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 ’NITROBIKE’ Score: 6 stars (out of 10) Rating: Mature (M) Platform: Nintendo Wii Publisher: Ubisoft Price: $49.99 No More Heroes fromoffers a very stylized – and quite weird – action game experience. “>No More Heroes fromoffers a to a high degree stylized – and quite weird – action game experience.  ’NO MORE HEROES’ Score: 8 stars (out of 10) Rating: Mature (M) Platform: Nintendo Wii Publisher: Ubisoft Price: $49.99
If you’re up for a messy good time offroading in a motocross bike or playing as a bloodthirsty assassin, leading video game publisher Ubisoft has just launched pair new exclusives for the Nintendo Wii.

Created by the developer responsible for the Nintendo 64 classic Excitebike 64,Nitrobike is the first motocross racing game for the Wii that takes advantage of the corbel’s motion-sensing controller and built-in Wi-Fi connectivity.

No More Heroes, on the other hand, is an over-the-top and stylized adventure that lets gamers play similar to a katana-wielding killer, on a mission to be converted into the world’s best assassin.

Here’s a closer look at one and the other Wii exclusive, now available from Ubisoft (www.ubisoft.com) for $49.99 apiece.

‘Nitrobike’

Fans of Nintendo’s 2006 Wii launch title Excite Truck might also enjoy the mayhem of offroad racing in Nitrobike, which lets you race a motorbike encompassing plenty of tracks, but throws in nitro-powered rockets for added fun.

Hold the Wii Remote horizontally and simply tilt left and not crooked or forward and rear to steer your bike. The “+” button activates your nitrous boost to soar by your opponents, but be attentive how and when you use it as you might find yourself without control, and to this degree performing a face-plant into the dirt. While in the air you can perform slick moves, including combos, by pressing other buttons on the controller.

If you grow tired of the 20 levels and dozens of events to partake in, this arcade racing game also supports six simultaneous players over the Internet, but it could be difficult to contribute others inasmuch as of the lack of available riders (at the time of this writing) and the somewhat confusing online lobby screens. That said, once you’re vying for the polish line, the multiplayer racing is fast, smooth and fun.

‘No More Heroes’

With the “cel-shaded” graphical style of Capcom’s Killer 7 and Ubisoft’s own XIII, the gory No More Heroes offers a extremely stylized — and quite weird — action game experience because those who want to assume the role of a smooth assassin bent on being the world’s top professional killer.

Armed by a “beam katana,” that resembles a sword and a Star Wars light saber rolled in one, hero Travis Touchdown is out to carve himself a name in the record books.

Your job is to hack and slash or dropkick your advance to the top by tackling skilled enemies and even tougher-but-silly-looking boss fighters. You also pick up power-ups, earn cash, light upon collectible cards strewn throughout the levels and navigate around this colorful 3-D world on a futuristic motorcycle.

You can also customize your character’s look and weapons and partake in side missions and minigames, including odd diversions such as coconut gathering.

Fans of classic ’80s games will pick up on, and appreciate, the nod to the golden age of interactive entertainment with many audio and visual references to this period.

No More Heroes should appeal to players vale of years 17 years and older in search of a unique game that’s fragmentary, humorous and quite bloody.

Contact Saltzman at gnstech@gns.gannett.com.

San Francisco - AT&T's wireless data networks in the Southeast and Midwest U.S. are down, causing BlackBerry and iPhone users to be without data services.

The EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) services in those regions began having problems around 6:30 a.m. EST this morning, said Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman. Voice calling has not been affected, but people trying to practice wireless data services might have "difficulty," he said.

Several users of a BlackBerry newsgroup have reported being unable to receive data to their handsets. A systems administrator in Kansas reports that BlackBerry devices there are displaying a notice that says "data connection refused."

AT&T is still looking into what exactly caused the failure, but technicians have found a solution to the problem and expect the service to be restored by around 3:30 p.m. EST, Siegel said.

The iPhone runs adhering the EDGE network, so users of the phones, as well as any other mobile device that receives given conditions from either of the networks, will have problems using data services.

In early 2007, Research In Motion implemented a software upgrade that caused its systems to crash, resulting in a BlackBerry service outage that started in the evening and lasted through the night. This time, the enigma appears to be with AT&T's network and not with RIM's infrastructure.

