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It was time for Microsoft to improve the XBox Dashboard to a more usable and Next-Gen experience.

I’m very positive about NXE and the cleaner in-game Dashboard, the new contextual actions (expecially while you’re gaming) are a nice feature. It’s easier to chat via MSN when you can just respond with a single click, instead of navigating through the conversation window.

I really liked the new Avatars and Gamecard features, the new Gamecards are cleaner and much better looking than the older ones.

A more complete assortment of screenshots is here (sorry but the gallery system of Wordpress is mental!).

Blizzard realized our worst fears: World of Microtransactions. They decided to start milking the franchise to exahustion, with lots of contents to be available as add-on commercial services. 

It will start with new appeareance options available only to people willing to pay for it, and it will stop, well, they didn’t say it will stop at all, to be honest. Wonderful: crippling for money the game you already pay a monthly fee and hefty retail prices to play. Looking at the less than enthusiast fanbase reactions I guess Activision got the MMO commercial models wrong: the fusion of two different models is not very smart, DLC on consoles proved it and publishers adjusted the pricing and aims of commercial add-ons accordingly to not leave with lots of pissed customers.

The risk is high: Blizzard took an already conservative reaction against WAR, they basically are pretending it don’t even exist, but the sad truth is that, marketing and tear-inducing quests (in WOW, lol!) aside, the latest iterations of WOW where a lot of more of the same and the new one will only extend the grind and piss off existing players (that, if you’re not under a rock, in Europe are leaving in droves due to boredom). Getting ready to battle more innovative games may be very hard for Blizzard, social phenomenon or not (just look at what is Second Life today!).

The move to let people buy three different copies of Starcraft to play the whole game is just another little money draining maneuver. The problem is that, corporate finances aside, these tactics often leaves IPs as a pale shades of themselves, often tainted by a bad reputation.

I have a bad feeling what it will be needed to play Diablo 3, let’s hope for the best.

From now on, I’ll try to test Gengo and Wordpress 2.5.1 to post in both english and Italian. Older relevant articles will be (slowly) translated. If something’s will start to act fishy, it’s just me trying to sort things out.

OK, since my folks on Ars Ludica are covering the matter in every possible way, I’d like to share my 2 cents here, just to revive the blog that is witnessing the most long hiatus of his history, due to my precarious health conditions.

You know, I’ve been one of the biggest detractors of GTA III (and its many variants). From this point of view, GTA IV is another game, even if it remains faithful to his own roots. What GTA IV does better is to be a game that a real mature player can enjoy. There are a lot less gangsta jokes and stereotypes, expecially in the leading roles.

Niko Bellic is a survivor and states over and over that crime is not his life, he’s in Liberty City for revenge or, in my book, for justice. He embraces crime because he needs connection, work and to stay alive. He has apparently no choice, but the game is surprisingly good to let you make the right choice even in the worst circumstances.

The distinguishing point from the past crap, it’s the script. It’s so good that the experience is intensely cinematic and you’re caught more often than not to crave for another episode, more than mission. It’s like Sopranos, with a tint of noir and lots of social critics. Something you wouldn’t expect, basing your judgement on the past teenage-teasing GTAs.

Technically, the game is a bit of a let down, aside cut-scenes animations (with poor lighting and shadowing) and a really good physics engine (with lots of limitations in the area that borderlines animations and physical interaction: you can’t seem to be able to close a car door or open an house door without bumping into it, which is cheap), the game is not really turning tables on graphics. The engine does a lot better on creating a believable, lively and realistic enviorment, instead of indulging on the small graphical details, like realistic trees or better shadows (maybe the less solid aspect of the whole game).

Just forget the rampant Bandai marketing for the pokemonesque card game and Ultra Galaxy: Daikaijyu Battle is the Nirvana of giant monsters lovers.

The serie is literally a blast of cheesy Japanese monster action and very good digital effects. The creatures in themselves are the typical spongy rubber suits we were used to since childhood. I can’t comment on the stories, since my Japanese is not so good to completely follow up all the dialogues, but who cares? The serie has literally dozens of different kaijus that fight for supremacy and that’s what matters most.

