, sequential pattern almost every five to six years and it takes you about five years to develop a new piece of console hardware. The handhelds and portables, like Game Boy and now DS, we've always been continuously innovating, and whenever we feel like it's time or have an upgrade, we'll do it, whether it's an improved screen for the handheld or slimmed down like the DS Lite - those types of things. So it's not out of the question on Wii, but we're not even to our second holiday yet, so it's kind of premature to talk about any revisions to the hardware itself.'"

AGFlamey writes "On Angry Gamer is an interesting and lengthy article about the new direction Nintendo are taking with the Wii and in particular "non-games" like Wii Fit and Big Brain Academy. From the article: "Hardcore folks don't like to admit it, but Mario and Zelda are relics of the past. It's become quite clear that Nintendo is losing interest in remaking the same old games over and over. They want to pull us into something new, if only we can give them the chance." Is it such a bad thing that Nintendo are neglecting their roots?"

6 writes "Technology isn't just about design and hardware; sometimes it's about psychology, politics, sociology, and economics. The website of Stanford design prof Michael Shanks is hosting a student project by William Choi and Antoine Sindhu, a fascinating online course about slot machines. From the site: 'Much research has been devoted to studying gambling behavior from various points of view, including the psychological, social, economic, and political bases and implications of gambling ... [just the same,] focusing on slot machines reveals and inspires the study of many sociological issues that have come to express themselves specifically and notably on these machines. Here, we examine a number of these issues, attempting to link slot machines to them in an effort to better understand and explain them.'"

MojoKid writes "AMD hosted a small gathering in the Penthouse at the SoHo Grand Hotel in New York City yesterday to demo some products due to be released in the coming months. HotHardware attended the event and snapped some photos of the various demo stations. The shots and info regarding the AMD quad-core Phenom-powered system running John Woo's Stranglehold (Unreal 3.0 engine) will be of interest, as will the slick notebooks, HTPCs, and hand-held devices, like the HTC Advantage 7501. It's essentially a cross between a UMPC, Phone, PDA, and portable GPS. The device features and AMD Imageon processor, 8GB of flash memory, a 5" touch screen, and a built in magnetic QWERTY keyboard, GPS navigator and 3MP camera."

Just when reduced manufacturing costs were beginning to turn Microsoft's Xbox division around, the weight of the warranty guarantee came crashing down on the company. The Xbox division of Microsoft Entertainment posted a loss of $1.89 billion for the fiscal year. Overall the Entertainment division did well, as sales of the Zune, consoles, and Xbox titles helped push revenues higher. Just the same, as Next Generation reports: "The fourth quarter in the EDD was down, with operating losses increasing 183 percent to $1.2 billion, again due to the billion-dollar-plus warranty charge. Revenues dropped 10 percent from a year ago to $1.16 billion due specifically to 'decreased Xbox 360 console sales.' Microsoft shipped 700,000 consoles during the quarter compared to 1.8 million for the same period a year prior."

The folks at XFire passed on a link to their recent interview with the people at Harmonix. Now working on hit of E3, Rock Band, the company's senior designer at Harmonix, Community Developer, and Associate Producer answered questions from the XFire audience about the upcoming title. "shrouded: Can you tell us about the challenges of designing the drumset? ... Answer: The hardest part was satisfying all of the stuff we wanted - we're a company of musicians, including a sizeable chunk of drummers. I think we spent at least half a year making sure that the pedal felt almost exactly like a real drum pedal, and not just some switch. We also had a bunch of non-negotiable things that we had to get in, like using real drumsticks. I could go on forever, but the basic summary is that from day 1 we wanted this to be as close to an electronic kit as possible, with as few compromises as possible."

For the first time since 2004, there won't be an XO event in Europe this year. Gamespot suggests that Microsoft's annual press event is superfluous this year, as last year it fell directly within the timeframe of the Halo 3 launch. "Speaking on the E3 podcast of Microsoft fan site Squad XP, Xbox Live marketing manager Aaron Greenberg flatly said that 'There's not a real X07 this year.' And while Microsoft's official spokespersons refrained from comment, last night Xbox Live director of programming Larry 'Major Nelson' Hyrb posted a small note (pictured) on his heavily trafficked blog morosely confirming X07's demise."

