If you've been pretty pissed about NBA 2K9 (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) crashing left and right, you'll need this patch. This long list of tweaks and fixes go cover general features, gameplay, and all the way to online play. Be sure to read up on this so you won't have to regret playing and losing your progress to crashing.

 

Compared to the previous week, most Nintendo Hardware saw an increase in sales for the week ending April 22. The only other system to see an increase in sales is Sony's handheld, the PSP. The number of PSP units sold this week is even higher than the PS3s and the PS2s combined. Ogle the Media Create sales numbers yourself:

• DSL:  172,359  (+39,034)
• Wii: 77,913  (+2,154)
• PSP: 29,459  (+4,609)
• PS2: 11,398  (-1,474)
• PS3: 11,000  (-948)
• Xbox360: 2,307  (-593)
• GBASP: 860  (+206)
• GBM: 449  (-168)
• GC: 266  (+99)
• DS: 81  (-65)
• GBA: 55  (+29)

The bigger high-definition consoles, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, saw a dip in sales this week. PlayStation 2 sales also slowed down a bit.

What's good to see is that the PSP is getting some much needed love. We see Final Fantasy I 20th Anniversary Edition near the top of the Media Create Software charts (at number 5 actually). Perhaps that had something to do with it?

Finally, this week marks one of the biggest selling weeks for the DS lite since it sold past the 200,000 mark sometime last February, but you all know that everyone and their dog owns a DS lite in Japan, so that's like saying that the sky's blue.

---

Please note that these numbers are slightly different from the ones released by VGChartz. These of are obviously from Media Create while the ones Gino D reported on, are from the site he sourced. Different as the numbers may be, the trends they displayed are quite similar. Ninty stuff are on the rise and so is the PSP while the PS3, the Xbox 360, and the PS2 aren't doing so well.

It's 2007 ladies and gentlemen, and for the people in the Land of the Rising Sun, New Year has been a quite a spending spree. As Media-Create noted, the DSL and Wii sales figures constitute for almost 70% of the market sales. As they have conveniently jotted down:

• DSL -  344,878
• Wii - 195,331
• PSP - 118,186
• PS3 - 69,944
• PS2 - 52,037
• Xbox360 - 18,235

As usual, we can see that Nintendo is continuing to ride the waves of success even in its native country, with the DS Lite still maintaining its popularity. So, under the basis of this old belief that the beginning of the year will pretty much signify the trend for the rest of the year, is it possible that 2007 will be Nintendo's year? Or will the PSP or the PS3 bounce back to the top once other PS3 titles are released later this year?

“As Hollywood readies its new and controversial high-definition DVDs, at least one major studio is leaving some of the most advanced parts of the new disc formats on the table in favor of technology that's more than a decade old.

That could mean disappointment for some of the tech industry's biggest names, particularly if other studios follow suit. Companies such as Microsoft and Apple Computer have been betting that their work on advanced video software formats, called "codecs," will help them sell their own products."

It's a little-known but equally intriguing subchapter in the year-long fight between Blu-ray and HD DVD, two incompatible hardware technologies for high-definition DVDs, backed, respectively, by consumer-electronics manufacturers Sony and Toshiba.

Video codecs (a contraction of "coder-decoders") are important because they determine what quality of video can be squeezed into a given amount of digital storage space, or can be sent over a DSL or cable television line. The codec is an essential part of a DVD.

Microsoft surprised many two years ago when it submitted its Windows video technology, called VC-1, to technical standards bodies in hopes of seeing it appear on the new DVDs. Other technology giants hold patents in a rival advanced format called MPEG-4 AVC.

Last week, studio giant Sony Pictures quietly voted for "none of the above," and took a swipe at the new codec formats. The new advanced codecs aren't immediately necessary for discs released in Sony's high-capacity Blu-ray format, Sony Pictures executives said in an interview with CNET News.com, and the studio would instead use the 11-year-old MPEG-2 video codec used on today's DVDs.

"Advanced (formats) don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Don Eklund, Sony Pictures' senior vice president of advanced technology. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2."

None of this alphabet soup of acronyms is likely to mean much to the average consumer. Once the discs come out, it will be a matter of matching a Blu-ray disc with a Blu-ray player, or an HD DVD disc with an HD DVD player. The discs should play as simply as they do today, no matter which underlying video format is being used.”

[Read] (News.com)