Portal 2 Accelerates the Hype with Alternate-Reality Fun
Valve is upping the Portal 2 based ante by assailing Steam users in the know with insane alternate-reality challenges similar to the announcement leaks hidden in the original game some time ago.
As well as an ominous doomsday timer and message located in the aperturescience.com domain name registered by valve found here, Steam users have transmogrified the latest garbled Steamcast using Audacity and found themselves this secret waveform-based message…
Evidence perhaps of the rarely seen flying Glados perhaps… you decide. On top of this weirdness, steam users using the service’s chat interface have been coming across cryptic console commands and puzzles, which ominously culminated in users coming online and well, see for yourself.
Notice the weirdness? The Steam chat ‘Console’ seems to be the final part of Valve’s little game, so keep your eye on your inbox or whatever, it’s interesting. Oh as well as this it might be possible that Portal 2 or something related to Portal 2 may arrive later on today, as the doomsday timer is imminently going to run out.
Multiple Gaming Outlets rumor Nintendo HD Console Announcement Within 6 Months.
Portal 2 aside, this is a big deal. There was once a time, before the Wii, when Nintendo released epic consoles of graphical awesomeness and with a library of titles that shone with integrity. No motion control crap either.
Today, many outlets are confirming a rumour going around that Nintendo is about to, in the next 6 months, will release some kind of preview of their next generation console.
The new console, as of yet unnamed, is confirmed to be capable of running games at HD resolutions, although reports are conflicting as to whether the console will be capable of competing with the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 with regards to graphics rendering capabilities. It could either look better or worse according to outlets.
HD rendering would mean Nintendo could be getting involved in the multi-platform world, attracting contractual attention from major publishers who make the biggest games, such as COD and The Elder Scrolls, both of which have not really made much of an appearance on Nintendo systems.
Apparently the Japanese company has already approached major publishers with previews of the device, giving potential partners plenty of time to come up with something for the console’s purported launch, which according to some sources points to late 2012. Nintendo has always gunned for the Christmas sale in the past, so this information could be accurate.
In a press conference last year, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata commented on Nintendo’s concurrent bad relations with third-party developers. “We need to decrease the concern that only Nintendo software can sell well on Nintendo platforms and third-party software cannot sell in the same volume. We feel a need to have closer ties with our third-party developers from the beginning.”
“Nintendo is doing this one right,” according to an anonymous source “[It’s] not a gimmick like the Wii.” What else, beyond graphics, this may imply about the system is unknown. What kind of controls the system will support (we imagine a need for both classic analog configurations and motion controllers) or what level of software and infrastructure Nintendo will provide for online gaming is also unknown. However, it’s a positive sign that the system might be more than just an HD Wii.”
It seems like a decent time for Nintendo to be thinking about making a next-generation console, as with the combined threat of declining Wii sales and Microsoft’s new Kinect peripheral, the company is feeling the sting.
Watch E3 coverage this summer for more info. Expect the best. Over and out.
3DS Outsold by DS?!
It’s not every day that a supposedly inferior console outsells its successor 460,000 to 400,000.
It seems that with all the 3D trickery that Nintendo could bring to the table, the existing DS platform still seems to be a top seller. What’s more, the DS itself when first launched sold 100,000 more units in the first week it was released than the 3DS, 500,000 against the 3DS’s 400,000.
Hopefully as the 3DS gets more games for everyone to play and better developed titles that further take advantage of the 3D system, the 3D handheld will pick up in sales. On the flip side, latest Pokémon outings Black and White have sold 2.4 million copies. Epic.