Sony and Nintendo said their flagship videogame machines are likely to be in short supply all year owing to component shortages, extending a problem that has plagued both companies. From a report: "There's no end in sight to the semiconductor shortage at this point," said Nintendo's president, Shuntaro Furukawa. Sony's chief financial officer, Hiroki Totoki, said the company aimed to sell 18 million units of its PlayStation 5 videogame console in the current fiscal year, which ends in March 2023, down from a previous projection of 22.6 million. Demand is greater than what Sony can supply, he said.

Among other problems, Mr. Totoki cited Covid-19 restrictions in China, including a lockdown in Shanghai, that have made it hard for companies there to manufacture and ship parts used in game machines. "It would be likely to affect our production if the pandemic situation in China worsens, or if the lockdown expands further," he said. The PlayStation 5 has been notoriously hard to get hold of since its introduction in 2020. In the fiscal year ended March 2022, Sony said it sold 11.5 million units of the machine, falling short of the previous target of 14.8 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In most cases, the release of yet another classic console emulator for the Switch wouldn't be all that noteworthy. But experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo's European Research & Development division (NERD). That has some industry watchers hopeful that Nintendo may be planning official support for some emulated classic portable games through the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service in the future. The two leaked emulators -- codenamed Hiroko for Game Boy and Sloop for Game Boy Advance -- first hit the Internet as fully compiled NSP files and encrypted NCA files linked from a 4chan thread posted to the Pokemon board Monday afternoon. Later in that thread, the original poster suggested that these emulators "are official in-house development versions of Game Boy Color/Advance emulators for Nintendo Switch Online, which have not been announced or released."

In short order, dataminers examining the package found a .git folder in the ROM. That folder includes commit logs that reference supposed development work circa August 2020 from a NERD employee and, strangely enough, a developer at Panasonic Vietnam. NERD's history includes work on the software for the NES Classic and SNES Classic, as well as the GameCube emulation technology in last year's Super Mario All-Stars, so the division's supposed involvement wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Footage from the leaked Game Boy Advance emulator also includes a "(c) Nintendo" and "(c) 2019 -- 2020 Nintendo" at various points. While suggestive, none of this is exactly hard evidence of Nintendo's involvement in making these emulators. Some skepticism might be warranted, too, because there is some historical precedent for an emulator developer trying to get more attention by pretending their homebrew product is a "leaked" official Nintendo release.

Some observers also pointed to other reasons to doubt that these leaks were an "official" Nintendo work product. ModernVintageGamer and others noted that the leaked GBA emulator includes an "export state to Flashcart" option designed "to confirm original behavior" on "original hardware," according to the GUI. That option is illustrated with a picture of an EZFlash third-party flash cartridge in the emulator interface, an odd choice given Nintendo's previous litigious attacks on such flashcart makers. A "savedata memory" option in the emulator also references the ability to "inter-operate with flashcarts, other emulators, [and] fan websites..." That's a list that would serve as a decent Johnny Carson "Carnac the Magnificent" setup for "things Nintendo wouldn't want to reference in an official product." A prominent video game historian that Ars consulted with said they were "99.9% sure [the emulators are] real" and that "personally I'm absolutely convinced of its legitimacy."

Mike Bouma writes: I just bought the A500 Mini here in the Netherlands. The first reviews are now available.

The Guardian gives the device a 4 out of 5 score in their review: "The A500 is a robust piece of tech nostalgia that will give veteran fans many hours of nostalgic pleasure while also providing an accessible means of introducing younger family members to the Amiga scene. The colorful sprites, pounding techno soundtracks and sardonic wit of the beloved Sensible Software, Team 17 and Bitmap Brothers games retain their appeal and it has been fascinating to rediscover how much the modern independent gaming scene owes to this 35-year-old home computer."

Nintendo Life has reviewed the device, giving it an 8 out of 10 score: "As such, this is an intriguing device for anyone who is even remotely interested in tracking the development of the games industry -- and while its 120-pound price tag makes it more expensive than many of its micro-console rivals, the ability to side-load games is very welcome indeed."

Express.co.uk gives the device a 3.5 out of 5 score in their review: "Overall, the Amiga 500 Mini is a strong addition to the crowded classic console market that will appeal mostly to those that have a lot of nostalgia for this iconic PC gaming machine. And the ability to add extra games is a great little bonus which will add plenty of extra life to the system."

Furthermore, various YouTubers have reviewed the A500 Mini, including Retro Recipes, which gives the device a perfect 5 out of 5 score while stating it beats expectations.

"Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles," Kotaku reports, "rendering a random assortment of games unplayable."

