Hi all, ive just got home from work and discovered we were hacked again this afternoon, it seems these hacker wankers are using an exploit that was warned to us via vbulletin the other week and most sites are vunerable to it.

For now i like you have to wait for Martin to fix it and restore the site via one of our backups and kill the exploit into the site, we may lose a few days posts but we will be back.

In the mean time i ask you to visit our affiliate at www.gamingandgadgets.com or www.dcemu.com where you can discuss all of this bullshit.

Again im deeply sorry for this downtime :(

Wraggster

via Eurogamer


Japanese gangster game Yakuza 4 comes stuffed with a mind-bending 384 minutes of cutscenes to watch. That's more than six hours worth (6.24 approximately)!

That staggering number was revealed by UK game-ratings board BBFC, which stamped SEGA's openworld crime game with an 18 rating.

Yakuza 4's total makes mincemeat of BioWare's upcoming fantasy RPG Dragon Age II, which was revealed to have 103 minutes of cutscenes last week. Killzone 3 only has 70 minutes of cutscenes - hardly worth even turning on.

Unsurprisingly, Yakuza 4 was deemed to contain "strong bloody violence and strong language". Lovely.

Eurogamer reviewed Yakuza 4 on import last April, awarding 8/10.

"Yakuza 4 is made from the exact same parts as Yakuza 3. There are no significant changes to the core combat or the setting, and it looks unerringly similar. But that same mixture of brutal fighting, storytelling, exploration and random nonsense is framed much better this time around. Adding three new characters has changed the pacing completely and given the game structural discipline and variety that makes it a lot more palatable."

via Computer and Video Games

Heavenly Sword and Enslaved developer Ninja Theory has told CVG that it's excited by the "high end capabilities" of Sony NGP (PSP2) - and that it considers the device a "clear shot at the hardcore".

The UK studio, which is currently hard at work on Capcom's reboot of Devil May Cry - dubbed DmC - has also joined millions of gamers in applauding Sony's decision to introduce twin thumbsticks to the console.

"I'm certainly excited by NGP as a platform because it's a clear shot at the hardcore market with high end capabilities and decent control input systems," Ninja Theory co-founder and tech chief Mike Ball told CVG.

"With that configuration they can build on the user base of 360 and PS3 players who might consider a current PSP game to be an inferior experience. Also, whilst I absolutely adore my iPhone, gaming on it is rather like snacking on a pack of crisps, I'm hoping that the NGP will provide the full pie 'n' chips."

When asked what price tag Ninja Theory hoped NGP would carry, Ball said he was keeping his "fingers crossed for something in the £200 - £300 range".

Sega West president Mike Hayes has told CVG that he is "extremely optimistic" NGP will be a sales success.

Meanwhile, UK developer Codemasters has predicted that the price of the system will be in line with Nintendo's 3DS in the UK.

Sony unveiled NGP last Thursday, revealing a very impressive set of technical specs. The console boasts a five inch OLED screen that can handle 16 million colours.

via Eurogamer

Why isn't your favourite PSone game on the PlayStation Store yet? Emulating old PlayStation games for new PlayStation hardware isn't as easy as everybody thinks.

Crucially, Sony is still "dedicated" to resurrecting the games you want most, pledged PlayStation Store's Ross McGrath on the EU PS blog. But the process can take "several months".

Each PSone revival requires a good original copy of the game (in all languages), legal clearance (checking expired licenses and who owns publishing rights), Store packaging (image, descriptions for all territories), and submission to Sony QA for extensive bug testing.

"There are two major stumbling blocks between submitting a game for emulation and us being able to publish it," illuminated McGrath. "Not getting legal clearance and failing quality assurance (QA)."

Legal clearance can be halted by intricacies such as real-life branding in a game that is now off limits. In some cases, publishers have died like dinosaurs, and who owns the game can be a time-consuming question to answer.

"The other problem is failing QA because of serious bugs, and when I say bugs, I mean giant cockroach-sized uber-bugs," revealed McGrath. "I have seen a lot of PSone QA reports with some weird and wonderful errors: menu screens with upside down text, explosions that kill your character at random after watching a cut-scene, games that continue to slow down the longer you play them, or music that sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well... the list goes on."
Those bugs can't just be stamped on by the developer, because that developer washed its hands of the game long, long ago. If a serious enough problem is found, the game may have to be pulled entirely.

"If a game fails QA, there are some things that can be done to fix them but, unlike with a PSN title, they can't simply go back to the developer for another round of fixes, so it can get complicated," said McGrath.

But the PSone emulator is constantly improving, "so often serious bugs that prevent games from loading at all are fixed with new versions".

"The million dollar question," McGrath wrote, is why some PSone games are available on the US PlayStation Store but not in Europe. "This usually comes down to either publishing rights or bugs that occur within the emulated PAL version that did not occur within the NTSC emulated version," he revealed.

Sometimes ancient PAL copy-protection fudges things up; other times, the publisher in America turns out to be different to the publisher in Europe, and more negotiating must be done. Even when a licence is renewed, territorial restrictions prevent this applying worldwide.

"We are still dedicated to bringing you as many PSone games as we possibly can," McGrath said.

"There are some PSone titles that we have been seeking legal clearance to publish from as far back as 2007, some of which are still ongoing and some have only just been legally cleared (Wild Arms).

"There are titles which previously failed QA that are bug tested again with every new version of the emulator and they come your way as soon as we can release them.

"We've just sent another round of first-party titles for clearance and emulation to fill in the gaps in the catalogue," he added, confirming one of those as Tombi - "so stop asking!". "We will be going back to publishers and specifically pushing for the most requested and popular titles."