Massively and its hunger for readers is like their editorial staff unfamiliarity with MMOs. Today’s try to breaking news is the huge dilemma any MMO player felt almost once in his career: “It’s ok to kill animals for money and experience?“. The post is one of the most prominent problem with the blog: it lets you wonder why they don’t simply relay MMOG news since most of the time they didn’t have a clue about what they are writing…

After years of waiting, the fan translation of Tales of Phantasia PS1 is ready! I tested it for good and can assure you that the patch not only works but it is completely compatible with the PSP, so look for a Japanese version of the game (I suppose it won’t come out cheap for a while, but several store owners are still selling it for its real value that is pretty low since there are tons of copies still around), grab your favourite PSX converter and start playing on the go!

The project took an insane amount of time and a huge hacking effort but in the end the quality is simply unmatched by anything else in the realm of fan translations.

Let it be just another monument against years of region locks and stupid product placement policies that deprived (and still ocasionally deprive) lots of gamers of their favourite titles.

Well that Sony was thinking about a brand new edition of the PSP hardware is a widely known fact. In the usual PSP marketing survey Sony is about to send to all the registered PSP users, there’s a section where users are asked to state their interest in a series of improvements. Here’s the list of the relevant ones:

• Mobile phone integration (there’s a Sony patent that is widely known by now talking about the exact same thing).
• Digital delivery of books (nice) and comics (are you kidding? on such a low res screen?)
• Touch screen (Riiiiidge Raceeeeer!)
• Built-in storage (flash memory or built-in HD)
• PDA functions
• New overall design (clamshell or slider)
• Bigger screen (bigger? I also suggest to change the name in PSP Vaio!)
• Longer battery Life (it’s still the Achille’s heel of the whole product)
• Slimmer, lighter design (Since the PSP Lite, this section should be: “shorter design so you can place it in a pocket”)

The list hints that Sony’s going to radically change the PSP (PSP 2?) in the future.

I really hope for a clamshell design or any other way to protect the screen and I’d really like to see the UMD ditched (a possibility, since there are no new suggested features about that technology) in favor of a flash based solution and digitally delivered games.

So finally Microsoft admitted that their 6 M accounts on XBLA are full of fakes and doubles, and they are going to make them disappear.

Too bad they aren’t so much concerned with fair play or exploits, they are starting to ban people that use XBL accounts to buy out of region contents. Once again a Next Gen console with a Cave Gen content locking. The problem of content locking on digital delivery is not a Microsoft-only plague: you can see region locked deliveries on Steam, you can see regional digital deliveries services on Sony’s and Nintendo’s console, too.

The reason why digital distributors are in love with region-locked digital delivery is simple to understand for us Europeans: 1 euro is  worth 1.36 dollars.

Usually gaming products are sold in a 1:1 exchange rate even if there’s no more 1:1 exchange rate in currency for years. To hide this fact, now games are sold by points, points bought with pre-paid cards, that doesn’t follow the rules of international currency exchange.

This means that often in Europe we pay 36% more for the same bunch of bits, for no apparent reasons, aside sheer greed. Apparently that is good, and it’s a right that console manufacturers want to preserve till the end of time, hitting people that don’t like to be cheated hard, very hard.

The problem is that distributors and publishers will start to obsolete if the digital distribution and platform locking start to slip out of their control. It’s not really a Next-Gen war, it’s a survival war: get shops, distributors and couriers out of the equation, keep the same retail prices, with neglegible distribution costs to increase profits. Prices become inflatable at will, since people can’t get software anywhere else. This model forgets two other key roles in the Game Industry: developers, who usually get worse deals and gorw a strong economic dependency to the console manufacturers they work for, and customers, that are plagued by increasing costs, no matter how more efficient the distribution pipeline is.

The strict control distributors can now apply to licenses are not that healty, too. They are far beyond the simple copy protection mechanisms: they can deny you to use contents if you don’t follow their rules (whatever they are), you can be flagged as a criminal if you don’t agree to pay the region tax they made out of thin air. They can kill the free market with a mouse click. They can keep your money and ban you as an illegal thief.

It’s hardly Next Generation here, it’s Imperialism Era again.

With a foreseeable announcement, Nintendo said it will start to support soon independent developers focused on original games for the Wii Virtual Console channel.

The exact release dates will still be confidential for a while, but indie developers will be provided with a custom programming toolkit made for VC games (similar to XNA from Microsoft, I suppose).

From what I heard from Adobe, it is highly possible that some version of Flash will be officially supported for the new VC releases, since the current Flash offering for Wii was highly praised and liked (despite the simplicity of some of the game design concepts).