WiiFit is a game that has probably sold over 98 Quadrabajillion copies worldwide by now, but there's some interesting things about the game that you may not know. See, the game has a weight limit. Shocking? - Well it shouldn't be "shocking". The WiiFit is advertised as a fitness video game, and as such, fitness equipment does have weight limits. In all other countries except for the United States, the WiiFit board has a weight limit of 300 lbs. This limit was increase slightly to 330 lbs. for the American release, but for some people, 330 lbs. may be a goal to reach rather than a weight limit cap. While the board can support up to 600 lbs. directly, the built-in scale doesn't read more than 330 lbs. and because of this, players will not be able to start a game without assistance and won't be able to have their WiiFit progress measured until reaching 330 lbs. or below. This can leave people that exceed this weight limit feeling scrutinized or embarassed of their weight.
Well never fear! I've done a little bit of research to find out if there is a type of hardware tweak to allow the board to function without the scale. There's good news and bad news, however. I was unable to find hardware or software tweaks, but there is a sort of a "soft mod" that you can do. In fact, it's a very soft mod. The YouTube user, mrabtruse, has come up with a sort of retardedly genius idea. See, he's got a large piece of foam, folded it in half, and made necessary cuts in the corners so that the stands of the board still touch the ground but the cushion of the foam padding allows him to play despite him being roughly 375 lbs. (at the time of recording). He doesn't give specific measurements but it should be easy enough if you own the board yourself.
If you're someone who may be interested in this type of "modification", please click the YouTube link below. The mod is very easy to perform.
A few days ago Kojima put up what seemed to be a simple flash teaser, showing only a grassy field under a thick blanket of clouds, with a fence and sparse forest on the right and left. Now that the first countdown has been reached, it looks like a new one is counting down. As well as the clouds are moving much faster and there is lightning and thunder in the background, and a mysterious number or letter 5/S. What caught my attention was that "Raiden" in Japanese means "Thunder and Lightning!" But for right now we will have to wait until we actually find out what it means. But right now it doesn't look like its ending any time soon. Many people have been going through all of the source code of the flash and it looks like the countdown will continue. 5/18 (Today), 5/22 (This timer ends, new one starts), 5/27 (Timer #3), 5/30 (Timer #4), and 6/1 (First Day of E3, also Microsoft Press Conference.) But don't get your hopes up 360 Fan boys, Hideo Kojima himself said there will not be a game / remake of a game for the 360. So right now we are just going to have to wait it out!
Believe it or not, but the R4 cards have been labled as "the scourge of Nintendo DS market". For those of you who don't exactly know what the R4 is, its a flash cart made for Nintendo DS and Ds Lite systems. You place the ROM's that you would like to play on a Micro SD card, and place the SD card into the R4 unit, and lastly, place the R4 into your NDS or NDS Lite allowing you to play the games you have at your disposal. Its good for keeping those DS games in one convient location, making it easier to carry every game you have, whether you pay for them or not. But currently, a man named Andrew Mclennan, who is the CEO of Metaforic (which is a company that many other companies use as their safe guard in security) has been looking to make the R4 cards disapear from the world market.
He isn't the only one either, Nintendo, in 2008, filed a lawsuit in Tokyo District Court in hopes to sever the use of R4. Metaforic itself has a role in Nintendo's security as well, and is talked about in an article on Gamasutra.com, which is the source located right below. Take a gander if you want to know more about the exclusive interview with Andrew Mclennan on Gamesutra.
NDS | New Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver CONFIRMED
Even if you're just a young squirt, you will feel old when you read this next sentence. In order to celebrate the 10th year anniversary of Pokemon Gold and Silver versions (GBC), Nintendo is in the works of producing remakes for them. Yes, it's been 10 years. The games will be called Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver.
The Gameboy Color Pokemon games, Gold and Silver, were some of the most popular and most renowned titles in the Gameboy Color library. Just the same, those games were also some of the most popular among Pokemon fans in general. So it seems fitting as we're coming up on the 10th year anniversary of these games for Nintendo to remake these titles with modern technology and give the Pokemon Franchise a facelift from the past.
The details are few and far between at this point, but the fine folks at GBATemp have come up with some very nice scanned images of an issue of CoroCoro, a Japanese magezine. I highly encourage anyone who is interested to check out the scans on their website. The following "release hints" listed below are stolen directly from GBATemp.
