Music, maps, missiles and milf on your Wii

MORE GAMES NEWS from the INQ, focusing on the important and the plain odd.

Wii
The FineTune service has been adapted specifically for the Wii and enables the playback of streaming music via the downloadable Opera browser. This appears to be more useful than the Wiimote controlled USB missile launcher.

Another Wii-related website comes from MapWii which couples Wii friend codes with Google maps, allowing you to contact/stalk Wii users in your local vicinity.

Not all site adaptions for the Wii are quite so innocent. Arstechnica had a reader contact the site about an 'adult' site having adapted the site's interface for Wii users. It seems the Wii really is for the whole family.

We can imagine Nintendo is as fond as adult-web-site compatibility as it is of the recently mocked up PSPboy viewable at Gizmodo here.

It seems like it's one disaster after another for Wii owners - and this one was caught on tape.

PS3
After our original report suggesting that PS2 games running on PS3 under emulation were extremely jaggy, users at PS3fanboy have discussed several ways of improving the graphical quality of the emulated games. Unfortunately it's dependent on what connectivity your TV has.

As you may know, Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection is now available in the PS3 store for download, but only to those users who live in Hong Kong and Japan. Fortunately for those not living in the far east, Gamersreports has found a way around the problem, and you US PS3 owners can now download your very own copy.

By the way, the PS3 is now available in red and the previously reported white, albeit at a premium.

If blue is more your-bag, and you're annoyed at the inconsistency between the blue LEDs on the PS3 and the red on the Sixaxis pads, you can follow this tutorial at PS3scene and replace the joypad lights with some pretty blue versions.

Xbox 360
Joystiq reports on the new Xbox Live Arcade game based on Worms. Should be a fun little game to pick up once and a while, especially in multiplayer.

Variety has an article which suggests that several 'Hollywood insiders' have reacted with surprise at the success of Xbox Live Marketplace - the SD & HD TV show/movie download service running on the 360 in the US.

Xbox-Scene has a video of an alleged hack running on the 360.

It's widely reported that during the German 23C3 Hacker Congress an anonymous presenter came on stage during the 'open mic' session and was recorded demonstrating the hack which shows a Mac OS and Linux-Tux logo after the normal boot of the carried-on 360, which had some undisclosed circuitry attached (and some kind of Apple laptop).

It seems odd to show the Mac OS logo, and though the OS originally operated on PowerPC hardware which isn't too dissimilar to the 360 CPU, we'd be surprised if a hacker has had time to hack the 360 and manage a complete port of the old Apple operating system to a completely new device.

It's speculated that this could easily just be some kind of modified shader-hack that has already been found and abused in the unsigned vector shaders in the King Kong demo on the leaked Xbox 360 kiosk disk (which the machine seemed to be running). Alternatively the hacker could of somehow exploited the shaders to allow the running of unsigned code. Nothing has been confirmed yet, and it will be interesting to see how this one runs.

Arstechnica has a great interview with Aaron Greenberg, the Group Marketing Manager for Xbox Live, and Scott Henson, product unit manager for Microsoft's game technology group who arrange a comparison on PS3/Xbox 360 graphics. They also delve into the internal hardware scaler used within the console, dubbed 'Ana', which is apparently Microsoft's secret weapon in the war against Sony's PS3 (which reportedly has no hardware scaler).

Don't forget our news on the HDMI-equipped Xbox 360 v2 (which also talks about the 'Ana' scaler), which you can read here. µ

See also
Xbox 360 v2 rumours surface
Wii, HD-DVD and PSP hacks
Wii shipment problems, PS3 delayed again
Wii reigns in Blighty