All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

We wish a football, GT5, and turkey-filled Thanksgiving to you from SCEA and your PlayStation Social Media Team!

We’re taking the next few days off for um, football, turkey, and GT5, and will be back with our regularly scheduled programming on Monday. While Sid is evangelizing Twitter and The Walking Dead back home in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, and Rey and I are freezing our asses off in the significantly-colder-than-normal, but-not-actually-that-cold Bay Area, we’ll leave you with links to the best PlayStation Black Friday deals.

Black Friday PS3 Bundles
Black Friday PSP Bundles

I’ll now wait for our Canadian friends to remind us that Thanksgiving was last month :) We’ve got you covered too. Toronto-based correspondent Ashley Beaulac sent along these Canada-centric Black Friday Deals:

Often referred to as the busiest retail shopping day of the year, Black Friday serves as the ‘unofficial’ beginning of the holiday season, falling on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day in the United States.

United States you say? Don’t worry, we aren’t leaving our PlayStation Canada fans out! We also have a “Black Friday Bundle” to offer you. Tomorrow we will be introducing the PlayStation 3 EA Sports NHL Bundle and the PSP Holiday Pack at select retailers, see details below:

PlayStation 3 EA Sports NHL Bundle – $299.99
Includes:
• PlayStation 3 160GB Entertainment System
• DUALSHOCK 3 Wireless Controller
• EA Sports NHL 11 Blu-ray Game
• inFAMOUS Greatest Hits Game

PSP Holiday Pack – $129.99
Includes:
• Piano Black PSP-3000
• LittleBIGPlanet UMD Game
• Karate Kid UMD Movie
1G Memory Stick

These bundles will be available while supplies last at all major retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, EB Games, Future Ship, GameStop, HMV, Loblaws, London Drugs, Solutions 2 Go, Sony Style, The Source, Toys R Us, Walmart and Zellers.

Happy shopping!

Have you found a great Black Friday deal? Share it with your fellow readers in the comments.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Doctor Who, the lonely lord who taught us that time is "wibbly wobbly," is heading to iOS devices with an app titled Mazes of Time. The game, based on the popular BBC show, is expected before Christmas and will be developed by Dundee, Scotland-based developer Tag Games.

"Doctor Who is the UK's number one science fiction property, and I think it is in the BBC's top three for worldwide sales, so it is great to bring it to Dundee - especially in light of what happened at Realtime Worlds and the effect it had on Dundee," a developer spokesman told The Courier. "It shows there is still something positive we can bring to the sector."
Tag has also made apps based on the UK's Channel 4 properties Come Dine With Me and Peep Show, which doesn't sound half as interesting as a potential app combining the two: Come Dine With Me at the Peep Show.

Sony's advice to those currently having hiccups with Gran Turismo 5 is to temporarily disable internet access on their consoles. Eurogamer reports that the game's constant online connection, even while navigating single-player content and menus, is causing "longer than comfortable lag."

Sony has confirmed the game "performs online access not only when participating in online races and using community features, but also when starting the game and during the various screen displays in GT Mode." This is causing "online congestion" and the publisher is working on "several different solutions" to improve the network.

One of the solutions should come this Saturday, November 27, as GT creator Kazunori Yamauchi says a patch should fix several issues, including "the usability of the game to make it a better experience." He noted the game's data center was "set up to handle 500,000 connections, but the number of connections we received greatly exceeded that amount and there was a high chance of experiencing problems as a result."

Wait, wait, wait. Gran Turismo 5 was designed in such a way that it constantly pings the data center was only set to handle half a million connections... for a Gran Turismo game? It sounds like Sony hired the same consultant Battlefield developer DICE used to come up with its launch day capacity requirements.

#gt5 Gran Turismo 5 is realistic. How can you tell? Well, a tiny little Fiat 500 has trouble getting up a mountain in the real world, so it makes sense it can't get up a mountain in GT5, either. More »

According to Bloomberg, Sony Corp. is looking for a new heir apparent for its consumer electronics kingdom, and a familiar name is in the running. According to inside sources cited by the report, Sony is hoping to install a president to lighten the work load of (and eventually replace) acting CEO Howard Stringer; one of the names on the rumored short list is Sony Computer Entertainment president and CEO Kazuo Hirai. A Sony representative refused to comment on the story, but Stringer has stated his intent to stay on as CEO until March 2013.

