Can't Eat, Can't Buy Gas, BUT, Can Buy Video Games

U.S. video game sales seen up 53 percent in June

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video game hardware and software rose 53 percent in June from a year ago, with Konami Corp's (9766.T: Quote, Profile, Research) "Metal Gear Solid 4" helping to fuel a dramatic increase in the number of Sony Corp's (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) PlayStation 3 units sold, market researcher NPD reported on Thursday.

"Metal Gear Solid 4" claimed the top slot as June's best-selling game, overtaking the two month reign Take-Two Interactive Software Inc's (TTWO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) "Grand Theft Auto 4" enjoyed since its launch in April. The Konami game is made exclusively for the PS3.

PlayStation 3 console sales jumped 94 percent from the prior month. U.S. consumers bought 405,500 PlayStation 3 consoles in June, up from 208,700 consoles in May.

"Exclusive content usually fuels hardware system purchases and PS3 sales certainly reflect the impact of Metal Gear Solid 4," NPD analyst Anita Frazer wrote in the report. PS3 unit sales hit a record for a non-holiday month, she said.

Nintendo Co Ltd (7974.OS: Quote, Profile, Research) sold 660,000 Wii consoles during June, a slight decrease from the 675,100 Wiis sold the month before. But the Wii's solid sales have secured its spot as the best-selling video game console in the U.S. of the current generation of machines. The console has sold 10.9 million units since its November 2006 release.

"The Wii appeals to people of all ages, generations and ability, and more and more new consumers continue to discover the Wii," Cammie Dunway, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America, told Reuters.

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) sold 219,800 Xbox 360 consoles, a 17.8 percent increase from May.

For the first half of 2008, the U.S. video game industry has generated $8.3 billion in sales. This is a 36 percent increase in sales from the same period a year before, indicating that the sluggish economy is not hurting the industry's performance as people turn to home entertainment, NPD said.

"These numbers are mind bogglingly large," said Michael Pachter, a Wedbush Morgan analyst. "Clearly we have an expanded demographic, more than just hardcore gamers, and they have an insatiable appetite for video games."

Six of the games on June's top ten best-selling game list are made for Nintendo hardware, including the month's second place top-seller, Activision Blizzard Inc's (ATVID.O: Quote, Profile, Research) "Guitar Hero On Tour," for the DS handheld. Other top games included Microsoft's "Ninja Gaiden II" for the Xbox 360 and "Wii Play" and "Wii Fit" for the Wii.

Just goes to show YOU, "there is always a way to get what YOU want, regardless of the state of the economy". Video games are the ultimate entertainment experience in this day and age. Video games are todays life!

Get Your Game On,

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Star Wars Video Game Characters Smarter Than YOU

Game characters get smarter _ and less predictable

In the upcoming video game "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed," the evil Stormtroopers are smart enough to keep players guessing.

Throw something at the white-armored troopers, and they may toss a grenade back. Or they might just put their hands up. Or they could do something completely new, each time the game gets played.

Video games used to come preprogrammed with canned movements that expert players eventually could anticipate and figure out. But recent advancements in video game design - and new game consoles with dazzling computing power - have endowed computer-controlled characters with a sense of self-preservation and unpredictability not seen even a year ago.

The "Star Wars" game, which publisher LucasArts will show off at this week's E3 Media and Business Summit in Los Angeles, is just one of the games offering this advanced degree of realism. Game designers say this increasing sophistication is helping to put their medium on par with movies as a form of mainstream entertainment.

"I think you connect to these characters much more," said Torsten Reil, co-founder and chief executive of Britain's NaturalMotion Ltd., the company that developed technology used to breathe life into characters in the "Star Wars" game.

Called "euphoria," the technology generates animation on the fly, so each moment in a game is unique. The first game to feature it was Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. (TTWO)'s "Grand Theft Auto IV," whose April debut rivaled - and in dollar terms bested - blockbuster movie openings.

NaturalMotion grew out of research Reil and colleague Colm Massey did at Oxford University on the way animals and humans move. The resulting technology creates 3-D character animation in real time, simulating the way the body moves so it looks authentic.

Other games deepen their measure of surprise by going in a different direction - abandoning realism.

For example, "Spore," from "Sims" creator Will Wright, immerses players in a world where not only the main character, but the game universe itself is the product of their own imaginations.

Players design a creature that evolves over several levels - which are games unto themselves - into beings capable of intergalactic travel. Because no two characters are the same, each will evolve in a different way.

That's a big contrast to traditional games, in which the main characters, be they James Bond or Lara Croft in "Tomb Raider," are prebuilt by the developers.

"Goldeneye 007," launched in 1997 for the Nintendo 64, was the first in which gamers encountered enemies that could react to what the players were doing, said Libe Goad, the editor-in-chief of AOL's GameDaily.biz site.

"If you shot at them, they got out of the way," she said. "Before, they would just stand there, which made the game easier but it wasn't necessarily a realistic experience."

A few years ago, games began showing off "ragdoll physics," which among other things made computer-controlled enemies look more believable when they died or got shot. But ragdoll technology is for dead bodies. Now Stormtroopers, or the cops in "Grand Theft Auto IV," want to stay alive.

Only the latest generation of gaming consoles, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s Xbox 360, Sony Corp. (SNE)'s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Co.'s Wii, are powerful enough to handle such complex animation systems.

Their microprocessors and graphics chips can serve up vast virtual worlds that always change and get "computer-controlled characters to act as believable as human-controlled characters," said Michel Kripalani, director of business development in Autodesk Inc. (ADSK)'s games technology group. Autodesk's Kynapse software is used by game developers to make non-human characters respond to their surroundings.

Reil expects future games to get still more complex and unpredictable. For instance, computer-controlled characters might carry on conversations with their human opponents.
"There are so many other areas we are not really addressing," Reil said.

Pretty soon, YOU will need a college education to play against the new genre of video games. WHY? Because your enemies/oponents will be as smart or, smarter than YOU. As it is now, alot of folks cannot progress on some of the games because they just DO NOT have the mental savvy to do so. People, "this is NOT PONG"!

"Get Ur Game On",

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