Japanese release date is September 11th, 2009
Pre-orders start on July 20th, same date as the new movie
It is hinted at that the Kanto region will be available
New wi-fi features included, "building on what was established with Diamond and Pearl, and Platinum."
The player can choose either a male or female character. However, the female character is NOT the female from Crystal version. She's a completely new character.
There will apparently be a skateboard involved? It's speculated that it may be an addition to the bicycle or possibly replace it (not likely)
The PokeGear has been redesigned
There appears to be some sort of Pichu event in Ilex Forest.
Stay tuned to find out more about Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver as it comes in.
Competing with MoonShell 2.0 is a task that the EZ-Flash team are trying to overcome. This is yet another pre-alpha release of the 2.0 kernel which is very similar to MoonShell 2.0. Read/ write speeds are pretty nice for users testing out these cards so far, but many people are having problems as well. Many people are receiving 2mb read/ writes which is nice for the savestates and such. Only time and testing will prove whether this flash cart is a true hit or miss, but for now, it seems like a worthy flash cart, especially considering that it is a Pre-Alpha release for the new kernel.
XBOX | Rumor Control: Xbox 360 Exclusive Metal Gear?
No images, no teasers or trailers or even hints about the type of gameplay have been released. One lone account on Twitter is convincing thousands of people though.
The game, as the unidentified tipster says, is slated to be called, "Metarl Gear Solid + Oxide". This may seem a little unbelievable coming from some random Twitter account, and it might all just be hype, but this particular Twitter account has been "tweeting" a lot of E3-specific information. He's gone as far as letting people know what games different companies will bring to E3 and even some hardware too. The Twitter account is "GameFork"; you can click the name to check the account to see for yourself. The bigger question on the table is, "what does this mean in the future?"
The Metal Gear Solid franchise has nearly been exclusively sold on Playstation consoles. Fans of the PS3 in particular have made sure to mention that the "PS3 is better because it has games like Metal Gear Solid" and other titles. It appears, however, that Metal Gear Solid just MIGHT get a chance in the spotlight on the Xbox 360 in the future. The upcoming gaming convention, E3, will let us know if this guy is just a hoax or the real deal. Now it's a matter of time.
Recently, and not so recently, there has been some loose talk about a new gamefor the PSP called,
Undead Knights.
From what has been said around the net, the game has a very simple form of gameplay. You turn knights into zombies, they attack other knights, and you get one massive undead military force that is seemingly unstoppable. Depending on what type of enemy you convert to your forces, they retain the abilities from when they were your enemy. Even though its said that there isn't much of a tactical point to the zombies, it doesn't seem necessary considering, them being zombies and having a one track mind.
Even though the game was talked about late last year, it seems revolutionary for a PSP title, and IGN.com has an exclusive interview with the producer of the game, Kohei Shibata. Click the source below to delve deeper into Undead Knights.
Horror is difficult to get across on a portable. After all, if things get too unnerving, you simply toss the system aside and breathe easy. That said, Playlogic is the latest to try its hand at fright on the go, announcing plans to again port Obscure: The Aftermath to yet another platform the PSP.
Set to ship in North America this September, the sequel to 2005's Obscure looks to offer much of the same B-movie shock value as it has on other platforms, just on a smaller screen. Still, our previous time with the teen horror romp was more annoying than scary, and we doubt being able to play it while waiting for the bus will be enough to make our hair stand on end.
Source: PSP Fanboy
Posted by: Surenix on Friday, May 08 2009 @ 4:34pm PST
PS3 | Final Fantasy XIII producer thinking about downloadable content?
Square Enix producer Yoshinore Kitase has told VideoGamers.com that Square Enix has "no plan" to release a disc-based demo for Final Fantasy XIII in the States. The demo, bundled with certain copies of the Blu-ray release of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete, thrust PS3 to the top of the Japanese sales charts, and became the best-selling anime Blu-ray in Japan. While including a demo with the upcoming US release of the movie seems like a no-brainer, Kitase explained that a PS3-exclusive demo would be unfair to the Western audience that's also expecting an Xbox 360 demo. "We are going to carry on with the project alongside the Xbox version, so we really can't just make it available only for the PS3," he explained.
Kitase then noted that the company "would like to check" on the possibility of a downloadable demo. We're certain the logistics behind delivering a 5GB demo to the PSN/XBL masses will be quite difficult to figure out.
