Damnit. Now I’ll have to buy a freaking Playstation Portable. Rockstar Games has announced a NEW Grand Theft Auto game based in Liberty City (home of the original GTA III) playable on the forthcoming PSP machine. Let me repeat – this is not a port of GTAIII to the PSP, it’s a stinkin’ new game. Bring it on!
Category Archives: asides
DirecTV follows Dish with Mosaics in U.S.
DirecTV launched three ‘mosaic’ television channels on Thursday at CES in Las Vegas. The channels aggregate into one screen six or seven video signals by category, allowing a news junkie to keep tabs on CNN, CNN Headline News, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News Channel and The Weather Channel on the same screen at one time.
CBS Marketwatch coverage here.
The Sports Mix includes ESPN, ESPN2, The NFL Network, TNT and others, but has the caveat that it may be blacked out subject to local programming restrictions. Kids Mix features children’s networks such as Nickelodeon and Turner’s own Cartoon Network.
These channels (which I was happy to see at home on my DirecTV system on channels 102, 104 and 111) follow the succesful launch of mosaics last Summer and Fall by Echostar’s Dish Network. They broke this ground in the U.S. with an Olympics mosaic over the Summer showcasing the various NBC channels carrying that programming, and followed that up with an election-night mosaic featuring CNN and the other news networks.
The new DirecTV mix channels can’t truly be called interactive, however. They are a static collection of the networks with (on the news and sports channels) a somewhat annoying barker channel talking about news/sports programming on the network. Unlike the Dish version, the user cannot use the channel to move from video to video and change the audio signal. That small detail alone would, IMHO, vastly improve the usefullness of the service. The Dish version also allowed the user to highlight one of the streams and click to tune.
I suspect DirecTV will follow up with click to tune and switchable audio with a new version soon. BSkyB, their sister company in the UK, has numerous similar applications running there which have these features and more, including interactive news feeds and stories.
More screenshots here at Engadget.
Sir Peter
British games maker Peter Molyneux (who I discussed regarding his game Fable a few weeks back) will become the first games developer to be named to the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. Here here, Sir Peter! You’ll have to write yourself into the Fable sequel, I guess, as lord of one of the manors. More here from the BBC.
Buh-Bye to ESPN NFL2k6
Unless you don’t mind playing NFL games where ‘KC #10’ passes to ‘KC #87″ instead of ‘Chiefs QB Trent Green passes to wide receiver Eddie Kennison’, you are not going to be pleased with this news. The NFL and Players Inc. today announced an exclusive deal with Electronic Arts granting a five-year exclusive right to the NFL’s teams, stadiums, and players across PCs, consoles, and handhelds. Five companies reportedly bid for this exclusive right, and EA came out on top in the undoubtedly high-priced bidding war. Why is this bad news? Exclusivity sucks for the consumer on all fronts. I hate my DirecTV (fade out, spotty service), but I’m reluctant to drop it ’cause I love Sunday Ticket. Guess what – DirecTV is the only licensee for that. Same deal here – ESPN’s NFL2k5 is a much better game than this year’s Madden – I can only hope that EA steps up and improves their product. More at Gamespot, Slashdot. Joystiq suggests an alternative – Maximum Football. And get a load of this illustration on Joystiq as well – a bit of a strong statement, but it shows how people feel…