Eric Caoili:

Against strong competition like Nintendo’s 3DS and the flourishing mobile market, PS Vita has sold only 2.2 million units worldwide as of June. While Sony has been hesitant to share monthly sales data for the system in the West, it’s getting trounced in Japan not just by 3DS but by PSP, its seven-year-old predecessor. That’s been the case for the most part since the portable’s launch there last December.

The Vita is my handheld of choice this generation. The screen is beautiful, the hardware feels solid, and it’s capable of much more than the 3DS. Buying Sound Shapes or Retro City Rampage on the handheld and getting the PS3 version along with it is a wonderful, super consumer-friendly innovation. I think Sony made a mistake with the gimmicky back touch panel and the 3G models, but it would be a real shame to see the platform fail for want of new content.

The Verge’s Alexa Ray Correia got a chance to sit down with one of my favorite artists, Yoshitaka Amano, at New York Comic Con this weekend:

“When people look at the 16-bit characters and earlier iterations of these games, we know they don’t look like real, engaging, compelling characters,” Amano said. “But my artwork came with the box and showed this characters in great detail. Even though they play with 16-bit characters, inside their head players see these beautiful characters like the ones I draw.”

The whole interview is a great read.

Oh Capcom, you aren’t even hiding that you are pissing all over a beloved franchise anymore. First this game looked like a weekend project already, then they are just going all fuckwild with the canon and now we learn really, not only can it be done in a single day, but with an auto play included at that.

Look, if you want to piss away all that money to make a Mega Man game, give it to some people who care, and obviously way more than you do at that. Hell, give it to me at Critical Damage. I adore this series like it was my first born.

Tracey Lien at The Verge reports:

Over the weekend EA sent out special download codes as thanks to those who completed a survey, entitling them to one free game download from EA’s online store, Origin. But [a] blunder in the code’s security meant that the code could be used to download as many games as the user wanted, resulting in a Reddit thread where code recipients exploited the error and passed their codes around.

And the pile of shame grows larger…

In theory, this move to the free-to-play model should bring in more players to utilize Sony’s a la carte SingStore service. However, SingStar still requires the use of USB microphones, which may prove to be enough of a hinderance for new players curious to try the game.

Kyle Orland over at ars technica reports that the latest Android offering from Square Enix will not launch on rooted Android devices due to a deliberate check for root that occurs at launch.

Why Square Enix would do this is still a bit of a mystery. As Orland rightly points out, Android piracy is a simple fact of life, whether a device is rooted or not.

A great collection of Pile of Shame confessions from some major players in the games industry. My own Pile might be taken as a sign of mental illness if it were ever to come up in a court of law.

Emily Gera reporting for The Verge:

Stewart now states he wishes he released the title as a paid app, explaining that he “prefer [to] shoot for like a hundred thousand downloads at a few bucks each, instead of praying for 3 million players.”

Mobile gaming’s race to the bottom claims another victim.

Andy Robinson for CVG UK interviews David Wise:

I wasn’t sure which direction to take things in, so I put together a demonstration tape of three different possible styles for the jungle level. I played these to Tim Stamper, who asked me to take the breaks out between the three pieces. That’s the jungle tune.

Fascinating insight on some of Wise’s most famous compositions as well as a short retrospective on his extraordinary career.

Kyle Orland:

This one issue causes a somewhat comical amount of frustration for a small segment of vocal gamers. They fill up comment threads and messages boards with outrage at the injustice of it all. Kotaku commenter TreyTable summed up the level of vitriol nicely when he described his reaction to on-disc DLC, “The best way to fight this trend is to put a company out of business, even Capcom. That’s how one can fight this bullshit.” Another commenter MarkoPolos put it more bluntly, “How about fuck Capcom?” But the most common complaints about on-disc DLC start to break down once you take a closer look at them.

I basically agree with his reasoning, but I think he misses the bigger point – DLC is how publishers have managed to raise game prices without creating a giant backlash. It’s a good thing for everyone. Developers who might otherwise be laid off have the opportunity to justify their continued paycheck. Consumers who don’t want the extra content aren’t forced to pay for it, and continue to pay the same retail prices they’ve been paying for the past three decades. The studios and publishers are able to appeal to a wider portion of the gamer spectrum by providing a way for those who love their game and are willing to pay more to see more of it to send them money, not to mention letting them tap into the used market to some extent. I’m not aware of any data on how DLC has affected the average total price paid by consumers for games this generation, but I suspect the model’s success is reflected in the enormous budgets companies have been investing in development.

Just wanted to say that.

Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade fame is working on a card game with Cryptozoic.

In Thornwatch enemies deal wound cards that get shuffled into your deck and since they cannot be discarded begin to build up in your hand. When a vampire picked a wound card from a player the vampire was healed and the wound card went back to the player. They could also smell blood so I let them teleport to any player who had a wound in their hand. When a player hit a vampire they could choose to either deal damage or strip off one of the vampire’s buff cards. It made for some fun choices and I could not have been happier with the way they worked.

Color me intrigued.

Adam Smith at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

Every development update makes Cube World’s differences from Minecraft more apparent, although it’s not too far removed from what I imagined the adventure mode of Mojang’s game might be – a block-based world of exploration, combat and questing.

It’s nice to see a game not only try to move away from its inspiration’s teat but at the same time not release as a quarter featured paid alpha.

Tracy Lien at Polygon:

While this doesn’t mean that adult games won’t be playable on Windows 8, it does mean that games with adult ratings will not be available from the Windows 8 Marketplace, which could potentially mean that players will miss out on special Windows 8 functionality for certain games.

So it looks like you’ll have to go straight to the publisher for your copy of Singles: Flirt Up Your Life.