Atomic’s Game News Roundup -- 9/11/06

Xbox 360 bundles announced in time for Christmas and Sony’s PSP media manager.

Because Christmas is around the corner, Microsoft has released two Xbox 360 bundle packs. First off the rank is the massive entertainment pack, which includes the console (with hard drive), component cable, network cable, media remote, extra controller, Project Gotham 3, Dead or Alive 4 and a silver subscription to Xbox Live. That one’s $769.95.

The second bundle, dubbed the family fun pack, contains the console sans hard drive and with a single, wired controller, and a copy of Kameo: Elements of Power. That one’s $499.95.

The PSP media manager has been launched, allowing you to do officially what you’ve been hacking your way around for years, namely media management on your PSP.

It supports quite a few formats, too:
Audio: mp3, ATRAC, wma, wav, pca, ogg, m1a, mpa, m2a, m4a, m4b, aac, mp4
Video: mp4, avi, wmv, mov, qt, dv, mpg, mpeg, mpeg1, mpeg2, mmv, m1p, mp1, mp2, m2t, 3gp, m4v
Images: jpg, jpeg, jpe, jfif, pnp, gif, bmp, dib, tiff, tif
Documents: txt, .rtf, .doc, .wri, .wpd, .wps, .xls, .html, .mht, .htm

It also lets you back up game saves and transfer Internet Explorer favourites to the PSP. It’s set to retail at $39.95. We have one in the labs and are testing it at the moment, so expect the review soon.

V8 Supercars 3 will make an appearance on the PSP, with Wi-Fi network play. It also supports game sharing, so you’ll only need one copy of the game between four PSPs in multiplayer mode. The game engine is a tweaked version of the engine that powered V8 Supercars 2 on PSP, and we have been told to expect 37 licensed cars and 34 real world tracks in the third instalment.

Do you remember the Xbox 360 camera we reported on a few weeks ago? It turns out it can be used for non-smutty purposes too. Rainbow Six Vegas uses it to model a picture of your face onto your character. Ding Chavez of Rainbow will look like Richard James of Aphex Twin when we’re through with him. Rainbow Six Vegas is due in stores on November 23 for the Xbox 360, and we have some screenshots to celebrate.









There have been some new releases on PC too. Gothic 3 (which is an RPG, yet not Oblivion clone) and Paraworld (a totally bizarre RTS) should both be on the shelves soon.

Finally this week, Nvidia has officially announced its new graphics cards, the Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS. DirectX 10, Shader Model 4, two PCI-e power sockets and far too much good stuff to miss. Craig’s beefy review is here. We will be benching for the next issue, so stay tuned.