Angry Birds has finally been released on the Android Market and GetJar store and guess what! It’s free!
Yeah, Rovio decided to bring it to the Android and good thing they did! It’s already seen over a million downloads in its first day on the system. But, you guys should know that it does have ads in it but they won’t get in the way of your game play. Especially if it’s free game play. :p

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DotA 2 will be Valve’s next game. If you don’t know, they are the guys who made the Orange Box and if you didn’t know, the original Defense of the Ancients was a mod of Warcraft III that grew very popular.
Valve has decided to take on the challenge of releasing this game in hopes of winning the fans of the preceding RTS and bringing them to Steam’s side. Each player is given a hero who is used to control armies that are pitted against each other to conquer land and gold.
The sequel will be based off of Valve’s Source engine and allow voice-chat and Steamworks achievements.

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As always, it is fun to speculate future game system specs and designs. Well here is a list of 10 Xbox 720 designs compiled at gamingbolt.com. Interestingly enough, there seem to be quite a few handheld system mock ups. With the lack of console-based designs, here is a second image that shows several mock-ups that can be found over at xbox720chat.com.

Due to our strict silk pants-only policy, the PSP Go (and, really, any other handheld) has been a hard sell — sure, the $250 asking price isn’t helping, but that may be changing in the near future. A dutiful tipster sent us the above image from his AAFES-based store of employment, indicating a $50 North American price drop to $200 for the digital-only handheld. Oddly, Sony has kept mum on the possibility, not even offering a “We don’t comment on rumor and speculation” to our repeated attempts at contact.

Our friends in other retailers have yet to uncover any news of the price drop, but Sony’s silence gives us the impression something’s up. Perhaps you have something to share? Don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

[Source: Joystiq]

I think it is about time for this, $250 is much to steep for an old handheld that does not support a physical format. Digital Distribution may be the future, but the world is not quite ready yet. Though this is still a rumor so do not take it to heart!

Though the good news is that Amazon is currently selling the PSP Go for $199.00 anyway.

Brewology is releasing its own PKG installer. Input your PS3 FTP Server IP address and choose what you want it will be waiting for you on your PS3.

Features:

• Cross Platform (Windows, Linux, OSX)
• Downloads directly to your PS3 (no need to worry about transferring or disk space)
• Auto generates PDB files
• Creates the correct folder structure
• Shares PSN Link with Brewology for others to use as well (help the community effort). Check the repository of them here. Try clicking one

Notes:

• Things to fix/add include: Threading, Multiple Downloads,  Make it not ugly, Better categories on PSN link repos, A few more surprise… In all honesty there is a TON to do… just gotta find the time.
• I still don’t have a device I can use to jailbreak my PS3. So I have not got to test everything myself. As you find bugs please post them on the forum. I will get to fixing things ASAP.
• I would like to thank Shane (from ps3-hacks irc) aka Cypherous on our forum for helping me test.

Forum Discussion

Check out the Installer here and the PSN links here.

What we’ve been told, Windows Phone 7 phones will be deployed in over 30 different countries, 60 carriers, and 10 different launch devices. Looks like Microsoft will be trying to do what Google’s done with their Android platform. One downfall about American Windows Phone 7 phones will be that it won’t be available for Verizon or Sprint for quite some time. Other missing features, it seems, are running applications in the background, and copying and pasting.

If you set those two aside for a while and look at the gaming aspect of the phones (since we are a gaming site), the games look beautiful! Microsoft has included Live support for online gaming an even the ability to edit your avatar on the phone itself!
Anyways, some cool games coming out are Halo: Waypoint, The Oregon Trail, Assassin’s Creed, Guitar Hero 5, The Sims 3, Crackdown: Project Sunburst, Bejewled, Uno, Star Wars, and many, many, many more!

As a student, you can download a pack for Microsoft Visual Studios for free that will upgrade the compatibility to allow deployment of applications to the new phone systems and a few other goodies through Dream Spark. I’ve had plenty of time to play with the new expansion and the UI itself is great, and the architecture actually rocks. The IDE is a hundred times better than Apple’s XCode. If you’re not a student, Visual Studios will cost you $1,200, not including the WinMo 7 expansion. I’m not sure how much that will cost on top of the 1.2K.

