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Heads up people! The cutest MMORPG, Hello Kitty Online has a huge update. "The Founder’s Beta" has been announced. This allows those who haven’t joined in yet on the closed beta to grab a chance to try the game. Hurry up and scuttle over to their site to grab one of the limited 20,000 founder accounts.

Below is a quote from their press release:

Hong Kong – September 12, 2008: Sanrio Digital (www.sanriodigital.com) announced today that Hello Kitty Online will begin an exclusive Founders’ Beta on October 8, 2008. The Founders’ Beta will allow a limited number of users to play the official Hello Kitty MMORPG ahead of launch while receiving Founder benefits and participating in special in-game events. Hello Kitty Online (www.hellokittyonline.com) is a free-to-play Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) based on Sanrio’s famous characters. The game transports players into the cute and cuddly world of Sanrio Land, where players will meet and interact with over a hundred Sanrio characters, including Hello Kitty, Badtz-Maru, Keroppi, Dear Daniel, My Melody, Pochacco, Cinnamoroll, and many others.

Hello Kitty Online boasts several new additions and improvements since the Closed Beta version, and the Founder’s Beta will feature a new game client with an improved interface, improved graphics and special effects, new monsters, new maps, new items, and the opening of London and Paris. The Founders’ Beta will also introduce gameplay changes such as new skills, new pet systems and team-play oriented enhancements.

20,000 Founder accounts will be issued on a first-come first-served basis. Players who wish to become Hello Kitty Online Founders are required to sign up on SanrioTown (www.SanrioTown.com) and use the SanrioTown email system to send a blank message to hkofounder@hellokitty.com. Only emails originating from SanrioTown will qualify.

Hello Kitty Online is fully integrated with SanrioTown (www.sanriotown.com) and offers several features of the popular community site, including:

- Fully developed email system available in-game

- Players can create, post and view blogs from inside the game

- Upload, share and view videos in-game

- Social networking options - Multiplayer mini games with ranking system

Sources:

Hello Kitty Online Official Site

SanrioTown Community

Sanrio Digital

Heads up! The new Red Alert 3 trailer is bound to be so awesome in so many ways. J.K. Simmons (the guy who was Peter Parker’s boss in the Daily Bugle in the Movie Spiderman) makes one of a hell of a President. I would definitely vote for him! There is also a lot of Tanya goodness in this trailer. Enjoy!

Crickey! This latest Little Big Planet trailer features a similiar documentary style, featuring a Steve Iriwn-like voice commentary on how life goes on in Little Big Planet. Its fun to watch. If the trailer is right, there should be more like these in the coming days leading to the official launch of the game. Lets hope this game claims to be a best-seller as Sony is touting it to be.

We’ve been hearing news about EA acquiring Take Two, Ubisoft, 2K and other developers. Recently EA has been making moves to "acquire" Japanese Game developers. Well, the correct term is to "partner" with these developers anyway. EA has been hot with its new partnership program signing up Japanese developers such as Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil Creator). There is also a rumor that Hideo Kojima (famed creator of the Metal Gear series) has signed up on the partnership.

It appears there will be a great deal of possible new IPs developed from Japanese studios but are good as home-grown to the US.

[Source: MTV Multiplayer]

I would never had thought that Hatsune Miku would go into gaming. Hatsune Miku was made famous by Yamaha’s software that produced a synthesized voice based on a real human. It was so popular among the Japanese PC users when it first came out. Sega has announced that it will create a rhythm game on the PSP for this reason. I can only imagine PSP sales rack up because of this title. No official word on a release date but it is clear that it will be out by 2009.

[Source: Gamekyo]

According to some people at Nvidia, it may be too much for Hollywood to actually do real-time ray tracing. So far Cars, by Walt Disney, was the only movie that was able to use Ray tracing capabilities in full. Mental ray is one of the best ways of doing ray tracing and Nvidia owns it, but at this point no one from Hollywood even considers this as a real alternative.

They can still get away with the traditional ways of rasterization and light approximation. Photons and Ray casting and something for the distant future.

So this means games that utilize this technology will still be a little ways off as you can see the guy in the video above had to hook up 3 PS3s to do the real time rendering. Take note that the video has nothing to do with Nvidia as I just needed to pull off a video that roughly gives you an idea as to what Ray Tracing is.

[Source: Fudzilla]