QuickJump QuickPeek 53: Of Dark AleX’s welcome back party, black holes in Switzerland, and when the Weekend Warriors take the stage
It’s the first week for QuickJump QuickPeek’s second year! Some things never change, while others… well, they get quite a pretty make-over too. Debuting this week are our blog-specific Weekend Warriors, marching all over the QJ.NET blog with their very own in-depth recaps for a full seven days’ worth of industry news. Take a gander… some of you may have only seen your preferred blog’s Warrior, but now, it might pay to see how everything went for everyone else in the community.
Finally, we’re on Year 2! QuickJump QuickPeek has indeed been around for fifty-two weeks (which is … less than nine thousaaaaand!) now, and we’re giving each of our blogs the chance to shine in their very own Weekend Warrior post.
As you can see below, QuickPeek’s that much more quicker of a peek, as its name should suggest. What with snowballing down the hill of long updates in previous QuickPeek editions, we’re reducing things in bite-sized format for all of you guys. If you want a more in-depth look at a certain blog’s week in recap, you can click on the links provided.
We see great strides in custom firmware development this week. With the release of the official PSP FW 4.0 (and its subsequent 4.01 update) comes CFW 4.01 M33 from Dark AleX and the rest of Team M33!
Square Enix has also revealed quite a lot of details about Dissidia: Final Fantasy. There’s nothing much new on the side of full character rosters, but speculation in the comments section sure do run deep.
Link: The PSP Weekend Warrior: the FW-CFW update tango, Dissidia mania, and PlayStation Store
Solid Snake‘s power level? It’s over nine thousaaand! Even a couple of weeks after its release, Hideo Kojima‘s PS3-exclusive is still making waves – selling by the millions, no less.
And though our PS3 blog might seem like it’s transformed into an MGS4 blog, we still have a couple of cool updates. Aside from more details on games like LittleBigPlanet and Call of Duty 5, news from Sony’s corporate table has its ups and downs – respectively: a) the announcement of the new 65nm RSX Graphics Chip, and b) Sony’s loss of US$3 billion since the PS3’s launch. But what’s this about CliffyB’s statement?
CliffyB is one of today’s greatest minds in the video game industry. With Unreal Tournament and Gears of War (not to mention Jazz Jackrabbit from ages past) on his portfolio, he’s got quite the two cents on MGS4.
Despite Bill Gates stepping down from his chairman position in Microsoft this week, things are still looking up. We’ve also got some coverage on the release of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD‘s beta (some freezing problems notwithstanding), and over on XBL, there’s a handful of content to download: a GTA4 patch, a map for Frontlines, and two XBLA titles.
Link: The Xbox 360 Weekend Warrior: Say ‘Bye-bye!’ to Bill, and other flights of fancy
This week on the Wii scene, we get two Warriors waving the flag for the great waggler. On top of finding more details (and screens, mind you!) for Mario Super Sluggers and Wario Land, there’s already talk of E3 line-ups.
Other than Nintendo games, third-party titles like CoD5 (yes! we’re getting it this time too!) and Castlevania: Judgment are shaping up pretty well. Not to mention the official confirmation of Mega Man 9 for the WiiWare service!
With the Wii homebrew scene boom like no other, we decided to create a spin-off Weekend Warrior solely for the whole slew of Wiibrew updates we’ve gotten this week, which include: a new Twilight Hack that’s compatible with Wii Menu Update v3.3, some homebrew media applications (the GeeXboX is a sure fire hit!), as well as games and emulators to boot.
Link: The Wii Weekend Warrior: the rest of the year’s going to be busy
Link: The Wiibrew Weekend Warrior: the dawn of a new Twilight Hack
The Nintendo DS scene has been quiet of late – everyone’s probably busy with Space Invaders Extreme or Final Fantasy Tactics A2. That hasn’t stopped homebrew devs from releasing a ton of projects though.
Link: The DS Weekend Warrior: games, games, and more games
What’s new for the PC? In case you’ve been living in the deepest, darkest crevices of Hades, know you this: Blizzard has finally unveiled Diablo 3! From new NVIDIA and Radeon cards to patches, we got you covered!
Link: The PC Weekend Warrior: shooting for 2 billion in 2014, weighing copy protection
Lots of updates on the MMORPG blog, and as with the Wii blog, we decided to create spin-off Warriors for World of Warcraft and Age of Conan. We’re geeks like that too – for sure you’ve noticed.
SOE’s E3 line-up has finally been published, but more importantly, we get some details on their upcoming DC Universe MMORPG. Sweet! You can finally get to live your dream life of wearing undies on the outside.
Meanwhile, Age of Conan‘s seen quite a(nother) dose of patches – twice this week – and we’ve got some coverage on the undocumented changes both of them introduce. But in between regular updates for WoW, we hear of where the MMORPG found its roots: a free-to-play model!
Link: The MMORPG Weekend Warrior: DC MMORPG, AoC patches, WoW Free-to-Play, and item giveaways
Link: The Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Weekend Warrior: patches galore and more
Our Science blog has been running crazy with a big boom in comments lately – nice intellectual humor on the side too! This week, we hear more about black holes and veggies and chocolate (and Switzerland too)!
Link: The Science Weekend Warrior: black holes and Martian asparagus
What’s this? A Trojan… for the Mac?! What’s the world coming to? But that’s not the only thing spotted this week: on the brighter side of things, we also got to see Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard running in the wild!
Link: The Apple Weekend Warrior: Snow Leopards and Trojan malware for everyone
It’s over nine thousaaaaannnnddd!
And that’s it for the first week of our band of Weekend Warriors. QuickPeek sure looks different now, but wait!, we can’t just leave it at that, can we? We all know that QuickPeek can’t be QuickPeek without a final closing remark from our Comment of the Week!
While the individual Weekend Warriors may or may not have their own blog-specific Comment of the Week, that doesn’t mean QuickPeek can’t have its own, right?
Pretty tough week on our hands – lots of good comments here and there, probably totally over nine thousand. For one, that CliffyB post was quite a field day for all of us, wasn’t it? And every now and then, a science article would explode with so much feedback from you guys.
But now, we turn our eyes to Nathanias who has quite a novel suggestion for Dark AleX’s next custom firmware update. Well, what with so many features being incorporated in almost every CFW release, maybe there is room for some certain… changes?
We know our search engine ain’t all that great… (not to mention the messy character/symbol transformation in our comments system too)… but we’re sure some of you guys might get a kick out of it either way.
Link: Dark AleX releases PSP CFW 4.01 M33; 1.50 kernel add-on to follow