Does anyone (this is mostly for, but not restricted to, any Portuguese readers) reading this know of a Portuguese-language equivalent of PRWeb, a site to which you can (by paying some amount of money) send a press release, which is then picked by many news sites and aggregators?
Thanks in advance.
P.S. - this is related to my new Nintendo forum, in case you’re curious. See, full disclosure. 
This is likely to be of interest only to Portuguese readers, but since there are a bunch of them reading this through Prt.Sc, here goes…
A couple of days ago, NintendoPT, the biggest Nintendo-related forum in Portugal, closed down. I was already thinking (see here if you don’t believe me) about expanding my Nintendo DS forum, NDS-PT, either to add the Wii as an “equal partner console”, or to expand it to a full Nintendo forum, but was inclined toward the former because I didn’t want to compete directly with NintendoPT. But since the latter is no more, there is a big gap to fill, and…
… I am pleased to announce the transformation of NDS-PT into NintenForum-PT, possibly the biggest Nintendo forum in Portugal nowadays. More than 500 members, more than 16000 posts, and no longer invaded by Pokémon fans (who scared many of the NDS-PT old timers away in February, but who then moved en masse to a separate Pokémon forum).
Ah, the eighties.
If, like me, you have a Google News alert for “wii”, yesterday and today you’ve surely been inundated with rumors about a forthcoming announcement at E3 for a hard drive for the Nintendo Wii. Its main use would be for Virtual Console games, since the Wii only has 512 MB of flash memory for them (you can move some to an SD card, but they aren’t directly playable from there).
Their justification? The fact that some time ago it was announced that Neo Geo games would be coming to the Wii, and, as they keep saying, “Neo Geo games can use up to 330 MB”.
Really?
I’m betting they’re taking that number from the Neo Geo common intro screen (you can see it using MAME, on older games), which says “MAX 330 MEGA”.
However, those are not megabytes, but megaBITS. 330 megabits = about 41 megabytes. Still bigger than all current virtual console games, but not more than half of the Wii’s flash memory.
Amazingly, I’ve seen about a dozen news sites repeating that mistake. It seems that nobody researches anything these days; “news reporting” is simply repeating what others already said, using different words so that it looks “original”.
Incidentally, the 330 megabits Neo Geo limit was passed some years ago. The biggest Neo Geo game I have on MAME (King of Fighters 2003) is about 100 megabytes (or 800 megabits).
NOTE: the following is translated and adapted from a post of mine on the Nintendo DS - Portugal forum.
I have it at home, since yesterday.
I’ve been playing with it for several hours, now. Unfortunately, my brother (who is the one who bought it for me; I wasn’t in the country on release day) was only able to buy the basic package: the console itself, Wii Sports, one wiimote and one nunchuk.
I haven’t been able to explore Wii Sports thoroughly, as my TV is in my bedroom, and the bed is in the way. 
I’m going to move the TV to the living room today or tomorrow, hopefully. I’ve won a couple of tennis games (which is much more fun than you’d imagine), but the “real thing” will be when I can play with more room, and with more people (which will require more wiimotes, and they’re completely sold out right now).
Besides disk-based games, the Wii supports several channels, and can go online. Connecting it to the Internet was extremely easy; there were no compatibility problems with my Linksys WRK54G router, which I already use for the Nintendo DS. The wireless range seems to be better than that of the DS, and it now supports WPA encryption (which I’m not using, though, because of the DS - only WEP there). As soon as you go online, the console updates its firmware, which takes a little while, but no effort at all.
News and weather channels are available on the channel selection screen, but they’re not working yet; according to Wikipedia, they’ll be up and running either this month, or in January. Same thing about the Opera browser, whose release date is apparently December 23.
One of the most interesting channels is, of course, the Virtual Console. Apparently, new games will be released every friday. I’ve already bought a few: Donkey Kong (NES) due to nostalgia (even though it’s a relatively poor version, quite inferior to the original arcade), F-Zero (SNES), Super Mario 64 (N64), Donkey Kong Country (SNES), Sonic the Hedgehog (Mega Drive), Super Star Soldier (PC Engine) and Dungeon Explorer (PC Engine). A special note about Mario 64: I never had an N64, and, though I had already played the game using emulators, and later on the DS, I had never played it using an analog controller (in this case, a GameCube one) until yesterday. And the game really needs one; it’s like I was playing a different game! Moves and tricks that I had to struggle with on the DS come up absolutely naturally here. The N64 version doesn’t include the DS extras (3 new characters, more stars, better graphics), but this game really requires an analog stick…
A couple of PC Engine games support 5 players at a time. Dungeon Explorer is a more complex Gauntlet clone, and Bomberman 93 probably needs no introduction. Since the Wii can only support 4 wiimotes or classic controllers at a time, and up to 4 GameCube controllers, you need to use a combination of both. I have 4 GC controllers, so I will, hopefully, be able to play 5-player Dungeon Explorer after the next lunch here.
One warning: some (not all) NES, SNES and Mega Drive games (not PC Engine, oddly enough) weren’t, originally, properly converted from NTSC (60 Hz) to PAL (50 Hz); they had black borders on the screen, and were about 13% slower than the original versions. Since they’re perfectly emulated here, and the European Wii uses emulated PAL versions, the problem persists. If you’ve played the original versions and were OK with them, you won’t see a difference here, but it’s a pity that Nintendo didn’t do the extra work of fixing this problem… after all, the Wii supports 60 Hz PAL, unlike the original consoles.
