By Agence France-Presse

SINGAPORE –Sony has no plans to cut the price of its PlayStation 3 game console, the company’s chief financial officer Nobuyuki Oneda said Friday.

“This year, our strategy is not to sell more quantity for PS3 but to concentrate on profitability,” Oneda told a forum in Singapore.

“Our plan is not to reduce the price,” he added.

His comments followed a report in the Wall Street Journal which said Microsoft plans to cut the price on a popular model of its Xbox 360 game console in an effort to boost sales in the face of stronger competition from rival Sony.

The Journal report cited people familiar with the matter who said the price cut would come as early as Sunday.

Oneda also said he expects Sony’s PS3 operations as well as the broader game segment to be profitable for the current year ending March 2009. With a report from Dow Jones Newswires.

By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

LET’S see if an Iron Man video game based on the movie-comic book tie-in would save the world from the bad movie-video game curse.

Nope, it won’t.

Our faith in even the most beloved comic book franchises cannot save the poor gamer from having to suffer from the effects of playing video games based on movies. At some point you would ask, “Why do all movie-video game tie-ins suck?” Iron Man the game is a big joke. Which begs the question: why do developers and publishers bother releasing a title that they know will suck? Simple: some of us get suckered into shelling out a few bucks to satisfy our curiosity and at some point, to falsely believe that there’s a future for video game-movie tie-ins until they’re dashed the moment we chuck the game disc into our players.

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By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

IT certainly is the most absurd mini-cartoon series ever created but it does a lot of good for the heart, because it’ll make you laugh pretty hard. Harvey Birdman is one of the characters in “Adult Swim,” a late-night show that is one of Cartoon Network’s most original comedy animations. It is quite a surprise that a video game was released by Capcom to emulate the show’s off-beat humor. The PlayStation 2 game Harvey Birdman, Attorney-at-Law is largely an interactive video game that takes the player to the world of Harvey Birdman, a retired 1960s superhero-turned-lawyer for a law firm called Sebben and Sebben. The entire series is very short; about four to five hours, depending on your speed of gameplay.

Speaking of which, this game doesn’t have much gameplay. Would-be players of Harvey Birdman may have to be told to watch out for its lack of the normally fast-based gameplay that is expected of a video game. There is barely enough playing around and it’s basically a TV series offshoot squeezed into a DVD game. Its interactive nature is more of pointing and clicking on items on the screen, moving forward and backward and, well, that’s basically it. However, what it lacks in gameplay it makes up for with its utter absurdity to comedic effect. The humor used in this game is just as good as the Adult Swim TV series and it will give players moments of laughter, especially with the dialogue of the characters.

Just as in the TV series, Harvey Birdman will take on court cases that range from finding out who robbed a bank to proving that Harvey’s partner, Peter Potamus (another Hanna-Barbera cartoon character way back in the 60s) is not an arsonist. You play Harvey Birdman to solve these cases. Each case will require Harvey to search for evidence or clues that he can use during the court case. Harvey can interact with witnesses (most of whom are also 60s characters) and police officers to help him out with his cases.

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By Relly Carpio
INQUIRER.net

THE LATEST installment in the Turok first-person shooter series will become available starting Thursday at DataBlitz stores, according to Maricel Espiritu of DataBlitz.

“Turok for the PS3 will be available tomorrow at all our branches, though there is still no advisory yet when it will be available for the Xbox 360,” Espiritu said.

One thing going for this latest version of the game is the simplicity of the story. No longer are alien masterminds or alien technology involved (well, not too much, anyway).

Also, what sets it apart is the multiplayer FPS setting where aside from worrying about your opponents, you have to worry about dinosaurs walking around trying to have you for lunch.

Turok has the beginnings of a survival horror survival game as you start with nothing but your trusty knife. But from the initial images and videos, you will be using your trusty knife a lot as the game has a lot of cool knife action scenes built into it. Considering that Turok has always been a great bows and arrows and knife game, this was sort of expected, but using current generation console technology, it is an immense leap from the unrealistic dagger waving of old.

Turok, Son of Stone began as a comic book character that first came out in 1954. Since then he has appeared in various incarnations of the comic, the last being from Valiant Comics and Acclaim Comics.

Turok will also be available for the PC in March.

By Alex Villafania, hackenslash Reporter
INQUIRER.net

I’M an air guitarist, that is I strum my fingers without a real guitar. Actually, I don’t know how to play the guitar nor will I have the patience to learn how to. I just use my imagination like most non-guitarists. But Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PlayStation 2) just about made me wan to pick up a real guitar and learn how to pluck chords.

This is the very first time I’ve played a game from the Guitar Hero series, which has been getting more and more popular and gave PS2 owners a reason to actually keep their PS2s for quite a while. This is not a game about graphics and as such players will not be concerned or distracted by the 3D background, which I would say is nominally good in some sense. All the players will be concerned about are the five colored notes from the top of a screen coming down along a virtual guitar neck and the player will have to press the corresponding fret button on their guitar controller. It’s also important that every time a fret button is pressed the strum bar has to be pressed down as well. As in a real guitar, there is also a whammy bar for hammer-on and pull-offs for rapid, consecutive notes.

First-time players like me will find playing the game difficult to start with, especially when having to press five buttons with only four left fingers (the left thumb is at the back of the guitar neck). Most of the time, the index finger will be used to press two buttons as it is the most movable finger among the four. Still, it takes quite some time to learn what to press and can be daunting even with the easy mode. The concept is similar to the arcade Dance Dance Revolution wherein the player has to time their button press when the notes hit the empty colored buttons at the bottom of the screen. Missing a note will cause some points and the Rock Meter to be shaved off. The Rock Meter serves as the player’s health and when it drops to zero it will cause the music to stop. Not missing for a while will give special bonus points to the player. Bonus points become harder to achieve as the levels increases. Getting in the “groove,” that is, being able to completely following the buttons on screen would take at least 1 hour. But once the buttons are mastered, it’ll be hard for anyone to let go of the controller.

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