Wii 2 Confirmed for next year
Nintendo has confirmed that a successor to its Wii console …
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Valve has confirmed details on its first downloadable content coming for Portal 2 “this summer”.
The new DLC will be available on all platforms(PS3, PC, 360 and Mac). Currently code named Portal 2 DLC #1, it will bring new chambers, leaderboards, a new challenge mode for single and multiplayer modes, “and more”. That already sounds like plenty, but we’ll take more if you’re offering, Valve.
And guess how much that lot will be. Free! The best kind of price.
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Gamers have had to deal with no PSN over this Easter break and the network is still down after a total of six days.
Sony’s latest official company update on the outage remains its clarification that the network is having to be “rebuilt” in light of an outside attack, which was posted two days ago (April 23) on the official PlayStation Blog in the US.
Since then a rep has said:
“We will announce through our websites as soon as there are any updates. We are currently investigating to determine the cause of this outage and are working to restore and maintain the services. Since this is an overall security related issue, we will not be providing further commentary for this case.”
The service went down in the early hours of Thursday morning, the same day as Portal 2 was released for the PS3.
Anti-Sony hacking group Anonymous has denied responsibility for the attack, but has not ruled out the possibility that one of its members could have acted individually.
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Nintendo has confirmed that a successor to its Wii console will be released next year.
Speaking to shareholders via an investor update, Nintendo said that the new home system would be shown at E3 2011 for the first time.
The release reads:
“RE: Wii’s successor system: Nintendo Co. Ltd has decided to launch in 2012 a system to succeed Wii, which the company has sold 86.01 million units on a consolidated shipment basis between its launch in 2006 and the end of March 2011.
“We will show a playable model of the new system and announced more specifications at the E3 Expo, which will be held June 7-9 2011 in Los Angeles.”
The new Wii is said to feature a custom IBM PowerPC CPU with three cores, a GPU from the ATI R700 family with a shader unit at version 4.1, and at least 512Mb of RAM.
Rumors are also circulating that the new controller will have its own built in high definition touch screen.
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Every Valve game starts by showing their famous logo of the bald guy with a valve in his head. But where did this logo originate from, well Valve have explained all.
One Redditor recently wrote Valver Ray Ueno about the bald guy in the Valve logo and got this response:
I worked with Gabe and team to develop the “guy in the logo” back when we first named the company, Valve (circa 1995/6), and needed to develop the visual brand vocabulary to go along with it.
Interesting that you should ask about the bald guy. Back then, the casting agencies we were using to find models only had “supermodel”-type talent. We kept requesting “heavy-set”, “normal” models, and they kept sending us “beautiful”, “thin”, “perfect” headshots to review.
So, we finally asked them to just go out on the street and pull “everyday Joes” who were more “interesting”, “common”, and for the bald guy, “kinda big, heavy-set, and bald”.
They went out to the streets of Seattle’s Broadway district, took tons of polaroids of the types of folks we were looking for, and brought the shots back to us. We selected the bald guy from the batches of “off-the-street” polaroids—he was literally pulled out of a coffee shop or book store!
A few days later, we brought him into studio and shot the image you now see at the beginning of our games. We also shot a 2nd image of a different guy with a valve in his eye using the same process (you might remember him as well—attached below). The two comprised the “Open your mind. Open your eyes.” concept for our initial brand, respectively.
It’s been very long since we did that work, so we don’t know who the models were. And the fact that they weren’t professional models, would make it very difficult to find them—if not impossible for the bald guy (not facing camera).