WASHINGTON: A bid on the largest portion of public wireless airwaves, now being auctioned by the U.S. government, reached $4.7 billion Thursday, surpassing a threshold price that would trigger so-called open-access rules that would allow any legal fickle device or software program to use those airwaves.

While bidding was anonymous, analysts speculated that Google and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group, were the likely bidders on that swath, or about one-third of the sum total spectrum being auctioned.

Winners, however, will not be known until the entire auction by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission ends, a process that could take separate more weeks. The auction began Jan. 24.

To retain the open-access conditions on that spectrum, a minimum $4.6 billion bid was required. The commission is selling a spectrum that is being freed as part of the switch to digital television in February 2009. The airwaves are considered especially valuable because the frequencies travel long distances and can easily pass through walls.

More than 214 bidders had qualified for the auction, although only a handful were expected to bid on that section with the open access provision.

Google had lobbied to make open-access conditions part of the spectrum, which the major telecommunications companies have fought. The commission chairman, Kevin Martin, said such a provident measures would enhance high-speed Internet access athwart the unrefined.

Google and Verizon Wireless are the likeliest bidders on this swath, Rebecca Arbogast, each analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, said, adding that it was also possible that AT&T and EchoStar submitted bids.

If Google does not come up the victor, it could still get some of the spoils. Open-access provisions do righteous that: open up access for devices and applications. And that, Arbogast said, could mean easier and more widespread exercise of Google's search engine and other products.

“They definitely moved the ball,” she said.

The auction could raise as much as $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury. So far, the auction, through 18 rounds, has raised nearly $13.7 billion.

Bidders were given a handful of waivers at the start of the auction that allow them to sit out a round and still remain eligible to rejoin the bidding later.

Currently, U.S. wireless carriers restrict the models of cell phones that can be used on their networks. They also limit the software that can be downloaded onto them, of the like kind as ring tones, music or Web browser software.

AT&T and Verizon have been moving away from that restrictive stance in recent months. A Google spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, and a Verizon Wireless spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson, declined to comment, citing commission rules that banned participants from discussing the auction.

Shares of Google were up $5.23 at $553.50 in lately trading Thursday put on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Shares of AT&T were up 15 cents at $37.50 on the New York Stock Exchange, where Verizon Communications was up 31 cents at $38.55.

The auction is scheduled to continue until there are no more bids.

No matter how rough the action gets on the field Sunday, when the New England Patriots meet the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII, the advertisers will be playing nice.

Most commercials that Fox Broadcasting will scud during the game - for which sponsors are paying record prices or close to it - will be taking a milder, sweeter approach. There determination be cute animals, at least one talking baby, an seek reference of the case to help fight AIDS, a knack contest, light-hearted parodies and sufficiency celebrities to fill several seasons of “Dancing With the Stars.”

“So many advertisers are promising to show their soft, friendly interest,” before-mentioned Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony, a research company that is part of the TNS Media Intelligence unit of Taylor Nelson Sofres.

“Maybe it's because people are acquirement their fill of blood and guts in political advertising.”

The note of the 40 or so Super Bowl spots, along with related campaigns online and in stores, will be in marked contrast to the commercials shown during the Super Bowl last year. Many of those drew complaints for slapstick, cartoonish violence that was deemed crass or even callous.

The misbehavior in the spots for Super Bowl XLI included a bank robbery, a monster run amok, a man throwing a rock at another man's head, fights among office workers, people slapping each other across the external part and men tearing out patches of trunk hair.

Some of that unlucky behavior was out of this world - literally. In a commercial for FedEx, set on the moon, an astronaut was obliterated by a meteor.

By contrast, there will be “no dying this year,” David Lubars, the creative leader at the agency working for FedEx, said about the spot the company plans for Sunday.

“We have several commercials that are all fun and nice,” said Lubars, presiding officer and chief creative officer at BBDO North America, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.

The commercials include, in addition to FedEx, spots for PepsiCo beverages like Amp Energy and Diet Pepsi Max as well as a commercial featuring the singer Justin Timberlake “having a lot of fun with himself and his reputation,” Lubars said, on behalf of Pepsi Stuff, a music advancement sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Amazon.com.

“I don't know that it's a conscious decision,” Lubars said, referring to the shift to sunnier ads from darker ones. “Maybe clan got tired of those jokes, or they ran their set of dishes.”

“Or maybe it's where the zeitgeist is, separately with tough financial times now,” he added. “Maybe people want a person of consequence lighter and less aggressive.”