The glitch is "affecting users' ability to play games they ostensibly own." Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game's apparent delisting from the handheld's store.

While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library.

Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response....

The only potential explanation I've seen for this issue thus far involves what's known as the "Unix epoch," or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system's lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony's backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can't be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms is among the most vocal proponents of the future of the metaverse, but one gaming industry veteran is particularly skeptical about its vision. From a report: Like the cloud five years ago and even the internet of 20 years past, every business is now trying to latch onto the metaverse, said former Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime. Instead of Facebook's parent, the digital future will be driven by smaller companies that are really innovating, while companies like Epic Games are doing "really compelling" things, he said. "Facebook itself is not an innovative company," Fils-Aime told Emily Chang at the South by Southwest event in Austin, Texas, on Saturday. "They have either acquired interesting things like Oculus and Instagram, or they've been a fast follower of people's ideas. I don't think their current definition will be successful."

Does the Nintendo's larger and more vivid Switch suffer from the image-burn in that has crippled several devices with such display? An unusual and unexpected comprehensive test hasoffered some answers. InputMag: After 3,600 hours of subjecting an OLED Switch to the the same image -- one that was ripped from The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild -- Wulff Den, a YouTuber who specializes in gaming videos, concluded that the device is finally, surprisingly, showing faint signs of burn-in. As reported by ArsTecnica, the damage is minor -- on a white screen, like the Switch's main menu, there was a faint "blue ghosting," that appeared following the six-month experiment. But as, Wulff Den himself points out, "It's still a little subtle. It's not anything that I would do an RMA request for." The experiment began as soon as the OLED Switch was released, when Wulff Den decided to find out whether users would have to worry about burn-in. The YouTuber left his OLED Switch on, displaying the same image and set to its full brightness, without any interruptions aside from the occasional check-in. After 1,800 hours, or three months, the project yielded negligible effects -- white pixels were slightly dimmer but Wullf Den noted he most likely wouldn't have noticed, if not for relentlessly monitoring the changes during his test.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: People are review-bombing a hospital in India with one-star reviews after a doctor tweeted a video of himself during a procedure with an unconscious patient. The anesthesiologist, who goes by Dr. Shreeveera on Twitter and his YouTube channel, filmed himself supposedly in an active operating room where he had just anesthetized a patient and was preparing for an invasive procedure to remove a gallbladder. He claimed to be defending himself against people claiming he's not a real doctor, because they disagree with his passion for the "console wars." "Console wars" is shorthand for the decades-long argument between gamers about which platform -- Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo devices, PC gaming, and so on -- is the best.

Shreeveera posted the video to Twitter, writing, "Here I am after inducing anaesthesia, intubating & putting a patient on controlled mechanical ventilation for a Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy case in OR. Slandering my identity, profession coz you Xbots can't Argue FACTS!" according to gaming news outlet Dextero. He added, "SAVING LIVES- My Job. CONSOLE WARS- My Hobby." He was allegedly trying to defend himself from accusations that he wasn't a real doctor. Dextero, which viewed the video before Shreeveera locked his Twitter account, says that he pans around an operating room holding up the phone to record himself, showing the patient on the operating table.

Shreeveera posted an unlisted apology video on YouTube on Monday, saying that he's received a lot of backlash and racist harassment because of his video. He says he regrets posting the video and acknowledges that his obsession with console wars is childish, but also tries defending himself and his hobby. "I'm a human being guys, I make mistakes, please let's move on ahead," he said. "I do not hate anyone on a personal level. If I do not like the console they're playing, I just make points regarding what that console is giving you... this is just a hobby of mine." Judging from his YouTube channel, Shreeveera is clearly a PlayStation fan and an Xbox hater.

Nintendo has announced that in March 2023 the online storefronts for 3DS and Wii U systems will be ceasing operations, a move that the BBC reports has attracted a lot of backlash from fans. Kotaku adds: In terms of people playing and enjoying the games they already own, Nintendo says: Even after late March 2023, and for the foreseeable future, it will still be possible to redownload games and DLC, receive software updates and enjoy online play on Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS family of systems." All of this is expected stuff. The 3DS is 11 years old this year and the Wii U ten, so digital store closures were always going to happen sooner or later. What's shitty about these closures in particular, though, is that both shopfronts offered users the ability to purchase and then own many of Nintendo's greatest ever titles, something you're now largely unable to do ever since the company switched to a subscription model with Nintendo Switch Online. The announcement post from Nintendo initially had an FAQ question, which read, "Doesn't Nintendo have an obligation to preserve its classic games?" The company deleted that part from the blog post. Kotaku adds: "We currently have no plans to offer classic content in other ways," is an incredibly shitty thing to read, because under zero circumstances is a subscription-based model an acceptable substitution to actually owning a game.