And that’s it for now. When they’re available again, I hope to buy Wii Play (which includes an extra wiimote), a second nunchuk, and a couple of classic controllers. As for games, I want Zelda, Red Steel, DBZ: Tenkaichi 2 and Call of Duty 3. It’s likely that I’ll only be able to get most of those next year, though…
Unlike Ricardo, I am — hopefully — getting a Wii this Christmas. In a few hours, in fact.
I don’t have a pre-reservation, and I won’t be here this weekend; I’m going to Barcelona tomorrow morning — and, by “morning”, I mean before sunrise. I could get one there, of course, but the Spaniards have a nasty habit of translating absolutely everything, so I prefer to get it here. Therefore, my brother will try to buy one at midnight, or tomorrow morning. Which means that, if he succeeds, I won’t get to play it until Sunday or Monday…
Why do I want to get one? Well, I’d get it for Wii Sports alone. Zelda is a bonus. I’m also interested in the Virtual Console; even though emulators and roms are easy to get, having perfect versions (some even slightly enhanced, like the N64 games), playable with gamepads on a TV, is something that you simply can’t get — easily, at least — using emulators on a PC.
Unlike Ricardo, I have exactly zero interest in the PS3; if I was going to buy something like that, I’d go for the Xbox360, which has Dead Rising, the Jeff Minter lightsynth, and which Minter is developing small games for. Besides, Sony is one of the few companies in the world that make Microsoft look ethical…
As for Wii games, there are many more interesting ones than it seems. As I said, Wii Sports is a game I still expect to play 2 years from now. Zelda is Zelda. Then there’s Super Monkey Ball, Call of Duty 3, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Trauma Center, Dragon Ball Z: Tenkaichi 2, and, coming sometime in the future, Wario Ware, Super Mario Galaxy, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (zombies!), Metroid Prime 3, Sadness, the inevitable Mario Kart, and many more. There will be new games released for the Virtual Console, too; it won’t just be used for past games. It’s a great time to be a gamer.
Since at least the beginning of this week, Amazon.co.uk lists every PC or console game as “This item can only be delivered within the UK”. Other people are also complaining about it.
I’ve bought dozens of games from them during the last few years, and I had been mostly satisfied with their service, but if this is really a policy change (and not a temporary error in their site), it will be very annoying. There are other stores in Europe, but few have such a large catalog as Amazon.
I buy most of my games online, since I my two consoles are from Nintendo, and Portugal is an anti-Nintendo country; stores seem to think that “Nintendo is for kids”, and skip a lot of games, not to mention having them months behind the rest of Europe.
The French and German Amazons are not an option, since i don’t want games in French or German (I wouldn’t even want them in Portuguese, my native tongue. Games, like anything related to computers, should be in English, thankyouverymuch.).
Game.net may be an option. But let’s see if Amazon has really changed their policy (their “we ship to…” page still lists most of Europe as destinations for games) or not.
BTW, Amazon.com (the US one) has long shipped games to the US only. Maybe .co.uk is following suit? If so… I thought one of the great things of the Internet was that you could order products from anywhere; why is Amazon moving backwards? 
Nintendo’s ugly duckling grows up is the name of a recent article in gamesindustry.biz. As a happy DS owner, I loved it.
Excerpt:
When the Nintendo DS was shown to the public for the first time, both vocal fanboys and many media correspondents who should have known better were quick to dismiss it as large, clunky, ugly and most of all, a gimmick. It was viewed by many as a rushed and desperate attempt by Nintendo to claw back some attention from Sony’s PSP; at best, a stopgap Virtual Boy style curiosity that would fill in the gap before the arrival of a “proper” new handheld platform, unofficially dubbed Game Boy Advance 2.
Right up to the launch of the device, analysts were down on its prospects, swayed - as they assumed consumers would be - by the power and shiny design of the PlayStation Portable. Even though journalists and analysts alike hedged their bets to some extent, the tone of their comments on the DS made it clear that they expected the PSP to do to the DS what the PlayStation had done to the N64.
And yet…
Here it is, my 7th blog: A Revolution in Gaming.
It’s about the only announced console that actually has me interested - because I’m too old to be swayed by “even more polygons than the generation before!!!”.
Go on, visit it.
Warning: that site is somewhat green.
Finally, and (warning: cheap shot at the PSP incoming!) since the DS is all about games, unlike certain other “media centers which also play games” I could mention :), what about some games?
Well, I only have one yet, Mario Kart DS, which came in the bundle I bought. And I haven’t played a lot of it yet (it was late yesterday, and now I’m at work).
Still, some first impressions:
On PBS: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked. A wonderful article that all the Hillary Clintons of the world should read.
Apparently, it stinks to high heaven. Who’d have guessed?
Love the reviews.
P.S. - please don’t buy it. Any money that imbecile gets will be used for more censorship and fear-mongering.
P.P.S. - apparently, Jack is now threatening to sue Amazon if they don’t remove the negative reviews! 
RSS feed
Recent Comments