Playstation Portable

This year's Austin Game Developers Conference is adding a nice twist to their event. It's not just gonna be about games, it's also gonna be about charity.

Yep, gamers who'd like to participate in the Austin GDC will not only be having fun by testing their skills as gamers, but will also contribute to a good cause by making a charitable donation. How? Simple. There's a US 20 entry fee for the Level Up Charity Games Competition, and everything will be donated to the ESA Foundation.

Marc Mencher, CEO of competition sponsor GameRecruiter, says this about their charitable deed:

We have a long-standing commitment to supporting the educational needs of minority and female students who are interested in being part of the video game industry. By providing this support to the ESA Foundation's Scholarship Program, we hope to allow deserving individuals to further their education and expand workplace diversity within our industry.

Scheduled for the September 17 competition feature titles such as:

• Rock Band 2
• Madden 08
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• I-Play Bowling

The Austin Game Developers Conference will be running from September 15 to 17 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Austin, Texas.

GameStop may not be getting its share of PlayStation Network cards until next year, but PS3 owners in North America will be able to get the cards from three more retail outlets next month.

According to the official US PlayStation website, three new retail outlets will start carrying PSN cards in September: Blockbuster, 7-Eleven, and Riteaid.

Some reports are also saying that Blockbuster and 7-Eleven stores all over the world will start carrying the cards in September. More good news for PS3 owners who don't have a credit card handy.

The cards are already available at Speedway, Pamida, Meijer, and other locations.

Thanks to PolishPride212 for the tip!

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Related articles:

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• OPM: PSN Cards definitely arriving in North America
  

A couple of minor updates found their way into the latest build of developer Hellcat's Pandora Installer for 3.xx kernels, bumping itself up to Revision 4b. The new version essentially includes support for the updated releases of several other homebrew utilities.

To be more specific, Pandora Installer now makes use of the version 7 of Despertar del Cementerio and version 0.4 of the ELF-Menu. Both these useful homebrew utilities were originally added in Revision 4 of the app.

Just a friendly reminder from the dev: please note that Pandora Installer only works on PlayStation Portables running on custom firmware and not the original PSP firmware. With that said, don't forget to browse through the Readme file before installing anything onto your handheld.

Download: Pandora Installer for 3.xx kernels Revision 4b
Visit: QJ.NET's PSP Development forum

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Related articles:

• Pandora Installer for 3.xx kernels 4a: added support for Despertar del Cementerio v6
• Pandora Installer for 3.xx revision 4

It's been over three and a half years now since the PSP has been released in Japan. And just last month, Sony announced that they've shipped some 10 million units of PSP to Japan retail. Now coming from Famitsu, actual sales totalled from the period of December 12, 2004 to August 24, 2008 have been tallied.

As of last counting, they've gotten 10,005,546 PSP units sold, to be exact. That's a lot of PSPs!

The numbers are consistent - Media Create reports that the PSP sells anywhere between 40 to 60 thousand units per week in Japan, and with the PSP-3000 announced, there's little doubt that PSP sales would end there either.

As for software, Capcom's dominating the PSP lifetime charts with their Monster Hunter Portable series, with Crisis Core sitting on third place, thus preventing the trilogy from getting a Top 3 sweep.

Meanwhile, Phantasy Star Portable, being the game with the shortest lifetime out of the top five, managed to just sneak into the all-time list - that's definitely saying something, compared to all the other games that have been released out there since the PSP's launch. Check it out:

1. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G (Capcom) - 2,396,642 units since March 27, 2008
   
2. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd (Capcom) - 1,706,387 units since Feb 22, 2007
   
3. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII (Sqaure Enix) - 790,795 units since Sept 13, 2007
   
4. Monster Hunter Portable (Capcom) - 668,964 units since Dec 1, 2005
   
5. Phantasy Star Portable (Sega) - 545,242 units since July 31, 2008

Download: Phantasy Star Portable demo (Japan)

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Related articles:

• Media Create coverage on QJ.NET
  
• NPD, Chart Track, Enterbrain combined global report
• Sony: PSP ships 10 million units in Japan