New developer permissions roll out on Facebook

Facebook announced Wednesday that it's beginning to institute a new interface that will pop up when users connect their Facebook accounts to third-party services--one which the social-networking company says will bring more "transparency" (yes, that word again) to how much information its nearly 500 million users are sharing across the Web.

Consequently, when a third-party application that connects to Facebook asks a user for permission to do so, it has to stipulate exactly what parts of a user profile it'll be accessing: photos, friend list data, basic public information, and so forth. This is something that the company initially announced last year following criticism on behalf of privacy officials in Canada and expanded upon at its F8 developer conference this spring in San Francisco.

"In order for these applications and websites to provide social and customized experiences, they need to know a little bit about you," a post on the Facebook blog by chief technology officer Bret Taylor read. "We understand, however, that it's important you also have control over what you're sharing. With this new authorization process, when you log into an application with your Facebook account, the application will only be able to access the public parts of your profile by default. To access the private parts of your profile, the application has to explicitly ask for your permission."

The flip side to this is that also at F8, Facebook made more of a user's profile public by default, igniting harsh words from the press and privacy advocates who painted the social network as repeatedly toying with users' privacy settings so that they had ultimately morphed into something far different from what they agreed to in the first place.

In tandem, Facebook also announced that third-party services are no longer subject to a policy in which third parties connecting to its servers could only store user data for 24 hours, something which the social network said will speed up and streamline applications as well as make the whole experience easier for users and developers alike. But privacy advocates took issue with this, too.

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Hands On: NIntendo 3DS Demos, From star Fox to Zelda

Good Morning. hope everyone had a great fathers day weekend. I'm extremely sunburned but I'm waiting for it to turn in to some nice color. lol we'll see how long that can take. anyways enjoy this article found it on google news and its a little longer then usual.


LOS ANGELES — Although it won’t hit stores for some time, the stunning Nintendo 3DS already boasts a healthy software lineup that will take advantage of the groundbreaking device’s capabilities.

Games and proof-of-concept demos on display at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week showed off the massive potential of the upcoming 3-D handheld gaming system.

In the hands of the right developers, the device’s promising 3-D camera and motion controls can combine to form a whole range of unique experiences.

Nintendo’s massive E3 display here housed dozens of new demos, and Wired.com conducted a whirlwind tour of the area. To keep the huge line of gamers that snaked around the company’s booth moving quickly through, all the demos were very short or non-interactive.

Read first impressions of Nintendo 3DS games like Paper Mario, Star Fox and a remake of the classic Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time below.

Kingdom Hearts 3D
Square Enix is about to launch a new game in its Disney crossover Kingdom Hearts series on the PSP, and announced another game for the current Nintendo DS platform at E3. But that’s not enough, apparently, and a separate Kingdom Hearts is on the way for 3DS.

A brief, unplayable demo shown at the Nintendo booth featured scenes we’ve seen in earlier games, which would seem to indicate this is a remake of an existing title. But series director Tetsuya Nomura told Siliconera at E3 that it’ll be a new Kingdom Hearts title, “probably” developed by the PSP team.

That “probably” would be your indication that this is vaporware, if it doesn’t even have a proper development team yet. Don’t hold your breath!


The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D
This game, a remake of the beloved 1998 Nintendo 64 adventure, was not on the E3 show floor. Instead, Nintendo showed it at a private roundtable event Tuesday evening.

Ocarina of Time is considered by many to be the finest Zelda ever, and producer Eiji Aonuma assured the crowd that the infamous Water Temple — the most aggravating part of the original — will be less frustrating in this remake.

The non-interactive demo of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D showed Link riding his horse, Epona, over Hyrule Field. (Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto said he wanted to remake this game on 3DS because he thought the wide-open plains of Hyrule would look beautiful in three dimensions.)

Paper Mario
The Paper Mario series of friendly, accessible role-playing games fits the 3DS perfectly, since the paper-thin cutout graphic style can easily be rendered with crisp depth definitions, like a shoebox diorama.

The non-interactive demo of the 3DS version at E3 showed a variety of scenes, battles and exploration, illustrating that the game is quite far along in development. The console versions have been uniformly excellent, so we’ve got high hopes for this one.

