The booming popularity of Nintendo’s Wii console and DS handheld sent the combined sales of game machines and gaming software in Japan to a record high last year, according to research by a Japanese publisher. The results underline the stellar success of Nintendo, the company maker behind Super Mario and Pokemon games.
Nintendo’s Wii outsold rival Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) three-fold in Japan last year, helping the country’s multibillion-dollar video game market to notch up its best-ever year, a survey showed on Monday. Nintendo sold about 3,63-million Wii consoles in its home market in 2007 while Sony sold 1,21-million PS3s, according to magazine publisher Enterbrain.
Toshiba said on Sunday its HD DVD high-definition video format is not dead despite being dealt a big setback by Warner’s decision to exclusively back Sony rival Blu-ray technology. Akiyo Ozaka, president of Toshiba America Consumer Products, told a briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that HD DVD "has not lost".
It is almost 40 years since Roland Barthes announced the death of the author and called for the "birth of the reader" in that annus mirabilis of French history, 1968. For Barthes, it was the reader who should decide literary meaning. To a degree, authors were already playing this game before Barthes.
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/ 18 December 2007
Roger Federer again came close to winning the Grand Slam in 2007, reaching the final at all four major tournaments and winning three of them. This year, however, the top-ranked Swiss also came close to losing his record 54-match winning streak on grass at Wimbledon, and then struggled a bit after winning the United States Open.
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/ 20 November 2007
Amazon.com is hoping to invigorate a nascent market for electronic books by introducing its own e-book reader with free wireless connectivity. Monday’s long-anticipated announcement comes as e-books remain a sliver of overall book sales, partly because they lack the comfort and intimacy of bound paper.
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/ 17 November 2007
In the first big-screen casualty of the Hollywood writers strike, Columbia Pictures said on Friday it had postponed production on Angels & Demons, a prequel to its box-office hit The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks. The Sony-owned film distributor said the planned release date for the thriller has been pushed back to 2009.
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/ 26 October 2007
It is interesting why so few of us use one of the breakthroughs of recent years: the ability to search the web from wherever we are with a cellphone. This ought to be hugely empowering. There are a number of reasons why this hasn’t happened and why it may be about to change.
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/ 19 October 2007
The news of the death of South African reggae star Lucky Dube in a botched hijacking attempt in Johannesburg has drawn strong reaction from around the world. As he was leaving for the World Cup in France, President Thabo Mbeki made an appeal to South Africans to confront the ”scourge” of crime together.
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/ 11 October 2007
Couch potatoes beware: Wii owners will be able to get an even more vigorous workout from December when Nintendo launches a new fitness balance board for its hit video-game console. The ”Wii Fit” board and software can be used for exercising, sports and games including yoga, virtual snowboarding, ski-jumping and aerobics.
The recording industry has won a major fight in its effort to stop illegal music downloading with a United States jury decision to impose 000 damages against a Minnesota woman who used a web service to share music. The size of the damages is nearly 80 times higher than the average European settlement figure.
Fearing that it will lose out financially, much of the book industry is resisting internet pioneers’ vision of putting the world’s entire store of published information online. Some European libraries have portrayed the bid to digitise 500 years of books and newspapers as an imperialist plot.
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/ 25 September 2007
<b>CD OF THE MONTH:</b> The National’s new album is an instant classic, writes Lloyd Gedye.
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/ 25 September 2007
Microsoft began its midnight sales of Halo 3, the acclaimed alien shooter game that it hopes will widen its lead over Sony in the battle for industry dominance. Microsoft is backing the game with a marketing blitz that includes celebrity-studded sales events at about 10 000 retailers across the United States.
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/ 21 September 2007
Sony said on Thursday that it is bringing the rumble feature back with a new PlayStation 3 (PS3) controller, but there was no mention of any price cut for the console. The head of Sony Computer Entertainment, Kazuo Hirai, said that 40 new PS3 software titles will be released by the end of the year.
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/ 12 September 2007
The head of Microsoft’s gaming business in Japan promised more role-playing game software on Wednesday to attract fans in a market where its Xbox 360 console has struggled against offerings from Nintendo and Sony. Takashi Sensui, who heads Xbox operations in Japan, said Japanese prefer role-playing games.
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/ 9 September 2007
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African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma questioned the ”Americanisation” of culture in South Africa, criticising television images of sex and violence during a speech in Johannesburg on Sunday. ”There’s more violence on the TV … there’s more open sex on TV. What education are you giving to us? Is that part of our culture?”
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/ 6 September 2007
With its eye-catching white plastic design, the iPod has become a landmark of 21st century living in just a few years. But the music player marked the end of an era on Wednesday, as Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, finally ditched its emblematic look.
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/ 5 September 2007
For those fed up with the family photos where one person is perpetually frowning, a new Japanese camera is said to automatically weed out pictures when a person isn’t smiling. Electronics giant Sony said on Wednesday it will begin sales this month of the compact "Cyber-shot T" series that can detect a smile and immediately drop the shutter.
After a lavish ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Althea Gibson’s first United States title, Venus and Serena Williams, the two women who carry the hopes of the nation at this year’s US Open, played their first-round matches back-to-back in the Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Chipmaker Intel unveiled its new high-performance central processing unit at the recent Leipzig Games Convention in Germany. The Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 was shown to members of the press and industry ahead of the official opening of Europe’s biggest show for interactive entertainment.
Sony says it will start selling a combined television tuner and personal video recorder that lets users of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console capture live television that can be stored or transferred to the PlayStation Portable (PSP) for later viewing. Sony announced the new product at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany.
Recovering Japanese giant Sony said on Wednesday it will introduce a new line-up of flat-screen televisions, including the largest on the market, in a bid to boost its mainstay electronics sales. Introducing 15 new models of its Bravia line, Sony said its top-end flagship model with a 70-inch (1,78m) screen will be the largest flat television commercially available.
Self-conscious and Edgars-chic, The Black Hotels have stormed on to Jo’burg’s live music scene, writes Lloyd Gedye.
The future of reading novels could change from paper to paper-like-quality computer screens, writes Savo Tufegdzic.