Ubisoft Officially Announces Splinter Cell: Essentials

"Splinter Cell Essentials is a groundbreaking handheld game that has everything Splinter Cell fans love about the top-selling franchise," says John Parkes, EMEA marketing director at Ubisoft. "It will also feature a number of surprises that will allow players to dive deeper into the story of Sam Fisher."

About Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Essentials:

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Essentials takes players deep into the Splinter Cell saga. Experience all-new missions and objective exclusive to the PSP system, and discover the untold story of Sam Fisher through flashbacks to various missions from the entire Splinter Cell franchise, including Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent.

Key Features:

• PSP system debut: The highest-rated and top-selling spy franchise hits the PSP system for the first time, pushing the boundaries of yet another platform.
   
• Developed specifically for the PSP system: Unique gameplay sequences designed specifically for the on-the-go nature of handheld gaming and a new adapted interface.  
   
• Exclusive content: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Essentials starts where Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent ends, and takes players to the years before Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell when Sam was still a Navy Seal.
   
• A game of gadgets for your gadget:  Features all the weapons and gadgets from the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell franchise, in addition to some new ones exclusive to the PSP system version.
   
• Accessible Wi-Fi multiplayer: Challenge your friends in Spy vs. Spy Deathmatch multiplayer mode.

Sony Officially announces In-House Titles

Our first quarter lineup is yet another example of our continuous pledge to consumers to deliver viable and innovative new entertainment choices for the PSP system," said Jack Tretton, executive vice president, co-COO, Sony Computer Entertainment America. "With the PSP system's first holiday season demonstrating incredible sales and market penetration, we will continue to drive the unprecedented demand for the PSP system with compelling content for gamers of all ages.

• Pursuit Force - March 2006
• Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror - March 2006
• MLB '06: The Show - March 1, 2006
• Daxter - March 2006
• Ape Escape Academy - January 17, 2006

Neopets: Petpet Adventures - The Wand of Wishing is an action/role playing
game exclusively for the PSP system. Developed and created by Sony Computer
Entertainment America, Inc. and Neopets Inc., Neopets: Petpet Adventures - The
Wand of Wishing brings a hidden Petpet world of Petaria to life in 3D for the
first time. Players move through the game using characters they create from
among four popular Petpet species and, utilizing the wireless Ad-Hoc mode, can
compete head-to-head in the Battledome using their characters from the
single-player game. In their search to overcome evil and recover the fabled
Wand of Wishing, players will discover more than 100 unique characters and
enemies, as well as have the opportunity to collect and use over 800 items.
With more than 30 million registered users worldwide accessing the site in
11 languages simultaneously, Neopets.com is the fastest growing youth-oriented
website in the world. Neopets.com is consistently ranked among the top 10
stickiest sites on the Internet, generating more than seven billion page views
worldwide per month.

Quake 2 Patch Coming and Blue-Screen Explanation

Have got a lot of bugs reports. But I know there are much more bugs :D

I'll upload the first patch soon.

* Changes enable invert analog nub
* go to menu after id logo
* remove network game start crash
* on screen keyboard for console input

The next beta with more features will come when a lot of more features are finished.

A lot of people were angry about this protection. Especially PSP-hacks where strong against this. How can I play my legally backup now?

I don't think there is a really need for backup a psp game.

The typical argument is the umd will be damaged. This is very stupid. The umd is safe boxed in the cover and will not take damage even if it is often changed. I'm sorry if this really disturb some gamer. But I'm sure the major part of iso gamers are 13 years old kiddies with one or two umds and one hundred isos. That was my intention. And as you can see. The protection was hacked fast...

I don't know if I spend further time with improve the protection, but I still think it was a good idea :D

After much retooling, I've ported the game LPairs to the PSP. LPairs is a memory game where the player flips over cards in a grid two-at-a-time to see if they match. If they do, they are removed from the board. The game ends when all the pairs are removed. Simple, yes, but fun!

The card sets are completely customizable, as are the background and button images. Card icons must be a 48x48 Bitmap (BMP) file. They're saved in the 'gfx' folder, as 0.BMP, 1.BMP, 2.BMP ... 19.BMP.

The background is 'back.bmp', and can be a BMP file of any size. The button is 'button.bmp', and contains two images, both 64x64. The left image is the button, the right is the shadow. They must be saved side-by-side in the image, with no space between them.

I suppose you could change the logo too, if you want.

So far as I know, all bit depths are supported for bitmaps. If you're recompiling this and have SDL_Image, libpng, and libjpeg installed in your dev environment, I'm pretty sure you could use PNG or JPEG images without a problem.

To install the game:

On a 1.00 PSP:
Copy the '1.00\PAIRS' folder into the X:\PSP\GAME folder, where X:\ is your PSP's drive letter.
Copy the GFX folder into the X:\PSP\GAME\PAIRS folder.

On a 1.50 PSP:
Copy the two folders in the '1.50' folder into the X:\PSP\GAME folder, where X:\ is your PSP's drive letter.
Copy the GFX folder into the 'X:\PSP\GAME\PAIR 1' folder.

Download it here.

K_man316 has released his latest creation – The Simpsons Battleship. LUA The Simpsons Battleship is a battleship game written in Lua scripting language by K_man316, the creator of Air Warriors. Here is more from the readme:

T H E  S I M P S O N S  B A T T L E S H I P
-------------------------------------------
This is my initial release of The Simpsons Battleship for the PSP.  This was written and is powered by the amazine PSP LUA engine!  I'm a big fan of The Simpsons and love the game Battleship and wanted something that could be played on my PSP so wrote this one. I know, what does Battleship have to do with The Simpsons?  Who knows...

The game is my first attempt and some things need to be tweaked.  Heck, the CPU AI is probably as good as Homer's right now!

Right now this is a single player game.  There are 2 difficulty settings - Easy and Hard.  Easy simply allows your shot to cover a bigger area. 

I have tested it with LUAPlayer version 0.15 on a US PSP with 1.5 Firmware so I'm not sure of compatability with other firmware versions.

INSTALLATION:
Copy the "Battleship                     1" and BATTLE~2% to the \PSP\GAME folder.

Download it here.

Sony Computer Entertainment Japan has announced Talkman Europe Language Version (Working Title) for European users. The game will support up to six languages, including English (British), Italian, Spanish, German, French and Japanese. The release date is slated for May of 2006.

Talkman is a voice-activated translation software application designed to teach English to Japanese PSP owners. Outside of pure translations, Talkman lets players play games to test their fluency of a language. The game is packed with a USB microphone.