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With the release of the delicious new PSPs, some of you may be lured in by the slim form factor and the lighter weight. But there are others among you who may have had the deal sweetened by the lure of a much ... darker desire: That seductive, underground siren known in hushed whispers as "homebrew." Though it's supposed to be hush hush, discussion about it has previously been fairly active on Sony's own forums. (We know, we were as surprised as you.)
Now, apparently, the gravy train has ended, with Sony banning mentions of the illicit activity on the forums, writing, "Homebrew applications void the warranty of the PSP®(PlayStation®Portable) system, and an official area to discuss such activities cannot be provided by SCEA." (By the way, primo community relations, guys. Did you hire Major Nelson?) Our friends at PSP Fanboy think Sony's trying to keep the new wave of PSP owners from hearing about homebrew, while we think they're just trying to make it seem all dirty and wrong again. What do you think?
Cult of rapture indeed! Some may have been having small doubts about paying their membership dues up front after some BioShock issues have poked their relatively insignificant heads up over the past few days. Now, after an announcement that all of those problems are either fixed or being worked on by 2K, the cult is really living up to its name.
Fans have probably been the most vocal about the field-of-view issue, which had widescreen players seeing less than those with fullscreen displays. Though 2K said that the choice was an intentional one, they've taken complaints into consideration and are working on a PC patch for the problem. (If you're in a rush, an unofficial hack is available here.) A similar update for 360s is "under investigation." Also an issue was a copy protection measure that limited the number of PCs a copy of the game could be installed on. That number is being upped, and machines will soon be able to be delicensed to free up a key. To help with these and other issues, a new team of support staff is being brought on to assist in the 2K forums.
We told you yesterday about a magical battery that can actually bring a bricked PSP back from the dead. "Surely you jest," you replied, "that is a power wielded by God and maybe Ken Kutaragi." Well, friends, we now have video proof of such necromancy.
After the break, take a look at the Pandora battery in action. Should you not want to watch the entire three-minute Lazarus Process, you can skip ahead to the 2:50 mark and finish from there.
The constant back and forth between PSP hackers and Sony's firmware upgraders may finally be over, with victory going to the hackers. The folks over at N00bz have released Pandora's battery, a downloadable exploit that creates a memory stick and battery combo that can downgrade any PSP back to the extremely hackable version 1.5 firmware. Even better, the hack will fix PSPs that have been "bricked" by previous failed hacks and "will continue to work for all future firmwares," according to the developers.
The exploit is the result of months of behind the scenes work by a team of hackers that figured out how to reset a PSP to Sony's service mode. With hackers no longer needing to concern themselves with how to break new firmware, we can't wait to see what kind of homebrew software the community comes up with for the most powerful portable hardware widely available.
When we first saw the video of a hacked Super Mario World level that could be completed without touching the controller, we figured it was a fluke -- the fevered creation of a singular obsessed mind, never to be duplicated.
We were wrong.
A bit of digging has turned up at least ten more examples of inevitable Mario movement, collected together below. Like the best Rube Goldberg devices, these videos stand as a mesmerizing testament to careful design and meticulous planning. We sit in awe.
If you told us twenty years ago that, by 2007, there would be a pocket-sized device that could make wireless phone calls, take pictures, play music and show movies, we'd probably get a little dewy eyed at the techno-futuristic possibilities. If you told us that device would also be able to replicate the games of hundreds of upright arcade cabinets, we might very well have exploded with anticipation.
So far, the efforts to port the ubiquitous Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator to the iPhone have had pretty limited results -- anything more complex than Pac-Man or Q*Bert reportedly runs into some hefty performance problems. Still, we can't help but imagine the possibilities that will come with some more development time. After all, just look at how far we've come in the past twenty years.
There have historically been few companies more supportive of the modding scene than Valve. Now, in a new interview with ShackNews, two Valve designers are giving advice to what many perceive to be an ailing mod community. John Morello, an animate and designer at the company, insists that the problem stems from modders thinking too big.
"Mod developers are setting the bar higher than people require--a fun game is a fun game," he said. "I honestly don't think the community is setting the higher standards as much as the mod developers themselves." While that may be true, when Morello begins talking about the Team Fortress 2 design crew being comprised almost entirely of former modders, one can't help but wonder if the mod scene might in some way also be suffering from its best and brightest being recruited away. What do you think? Have you downloaded a good mod recently? Have you ever tried to make one yourself?