That theory was echoed by David Ovens, chief marketing officer at Taco Bell, a division of Yum Brands that plans to run a commercial in what one. consumers offer a humorous “¡Hola!” to a new menu item, Fiesta Platters.

“Some of the advertising last year was a bit aggro,” Ovens said, using a British slang term for aggressive. The goal of Taco Bell and its Interpublic Group agency, Draft FCB, in developing the Fiesta Platters spot was to create something “engaging, but not in your face.”

“The in-your-face slapstick stuff is funny, but then you forget about it,” Ovens said. “Funny with a wink, with a twist - people will talk about it.”

Talk value - or “Monday morning chatterbacking,” to borrow a phrase from Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president at Nielsen Online Strategic Services - is acquirement further important.

That is because almost every Super Bowl advertiser wants its commercial to be amusing or intriguing enough to encourage viewers to watch it again after the undertaking, on Web sites approve AOL, MySpace, Yahoo and YouTube. They also hope viewers will forward video clips of the spot to friends, search for terms like “Super Bowl commercials” on sites like Google and visit special online microsites.

The Pepsi/Amazon promotion will have such a site at pepsistuff.com; another, truthinengineering.com, will pitch the Audi R8 sold by the Audi division of Volkswagen of America (which is inspiring a parody of “The Godfather” in a commercial created by Venables Bell & Partners).

“No one just buys a make spots on anymore; it's about extending beyond,” said Penry Price, vice president for North American advertising sales at Google.

For instance, not only do consumers start to search for Super Bowl spots upon the body YouTube before the game, Price said, but there is also significant viewing afterward. Last year, the site had considerable commercial-viewing traffic for 38 days after Super Bowl XLI, he said, from more than 28 million computer users.

NEW DELHI: Internet and telephone communications remained disrupted Thursday in the Middle East and the world's back office, India, as a result of damage to two undersea cables.

One cable was damaged Tuesday evening near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the waters off Marseille, telecommunications operators said Wednesday. The two cables, which are separately managed and operated, were damaged within hours of each other.

Damage to undersea cables, while rare, can result from movement of geologic faults or from the dragging anchor of a ship.

Hundreds of undersea cables, often owned and managed by international consortiums, sustain telecommunications running worldwide. Growth in phone and Internet connections in Asia and in new financial hubs like Dubai has increased trade on frequent of these cables.

The damage left just one cable connecting the Middle East to Europe via Egypt, according to TeleGeography Research. Until service is restored, what one. may take a week or longer, frequent carriers in the Middle East are being forced to reroute their European traffic around the globe, TeleGeography said.

Traffic was affected in Bahrain, Egypt, India, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Operators had more options in other areas, where most disrupted communications were quickly rerouted through other cables. Internet office slowed for some customers of Verizon, what one. is based in the United States.

“Some of our customers were impacted” by the damaged cables Wednesday morning until the company rerouted traffic, said Linda Laughlin, a spokeswoman with respect to Verizon. The company is building a trans-Pacific cable from Oregon to China, South Korea and Taiwan because it needs else capacity in Asia, she said.

A trade group in India estimated that roughly 60 percent of the Internet users in the country were affected, but many large companies switched quickly to backup plans, and business was not significantly disrupted.

India is the primary customer service center for many U.S. and European financial services companies, and Indian companies handle back-office operations during the term of many of the world's largest corporations.

“In some way or another, every company took a hit,” said R.S. Parihar, an executive with the Internet Services Providers Association in India. Internet traffic heading east from India was disrupted, and many companies rerouted their Internet traffic to the west in lieu, he said.

“In the case where people had only one route, they were in trouble,” Parihar said. Smaller companies, or those that did all their business through the damaged cables, were the most affected, he said.

One of the damaged cables stretches from France through the Mediterranean and Red Sea, then around India to Singapore. The cable, Sea-Me-We-4, is owned by 16 telecommunications companies along its route. The full name of the cable is the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4.

The second cable, Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, or FLAG, runs from Britain to Japan.

Ashutosh Sharma, a spokesman for Bharti Communications, one of the largest telecommunications companies in India, said Bharti had “taken significant steps to ensure that services are available by routing traffic through alternative paths.” Bharti was working closely with the cable operators to “restore normalcy as soon as possible,” he said.

