Nightly News Roundup: 01.25.2012

Kid Icarus stand landing in the UK too

UK 3DS owners, rejoice. If you thought you would miss out on getting that stand with Kid Icarus: Uprising this March, then your prayers have been answered. It will be free with every copy of the game.

First revealed earlier this month (and already confirmed for Japan and the US), the stand will allow players to rest their 3DS on its flat surface, making it easier (allegedly) to control the game’s frantic flying sections.

Source: Eurogamer

New battery to extend life of 3DS

Tired of your 3DS’s short battery life? Brave enough to perform some DIY surgery on it? Then Japan Trust Technology has just the thing for you. Released today in Japan, their new battery device will give your 3DS an extra 5800 mAh (or 4.4 times the system’s standard battery life), meaning you’ll get over 10 hours of play time.

There are some downsides, however, as JTT’s battery requires you to take out your original 3DS battery. This will make your 3DS both heavier and 9mm thicker, but at least they’ve made them in lots of different colours to match your current model. Available in two colour sets, the white, red and pink set will set you back ¥9980 (around $129), and the blue and black set will cost ¥9480 ($123).

Source: Andriasang

Xbox 720 rumoured to be only 20% better than Wii U

IGN have stated that “sources close to the project” have revealed that the next Xbox will launch in late October or early November 2013 with a processor “akin” to the AMD Radeon HD 6670.

The 6000 series of processor chips was introduced last year, and the Radeon HD 6670 currently offers support for DirectX11, multidisplay output and 1080p HD output. “In real terms”, IGN wrote, this will mean that the Xbox 720’s raw graphics processing power will be around six times that of the Xbox 360, and will yield 20% greater performance than Nintendo’s forthcoming Wii U.

Does this mean that Wii U will weather the transition to the next console cycle much better than previously expected? It remains to be seen what potential specifications PlayStation 4 will boast, but as Digital Foundry editor Richard Leadbetter has said in response to the rumour,

“If the GPU story is true, it suggests that Microsoft is placing price-point ahead of performance. By PC standards, the Radeon HD 6670 is an unremarkable, entry-level enthusiast product aimed more towards the home cinema PC audience. It struggles to run Battlefield 3 at 20 frames-per-second on high settings at 1080p, and could maybe hit 30FPS in Crysis 2 at the same resolution.”

“In a closed box environment with custom modifications and a dedicated development platform to support it,” he continued, “the chip could achieve much greater things (360 dev kits initially shipped with unremarkable X800 graphics cards, before getting X1800/X1900 upgrades). But it would be a curious choice for a platform holder looking to sustain another lengthy console lifecycle.”

Source: IGN