New Sony Store Won't Be Region Locked

Everyone knows that Ms. Pac Man is filled with ghosts, four of them to be specific. But a fifth ghost?

That's what a Boston-area Craigslister claimed when he was contacted to ask why he was giving away a Ms. Pac Man cabinet for free.

Someone on ArcadeControls.com contacted the cabinet owner for the explanation, which involves poltergeist, a crying 3-year-old and a "dark figure."

The moment is here that you've been waiting 3 or 4 days your whole lives for. Kotaku readers from around the globe assembled in the hopes of finding America's Next PSP2 Concept. How did you all do?

Let's just say we had mixed results. So hit the jump to vote for your favorite of our best picks. Then laugh to your heart's content at everyone else.

This Is How You Will Play Games In 2029 (Possibly)

Today's Game Developers Conference keynote featured a uniquely distinguished individual. Instead of a background in coding or art design, Ray Kurzweil has been "inventing" computer products since the 1970s, pioneering such areas as the optical technologies you see in products from Xerox.

Today, with the aid of countless charts tracking the exponential growth of technology over the past 150 years, Kurzweil explained gaming in the year 2029. And no, we're not "drinking the Kool-Aid." Instead we've opted to siphon gallons of the stuff intravenously into our bloodstream.

By Brian Crecente

Mind-control, it turns out, isn't as easy as it looks.

After spending half-an-hour watching an Emotive guy levitate rocks, pull down trees and make object vanish with little more than the power of his mind, it was my turn to check out Emotiv's Epoc neural detector.

The headpiece, its stiff fingers slipping through my hair to find my scalp as it was placed on my head, felt like something alien settling onto my skull to roost, perhaps before enjoying a light snack.

Mind-controlled video games comes to the masses this Christmas for $300 a pop. Emotiv's Epoc "high-fidelity nero system" will begin shipping later this year with a Bluetooth dongle for synching with a computer and come packed with a PC game that will allow gamers to levitate virtual rocks, pull digital trees and scare of in-game spirits, all with their minds.

"At Emotiv our vision for the future is that controls won't be limited to conscious controls," said Tan Le, co-founder of the company behind the mind-reading device. "This will allow machines to understand your emotions and expressions."

The wireless device slips onto a gamers head, its 14 or so slender metal branches sliding through hair to rest against the scalp. The metal arms, which are coated with a proprietary material, detect the electrical current conducted by the brain and transmits the data to an in-board chip that deciphers the information and translates it into data that can be used by the program to control games.

The device, which will come in black or white, will sell for $300 through Emotiv retailers and "select" retailers. Up to four devices can be synced on a single computer, Le said.

NVIDIA Buying AGEIA for Bouncy PhysX Tech

NVIDIA today confirmed rumblings that they were looking to buy physics-centric AGEIA Technologies. NVIDIA said today that an agreement to acquire the industry leaders in gaming physics, though the acquisition still remains subject to some closing conditions.

More details about the deal will shake out during NVIDIA's upcoming quarterly conference call, set for Feb. 13.

While AGEIA appears to continue to struggle breaking into the mainstream PC market, they've made significant in-roads into the console market with 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii and PC. The company has more than 10,000 registered and active users of their PhysX software development kit as well.

"NVIDIA is the perfect fit for us. They have the world's best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience," said Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of AGEIA.

Full release on the jump. I wonder if NVIDIA would try to come up with a way to incorporate the PhysX engine into a graphics card, instead of requiring two pieces of hardware? Maybe that's not possible, actually.

Hands-On With Skype PSP

Today's Playstation Portable firmware update came with a little touch of Skype (except if you live in China, go figure). Once patched, the Skype option shows up under Network. I was able to pretty quickly register for a new account using the PSP and get it working in less then five minutes.

It's a pretty cool build of the software and while I'm not sure how often I'd use it around the house, I definitely plan on bringing it with me when I travel for some free calls. Also plan on abusing the hell out of it to harass Ash since it only cost me $10 to buy seven hours worth of worldwide Skype to phone service. (Skype to Skype is free) That's right seven hours of me rambling to Ash... can't wait!

50 years ago today the Lego brick as we know it was born, allowing generation after generation of parents to stand in the toy aisle at their favorite retail establishment exclaiming, "How the hell do these cost so much? They're just Legos for chrissakes!" Seriously, I'd be ass-deep in Star Wars Lego crap if the price point weren't so insane. Still, 50 years of Lego history has given us countless Lego video games (if you can't count to 33), so I figured I would take a moment to check out the top five Lego video games of all time, in honor of this special day.

5. Lego Digital Designer

Not so much a game as it was the updating of Lego to the digital age, allowing you to use your Mac or PC online to create your own Lego design and then order the blocks online, bringing your virtual creation to life. For those of us who can't afford the millions of Lego bricks it would take to build their own Lego home, this is as good as it gets.

We know that Nintendo dominated 2007, with a constant, reliable stream of good news and strong sales. But how did the rest of the competition stack up? We've decided to look back at a full year of sales data from Japanese analyst outlet Media Create, whose sales data we regularly feature in the Simple 2000 Japanese Sales Chart series.