From the "too good to be true" department comes the "Vast" advanced memory card, capable of providing PlayStation 2 owners with the same functionality found in modified consoles. This means everything from playing imported titles to other nefarious and totally discouraged deeds.
MaxConsole claims to be in contact with the developer of this new memory card that is being prepared "to be launched within the next two weeks." While we have our doubts, it should be noted that an exploit of this nature has popped up before, known as Independence. That exploit, however, was nixed with the Slim line of PlayStation 2's.
Prove us wrong, Vast ... and would you mind doing it before Arcana Heartis released? Thanks!
MAKE magazine has a link to instructions on how you can make this ultra-retro video game quilt. Ever think you'd have a giant Q*bert keeping you warm at night? Now your dreams can come true ... or your nightmares.
Follow along and try your hand at making your own, or try something even more retro and let us know about it. At the very least, you'll have a new bed for the cat to sleep on. Where's the Pong quilt when you need one?
Have you finished the Bioshock demo? On hard mode? Take your experience to an even more surreal plane, and explore the outside of the game world though a glitch. Similar toHalo 3 beta shenanigans when Bungie introduced the Banshees, this video from SPJglitches shows how to slip through a wall, and hop along the outside of a building. To what ends, we're not sure. But wring out every last morsel of Bioshock before the shock of buying a $60 new game.
When we first saw that the Hard difficulty in the BioShock demo was not initially available, we figured it would require a quick playthrough to unlock, a la Ninja Gaiden Sigma. No dice -- beat the demo and the hard mode still sits there behind its grayed-out curtain, taunting you with the implicit judgment that you haven't played enough first-person shooters to handle it.
Fear not -- unlocking that hard mode isn't as hard as you think. Apparently, if you go into your Gamertag profile and set your default difficulty to "hard," the mode will start out highlighted and selectable when you go into the demo. We've included some video of the simple trick after the break for those of you who are a little slow on the uptake.
Not a groundbreaking discovery, by any means, but it is a nice way to squeeze some more fun out of that demo before the street date. That is, assuming you haven't picked up the game already.
Every week, sister-site Wii Fanboy's weekly REVOLUTIONARY feature takes on the exciting task of exploring the possibilities of the Wii. This week, they made up their own Wii Balance Board using nothing more than some tennis balls, some blue, some plastic trays, some foam strips, grip tape, and of course, a Wiimote.
All that's left is to find a PC game to test it out with – snowboarding sim Stoked Rider does the trick nicely – and whip up a script in GlovePIE to convert the Wiimote actions into input. Throw everything together and, voila, you can be balancing like a pro. Now, let's try to play Resident Evil 4 with it ...
Sometimes it feels like hackers do things just to prove that they can rather than for any actual useful purpose. Case in point, Japanese homebrew developer SofiyaCat has set up a minimally-functional DS emulator on a hacked PSP. The compatibility is reportedly spotty and the emulation runs extremely slowly, but you can count on the community to improve these problems in due time.
It might seem pointless to emulate the DS on a system that only has a single, non-touch screen but ... well actually it is pretty pointless. But it is possible, and that's all that matters sometimes.
Each week Dennis McCauley contributes The Political Game, a column on the collision of politics and video games:
Somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is lounging in a cave, chuckling into his goat stew.
It's surely a well-equipped cave, complete with all of the electronic accoutrements one might expect a modern terrorist CEO to have: satellite phone, laptop, plasma TV, GPS. Hell, OBL maybe even has a Wii or a PS3 running on a generator for little Osama.
Here at home, it has been nearly six years since that terrible, gut-wrenching day when World Trade Center towers came crashing down. Six freaking years, and the mightiest military and law enforcement apparatus in the world can't find one sickly, middle-aged guy hiding in a cave.
But they can find American citizens, hiding in plain sight in places like Ohio, Iowa and Hawaii.
You want proof that Cheapy D isn't just a clever name? The lord of Cheap Ass Gamer proves it with this video, demonstrating his personal spin on the red-ring-of-death-repairing towel trick. It's an interesting process to watch if you haven't seen it, vaguely reminiscent of our college days when we would watch, enthralled as our stoner friend Rusty would turn his PlayStation completely upside down so we could all play Tony Hawk.
What makes this such a moving tribute to cheapness is not that Cheapy D will go to these lengths, it's that Cheapy D will go to these lengths every four days or so to avoid buying a new 360. Now that's a man who hates spending money.
When we 
Have you finished the 
Somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is lounging in a cave, chuckling into his goat stew.