Star Fox 64 3D
Hey, a game that was actually playable! The first Star Fox was, for millions of gamers, the first polygonal 3-D game they’d ever experienced. It’s fitting, then, that a remake of Star Fox 64 would be one of the first 3DS titles.

Star Fox 64 3D fits the 3DS like a glove. The device’s analog stick is great for controlling your ship. Most of the game’s levels involve flying straight ahead at automatic speed, making Star Fox 64 3D well-suited for portable gameplay. And since the graphic display is all about objects rushing from the background into the foreground, it’ll be a great way for early adopters to show off the system’s capabilities.

Pilotwings Resort
Here’s an odd smash-up of franchises. Pilotwings, a fun flight-sim series last heard from as a Nintendo 64 launch title in 1996, has been crossed with Wii Sports Resort.

Pilotwings Resort takes place on Wii Sports Resort’s tropical island, and uses Mii characters. Two styles of flight gameplay were shown at the E3 booth: Piloting an airplane through a series of rings, and flying a jetpack through the city while bursting giant balloons. This should be fun: Much like Star Fox, the gameplay lends itself well to the 3DS hardware.

Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle
Note that Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle is not the next game coming to the United States in the acclaimed puzzle series. That would be Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, which will be released for the current DS this September. No, Mask of Miracle is the fifth game in the series — it’ll be a while before we’re playing it on these shores.

Mask of Miracle will be published by the new U.S. office of its creator, Level-5, rather than by Nintendo. That’s why it showed up at E3 with this less-than-perfect translation, I’m guessing. The poorly constructed prose seen in this screengrab is one of the better passages in the demo. I hope Level-5 can polish the writing as well as Nintendo has in previous imports.

After four Layton games, fatigue is starting to set in, which is why I’m glad the series is moving to 3DS. Hopefully the upgraded graphics and functionality of the system will help the game design evolve. We got a very brief hands-on glimpse of how that might happen: Unlike previous games, you don’t click directly on the screen — you drag the stylus around the touchscreen, but the cursor appears on the top screen. As the magnifying-glass cursor is dragged around, the perspective on the 3-D town screen changes.

The one puzzle that was shown illustrated how the touchscreen and 3-D screen will be used together. In the demo, you had to assemble a robot on the lower screen, then watch the parts come together in 3-D on the top screen. (It wasn’t a very good puzzle.)

DJ Hero 3D
Activision’s abstract DJ Hero series makes a lot more sense for portable platforms than Guitar Hero, with its goofy guitar and drum controllers.

In DJ Hero 3D, you just tap and scratch the touchscreen, which works well to mimic the feel of scratching on a turntable.

That said, there wasn’t much going on here that wouldn’t work on the current DS.

Various Tech Demos
In addition to the officially announced games in Nintendo’s E3 booth, the company showed a variety of tech demos. These could be expanded into full game concepts, released as downloadable 3DSWare games or shelved forever. I’m assuming we’ll see a few of them, as they were some of the more interesting projects on the floor.

The best ones employed augmented reality, using the 3DS’ outward-facing 3-D camera to capture the real world around you and transform it into a backdrop for the game you’re playing. One game took a picture of your face, then turned you into a 3-D enemy character. Faces flew all around, and you had to move the 3DS around to aim and shoot at them. Another game used a paper card laid on a table, then made a monster appear on top of it on the 3DS’ camera image.

Other proof-of-concept demos showed how stereoscopy could affect gameplay. A demo called 3D Jumper showed how depth perception made a simple platforming game much easier to play. 3D Challenge asked players to identify which of two images was 3-D and which was flat.

It was clear Nintendo was attempting to keep the 3DS demos as brief as possible, either by whittling them down to minute-long gameplay experiences or by making them non-interactive. The point was to wow gamers with the technology while providing as few details as possible about the state of the product.

Missions accomplished. Now let’s see the full games.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/06/nintendo-3ds-hands-on/#ixzz0rVwiY1uw

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Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 11 offers video game realism at its best

It used to be that Tiger Woods and John Madden perennially boasted some of the highest Q scores, which measure the brand familiarity and likeability of athletes and sports personalities. Madden, despite retiring from sportscasting last year at age 73, is still running a close second behind Michael Jordan.