A U.S. district judge "sentenced a Nintendo Switch hacker to 40 months in federal prison," reports the Independent: Gary Bowser, 52, is one of the leaders of the "Team Xecuter" hacker criminal enterprise, a notorious video game piracy gang, authorities said. The gang sold software to hack and download stolen games to various consoles. Besides the Nintendo Switch console, Team Xecuter also targeted the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic and Microsoft's Xbox.

Bowser, a Canadian citizen, was the public face of the group and handled Team Xecuter's public relations and operated its websites. He was arrested in October 2020 in the Dominican Republic and extradited to the US to stand trial in New Jersey. He pleaded guilty in October 2021 to two criminal counts — conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices, and trafficking in circumvention devices. As part of his plea deal, Bowser agreed to pay $4.5m in restitution to Nintendo.

Federal agents said that he caused a loss of about $65m (about £48m) to gaming companies.
"The hacking group was initially adamant that its hardware and software modifications that circumvented copyright protections were intended for homebrew application development, not to enable users to steal software..." notes Hot Hardware.

"Following the guilty plea, Bowser settled a civil lawsuit with Nintendo to the tune of $10 million, on top of the $4.5 million in restitution he already owed."

Nintendo's latest financial report to investors, issued as an overview of its fiscal year's third quarter, came with a momentous announcement for the veteran video game and console producer: Switch has joined the 100 million-worldwide-sales club. From a report: What's more, Switch's current tally of 103.5 million means the device has leapfrogged over both the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo Wii in terms of sales. The count makes the Switch Nintendo's highest-selling home console of all time. While Sony's PS4 and PS2 console families continue to hold higher sales counts, neither got to the 100 million mark as quickly as Switch, which only needed 57 months to do so (March 2017 to December 2021). The only console family to get to the 100 million-global-sales mark faster is Nintendo's own portable DS platform, which needed only 51 months. The DS, which came out in 2004, launched at a lower $149 price point and went lower from there, while Switch has never sold for less than $199. In a statement to investors, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa affirmed that the Switch console, as it nears its fifth anniversary, is "in the middle of its lifecycle." Furukawa said nearly the exact same thing a few months earlier when Switch crossed the 90 million-sales mark.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: With its $68.7 billion acquisition of mammoth embattled video game publisher Activision Blizzard, Microsoft will be taking on a lot. It will be absorbing a company criticized by its employees for its workplace culture, one that is embroiled in lawsuits alleging gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment. Microsoft will also be taking on game development studios that have inched closer to unionization over the past several months. But it will also be adding an element that newly minted CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer sees as core to Microsoft's strategy for consumer acquisition: a slew of video games and long-abandoned franchises.

The games created by Activision Blizzard's developers provide the centerpiece of Microsoft's strategic thinking around the acquisition. The titles are some of the most popular in the world. And those Activision Blizzard properties extend well beyond Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush. In discussing some of the intellectual properties owned by Activision Blizzard, Spencer's excitement may have mirrored the enthusiasm of a "StarCraft" player noticing the long-dormant franchise's logo in Microsoft's acquisition announcement. "I was looking at the IP list, I mean, let's go!" Spencer said. " 'King's Quest,' 'Guitar Hero,' I should know this but I think they got 'HeXen.' " "HeXen," indeed an Activision Blizzard property, is a cult hit first-person game about using magic spells.

Microsoft's pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard also means owning the rights to many creations from gaming's past, including Crash Bandicoot, the original Sony PlayStation mascot. There's also the influential and popular Tony Hawk skateboard series and beloved characters like Spyro the Dragon. Toys for Bob, one of the studios working under the Activision Blizzard banner, successfully launched games like "Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time," but was later folded into supporting Call of Duty games. Spencer said the Xbox team will talk with developers about working on a variety of franchises from the Activision Blizzard vaults. "We're hoping that we'll be able to work with them when the deal closes to make sure we have resources to work on franchises that I love from my childhood, and that the teams really want to get," Spencer said. "I'm looking forward to these conversations. I really think it's about adding resources and increasing capability." Spencer said he's concerned about tech companies unfamiliar with the gaming industry barging in to the space, as opposed to the current, experienced competition against Nintendo and Sony. "They have a long history in video games," he said. "Nintendo's not going to do anything that damages gaming in the long run because that's the business they're in. Sony is the same and I trust them. [...] Valve's the same way. When we look at the other big tech competitors for Microsoft: Google has search and Chrome, Amazon has shopping, Facebook has social, all these large-scale consumer businesses. [...] The discussion we've had internally, where those things are important to those other tech companies for how many consumers they reach, gaming can be that for us."

