159w ago - Electronic Arts is launching their new one-time online pass registration program to enhance the sales of new EA Sports titles, while offering the pass with used video games for $10.

The move is designed to offer additional downloadable content to members that sign up with the purchase of a new game in the form of exclusive content and matchmaking tournament opportunities.

EA plans on unveiling the Pass with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, and will subsequently release the Pass for all EA sports titles.

To quote: "EA Sports boss Peter Moore spoke highly of the new direction in online subscription-based downloadable content: "This is an important inflection point in our business, because it allows us to accelerate our commitment to enhance premium online services to the entire robust EA Sports online community."

Many gamers might look at this and think that GameStop would be against the trend, but even more would be surprised to hear that GameStop is looking at this as an opportunity. "This relationship allows us to capitalize on our investments to market and sell downloadable content online, as well as through our network of stores worldwide," said GameStop president Dan DeMatteo.

While this is not a totally new practice, the information presented gives telling...

182w ago - Today UffSite.net (linked above) has posted a picture of the Final Fantasy 13 box that has leaked, which reveals that no mandatory PS3 HDD Installation is required to confirm previous reports.

Additionally, although the game naturally runs in 720P it includes 1080P full HD for CGI sequences and has no lossless audio for the PlayStation 3 version.

To quote: "Specifically, the back of the box states that the game has No Optional or Mandatory install, only using up 500kb of hard drive space for a save game. This is great news for PS3 owners, and indicates that the game will run as smoothly as the demo did.

The image also confirms that the PS3 version will have super high quality LPCM 5.1 audio and the CGI sequences will be in full 1080p HD rather than the 720p that was feared.

While the game itself does run in 720p, this means the FMVs on PS3 will be of the highest possible quality. This may be the advantage PS3 will have over Xbox 360, as fitting lossless audio and large FMVs on a DVD will prove difficult."

187w ago - The folks over at IGN went over the latest issue of Famitsu magazine and revealed that Final Fantasy XIII won't require a PS3 HDD installation.

They also made a comment on loading times, and how the only time you will see them is when the transition from town to field occurs.

The devs Tetsuya Nomura and Motomu Toriyama commented on how they did this because they wanted to create seamless environments with no loading.

To quote: "Toriyama also shared some technical details on the game. Save data will take up 500KB. Trophy data takes up 3,080KB (yes, it looks like the game supports Trophies!). In case you were stocking up munitions for a big system wars battle, there won't be a hard disk installation.

Worried about load times? Don't be. The only time you'll see load times is when you transition from town to field. Once you're out on the field, the game is seamless. Toriyama explained that the game's tech staff tackled loading early on in order to keep the experience as smooth as possible."

238w ago - The copy protection police have struck again. The new HD Netflix streaming service on the Xbox 360 requires an HDCP compatible display device. If you try play a movie while not connected to an HDCP compatible display, you will get the "Secure HDCP Link Not Found" error.

For all the people that have a non-HDCP LCD monitors hooked up via DVI to their Xbox 360, you are SOL. What is not clear is whether your resolution be limited to 480p if you have an older Xbox 360 with only component outputs.

This situation kind of mirrors the DVD upscaling issue with the Xbox 360, with the work around being use the VGA adapter in order to get DVD upscaling via analog outputs.

What is Netflix worried about? Who in their right mind would waste their time capturing HD Netflix movies via HDMI? Answer, Nobody!

252w ago - Marcan writes: While Nintendo did reply to bushing's open letter, he has not succeeded in establishing a conversation with an engineer about the issue. Furthermore, we have learned that they received and read at least two of the original three e-mails that were sent prior to the open letter, and decided not to reply (in fact, one of their replies was to one of the original e-mails, but only after the open letter was posted). Therefore, we can only conclude that they are not very interested in the issue.

As many of you may already know or have deduced, the bug in our open letter referred to a way of reading DVD-Rs (and Video DVDs) without the use of a modchip. Several people have investigated the bug independently, and they've gotten pretty close. However, we did discover an easier way of enabling this mode from homebrew, which, among other things, does not require any changes to IOS at all. This method is also relatively difficult to transform into some sort of backup loader.

Erant has been developing a library that uses this trick to enable DVD access for homebrew. We hope to release it this coming week, after a few details have been polished. svpe and dhewg have been working on a native mplayer port that uses this library to play back DVDs, which we hope to release as a proof-of-concept together...