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Naruto fans, stop eating that bowl of Ramen and get to your Xbox Live, now.

Ubisoft announced the free download of the Japanese Voices for the Xbox 360 game, Naruto: Rise of a Ninja.

The downloadable voices include:

• Junko Takeuchi - Uzumaki Naruto
• Kazuhiko Inoue - Hatake Kakashi
• Chie Nakamura - Haruno Sakura
• Noriaki Sugiyama - Uchiha Sasuke
• Kujira - Orochimaru
• Akira Ishida - Sabaku no Gaara

To download the voices:

1. Sign-in into Xbox Live (Silver account required)
2. Start the game
3. In the main menu - go to ‘Xbox Live Marketplace’
4. Download Japanese voices package from the Marketplace
5. Go to options - Play Japanese voices - select ‘yes’

It took over 2 years for the Kiev based GSC Game World to pass Microsoft’s rigorous program and become certified to be a Xbox 360 developer and the company is ecstatic.

The CEO of GSC Game World, Sergiy Grygorovych said:

“We are happy to say the big efforts of our company aimed to obtain the official Xbox 360 developer status now ended with success. Obtaining such a status for an independent developer based in ex-USSR means a lot - it took us over 2 years to get. We are very thankful to Microsoft for the assistance and high esteem of our team’s professionalism.

From now on, our old ambition to create multiplatform projects has become a reality. Such a policy is also fully compliant with the current game industry tendencies.

Creating games for PC, we achieved practically everything, and now are prepared to garner the top spots in sales charts and gamers’ recognition in the world of console games too. This said, we will continue paying maximum attention to the PC platform.”

GSC Game World is known for their projects are:

• Cossacks: The Art of War
• Cossacks: Back to War
• American Conquest
• American Conquest: Fight Back
• Alexander (Oliver Stone’s movie tie-in)
• Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars
• Heroes of Annihilated Empires
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadows of Chernobyl

The company’s first success came with Cossacks: European Wars which was released in 2000. I am thinking the company will port over the Cossacks games for PCs to the Xbox 360 with some newer graphics.

From 1995-1997, the company was creating multimedia encyclopedias and edutainment programs. The company began focus on game technology and computer game development since 1997. It has only published PC based games to date.

GSC Game World was found in Kiev, Ukraine in 1995.

Hate to be tangled up in lines when you’re rocking out?

Activision sent out a press release announcing plans for the Guitar Hero III wireless controllers designed by Gibson designs.

I am not sure if Gibson is manufactoring them or giving Activision the rights to the design but players on the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii will be using the exclusive Gibson Guitar’s Les Paul model.

The PS2 gamers will be able to shred on the Gibson’s Kramer guitar.

The ETA for these guitars are early 2008.

Blazing Angels 2 - PS3 demo, originally uploaded by jonjon_01.

The World War II aerial combat game Blazing Angels 2 is now available on the PS3 system.

Having upgraded my PS3 to version 2.0 operating system, I used the PS3’s WiFi to connect to my home network.

Using the PS3 as a internet browser is slow at best but the download for this 1116MB file is downloading about 1MB per 5 seconds.

Ubisoft’s website says the game is released today for the PS3.

For a country that does not like to reflect upon its past, Legend Studios brings Shadows of War to Spain.

The game is based on the 1936-1939 civil war. Spain’s civil war started when Francisco Franco’s right-wing followers made a coup against the Republican government.

Development of the game costed 1.5 million.

Read more on the International Herald Tribune, it is a great article written by Victoria Burnett and you can learn some great historical facts about the war.

To all you wannabe rock stars with dreams of rocking out on Guitar Hero, you might have to worry about getting more songs for the game.

The music group “The Romantics” are suing Activision Inc., for using their music “What I Like About You” in the music game “Guitar Hero”.

The Romantics filed the lawsuit in their hometown of Detroit seeking for unspecified damages. If the lawsuit takes effect, the band’s request for an injunction could take the Guitar Hero game off store shelves until the suit has been cleared.

The issue is not the illegal use of the groups music, which Activision does have permission to use to record a cover version but that the song on Guitar Hero is so similar to their own version.

I can see more lawsuits by bands coming soon, if Activision loses this case. Of course, I do not understand why any musician who has gotten royalty payments to have their song included into such a popular game would want to file any such lawsuit. It brings their music to a whole new audience and possible future sales of their songs…

You can read more from elpasotimes.

If they pull Guitar Hero off store shelves, you can always get Rock Band, which would allow you to play as a whole band.

Ahh, if only Johnny Depp’s character, Captain Jack Sparrow, only knew about Sony’s plans for a treasure hunt…

The game Sony had envisioned was a pager based system, in which you would receive information on your pager and you would then go on a quest to find the location, respond back, and get information to head to another locations until you reach the end.

Read the PDF for the Sony Patent.

The game which some of you might say is similar to Geocaching might find it interesting to note that Sony had applied for the patent back in 1997 and received approval in Aug. 1999.

Wikipedia shows that the creation of the Geacaching game was created on May. 03, 2000.

What’s truly more interesting is the mention of Letterboxing, which used references to landmarks and clues embedded into stories which is 150 years old!

Britain Wii fans visited the UK based Dixons website which recorded more than 10,000 hits in 10 minutes after the website put 600 Nintendo Wii consoles on sale.

The site had more than 1,000 hits per minute!

News from Scotsman.

Ah Hellboy, the demon child that grows up to save the world from evil… What a twist!

Fans of Hellboy will be rewarded with the release of “Hellboy: Science of Evil” on the PSP, PS3, Xbox 360 and even on your mobile phone around June 0f 2008.

The initial date of the release was sometime in 2007, but Krome Studios shows ETA and no dates showing for the release, currently, even thought their trailer shows 2007…

The E3 2007 game trailer looks like it’s for the PSP. YouTube commentors pretty much think the graphics look like its more for the PS2.

It does look pretty bad on YouTube, but I think it’s more due to the compression of the video, either that or its a PSP game trailer. Check out this video from Krome’s webpage link, it’ll take you directly to the quicktime vid.

The PS3 is now sitting prettily next to my Hitachi big screen and its working beautifully.

I got 10 free Blu-ray movies with the PS3:

• Casino Royale
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• House of Flying Daggers
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse
• The Fifth Element
• Ocean’s Thirteen
• Underworld
• Spider-man 3
• XXX

The deal for the Blu-rays were that you had to choose any 10 Blu-ray movies, under $30) and have it present with you when you purchased the PS3.

One thing about the PS3’s capabilities to play Blu-ray and Dvds is that it works as promised; I only wish that the PS3 could do upconverting of DVD movies to HD quality.

Perhaps Sony will add upconverting DVD’s to HD quality in their next software upgrade for the PS3…

Well, here’s the cool thing, the PS3 software version 1.8 and up supports the upconverting of DVD movies. It will also upconvert your PS1 and PS2 games! If you received Motorstorm with your PS3, then you can choose to update your software to 1.8 from the 1.5 which your PS3 probably is.