Odds And Ends: Tuesday News Roundup

An entry on the EB World website has lent credence to recent reports that Nintendo is planning a 1019-block, 64MB memory card to accommodate increasingly vast tracts of save data. Players of a lot of recent sports titles are actually been driven to higher capacity third-party cards these days, and Nintendo seems to be reacting to this with the Memory Card 1019, which is reportedly due out on June 8th in the US, priced $29.99. Nintendo's European subsidiary has yet to offer any indication of its plans, but it's a safe bet that the 1019-block monster won't be far off, and you can of course make use of American memory cards on European consoles and vice versa, so it shouldn't be too big a problem.

Following Sony's rather exciting PSP presentation at the Game Developers Conference last week, attention is drifting back towards its range of current products, one of which is EyeToy. Following its release in Europe in the middle of 2003, EyeToy has since gone on to excite the rest of the world (with EyeToy: Groove due out in the US right about now), so it wasn't too surprising to see new examples of the webcam's capabilities paraded in front of the industry masses in San Jose. Amongst the new features on display were a head-tracking technique that let the player lean round the corners of buildings, a magic wand application, and a hoverboard game that involves grinding along a course of rails. The latter can be seen in a video here, and we'd be very surprised if Sony's next EyeToy products (perhaps including the next "Play" package of mini-games) weren't doing the rounds at E3 in a couple of months' time.

Fans of being sent CDs in the post, and then hanging off the phone trying to find out how to return them, will be pleased to hear that the Britannia mail order club could soon be branching into games. "It might take some time to set up a video games club, but if things go well then why not?" a spokesperson told MCV last week, while reflecting on a successful trail run carried out last September by Britannia and THE Multimedia. From this week, a 16-page catalogue will be sent out to the 750,000 people on Britannia's database, and will reportedly cover all formats, as well as various peripherals and even mobile phone games. Regal.

Elsewhere, a couple of games have gone gold this week. Well, more will have done, but these ones landed in our inboxes, which ought to count for something. The first is Painkiller, a PC first-person shooter set along the road to hell, and the second is Fight Night 2004, a PS2/Xbox boxing title presumably set on the path to the top end of the charts, given that it's an EA title. Speaking of EA and boxing, the increasingly vast publisher presumably wouldn't want us to point out its alleged foul play in the boxing ring when mentioning Fight Night 2004, so we'll try to avoid doing that. Any more, that is. Obviously we did just then.