LOS ANGELES – No Doubt has sued video game maker Activision for putting words in band members’ mouths.

The band on Wednesday sued Activision Publishing Inc. over a feature in the new "Band Hero" game that allows players to control virtual band members and have them sing other artists’ songs.

The lawsuit claims a feature allows players to have lead singer Gwen Stefani perform suggestive lyrics from the Rolling Stones’ hit "Honky Tonk Women." The suit also notes a virtual version of bassist Tony Kanal can be made to sing his band’s hit "Just a Girl," but with Stefani’s voice.

The game, an offshoot of Activision’s popular "Guitar Hero" series, went on sale Tuesday.

The company, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., said in a statement that it engaged in extensive negotiations with No Doubt’s management and have a valid written agreement for their participation in "Band Hero."

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SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – A Motorola Droid smart phone goes on sale Friday, joining the growing ranks of smart phones on the open-source operating system backed by Google.
With Droid, which will work on the Verizon telecom network, Motorola is taking on mobile devide powerhouses such as Apple, Nokia and Research in Motion (RIM).
"People are gravitating to Android phones because they are different and trendy. Droid may be the new ‘in’ phone," said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.
Taiwan-based HTC brought the first Android phone to market late last year.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt recently proclaimed that the smart phone market was on the cusp of an "explosion" of Android devices.
Market tracking firm Gartner agrees, predicting that there will be at least 40 models of Android phones within a year, and that they will be the second place mobile platform by the end of 2012.
Reports surfaced on Thursday that Verizon is poised to add an HTC Android phone to its stable.
"In a few years Android will be the second most popular smart phone running neck-and-neck with Apple," Gartner analyst Van Baker told AFP on Thursday.

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[AP ] – Nintendo is counting on new games to pull its once-dominating Wii out of a sales funk in time for the holiday season. "The Wii is a family-oriented product and has always been strong as a gift purchase," said Hirokazu Hamamura, gaming expert and president of publisher Enterbrain, "and so sales are going to recover in coming months."

Nintendo’s first-half profit plunged as sales  of its hit Wii home console fizzled, forcing the maker of Super Mario and Pokemon games to forecast annual earnings would fall for the first time in six years.

The recent global price cut for the Wii also hurt Nintendo, which Thursday reported a 69.49 billion yen (US$772 million) profit for the April-September period.

That was down 52 percent from 144.83 billion yen ($1.58 billion) a year earlier, and trailed its own May forecast for a 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion) profit. Fiscal first-half sales dropped 34.5 percent to 548.01 billion yen ($6.1 billion).

Kyoto-based Nintendo lowered its forecast for the full fiscal year to a 230 billion yen ($2.51 billion) profit from 300 billion yen ($3.28 billion) — the first time in six years it’s predicting earnings to fall. Nintendo reaped a record 279.1 billion yen ($3.05 billion) profit for the fiscal year ended March.

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The Iconfactory released the fast-paced $2 iPhone game Pickin’ Time on Monday. The game features both single-player and multi-player modes, both of which test your pattern-matching skills and your reflexes.

The premise of Pickin’ Time, which I’ve been beta-testing for more than a month, is extremely simple: You need to spot and tap on a particular vegetable every time you see it on the iPhone’s screen.

Pickin Time’s single-player mode assigns you a particular vegetable and then shows you a succession of screens filled with an assortment of items. Once you pick out your item and tap, a new screen appears, with all the items redistributed across the screen. As the game progresses, the items get smaller and there are more of them. Just to make it harder on your brain, items not only change orientation, but they actually rotate on screen. The background color also changes. The result is a combination fast-twitch experience and a real warm-up for your brain’s visual centers.

The game features two multi-player modes. In the first mode, several players gather around a single iPhone or iPod touch placed on a flat surface within reach of every player. Each player chooses a vegetable icon, and then the game begins to show a sequence of screens, each featuring a single vegetable. The person who chose that icon has to tap it as quickly as possible.

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[Matt Peckham] – Sony’s PSP Go won’t celebrate its one-week birthday until Thursday, but retailers in the UK have already lopped 11 percent off the handheld game system’s price tag. The PSP Go debuted at £224.99, but HMV, GAME, Play.com, and Amazon UK have reduced that to £199.99, according to Gameindustry.biz. In US dollars, that’s a drop from $359 to $319, bearing in mind the exchange rate doesn’t factor relative market value.

Sony also told GI.biz that their first weekend sales of the Go were "in line with expectations," and that the Go sold "as many units as" its older UMD disc-inclusive PSP-3000. But even Sony seems to realize it’s priced the Go high. In an earlier GI.biz story, UK-based PSP product manager Claire Backhouse admitted "We were very aware of concerns when we went into it and I actually expected a lot more negative responses than we actually got."