Source: PS3 Fanboy
Posted by: PSPortable on Wednesday, May 06 2009 @ 12:52pm PST
PS3 | VidZone invites music videos to the PS3 this summer
Remember VidZone? You probably don't, seeing as we haven't heard anything about the music video service for the PS3 since it was announced at the Leipzig Game Convention last year. It's not dead, though. The service is ready to go live this summer in the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Australia.
VidZone will be a completely free, though ad-supported, way of watching music videos on demand. It will allow you to create playlists of streaming videos either from your PS3 itself or from your PSP via remote play. The service will feature "thousands of music videos and live concert videos, as well as behind the scenes, interviews and making of footage."
There's no word on how often the service will be updated, but we would hope that more content is added on a fairly regular basis. VidZoneis Europe and Australia exclusive, with seemingly no plans to bring it to the US.
Source: Sony Fanboy
Posted by: PSPortable on Wednesday, May 06 2009 @ 12:46pm PST
This Thursday, May 6, is the release date for the digital release of Patapon 2. It's also the day on which you can show off your lovefor Patapon clothing within Home. They'll be available from the Threads store in the mall, free or not, we don't know yet. Acting as walking billboards is one thing, without having to pay for the pleasure.
Check it out this Thursday on your local PS Home store.
Source: PSP Fanboy
Posted by: PSPortable on Wednesday, May 06 2009 @ 12:42pm PST
The 3000 series is finally feeling the love. It wasn't too long ago that "Hello World" was successfully exploited onto the 3000. Now just a short time later, the third full generation of the PSP is headed towards a wonderful hombrew-enabled future. ChickHEN is here for the PSP 3000.
Developer, Davee, of Team Typhoon, has released the exploit and directions for this seemingly easy-to-do hack. The steps and a handy-dandy download link are provided below for those of you who thought that you were doomed on the "Unhackable T88v3 and TA-090 motherboards".
Before I roll out with the good stuff, however, it's important to make known a few of the downsides of this Homebrew Enabler. ChickHEN currently cannot make .ISO or .CSO backups run. This applies for Playstation 1 titles too. You will also not be given access to flash memory either, so custom XMB's are not going to be readily available (yet). Plugins also won't be able to be loaded as a result of this, obviously, and that goes for custom firmware too. As of yet, no custom firmware is released for the PSP 3000, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. With breakthroughs like ChickHEN, developers are questioning just exactly how far they can go.
To run ChickHEN, follow these steps:
First off use the supplied TIFF image and place it in the PSP>PHOTO Directory.
Copy h.bin over to the MS ROOT and safely remove device.
Scroll over to the PHOTO icon on the XMB and click the ChickHEN folder and wait.
If all goes well the screen should blank out and flash green showing that the HEN is loaded and all is well.
Wait for your PSP to reboot and check your PSP's systemsoftware. It should now display: "5.03 ChickHEN".
Scroll on over to GAME and enjoy some Homebrew!
Interested in downloading this? The link is below! Enjoy!
Q. What is the PSP missing now? No, not a second analog nub or built in webcam at this point. It's missing a mouse, of course!
PSP hacker TokyoDrift found a way to map the handheld's buttons to a mouse, using nothing more than a PS2 mouse, an ATMEL ATmega8 chip-sporting breadboard, and a massive brain. PSP users looking to do this themselves can find all of the steps at the pspfreak.de forums.
NOTE: Of course, it goes without saying that you should probably be somewhat comfortable with homebrew before trying this yourself.
Source: Engadget
Posted by: PSPortable on Tuesday, May 05 2009 @ 1:57pm PST
PSP | PS3 | Capcom ready to release dozen+ PS1 and PSP titles on PSN
Capcom is going to make its PlayStation Network presence a lot more robust as it begins releasing ports of PS1 titles and providing downloadable versions of previous PSP titles throughout the year. The company spoke with Capcom's Chris Kramer, who let us know that the company would be listening to what the community wants and figuring out internally what titles to release but don't expect any of them to involve licensing shenanigans along the lines of Marvel vs. Capcom.
"We'll definitely be looking at a lot of titles that have things like Street Fighter and Resident Evil in the title," Kramer said. "We're thinking about putting together a long list of the titles we're looking at, and then releasing it on Capcom Unity and having people vote on them. Ultimately we're looking at bringing between 20 and 40 titles to the PSN over the next several months."
Source: PSP Fanboy
Posted by: PSPortable on Monday, May 04 2009 @ 10:54pm PST