Woods, meanwhile, has plummeted from being the most likeable athlete in America to a mediocre 25th on the list -- surpassed this year by winter Olympians and retired golfers Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. His negative perception, according to Marketing Evaluations, Inc., has increased about 160 percent in the past year.

Indeed, it would seem that Woods and Madden have little in common at this point, but each has an EA Sports video game title that bears his namesake. And these aren't just any video game titles. The Tiger Woods PGA TOUR franchise and the Madden NFL franchise are the most successful of all time in their respective sports. Last year, Tiger's title surpassed $500 million in sales since the first edition -- Tiger Woods '99 -- was released.

Of course, Woods' free fall in popularity is directly attributed to the highly publicized sex scandal that began with a car wreck on Thanksgiving Day 2009 and continues with never-ending tabloid speculation about his likely forthcoming divorce. The change in public perception has far less to do with the fact that he missed the cut at Quail Hollow, pulled out of The Players Championship with an injury and finished in the middle of the pack at the Memorial in his latest outings.

When Madden announced his retirement, EA Sports said it had no intention of changing the name of the game that has given so many would-be athletes hours of joy and ensuing tendonitis. And when it was revealed that Tiger had cheated on his wife again and again ... and again and again ... (et al.), EA said it would stick with him for Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 11, which hit the shelves last week. EA made this announcement at a time when AT&T, Gatorade and Accenture had all dumped Woods as spokesman.

Sure, EA added wunderkind Rory McIlroy to this year's cover, but we all know it's still Tiger's game. McIlroy, who thrilled golf fans in May when he celebrated his 21st birthday with a record-setting win at Quail Hollow, leads a pack of exciting newcomers to the Tour who look to challenge Woods in his bid to return to dominance. It's not likely he'll take over as the face of the franchise, but it sets a new precedent -- perhaps EA's recognition that Tiger is no longer the only exciting name on Tour. It also opens the door for other young stars to become more involved in the marketing of the game's future.

In terms of gameplay, PGA TOUR 11 is, hands down, the most innovative and intricately detailed golf game ever made -- just as Madden fits that bill for football titles. And like the Madden franchise, each successive year has seen either vast improvements or minor tweaks, all to correspond with emerging gaming technology.

At this point, EA could rest on its laurels, say, "We have a virtual monopoly on golf games and we no longer need to try." Instead, they strive each year to bolster the gameplay, make the courses more realistic and provide exactly the types of interactive online features gamers crave.

It'll be interesting to see how Tiger's misadventures will affect the sales of PGA TOUR 11. Those who purchased the game because of the name recognition may shy away, but those who play it because it's an unrivaled golf gaming experience will be back no matter what face they smack on the front cover.

EA's PGA video game franchise will survive and continue to thrive just as the Madden titles will continue to shatter sales records for the simple reason that EA is the hands-down leader in video game realism. This game doesn't need Tiger Woods to keep you engaged or give you a reasonable facsimile of what it's like to tee off on the seventh hole at Pebble Beach.

It's more than possible that Tiger Woods PGA TOUR will one day be called something else and another Tour pro will be doing the bulk of the promoting. But as long as improvements keep coming to this already-strong title, that shouldn't be a difficult job.

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GameStop shares climb after upgrade

(AP) – 5 days ago

NEW YORK — Shares of GameStop Corp. climbed Thursday after a Janney Capital Markets analyst upgraded the world's largest video game retailer saying its launch of new loyalty programs could improve its position in the evolving games landscape.

THE SPARK: In a rare step for brick-and-mortar retailers, GameStop is making a push into selling digitally downloadable video game content in its stores. The company said after its earnings announcement last week it will start selling the downloads in a group of test stores starting at the end of May. The company is also launching a loyalty program

THE BIG PICTURE: Downloads of video game content are an increasingly important revenue source for game companies because they help extend the life of and revenue from big-budget packaged titles.

THE ANALYSIS: GameStop stands to benefit from these programs, and the looming launch of new gaming technologies, such as new motion controllers from Sony and Microsoft and 3D gaming, should also boost results, according to Janney analyst Tony Wible. He upgraded GameStop to "Buy" from "Neutral."

SHARE ACTION: Shares rose $1.23, or 5.7 percent, to $22.89 in afternoon trading. The stock has traded in the 52-week range of $17.12 and $28.62.

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