It’s in the Nikkei so it’s news: first Sony Dips Into the Red, then Nintendo Logs Two-Digit Decline in Sales and Income.

Regarding Sony’s results for the 1Q of 2005, in short they are in the red, apparently because they didn’t sell enough TVs and MemorySticks. The good news is that the game segment is up 64% compared to last year, but they are still losing even more money than last year in that department too. Sony says this is due to an increase in the advertisement and R&D expenses.

Nintendo’s 2005 Q1 is not that good either, actually it dropped 14% compared to the figures last year. Sales of the Nintendo DS exceeded 1.38 million units during this period, but it’s still much lower than the 5.27 million units of the first four months. But they are still hopeful, and apparently Nintendogs is selling well. Sales of the Game Boy Advance and the GameCube dropped 60% too. Nintendo says they are not too worried because the Holiday season should balance it all nicely.

Buy more!!

1UP.com has this cool feature on videogames emulators by Nich Maragos, titled “Afterlife“, which is an interesting read if you’re into video games.

What looks like a game system, plays like a game system, and yet isn’t a game system? The answer is an emulator, which is a means to make one piece of consumer electronics behave like another. Whether they’re hardware add-ons or clever pieces of coding, emulators have been a part of videogames almost as long as the medium itself — but they’re decidedly the black sheep of the gaming family, for a variety of legal and ethical reasons. (More…)

(Always via Waxy)

Lost Garden has published a review of the game Nintendogs, titled “Nintendogs: The case of the non-game that barked like a game“.

As they state at the beginning of the article: “This is a game design review, not a game review. A game review typically is written for the consumer and is intended to help them decide if they want to purchase the title. A game design review is written for other game developers and is intended to highlight successes and failures of the various layers of the game design. The hope is that we learn from the successful design practices and apply them in an intelligent fashion to our future titles.”

Not a game?
The first thing that arises whenever someone talks about Nintendogs is the claim that it is not a game. “Dude, it is just a stupid Tamagotchi clone with dogs!” Such a vehement response is indicative of a larger trend in both the designer and gaming community. Unfortunately, it is a trend that has its roots in a fundamental misunderstanding of game design. Read more…

An interesting (and long) read.

The Nintendo DS has been outselling both PSP and PS2 combined during the first week of Nintendogs release. Nintendo’s handheld still on top a month later, GameSpot reports.

After the punch in the face Nintendo got from the introduction of the PSP, this is very good news for the people on the Mario side. According to the GameSpot article, the DS has been the “best-selling piece of gaming hardware in Japan since the release of Nintendogs on April 21, outselling both the PlayStation 2 and the PSP” (with the exception of the week of May 9, just after “Golden Week”). When Nintendogs was released, the Nintendo DS sales exploded to 96,191 units, almost 5 times the figures from before the introduction of the game. Nintendogs is scheduled to hit the US market late August.

There will be a lot of security issues popping out about these very soon I am sure, it is nonetheless very exciting news if you like gadgets. The people at ign.com have been playing with the newly announced DSpeak at the E3 Nintendo booth E3, and they say it is simply “Voice-over IP using the Nintendo DS’ wireless and microphone capabilities”.

This is still just a concept demo, but by connecting headphones and a mic, DSpeak allows you to have a conversation with another Nintendo DS users via WiFi, with a sound quality “perfectly fine, as good as a mobile phone.”

The Engadget people were there too and they add that since there are two screens on a Nintendo DS, you get Mario or Wario on one screen, moving his mouth when the other person speaks. Apparently, the software will be available as a free download. They also mention that they “couldn’t squeeze a release date out of them, and no one at the Nintendo booth knew a damn thing about the actual technology they were demoing.”

Now if you are a Sony type of person and you don’t care about the DS VoIP (I love cryptic acronyms), then get chatty on your PSP instead.
Also via Engadget, the president of VoIP company Xten thinks his company should be able to hack together a VoIP softphone for Sony’s PlayStation Portable. Well, it’s not there yet if he’s only writing about it on his blog, but it should be feasible, with the PSP built-in WiFi, TCP stack, and “headphone/microphone/control connector”.

By the way, if you want to call worldwide and receive calls on your computer and you haven’t played with Skype yet, I suggest you give it a try today. (Plus, you can support 3Yen in the process)

Also in the Joystiq article is the introduction of yet another portable and yet another “mini”, joined together in the Game Boy Micro. Nintendo say it’s designed for “image-conscious folks who love video games, the ones who want the look of their system to be as cool as the games they play on it”. The Micro is about the size of an iPod Mini, i.e. 4 inches wide by 2 inches tall, and 0.7 inches deep. It weighs a mere 2.8 ounces, and features a 2″ backlit LCD screen. The GameBoy Micro has a built in rechargeable lithium-ion battery and expected to offer a choice of many colors and designs. Nintendo also said the GameBoy Micro has the same processing power and plays the same games as the GameBoy Advance SP.