Walter Yosafat, chief information officer of Genpact, each Indian company that does science, accounting, customer spiritual obedience and denunciation technology work for dozens of multinational companies including General Electric, GlaxoSmithKline and NBC Universal, said there was no rupture to customers as a result of the cable cut near Alexandria, thanks to a variety in cable routes and service providers in the network.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Google reported earnings and sales for the fourth quarter that missed Wall Street estimates, sending the stock tumbling after hours.

Shares of the leading Internet search company, which has typically blown away analysts’ forecasts, plunged nearly 9% after the closing bell. The stock had risen about 3% in regular trading Thursday. Google’s stock has taken a hit in recent weeks, dipping nearly 25% below its all-time high of $747 continue November.

Google reported that its fourth-quarter revenue came in at $4.83 billion, up 51% from a year ago. Excluding advertising sales that Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) shares with partners (likewise known being of the class who traffic acquisition costs or TAC), the company reported revenue of $3.39 billion, below the $3.45 billion analysts had expected, according to Thomson Financial.

Google posted net income of $1.44 billion, or $3.79 a share, up 17% percent from a year ago. Profits, hind backing out certain gains and charges, came in at $4.43 per share, narrowly missing Wall Street’s expectations of $4.44 a share.

"We’re very pleased with our performance this quarter," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "It reflects strong momentum in our core business, augmenting receptivity to our new business initiatives and improved discipline in managing our operating expenses."

Despite worries that the economic slowdown would have a negative impact on online ad budgets, Schmidt told analysts he was optimistic about 2008 in a call after the company’s earnings were released, saying he had not seen any "negative impact" from "rumors" of an upcoming recession.

But Google CFO George Reyes admitted to analysts that ad inventory on more of the hottest real estate on the Web - social networks - is "not monetizing as well as expected."

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s core pursuit is search advertising, but it has recently made an a more aggressive push into the mobile industry, launching an operating system called Android for cell phones. The first Android-running mobile devices are expected to come out later this year.

"This is going to do Internet on mobile as frictionless as it is on your desktop," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told analysts Thursday.

Google also has continued to aggressively hire new workers, adding 889 employees in the fourth quarter, half of which were engineers. The company very lately has a total of 16,805 people in more than 20 countries.

Google also increased its international sales, which now represent 48% of total revenues, up from 44% in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Google’s closest search rival, Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), disappointed Wall Street earlier this week when it announced its fourth-quarter net income fell 23% from a year ago and said that sales for 2008 would be lower than analysts’ forecasts.  

Internet traffic from India to countries like the U.S. and the U.K. has slowed down, as Internet service providers (ISPs) have started diverting traffic from Middle Eastern links to slower links through the Asia-Pacific region, according to the head of an ISP association in India.

Two underwater cables in the Mediterranean Sea, including one from Flag Telecom, owned by India's Reliance Communications, and another from the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) consortium, were damaged Wednesday for reasons as yet unclear.

"These links carry most of India's premium traffic to the Atlantic region, resulting in a disruption of about 50 to 60 percent of the bandwidth from India on Wednesday when the cables were first damaged," said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India (ISPAI), in an interview Thursday.

Most of the traffic has now been routed through submarine cable links in the Asia-Pacific but traffic to the east coast of the U.S. and the U.K. will be slow, because of the longer latency involved by these diversions, Chharia said.

Repairs to the Flag Telecom cable would take at least 10 to 15 days, which would mean that Indian companies, including outsourcing companies, will be affected for this period, Chharia said. A Reliance spokesman could not immediately provide an update on the status of the repairs, and other measures taken by Flag Telecom.

India's second largest outsourcer, Infosys Technologies, said that its Internet service had not been affected by the outage in the Middle East. The company uses a lot of redundant links from a variety of service providers, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

Another large Indian outsourcer, Satyam Computer Services, of Hyderabad, said that even as the links went down in the Middle East, the company automatically switched over voice and Internet traffic to networks from other service providers.

A lot of Satyam's traffic that used to go through the Middle East links is now being routed through Singapore. " We are seeing an enlarge in latency in MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) from 280 milliseconds to 310 milliseconds, and in Internet traffic from 300 to 350 milliseconds, which isn't a big problem," said Srinivasu C, head of netting and systems at Satyam.

The ISPAI recommends providing more backups on the Atlantic sector to ensure that the current problem does not get repeated in future, Chharia added.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A bid on the largest portion of public wireless airwaves, now being auctioned by the federal government, reached $4.7 billion on Thursday, triggering a provision to allow any invention or software to work on that spectrum.