According to the report, another potential replacement is current executive deputy president Hiroshi Yoshioka -- but we hope that if Sony does have to decide between these two parties, they take all the important factors into consideration. You know, factors like "which of these two guys does Joystiq have more memes prepared for?" Using that metric, the choice is crystal clear.

#videogamegiftguide2010 Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the parade! Delight in your dinner! Prepare for tomorrow's battle. More »

The foul finches in Angry Birds are preparing to spread holiday cheer with Angry Birds Christmas, which should be available sometime in December. Pocketgamer took note of a Finnish site that posted images of the expansion which, if it follows the pricing of the previous holiday special, Angry Birds Halloween, should come crashing in at $.99. There has not been an official announcement made yet.

Developer Rovio has dubbed December 11 Angry Birds Day and has set up a website for happy players to meet up all around the world and form flash mobs. Further details regarding your mob's activities will arrive by email closer to the date -- don't worry, it will allegedly be suitable for all ages. Then again, it's probably wise to be cautious when the basis for a meet-up is bird flinging.

Publisher allegedly broke agreement not to include Slash.

#announcement While most of us (really all of us) are busy eating Turkey or sleeping, there will still be a steady stream of stories coming to you from Kotaku. More »

#granturismo While gamers across the world are finally getting their hands on the oft-delayed Gran Turismo 5, series creator Kazunori Yamauchi and his team are working on the inevitable follow-up. More »

Level-5 has filed a trademark for both the titles "Black Market" and "Akihabara Black Market," which could mean that the developer of Dark Cloud and Professor Layton might be working on a new game based in the shadier parts of Japan's real-life Akihabara "Electric Town" district, well known as a haven for gadgeteers and fanboys. You might remember the area, as we do, from being immortalized in video game form in the great The World Ends With You.

Level-5 also filed a (probably unrelated) trademark for something called "Cyberanimals." These could be the titles the company is working on with Capcom, and/or they could represent projects planned for the 3DS next year. We'll have to wait and see.

As the game buckles under the weight of day one traffic.

#rumor According to a report on Bloomberg, Sony is looking at taking the job of company president away from current CEO Sir Howard Stringer, with one of the possible candidates for that role being PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai. More »

#pullquote You know when a man truly sounds like he's out of touch? Not when he's blaming the next big thing, but when he develops selective memory about the last big thing. As seen on The Telegraph. More »

Disney's iconic mouse hits the Wii, but is his latest adventure an out-and-out classic or does it take the Mickey?

#crime Japanese cops don't only arrest dudes selling phony hug pillow covers. Sometimes they arrest other types of criminals. Like people trying to scam gamers out of vital information. More »

Do you like games from Opus Studio that combine retro-style graphics, RPG gameplay and time-compression gimmicks? Well, good news: now you have more than just Half-Minute Hero through which to experience that unique combination. Aksys Games is localizing Jikan de Fantasia for PSP as Jikandia: The Timeless Land, due Spring 2011.

Jikandia is a unique side-scrolling dungeon RPG in which players set the time limits for each dungeon -- which, in turn, affects the treasure quality and the difficulty of the dungeon. Players control a boy from our world drawn into Jikandia, a once-timeless place that is now experiencing linear time, as a "champion," searching for his missing friends. Of course, given the random-dungeon style of gameplay, you probably won't need to spend much time worrying about the story.

Stringer's successor sought, and Hirai's on the shortlist.

Here's a brand new trailer for Shift Extended, a black-and-white platformer coming to PSN Minis next month. You could watch the video below to see how the game works, combining an interesting perception-shift mechanic with some clever platforming challenges, or you could just go play the Flash version of the game for yourself.

The "extended" version is supposed to have double the content of the Flash game, which means there will be new gameplay mechanics, new levels and even new scoring features. Look for it on PSN sometime in December.

#salesget The bestselling game in Japan this past week was an American-made game, with Treyarch's Call of Duty: Black Ops nabbing the first place spot on the country's sales charts. Just how well did Black Ops do? More »

#review I'm almost out of pollen. A nearby creature strums the guitar as I float about. I'll just hang here for a few more seconds before bringing life to some undersea flowers and restocking on pollen. Right now, I float. More »