The four retailers mentioned above comprise the bulk of retail game sales in the UK. It makes you wonder about the margins on the Go, and whether part of the system’s steep MSRP had to do with establishing higher retail margins–margins guys like Amazon and GAME are opting to live without in trade for higher sales.

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Blackberry users are getting a new digital music store that’s often cheaper than iTunes, Amazon, and basically every other competitor in the U.S. How do they do it?

United Kingdom-based 7Digital, which was founded five years ago, tells Macworld UK that the majority of its tracks cost 77 cents, and most albums are priced at $7.77 — an obvious play on the company’s name. If you don’t have a Blackberry, you can still access the store on the Web, at us.7digital.com. Browsing the Web store, I see plenty of tracks priced at 77 cents. But, I also many tracks cost 99 cents, and albums that cost $9.99, but often times these are songs that cost $1.29 a piece on iTunes.

The store itself isn’t too shabby. 7Digital says it has 7 million DRM-free MP3s available, compared to iTunes’ 10 million as of January. At 320 Kbps, the MP3s are of higher quality than other stores, and there’s a neat feature for Blackberry users: Download a song over a 3G or slower connection, and the file quality will be lower, but it will be automatically replaced with a 320 Kbps download when you reach a Wi-Fi hotspot.

There’s got to be a catch, right? I mean, after The Great iTunes Price Hike of 2009, in which the cost of many popular iTunes tracks was raised from 99 cents to $1.29, the competition followed suit. Lala, which raised its prices alongside Rhapsody, Amazon and Wal-Mart, chalked the price hikes up to "an industry shift."

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iTunes’ top 10 selling singles and albums of the week ending Sept. 21, 2009:

Singles:

1. "Party In the U.S.A.," Miley Cyrus

2. "Whatcha Say," Jason DeRulo

3. "Fireflies," Owl City

4. "Down," Jay Sean

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(WIRED) — With its upcoming PSPgo, Sony is betting that you like "new and shiny" more than you like "money and savings."

Sony’s new PSPgo is attractive and pleasingly compact, but pricey and not compatible with older games.

That’s not to say that we dislike it. In fact, the PSPgo is attractive, playable and pleasingly compact. The fourth entry in the PlayStation Portable line is considerably more toteable than its predecessors, with a slick form factor that resembles a slider phone.

Measuring in at 5 x 0.6 x 2.7 inches (closed) the PSPgo is about half the size of the original PSP. To access the controls, the bottom section slides forward with with a smooth but firm mechanism that seems sturdy enough to resist clumsy gamer hands.

It’s small but comfortable, even for those of us cursed with oversized paws: It’s just wide enough for the index fingers to curl around the frame, and your thumbs fall into prime button-mashing position without feeling cramped.

The face buttons are slightly thinner and more responsive, and the analog nub is recessed into the console’s casing, resulting in much tighter control than with earlier PSPs.

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There have been many Twitter-clones that have emerged over the past few years. There’s been Koornk, and German clone Duduku. Yahoo rolled out its microblogging service, Yahoo Meme, a few months ago in Portuguese, then Spanish and finally in English a few weeks ago. It looks like there is another clone on the block—Birddi.

The microblogging site is a virtual clone of Twitter. Everything from the blue interface to the to the style of the logo to the actual “Birddi” bird is strikingly similar to Twitter. According to the site, Birddi is “a service for friends, family and coworkers to communicate and stay connected with the exchange of quick messages. People write short updates, often called ‘Berddis’ in 140 characters or less.” Like with Twitter, you can Direct Message other users, post pictures and use hashtags to mark communications. Birddi also features trending topics and search functionality. One big difference: the site features advertisements powered by Google AdSense.

According to this Argentinian news article, (here’s the translated version) Birddi was started by 19-year-old Argentinian developer Martin Lio, who saw the power of Twitter during the 2008 presidential elections and hoped to inspire this communication during Argentinian elections with a Spanish clone. In the report, Lio says he is also planning to launch a Birddi iPhone app.

The site has basically stolen all of Twitter’s lay out, branding and wording, which seems totally sketchy. This must surely infringe upon a patent or copyright.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Legendary rifle maker Remington Arms Company said Friday it has teamed with videogame maker Mastiff to put virtual versions of its guns in a hunting title tailored for Wii consoles.

“Remington Great American Bird Hunt” for play on the popular Nintendo videogame consoles will be released by Mastiff in October.

“I grew up with Remington,” said Mastiff chief executive Bill Swartz, explaining that his father was an avid hunter.

“I still remember as a child when an A on a spelling test earned me what my dad called ‘a boy-sized 22 rifle.’ Naturally, it was a Remington.”

Japanese videogame maker Mastiff publishes a “Deer Drive” hunting game for Wii and will soon add “Shimano Xtreme Fishing” to its list of outdoor action titles for the consoles.

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