While bidding is anonymous, analysts speculate that Google Inc. (GOOG, Fortune 500) and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ, Fortune 500) and Vodafone Group PLC. (VOD), are the likely bidders on that swath, that is about one-third of the total representation currently being auctioned.

However, winners won’t be known until the entire Federal Communications Commission auction, that began Jan. 24, ends, a process that could take several more weeks.

The FCC is selling off the spectrum that’s being freed as part of the switch to digital television in February 2009. The airwaves are considered especially valuable because the frequencies travel lengthy distances and can easily pass through walls.

Google had lobbied hard to make the so-called "open access" conditions part of the spectrum, which the major telecom companies have fought. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said such a provision would enhance high-speed Internet access across the country.

The auction could raise as much as $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury. So far, the auction, through 16 rounds, has raised nearly $11.6 billion. 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian fixed-line operator Comstar UTS (CMSTq.L) said forward Thursday it had started to build a mobile broadband network using WiMAX technology in Armenia.

"We intend to launch the network this year and, therefore, become the first and the largest wireless broadband Internet operator in Armenia," Comstar's president, Sergei Pridantsev, said in a statement.

The company said it had chosen Airspan Networks Inc (AIRN.O) to provide equipment for the base stations. It did not disclose the value of the deal.

Mobile WiMax is an emerging high-speed wireless standard which is expected to support access to large amounts of data, such as movies and multi-media content.

The company expects to launch arising from traffic service in the second half of this year. The network will cover 75 percent of Armenia's population, a Comstar spokeswoman said.

She declined to say how much Comstar would invest in the network deployment. Last year Comstar announced plans to invest "10s of millions of dollars" to build a WiMAX network in Moscow.

Comstar, part of Russian services conglomerate Sistema (SSAq.L), provides voice, premises, Internet, pay-TV and other services.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Greg Mahlich)

TOKYO: Sony said Thursday that its net profit rose by other than 25 percent in the final three months of 2007, helped by robust sales of televisions and computer games, but it said the strong yen and subprime problems would determine the heaviness of on demand this year.

Net income rose to ¥200.2 billion, or $1.9 billion, in the three months to Dec. 31, from ¥159.9 billion a year earlier, Sony said after the close of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Sony also cut its operating income forecasts for the business year through March 31, saying it now expected to earn ¥410 billion, compared with an October forecast of ¥450 billion.

Sony shares closed 3.6 percent higher Thursday at ¥5,220 in Tokyo trading. The stock is down 9.4 percent since Oct. 1.

“Electronics sales appear to have done well,” said Shigeo Kikuchi, deputy manager of the trading province at Takagi Securities.

But, he said “the outlook is clouded, as the firm yen and U.S subprime issue issues are convenient to weigh on demand for LCD televisions and the like.”

One dollar averaged ¥112.2 in the period in question, representing a 4.1 percent rise in the yen, the company said. The firmer Japanese currency is seen as reining in exports, while ongoing sub-prime problems are seen reducing the appetite of American consumers for electronic goods, Kikuchi said.

The Sony share price might dip as low viewed like ¥4,800 judgment the end of March, he added.

Sales and operating revenue advanced 9.6 percent to ¥2.86 trillion, from ¥2.61 trillion as the electronics segment recorded its second highest profit level in the history of the company, on robust sales of Bravia LCD televisions, Sony said.

Sony posted solid increases in sales of PlayStation 3 game consoles and game software in the final three months of 2007.

But analysts said that deep discounting alone was unlikely to help the company indefinitely as it sought to fend off innovative competition from Nintendo and Microsoft, which are gaining popularity with a new class of games player.

Game console sales rose 31.2 percent in the latest quarter, while the company said it returned to advance at the operating level, compared with a year earlier.

Sony cut prices by 17 percent in the United States and Europe, and by 10 percent in Japan. It also introduced a cheaper model to offset criticism that the PS3 was overpriced.

Soichiro Fukuda, director of equity research at NikkoCitigroup said Sony game players remained popular with males in the 20-30 age assemblage. But he added that the Wii, which is made by Nintendo, and the Xbox, which is made by Microsoft, offered different ways for players to enjoy their consoles.

The new formats are more appealing to women and people over 35, he added.

Wii offers a corbel with a controller grip that allows users to imitate the swing of a tennis racket or golf club. That kind of physical interface appeals to more people than the PS3, which contains a motion sensor, but maintains the upright two-hand-held controller format, Fukuda said.