Yesterday we discussed Too Human's absence from this year's E3 event, and briefly mentioned the just-announced lawsuit between Silicon Knights and Epic. Today there's a bit of a clarification. Silicon Knights is suing Epic because, according to Kotaku, Epic failed to 'provide a working game engine' to SK causing them to 'experience considerable losses.' Essentially Knights argues that the Gears of War version of the Unreal engine was withheld by Epic so that Epic products could show up competitors at trade events. For a deeper look at this, the blog runs down the allegations in detail, and concluded by noting that a slew of next-generation titles slated to use the Unreal Engine have been delayed several times. This includes Stranglehold, BioShock, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Turok, Frame City Killer, Fatal Inertia and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway ... a somewhat persuasive list, when it's all laid out in front of you.

GameDaily points out something I didn't even notice: Too Human wasn't at E3 this year. Denis Dyack's histrionics in the year since the game's terrible E3 2006 showing may have had something to do with that. According to the site, Dyack said: "We made the decision not to show Too Human at the press conference some time ago. The reason for this decision was that we have another event planned in the future for Too Human that we thought would be more appropriate ... Not attending the show and setting appointments with the press was due to Silicon Knights being extremely busy finalizing the game and we simply could not spare the time." Of course, today's announcement of a pending lawsuit between Silicon Knights and Epic may have something to do with it as well. Too Human is using Epic's Unreal engine to get the job done ... perhaps they've run into a snag?

tgeller writes "My story on the Nature site announced that a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta has solved checkers. From the game's 500 billion billion positions (5 * 10^20), 'Chinook' has determined which 100,000 billion (10^14) are needed for their proof, and run through all relevant decision trees. They've set up a site where you can see the proof, traverse the logic, and play their unbeatable automaton. '[Jonathan] Schaeffer notes that his research has implications beyond the checkers board. The same algorithms his team writes to solve games could be helpful in searching other databases, such as vast lists of biological information because, as he says, "At the core, they both reduce to the same fundamental problem: large, compressed data sets that have to be accessed quickly."'"

GameDaily reports on a couple of new ways that Neilsen is trying to stay with the times. Game usage and tracking have always been hard for them, and they're rolling out two new strategies to consumers. The first requires participation on the part of developers: a 'tag' that can be built into software to register usage with the Neilsen folks. An initial attempt at this was tried in 2005, and never got off the ground. They're now trying again. The other is a bit more clever, and is usable on multiple forms of entertainment. The blog 'We Can Fix That with Data' did some research into the organization's 'Portable People Meters': "The Portable People Meter, developed by Arbitron Inc., is a pager-sized device that is carried by a representative panel of television viewers. It automatically detects inaudible codes that broadcasters embed in the audio portion of their programming using encoders provided by BBM and Arbitron. At the end of each day, the survey participants place the meters into base stations that recharge the devices and send the collected codes to BBM for tabulation. The Portable People Meter can measure exposure to any electronic media, which has audio that can be encoded - television, cable, and radio, even cinema advertising and in-store media."

CVG has the disappointing news, originally reported in the pages of EGM, that online co-op play will not be available when Halo 3 launches this September. In the game the second player would play the part of the Arbiter character, but fans will only be able to complete the campaign cooperatively via LAN or split-screen. Bungie stated the possibility still exists online co-op could be patched in at a later date, but significant hurdles stand in the way of the feature: "'We're not dumb,' says Bungie's Frank O'Conner. 'We know that people want it and we're trying to make it happen. I think the biggest problem for us for online co-op is that we have a situation where you can be in a Warthog with five troops, almost a mile away from the other player. That's a significant challenge. And there's lots of design things you could do to prevent that from happening, but they would make it not feel like Halo anymore. If we can make it happen in a way that works well, we will - and if it works badly, we won't.'"

