The pricing of PSone games to be played on the Sony PSP have been announced.
They’ll range between $6 (€4.60, £3.10) and $11 (€8.40, £5.70). With pricing at this level it’s highly likely that people will impulse purchase them.
The titles for the US service have yet to be confirmed, but the Japanese site is currently carrying Resident Evil: Director’s Cut, Tekken 2 and Arc the Lad.
If you haven’t heard of this offering before, here’s how it will work once the online shops are up and running. Browsing through the Playstation Store via a PS3, games can be selected and then downloaded to the PS3’s hard drive. The initial set of games will be between 140Mb and 550Mb downloads. Once they are safely ensconced on the PS3 drive, they can be transfered over to the Memory Stick, to be loaded on to the PSP. It’s unclear if transfer via WiFi will also be offered.
It was initially envisaged that Sony would give access to the Playstation Store through the PSP using its WiFi connection. We can see one advantage of not doing this – people wanting to use the service will need to buy a PS3!
Not only will the games that are downloaded play on the PSP, it’s expected that an emulator will be released for the PS3 that will play the games from the same downloaded file. Quite if anyone will use their hugely powerful PS3 to play games that will look frankly, a bit pony, is anyones guess.
For software developers this could be quite a boon. If the games will run on the PSP without much engineering modification, they’ll get the benefit of extending the sales of product that long ago stopped drawing income.
(via)
We see that Engadget are offering a charity auction for Save Dafur.
Ever self-aware, Engadget also point out they understand the irony of raising money for a Dafur charity, by playing a video game called Gears of War. Their defence is that their readers chose the charity and that they’d already decided what the event was going to be. As some step towards balancing this, Engadget have named the event Gears of Peace.
Nintendo’s eagerly awaited 
The first punter to get his hands on the shiny new console was the time-rich Isaiah Triforce Johnson, who had sat outside a New York store for more than a week.
Sony had shipped 400,000 PlayStation 3s in North American stores at the end of last week, but Nintendo boasted that it would have “five to ten” times as many Wiis available at launch, with an end-of-year shipping figure of 4 million units expected.
Just over nine out of every 10 e-mails sent worldwide are junk, with a “spam tsunami” flooding inboxes with relentless junk advertising.
Because each hijacked PC only sends out a relatively small amount of spam, they’re not detected by anti-spam networks and thus avoid being blacklisted on industry spamlists.
Spamhaus blames much of the problem on ISP’s who either fail to stop the spammers or do nothing to stop them through mismanagement or good old fashioned corporate greed.
To defeat the pain of trying to enter text using an on-screen keyboard using your gaming controller to peck out a letter at a time, Blue Orb have released Texter, a small device that sits between the game controller and the game box. Using some general cleverness, the box will appear as a USB keyboard.
We’ve not tried it yet, but looking at the usage diagrams it initially looks a little complex. That’s not to say that using it wouldn’t become easier after some practice. We’ve had a lot of experience in having to use different ways of putting text in, normally by having to review so many different mobile phones. Once you get past the initial pain of using the new method, some of them can be pretty fast.
Although many media players offer the facility to burn MP3 music tracks, the job is often made unnecessarily complex by fiddly menus or hard to find options.
The configuration tab lets you can customise output file name formats, add files to playlists (PLS or MPU), change output file directories, choose your CD-ROM source drive, change the rip offsets and turn jitter correction on/off.
It’s a shame that the program makes no attempt to tell people what the chuffin’ heck ‘CDDB’ means (it stands for ‘CD Data Base’ ), and it took us a while to figure out how to set CDex up to automatically download the information (Options > Settings > Remote CDDB, select “Auto connect to remote CDDB” and include an email address).
If you fancy yourself as a bit of a Cool Hand Luke kind of character when it comes to gambling, then Texas Hold’Em No Limit poker is a great way to practice your skills when you’re on the move.
Interface
For the asking price of $20, this a great little game for passing away spare hours on the train (or perhaps wasting time at the office) and for poker fans it could prove a nifty way to hone your bluffing skills.
Handmark have released the latest version of their consumer survey-based dining, travel and leisure information program, Zagat To Go v5.0.
The program now carries survey rankings for over 25,000 restaurants and nightspots in 70+ cities, with automatic free content updates.
Zagat To Go v5.0 is available for the Palm OS, BlackBerry, motorola Q and other Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Smartphone platforms and comes as free upgrade for existing customers forking out the $29.95 yearly subscription fee.
Now, we understand that when you agree to install a beta product, you can expect a few glitches.
Immediately, we were plagued with time outs, and that ruddy annoying animated exclamation mark icon that appears when Blogger’s uploading became a near permanent fixture on our screen.
Google’s perpetual betas
Google Maps for Mobile now officially supports GPS location information when used with mobile phones … well at least one of them at the moment, the Helio Drift.