With a license to seemingly print money, Nintendo took 2007 by storm, establishing console and handheld dominance with its two casual friendly game devices. Nintendo DS and Wii dominated software and hardware charts, seeing a steady flow of week to week sales for both platforms, appearing to only weaken when supply was constrained.

Sony's offerings, the PSP, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 2, had a solid (if not spectacular) year. The PS3 didn't make any waves, but the PSP did. The PS2, now seven years long in the tooth, still had a bit of life in it.

The Xbox 360? Well, we don't have nice things to say about its Japanese performance, so we'll just let the charts do the talking.

I've had a pet project I've been working on for years, three of them if my memory is right. It started as a simple idea: You can judge a lot from a person's desk. I bet you could judge just as much from their home entertainment system. So I decided it would be fun to try and track down some pictures from the work desks and home gaming set-ups of the people who work in and cover the video game industry. Simple right? Not so much.

Turns out that many of the people are either too busy or too private to want to participate in such a project. To make matters worse, there's always fear that something sitting on someone's desk, that ends up in a photo, could actually be news worthy. Like a secret project or the next big thing. But I didn't give up and about once a year I'd harass a bunch of game developers for photos. Finally, this year, the harassment paid off.

What started as a trickle of photos turned quickly into the collection of galleries you'll find on the jump: More than 40 different photo galleries from 17 studios, seven publications, two industry movers and shakers and a couple of fun surprises.

You'll get to see the desk of such greats as Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux and Tetsuya Mizuguchi along with plenty of others. Remember you can comment both on the next page and on each individual photo if you click on them.

If I find there is interest, I will try to periodically update this gallery of galleries with more developers, journalists and industry movers and shakers. Have fun.

Sony To Bring "Bite-Sized" PSP Games To PlayStation Store

Microsoft Says Xbox Live Outage Due To Server Strain

A pair of PSP Slims were on hand at this week's CES, showing off the recently announced Skype software designed specifically for the Sony handheld. While it's harder than one might think to test the clarity of a peer-to-peer phone call via Sony's own mouse-phone hybrid in a busy convention hall, there were no complaints about the actual technical capabilities of the service. Actually, the two Sony reps making the calls were about six inches from us when we picked up the phone, so those with an ear for such things may want to wait until in the field reviews arrive, if they're picky.

Twas the month before Christmas and all through the land,
Not a single retailer had one Wii on hand...

More like the year before Christmas, actually. An entire year where not a day went by that hundreds of electronic and gaming retail employees didn't have to negatively answer the same nagging question. "Do you have any Wiis in stock?" Even though the console sold relatively briskly in the year following its launch, getting your hands on one meant you either won a contest, knew someone who worked for a retailer, shadowed UPS trucks or were just plain lucky.

As the holidays season started heating up, things looked bleak for parents and gamers looking to get their hands on Nintendo's tiny, motion-controlled console. Rumors of chip shortages ran rampant, and I personally was certain that the eBay grey market price for the hot gift item would far meet if not surpass the highest numbers seen during the initial late 2006 release window.

Miraculously that never happened. At the very last moment, in a series of moves that gained them criticism from fans, Nintendo managed to pull together enough supply to curb the often ridiculously inflated eBay demand before it was too late.

Blizzard seems to be getting into bed with everyone these days. First comes news that they have mind-melded with Activision to be come Blizzivision or Actizard, and now comes news of this pretty spanky new World of Warcraft-themed Dell laptop.

And this isn't just any laptop with WoW images slapped on it, this is a hulking XPS M1730 Dell Laptop with WoW images on it. Hit the jump for all the details on the $4,500 laptop released just seconds ago. The laptop officially launches on Dec. 11.

Some good, scratch that, great news for Rock Band fans from Harmonix today. They wrote to tell us that gamers who are experiencing problems with their guitars (or any of the Rock Band instruments) should contact EA's customer support website and they will send out a replacement immediately.

As sometimes happens when new products first go into manufacturing, we discovered an imperfection with the strum bar in an early production run of guitars that were shipped at launch. We've since identified and fixed the issue in all subsequent production runs of the guitars. If users are experiencing a problem with their guitars or any of the Rock Band instruments, they can visit the customer support website ( http://support.ea.com/rockband) and we will send a replacement immediately. Harmonix is dedicated to creating 100% customer satisfaction and to the users who have encountered any hardware issues, we are sorry for the hassle.

Harmonix also took the time to address some of the concerns about the Playstation 3 guitars.

We've seen all the message board posts, discussions and stories regarding the PS3 edition of Rock Band—from issues with guitar compatibility to frustration that stand-alone guitars and drums for Rock Band have not yet hit stores. We want people to know that these issues have our full attention. We are listening and we read everything that is posted on our forums and we're committed to providing the best play experience possible. We're working hard to ensure that we solve these problems as soon as possible. We promise to keep the community updated and, in the meantime, we thank them for their patience.

Excellent. We all make mistakes, it's how a company deals with them that matters and this is exactly how it should be done.

Rock Band Support [EA]