SWAT 4 has reawakened something in us. Something we’ve missed since the days when we’d pile eight guys into a Rogue Spear map and play co-op all night. The return of the SWAT series, this time in the hands of Irrational Games (Freedom Force, Tribes Vengeance), looks to be shaping up quite nicely, as evidenced by the meaty beta preview we’ve had a hard time putting down this week… At the start of each mission, you’ll get a short audio briefing on the situation, as well as a basic map showing the layout of the building. Don’t expect exact blueprints of every location...

First-party titles to be playable over the ‘net using wireless hotspots Sony has revealed that five of its first-party PSP titles will feature online play from the launch of the system in the USA, with the games set to be playable both over local wireless connections and across the internet. ATV Offroad Fury: Blazin’ Trails and Twisted Metal: Head-On are joined by sports titles MLB, NBA and Gretzky NHL from Sony’s 989 Studios in the roster of early online-enabled games. The games will all feature standard wireless play between consoles in the same area, as already seen in many...

The chip that will run the next version of the PlayStation video game machine will have nine processor cores and run faster than 4GHz, the chip’s designers revealed Monday. Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba revealed those and other specifications for the Cell processor during a press conference at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where technical papers on the Cell design will be presented this week. The three companies have been working on Cell for several years, promising to deliver a high-performance chip optimized for multimedia applications. Test production of...

[UPDATE] The Japanese publisher confirms it has sold off Visual Concepts and its Kush subsidiary for a bargain price of $24 million. When Sega entered into an agreement with Take-Two Interactive to copublish its line of ESPN sports games last year, many industry watchers suspected the publisher was planning to sell off its internal sports studio, Visual Concepts. Those suspicions were confirmed just before Christmas when it was revealed that part of the codistribution deal allowed Take-Two to buy Visual Concepts, should it choose to do so… Gamespot [ article cont ] Well they didn’t...

The Chinese government on Wednesday issued a list of 50 banned video and computer games, according to government news agency Xinhua. The list is roughly split between pirated games and games banned based on content. Pirated games cited by the news agency included “The Sims 2,” the top-selling PC game in North America last year, and soccer game “FIFA 2005.” The remainder of the games were termed by Xinhua “illegally distributed foreign games,” presumably for content. The list includes several games based on the Vietnam War, including “Conflict Vietnam”...

BetaPlayer v0.5 has been released. BP is one of the most advanced Open Source Media Players for Mobile Devices available today. [ article ] – Bug Reports here: http://corecodec.org/tracker/?atid=117&group_id=9&func=browse – Suggest features here: http://corecodec.org/tracker/?atid=120&group_id=9&func=browse - Please uninstall previous version before updating Download it here: http://betaplayer.corecodec.org I must say that this is probably the best multimedia player for pocket pc’s around! I give it 5/5 and highly recommend it to anyone using a Pocket...

Retail sales of video games tallied just over $9.9 billion in 2004, according to figures released today by industry research firm the NPD Group. That figure, which includes all portable and console hardware, software, and accessories, represents a decline of less than 1 percent when compared with $10 billion in 2003. While dollar sales were down, overall, unit sales were up 4 percent, said the research group “Sales remained strong, thanks in large part to the console software, portable game software, and portable game hardware categories, which saw dollar sales percentage increases of 7 percent,...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. on Monday said it has signed a 15-year licensing deal with sports broadcaster ESPN, giving it the rights to use the network’s brand and to develop new games based on ESPN properties. The deal strikes a further blow against what was EA’s chief competition in the sports market, the line of games from Sega Sammy Holdings and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., which previously held the ESPN rights and used the ESPN name. However, at least initially, any potential changes to the EA sports games will be more subtle. “We...