He added: "I think we do have a unique point of view, which is not about how everything has to run on a single device or platform. That's been the real turning point for us looking at gaming as a consumer opportunity that could have similar impact on Microsoft that some of those other scale consumer businesses do for other big tech competitors. And it's been great to see the support we've had from the company and the board."

According to journalist Liam Robertson, Nintendo had plans to release a Game Boy accessory called the PageBoy that would've used radio transmission technology "to let Game Boy Color owners search for information and read international news, game magazines, weather reports, sports scores, and even, most ambitiously, watch live television," reports Kotaku. "This tech would also allow users to contact and message other PageBoy owners. This radio transmission technology at the time was heavily used by pagers, which is actually where the PageBoy name came from." From the report: In a video out [yesterday], Roberston revealed a whole bunch of details and images of the proposed device for the first time. [...] Roberston spoke to some folks who worked on the PageBoy project with Nintendo about the device and how it came to be and what ultimately killed it before it saw the light of day. According to those involved, after a meeting with Nintendo of America in 1999, the company was excited about the potential for the PageBoy, and for the next three years, Nintendo worked with Wizard -- a group created to help manage the device -- to see if this add-on could actually be created and if it would end up being profitable.

While Nintendo was impressed by many of PageBoy's features, including the ability to send images using the Game Boy camera and even the potential for Nintendo to send live videos to PageBoy owners via the radio transmission tech, it ran into a major roadblock. The device relied on radio networks that only existed in a select few parts of the world, like the United States, greatly limiting the device's customer base. According to Robertson, he was told that Nintendo believed the key to Game Boy's success was how universal the hardware was, allowing users around the world to play the same games with the same features. So, because of this, Nintendo reportedly canceled the project in July 2002. However, as pointed out by Roberston, many of the ideas proposed by Wizard for the PageBoy would end up becoming a reality in the years that followed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In an effort to restrict access to pirated ROMs illegally made available for its Switch console, Nintendo has obtained a UK High Court injunction against six internet service providers. Targeted against ROM portals with NSW2U and NSWROM branding, the two-year blocking order requires BT, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk and others to block the sites after they failed to respond to infringement complaints.

New submitter segaboy81 writes: In 2001 the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born, and it took the software engineering world by storm. Linux, Windows, Facebook, AAA games, and just about everything else, adheres to this manifesto in some form or another. It is a paradigm that allows teams to work collaboratively on projects in the most effective and streamlined way possible. However, EA may not have gotten the memo. According to a blogpost by former EA developer Adam Berg, different teams take very different approaches to development with one team in particular being especially slow to progress. Adam recounts his experience on the FIFA team where he worked on the Wii, PS Vita, and Nintendo 3DS ports of the game: "I often worked in the realm of competition logic. Testing changes here could mean progressing through several seasons of career mode in order to test out a change. No joke, it would take an entire day to change 3 lines of code and know that it actually worked correctly."

"The New York Times has an obituary for Masayuki Uemura, designer of the first Nintendo Entertainment System console," writes Slashdot reader nickovs. Here's an excerpt from the report: Video game consoles had a moment of popularity in the early 1980s, but the market collapsed because of shoddy quality control and uninspiring software that failed to provide the thrills of arcade hits like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Truckloads of unsold game cartridges ended up in landfills, and retailers decided that home gaming systems had no future. But in 1985, the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States changed the industry forever. The unassuming gray box with its distinctive controllers became a must-have for an entire generation of children and prompted Nintendo's virtual monopoly over the industry for the better part of a decade as competitors pulled out of the market in response to the company's dominance. "The NES was not the first video game console," adds nickovs. "The quality of the games that became available for the NES, including titles like Super Mario Brothers, made it much more appealing than pervious boxes and that lead to its commercial success. These games would not have been possible without the hardware that Uemura designed."

Masayuki Uemura was the lead architect for the Famicom (aka the Nintendo Entertainment System) and the Super Famicon (aka the SNES). The mark he left on the gaming industry and popular culture is indelible. According to Oricon News, Uemura passed away on December 6. He was 78. Kotaku: Ritsumeikan University, where Uemura became the director of game studies after retiring from Nintendo in 2004, announced his passing earlier today. Originally, Uemura worked at Sharp, selling photocell tech to various companies, including his future employer Nintendo. Once joinging the company, he worked with Gunpei Yokoi to integrate the photocell technology into electronic light gun games. He would go on to work on plug-and-play consoles like Nintendo's Color TV-Game.