You may recall back in March, when a group of smart folks got together to form a game canon. They essentially nominated the ten most important games, ever. Gamasutra has begun a series of articles which will explore the storied history of each of these titles, and they've started with Sim Meier's Civilization series. Benj Edwards' history of Civilization begins with a rundown on the series itself, and wraps with a lengthy Sid Meier interview. Required reading, essentially. "Meier [is] comfortable with a legacy inextricably tied to Civilization: 'I think that if that's what's on my epitaph, "Did Civilization," that would be fine.' In musing about the fate of his beloved series, Meier finds himself satisfied with what the future might hold for the franchise: 'There's probably somebody getting ready for their first day of college that's probably going to be a part of Civilization in ten to fifteen years from now. I think it'll be around for quite a while.'"

Clive Thompson examines an artifact unique to the medium of videogames: the hatred of 'B' games. Unlike in television, movies, or even books, there doesn't seem to be room in gaming for appreciation of offerings so bad they're good. "Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad. I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself. Or think of it this way: A bad game is like being stuck in traffic. You've got goals, you've got places you're trying to get to, but the system won't let you. So you just sit there grinding your teeth. Lousy art can sometimes cause joy; lousy games can only cause stress."

Reuters is reporting that the PlayStation 3 has reached 1 million units sold in Japan. The article notes that the eight months the console took to reach this mark is roughly four times slower than it took the Wii. Of course, the 360 has only managed to eek out 420,705 units sold in a much longer timespan. To put things in perspective, an aging news report suggests that the PlayStation 2 sold 1 million units the first weekend it was released in Japan. Even the Wii didn't hit that, though that may have been an issue of supply rather than demand. Do you think there is a specific reason the PS3 isn't selling as well as the PlayStation 2 did, or is the market just a different place than it was 7 years ago?

GamePolitics has a number of interesting posts up this week on developing stories. The ESRB has fired off a warning to 3D Realms over some out-of-date labeling on the Duke Nukem portion of their website. The organization says it's standard procedure, but 3D Realms co-founder Scott Miller views it as a 'sucker punch'. Meanwhile, Senators discussing earmarks for the year are in a row over videogames. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) is resisting a $7.5 Million appropriation for an advanced computer system, which he 'compared ... to videogames.' Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) countered by noting that Coburn authorized spending that resulted in the creation of an actual videogame, the Full Spectrum Warrior title released by THQ. Finally, Rockstar has fired back at GamesIndustry.biz. The respected European news site wrote a blistering editorial when the Manhunt 2 kerfuffle first started, saying that Rockstar was being 'juvenile, shameful, and irresponsible'. They've now responded: "What about games make them deserve special treatment from the authorities? According to industry groups, the average games player is in his or her 30s, yet you support the widely held view that games are somehow a less sophisticated medium than cinema, only suitable for immature audiences. In other words, although gamers can negotiate the boundaries between reality and fiction in other media, you believe we are incapable of navigating the same boundaries in videogames ... We believe in a well-run ratings system. With the best rating system in history and the future of the industry and medium at stake, we don't understand why it is necessary to effectively ban all games intended for players 18 and older."

IGN is reporting that the next chapter in the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XIII, has barely gotten into the production phase. "According to Sony's press materials, the highly anticipated RPG sequel is now 13% complete. Yes, a low, unlucky completion percentage. But thankfully it's not as low as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is listed as 1.3%!" And remember, even if it's completed sometime late next year or early in 2009 folks in the states will probably have a wait while the game is localized.

GamePolitics has a list of ten of the most well known gaming scandals to hit the games industry. Starting back in 1993 with the senate hearings on Night Trap (a game that arguably led to today's ESRB), the list catalogs some things that the companies responsible would probably just as soon forget. "Hot Coffee (2005) - needs no introduction. Cheeky Rockstar programmers left hidden sex animations (accidentally or otherwise) buried in the PS2 code of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Modders made sure they didn't stay buried for long. Rockstar's denials only made things worse. And then Hillary got involved ..." At the post's close they call for additional nominations, as it's definitely not an exhaustive list. They left off the ESRB's decision to re-rate Oblivion , for example. What 'scandalous' gaming events can you see rating with this topics?