News

Nintendo is set to release two new colors for the Gameboy Advance.  The colors are "Pearl Blue" and "Pearl Pink."  It is not know whether the these two colors (which will retail in Japan on September 5th at a price of 12,500 Yen) will be available in North America or Europe as of yet.

Pictures of the two can be seen here.

Source: OmniPlay News

Courtesy PC World...

The XBox's graphics will now be licensed to Microsoft by ATI.  Nvidia, the graphics company that previously worked with the XBox, has backed out, claiming that it needs to cut business costs.  Rumors have also said that Microsoft was looking for another graphics company in the first place.  Also, according to the article, it doesn't sound like Nvidia could have been very pleased with Microsoft, since "Nvidia was also left with a sizable amount of unusable inventory after Microsoft changed the security settings for the XBox, forcing Nvidia to absorb that cost."

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From the looks of things, it doesn't sound like this was a partnership made to last.  Both companies got a little greedy, and now it's biting both of them in the butts.  They couldn't agree on prices and had to have mediators come in to solve the problems with them.  Hopefully (for Microsoft), the partnership with ATI will be much more successful.

Unfortunately for Nvidia, this brings them out of the gaming market almost completely, and for ATI, it means they're now dealing with both Nintendo AND Microsoft.  ATI stock is bound to jump after this.

We have two new Final Fantasy VI rumours today, one from J. Wilson and another from an anonymous source (who I think might be a member of the forums, I can't recall).

Mr. Wilson discusses the Lord of the Dragons, Tiamat, and its relation to Final Fantasy VI. Our anonymous friend, meanwhile, knows where you can find Gestahl in the WoR.

Read those rumours and all of our other FF6 tall tales in the Final Fantasy VI rumour mill.

We've lost a couple of affiliates lately - one appears to be having severe trouble with their site, the other has simply vanished.

However, we do have a new affiliate - Final Flash. It's not the biggest FF site ever, but it's run by nice people and it's a very, very unique site. The staff enjoys it very much, and we hope you do too!

Thanks!

RPGamer has ten new screenshots of Squenix's upcoming title for Nintendo's GameCube.  Hopefully these will help hold over gamers until the game is finally released.  

Not much new information at the moment, but check out all of the CoN's previous news updates at our News forum.

Source: RPGamer

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The screen shots definitely look nice.  I still think the artistic style they are going with is a little different though.

Courtesy Herald Sun... (Ooh, a new sort of source for once.)

The title of this article, Game Over, is appropriate.  Playstation consoles can no longer be fixed to run games made to run on different models (that is, to say, they can no longer be modded).  Sony sells games in three distinct regions, and they are not supporting the modding of playstation consoles because of the evident threat of piracy.  This is an interesting and kind of unexpected decision by Sony, when the threat of emulation seems to be much greater than modded games.

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I don't own a modded playstation or know anyone that does, so this doesn't affect me.  However, as Tiddles kindly pointed out to me, this "sucks for Australia [because] nobody ever releases games there."  The Australian guy mentioned that their consumers can't use legally imported games anymore.  I don't know how much of a blow to their ecmonomy that is, but that pretty much shuts down imports entirely, except of course when people mod their playstations illegally.