But everything changed in 1981 with a single phone call. "President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges," Uemura told Matt Alt in an interview published last year on Kotaku. "He always liked to call me after he'd had a few drinks, so I didn't think much of it. I just said, "Sure thing, boss," and hung up. It wasn't until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, "That thing we talked about -- you're on it?" that it hit me: He was serious."

Ars Technica reports: Months after the first-person-shooter classic Quake got a major 25th anniversary re-release, its modern handlers have returned with an update that exceeds all expectations. Thursday's new 770MB patch on all platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC) adds an entirely new co-op combat mode, and it officially opens the game's mod floodgates for players outside the PC ecosystem.

The uncreatively named "Horde" mode works much like a mode of the same name in Gears of War. Instead of progressing through a level from start to finish, players are expected to hunker down inside a somewhat circular arena and then contend with hundreds of enemies spawning from all sides. Kill a full "wave" of foes, and your team will get a moment to breathe, replenish health and ammo (or argue over who gets to use it), and do it all over again.

For the sake of Quake's first-ever official co-op mode (beyond the campaign, which always supported co-op as an option), Bethesda support studio MachineGames has whipped up four brand-new battling arenas, which are pictured above. Each includes at least one "silver key" door, which is full of more powerful weapons and is gated until players earn a key by defeating a tougher "boss wave" of foes. Get through nine enemy waves, and your team gets a "gold key." You can either exit the level at that point or stay and keep fighting increasingly tough foes until your team dies.
In addition, Quake now has a new "add-on" menu, and this week's patch gives it an option for playing the foggy 2012 Quake mod "Honey."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Microsoft's vice president of gaming, Phil Spencer, wants the gaming industry to work toward a common goal of keeping older games available to modern audiences through emulation, he tells Axios. Emulation allows modern hardware to simulate the functions of older hardware and run game files, or executables. "My hope (and I think I have to present it that way as of now) is as an industry we'd work on legal emulation that allowed modern hardware to run any (within reason) older executable allowing someone to play any game," he wrote in a direct message. Microsoft's newer consoles -- the Xbox Series and Xbox One -- run huge libraries of older Xbox 360 and original Xbox games using this technique.

Emulators are most commonly used worldwide by fans, preservationists and pirates. They run games from the original Nintendo era to more recent PlayStations, but there is no consistent use of them by the industry. [...] An official industry emulation approach would require long-term online support to offer game files and to possibly check if the user has the right to access them. Spencer, whose own platform has some of these issues, still sees a path forward. "I think in the end, if we said, 'Hey, anybody should be able to buy any game, or own any game and continue to play,' that seems like a great North Star for us as an industry."

Long-time tlhIngan writes: Tim Sweeney is at it again. The CEO of Epic Games blasts Apple and Google and calls for a universal app store that works across all platforms. Naturally, he's proposing that Epic Games manage the store across iOS, Android, Xbox, PC, Nintendo and Sony. Bloomberg (paywalled) has more details. "What the world really needs now is a single store that works with all platforms," said Sweeney in an interview at the Global Conference for Mobile Application Ecosystem Fairness in Seoul, South Korea. "Right now software ownership is fragmented between the iOS App Store, the Android Google Play marketplace, different stores on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, and then Microsoft Store and the Mac App Store." Sweeney added that Epic Games is working with developers and service providers to create a system to allow users "to buy software in one place, knowing that they'd have it on all devices and all platforms."

"There's a store market, there's a payments market, and there are many other related markets. And it's critical that antitrust enforcement not allow a monopolist in one market to use their control of that market to impose control over unrelated markets." He went on to accuse Apple of complying "with oppressive foreign laws" while "ignoring laws passed by Korea's democracy." "Apple must be stopped," he says.

According to Nikkei Asian Review, "Nintendo will only be able to produce about 24 million units of its popular Switch game console in the fiscal year through March, 20% below an original plan." From the report: Its production has been held up by shortages of semiconductors and other electronic parts amid strong demand for Switch, including for its latest version released on Oct. 8. Nintendo's trouble is a reminder of the far-reaching impact of the global supply crunch that has affected a wide range of industries from autos to electronics to machinery.

The Kyoto-based company originally planned on producing a record 30 million Switch units on the back of rising demand for computer games triggered by the COVID pandemic, which has forced people to spend more time at home. However, production bottlenecks quickly emerged around springtime for key components including microcomputers. The company concluded it would have to revise down production targets as it was not able to secure enough supplies. Nintendo's suppliers have already been notified about the production cuts.