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Just how ambitious is Nintendo planning to be with their latest hand-held masterpiece? Very, to say the least. Before the console has been launched, Iwata recently said, “When we launch Nintendo 3DS, it will probably be the first 3D device to be sold in a significant volume in the mass market. An increasing number of people will see business opportunities by looking at Nintendo 3DS from that perspective. Nintendo does not have any intention to exclude such possibilities if they come to us with their proposals.”

Iwata seems to be on the right track with this one. It’s easy to understand that many companies may see potential in the vast market share that Nintendo usually has over the hand-held market. Besides market share, take into perspective exactly what the Nintendo 3DS will mean to the gaming industry as a whole. This will more than likely be the first mainstream 3D device in most markets around the world to actually have a solid niche in the market, particularly because it doesn’t require 3D viewing glasses/ goggles. The 3DS will have a unique opportunity for the film industry to capitalize on which could potentially lead to an increase in 3D films or variants specifically for viewing on the 3DS.

Iwata is saying this in light of being questioned about streaming movies and television shows to the 3DS. Nintendo is ambitious, that’s for sure, and it looks like they’re going to try and capitalize on the hand-held market in a way that they’ve never done before.

[Source: Game Adrenaline]

Hot off the press! Check this out. Joystiq just released some great new character videos for the upcoming Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. We’ve seen a few characters like Dante from Devil May Cry and various others, but look at the newest character trailers to come out! Here we have M.O.D.O.K and Magneto. I can’t wait to get my hands on this game.

Hopefully someone a little more advanced with Wordpress can add in the videos in this post? Until then, hit the source link and see what these two new characters have going on!

[Source: Joystiq]

Over at Platform Nation, Mitchel Broussard wrote an article discussing his griefs and nuisances with Microsoft’s newest motion-sensing technology.

After consumers have had their hands on Kinect for a bit of time, I think most users generally fall into this method of thinking. Paraphrased, Mitchel mentions that the Kinect technology is under-developed and more of a gimmick than it leads people to believe.

Kinect, for those of you that don’t know, relies on a camera to detect body movements as controller inputs. You can use Kinect in the main menu of the Xbox 360 and in games that support it, even opening Netflix with it, but there are some implied ground-breaking developments that might just end up costing more money than they are worth.

Consider this. Mitchel notes that first or third-party peripherals for the Kinect technology may end up wasting money and space for storage. He shows an inflatable “Game Boat” which states on the package that it is “Ideal for Kinect Adventures”. The real question is, no matter how fun or even amazing a game could possibly be with an inflatable boat add-on, how much would it cost, but more importantly, how many games will be released in the future with “Wii-like” peripherals that take up space, time, and effort to setup before playing? Going to play a tennis game? Why not pick up a tennis racket peripheral. Going to play a boxing game? What about boxing gloves? The potential to sell a product, a video game, without bundled peripherals to enhance gameplay means that the end-consumer would need to possibly shell out more and more money to get the “full experience”.

Mitchel rants a bit further, and his comments about single and multiplayer experiences with kinect are pretty strong. If you want to play a single-player game, you must be at least 6 feet away from the camera for it to be able to accurately detect motion input. If you want to play multiplayer, you’re looking at a minimum of 8 feet that both you and your partner must place yourselves from the camera. This begs the question, how many users have that much room in their “gaming area”? Not everyone, that’s for sure.

So just how practical is Kinect? I’m a bit on the fence about this personally, but leave a comment and let us know what you think!

[Source: Platform Nation]

So the folks at Gamrfeed have published a few nice charts showing the sales numbers from ‘07-’10 for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii. More interesting than those numbers, perhaps, are the market share numbers.

Truthfully, the Playstation 3 is beginning to see better days. We already know that Sony expects the Playstation 3 to be a 10-year console, but I’m not too sure even Sony is convinced of that after giving these charts a once-over. Very interesting stuff!

Since the charts aren’t the best when uploaded to Wordpress, make sure to click the source link if you’re interested in seeing theirs.

[Source: Gamerfeed]