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Quick Rumour: Keyboards in Green Day: Rock Band
What could it all mean! Mystery and Guesswork abound.
Following in the fine tradition of band tie ins, Rock Band Green Day is shaping up to be a Green Day fan’s dream, even if it is a bit of a niche. The demo has appeared on Xbox Life Marketplace and PlayStation Network, with a little teaser when you exited the demo. The teaser image above show the normal instrument icons, but with one addition.
In case you’re not too hot on musical instruments, the final circle is a keyboard, which could mean that for Rock Band 3 (what seems to be advertised by the image) some sort of musical keyboard device, thingy, will be added to the line up. I haven’t got a clue how the heck you make a keyboard for a rhythm game, as at that point, you’re heading into the area of being far too musical, and not enough game.
Insomniac Games Branching out to multiple platforms
I'm still up for a new Spyro the Dragon game by these guys
Insomniac Games, developer of the Ratchet and Clank and Resistance series’ have announced on their official blog that they have made a deal with EA Partners to make a new franchise for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Writing on the blog, Ted Price thanked fans of the games for supporting the company for 16 years and then goes into explaining the basic details of partnership.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we have created a brand new universe and franchise for you to experience in the coming years. As we develop it, one of our goals is to provide an awesome experience for as many players as possible. With that in mind, we’re working with EA Partners to bring this title to both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
PSN+, a flood of rumour and speculation
Yes, this was a little sneaky, but they asked very direct questions comparing it to Xbox Live Gold
I suppose it’s time to come clean. Quite a while ago, I was invited to take part in a survey for Sony with gauged how willing I would be to pay for additional PlayStation Network features. I took a screenshot of the survey, and may well receive a letter telling me to take it away, but welcome to the internet.
In either case, it looks like there is definitely going to be a move to some sort of paid service, as prompted by a question put to Andrew House, President of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe on the official blog. When asked, “Will PlayStation Network become a paying service?”, he replied;
Another Sonic game? Sonic Colours announced
(Video: Watch this video on the post page)
Hey, you remember that announcement of Sonic 4 that seemed to spell the end for the 3D Sonics that have plagued the past few generations. Well forget it. Sega have announced on their blog and a through a press release Sonic Colours, which appears to be taking place in a futuristic Sci-Fi theme park, as you attempt to save wisps from, surprisingly, Dr. Eggman.
These Wisps give Sonic extra powers. No, I’m not sure what this game is going to consist of, with the announcement trailer above being only 20 seconds of computer generated images, but I’m going to guess at it being a platformer.
The only other thing we know is that Sonic Colours will be coming to Wii and DS later this year. And that my americanised spell check is freaking out over me spelling colours with a u. Good work Sega, good work.
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Half Life 2 and cross platform Steam cloud support, now on Mac
As a helpful Bit-tech.net user shows us, Half Life 2 is now, most certainly, on Mac
I’m back, after a bit of a short break, and, typically, a lot of news kicked off when I was away, so I’ll do my best sum up some of the stories that have caught my eye and other people’s eyes. Thankfully, my eyes are still intact.
First of all, Steam for Mac got a game update yesterday, and whilst it was a little thin on the ground, some of the additions will please Mac owners so much they fly out of their turtle neck jumpers. Half Life 2 is now available on Mac, as well as episode one and two. Whilst this is cool news in itself is that rather than just releasing the games as port jobs, they have done some work on making the Half Life experience even better.
Phobias and Programming.
Anyone who has known me for long enough knows how much of an absolute failure I am when it comes to trying to learn a programming language and sticking to it. It’s not through lack of wanting to do it, I just easily get distracted by other “awesome” programming languages and try and learn those; a cycle forms.
Anyway, I am trying to stick with some languages now through hell or high water. I have decided to learn Perl and C and stick to them rigorously until I have finished my two books on them; which, incidentally, are very good and highly recommendable (O’Reilly’s Learning Perl and Keringhan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language).
Anyway, when considering what languages to study, my mind always goes towards other things. The biggest “other thing” was the Python programming language. I have always dabbled with Python and actually deployed it for some maintenance tasks on a few servers. It’s highly readable, maintainable and has a few nice features built into it. It is also the language supported by Ubuntu’s Quickly.
Mass Effect: The Movie
Set in sunny Normandy: THE Normandy.
After the weird news that Roller Coaster Tycoon is being made into a movie (eek, podcast spoiler), the studio that has fathered 300, The Watchmen, The Dark Knight and a whole other slew of bend-your-disbelief movies, Legendary Pictures, have acquired the film development rights to Mass Effect.
People worried that the movie might just be an onslaught of explosions may be slightly put at ease by the fact the writer of I Am Legend, Mark Protosevich, is writing the flick.
The Watchmen movie adaptation has been praised by critics and hated by the comic-fans. Will we see a similar avenue with Mass Effect?
Watch this space people! For more info, head here: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/05/25/legendary_pictures_mass_effect/
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Killzone 3 is official, a whole three screens released
Nope, not much yet, 'cept these dudes look angry and cold.
As what usually happens we report up to the minute news on our Ignition Podcast, we are instantly out of date as soon as we go live. Guerrilla Games recently had a press conference in their home town of Amsterdam and James Gallagher, a Content Produced at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, posted on the Official Playstation Blog about his trip and his experience.
Whilst Gallagher was obviously full of praise for the game, the screen shots that he brought back with him does show the Arctic levels that the GamePro magazine was talking about, as well as talking about the jetpacks and the worsening situation for the ISA.
Ignition 24/05/10
This week we decide not to enjoy the sunshine, but to sit indoors and talk games, movies and tech. On the topic list we have: Red Dead Redemption; Google IO; MUBI coming to PS3; A NES, SNES and Megadrive console; speculation on Apple’s WWDC 2010; a whole heap of infomation on upcoming video games and much more.
Duration: 72 minutes
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Google Chrome isn’t a Spy!
Google's Chrome browser has been heavy hit by people claiming it has serious privacy issues.
After an interesting discussion with people who are, “relevant to my interests”, the topic of Google Chrome soon came up. Most predictably what was mentioned was the privacy issues raised with it. As a believer in the open-source vetting process, I heavily disagree that Google could be doing anything subversive to our personal data.
To settle this argument in a non-subjective way I decided the best course of action would be an experiment. Essentially, what I wanted to test was the difference in packets between Google Chrome on first boot-up and search term “test123″ and a comparable browser with similar conditions. This way, we test Chrome against a vetted control browser. A few conditions before we get started:
- Experimental Browser: Google Chrome Beta for Linux (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 x64) with experience reporting disabled.
- Control browser: Midori 0.2.3 (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 x64), a WebKit browser licensed under a similar permissive license as Chrome.
- Analysis Method: A tcpdump, sudo tcpdump -w testbrowser.pcap -s 1550 dst www.google.com, command and Wireshark analysis.
- This tcpdump commands monitors all traffic going to the Google domain (216.239.32.0 – 216.239.63.255)
- Wireshark was to make the dump look pretty.
- Procedure: Start the dump, load up the browser and enter a search term to Google for “test123″. Stop the packet dump after this and monitor the results.
What I found:
The results actually surprised me in a very positive way. Not only did the two browsers communicate on exactly the same ports but Chrome also used around 60 less packets in the final dump. A cruel twist of irony that a third-party browser communicates with Google over 100% more than Chrome does. Anyway, without further hesitation, here is the dump from the different conditions.
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