This week end was the celebration of Nintendogs in Tokyo.
This guy is promoting Nintendogs in front of a shop in Akihabara. He is wearing dog’s ears and is surrounded by boxes of the game. And in front of him stands a little fake puppy. He was the only one with the dog’s ears, but the scene was pretty much the same everywhere in Akihabara last Sunday.

Of course, most shops have Nintendogs on demo and you can just grab a Nintendo DS and play a little with the virtual puppy. There are toys you can choose and you and the dog can play with them together. Including this big rubber-like purple rope that you pull on one side while the dog bites in it and pulls it on the opposite side. Because the dogs in the game are still puppies, they are very light, and you can lift them using the rubber rope when they bite in it, and even make the dog swirl until it gets too dizzy and gets thrown to the wall. Not that I would ever do this to a real dog, but I wanted to see how far I could push the game, and I liked the result. Then, it comes back to you with a grin and expects a hug and some more playing… All this is done using the pen and tactile screen of course.
I have to admit I got into the game really fast. But I am not sure I wouldn’t snap out of it as quickly if I need to start feeding it and taking care of it like a tamagotchi…

Now, one of the landmark of Shibuya is the statue of a famous dog called Hachiko, who came to greet its master at Shibuya Station every day after work. When its master died in 1925, Hachiko returned every day to the station anyway, to wait for him. It did that for the next eleven years. This statue is extremely famous and the area is crowded of people because it is one of the most well-known and easy to find meeting spot in Shibuya. People will often tell you they’ll meet you “in front of Hachiko, Shibuya”.

Utada Hikaru (the smiling front woman for everything DS) plays Nintendogs in TV commercials, and nicknamed her puppy “Shinchan”. Surprisingly enough, Shinchan is also an Akiba, the same breed as Hachiko. So Nintendo played with the expression “in front of Hachiko” and turned it into “in front of Shinchan”.

They put a big poster with the caption “in front of Shinchan, Shibuya” just outside the gates of the Hachiko exit. And of course, underneath there is a pic of a Nintendo DS and Shinchan on the screen. Apparently, some girls already picked up the hint and are waiting for their friends just there.

Any of you bought Nintendogs yet? Did you find any cool tricks you can teach to dog?

So at the same time Nintendo will release their pink DS (April 21st), they will also release the game everyone (at least teenage girls and Utada Hikaru) is talking about these days…

What Nintendogs is can be summed up in a short made-up formula like “dog Tamagotchi”, but it is a bit better than that. First, instead of being a weird animal with no shape, it is a dog, with dog’s needs and dog’s lifestyle (apparently you need to pick up poo after your dog). Plus, it comes on a touch screen console, so you can really do weird interraction with your virtual pet (I mean “weird” in a softcore nice positive way, such as petting, scratching, playing etc, ok?). That, and the fact that the DS has better computing capabilities than the little plastic egg used to…

Apparently, if you are playing with your dog, and someone else comes with theirs in the wi-fi radius of your DS, your dog will bark at theirs and you will be as embarrassed as in real life.

The game comes in 3 packs, and you need to choose which breed of dog you want, from one of the packages. I think they should make it like race cars games and allow you to make money by selling your dog so you can buy a new and more expensive one…

The pink Nintendo DS is announced for the end of the month (April 21st), and Tsutaya is starting to show off the pre-stock they got. If you are a girl and you gotta have everything in pink, and you have been waiting until now to get your DS, it does make sense. It IS very pink. You shouldn’t have anything to complain about. If you are anything else, you might want to see it for real before you set your choice on the pink rather than the black or the silver DS, because pink (and light blue for that matter) makes the DS look even more like a plastic model than the white does. The more I looked at the pink DS, the more it made me feel like the Sony PSP is solid and well-built. I love the DS, and it feels strange to think “cheap” when you look at one for the first time.
Well, anyway, it’s out soon, so you can decide for yourself if it is worth getting a Pink Nintendo DS just to play Nintendogs or not…

Forget the PSP and the Nintendo DS: if you’re really serious (some would say “geek”…), you need to get yourself a N64p. At least, that’s what Ben Heckendorn thought. Visit his page to see the whole building process.

Via Waxy