Practice saying it with us, “Our fund lost x% in the month of July/August.” Now, try it in a mirror. Were you smiling? Even though you’ve probably frozen redemption requests, investors see that big ole frown as a sign that something is really awry, opposed to the overwhelming cascade of economic indicators.
Fortunately there’s a new Nintendo DS game on the horizon that is designed to exercise your facial muscles so that you can smile while issuing the most bearish of fund reports.
The game, called “Face Training,” is packaged with a digital camera peripheral. With a little practice, your frown can turn upside down, unlike the market, from amNewYork:

The 16 types of exercises called “facening,” designed by beauty expert Fumiko Inudo, take about two to 10 minutes each to complete. Nintendo Co., the Kyoto-based maker of Pokemon and Super Mario games, recommends playing “Face Training” no longer than 15 minutes at a time to avoid overexerting face muscles or getting them “out of balance.”
Besides the animation that serves as a model for players, an electronic voice resembling an aerobics instructor guides you to twist your mouth, drop your jaw, wink, glare at the ceiling and perform other moves to tighten flabby cheeks and develop that bright-eyed look.
“Open your mouth slightly, one, two, three, four,” the machine says during one exercise.

The game comes with a built-in audience in the financial sector, as the soothing voice of a man counting off while you try and keep an orifice open is the most popular I-banking lullaby.
New Game Exercises Muscles for Smiles [amNewYork]

How do you follow up a 1-2-3 punch of your piece de resistance, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, being pulled by retailers for offensive material, shitty 2007 fiscals, and a duo of guilty pleas by former employees for falsifying business records in connection with improper backdating of employee stock options? With a video game featuring one of America’s most famous and smugly “not-guilty guilty” killers, that’s how!
That’s right, Take-Two, those paragons of decency and good taste, have knocked it out of the park with their latest sports video game, All-Pro Football 2K8, which allows gamers to play as The Assassins’ O.J. Simpson. Oh, and when Juice scores a touchdown, a hooded mascot makes stabbing motions with a large knife, probably suitable for killing an adulterous ex-wife and her lover and then getting away with it. (That’s just a for instance. You could also use it to cut steak). Thestreet.com estimates that Take-Two paid Simpson “anywhere between $50,000 and $125,000,” for his work.
Shares of Take-Two were recently down 0.6% (14 cents), to $20.29.
Take-Two Game Has O.J. Simpson — and a Knife [thestreet.com]

First National Bank in conjunction with Blizzard Entertainment, publisher of World of Warcraft (WoW), is set to release a World of Warcraft Rewards Visa. This is the first deal of this kind between a bank and an online computer game. Unfortunately, the “rewards” don’t include a visit from an especially voluptuous Night Elf or a primer on emoticons as aphrodisiacs. Instead you get boringly tangible game-time. You get $0.01 toward your WoW monthly sub fee of $14.99 for every $1 spent on the Visa. WoW players like the option of killing two birds with one stone – you spend $1499 on a real life replica of the vampiric runeblade Frostmourne on QVC and spend another month alone in your basement.
Many companies are trying to take advantage of a unique pool of pre-selected sedentary consumers new advertising opportunities in online gaming, from the variety of sponsored locations in Second Life to perhaps the most famous example in 2005 when Sony Online Entertainment cut a deal with Pizza Hut that let you order pizza in Everquest II.
Bank offering World of Warcraft Visa card – [Gamespot]

Capitol Distributing, a video game distributor, has settled a civil suit with the SEC for a video game “parking” scheme involving Take-Two Interactive, developer of the Grand Theft Auto series. Take-Two would wait until the end of its quarter, ship a bunch of units to Capitol Distributing and then book the shipments as revenue even though Capitol would just hold the games with no intention of selling. Capitol would then return the games to Take-Two with a false invoice labeled ‘purchases’ of ‘assorted products.’ This practice resulted in $15mm in revenue for Take-Two over four separate instances.
In the settlement, Terry Phillips, founder of Capitol, agreed to pay a $50k fine, and the company, “without admitting or denying the SEC allegations,” just had to agree not to violate the law (sounds like a plan).
Coinciding with the release of Bully, Take-Two has been in the principal’s office a lot lately. Last month the SEC started investigating Take-Two’s option grants and in June 2005 four Take-Two execs settled with the SEC over accounting violations.
Take-Two (TTWO: Nasdaq) has been flat in daily trading.
SEC Issues ‘Video Game Parking’ Ticket – [CFO.com]

Ken Kutaragi, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment and creator of the PlayStation, announced that he is retiring yesterday. He will officially step down in June. This is indicative of just how bad things are at Sony, as Kutaragi is the human face of the PlayStation. This would be like Nintendo distancing itself from Shigeru Miyamoto (designer of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda) – or at least not letting him give company presentations. More on the story, from CNet:

Kutaragi is one of the most celebrated figures in consumer electronics history, having shipped more than 200 million PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles, as well as the PlayStation Portable. Some analysts believe that had the PS3 been perceived as a hit or even a mild hit, there’s a good chance he would be sticking around for the full 10-year lifecycle Sony gives its consoles.
But the PS3 is widely seen as a commercial flop, given its third-place position among next-generation video game consoles, trailing Microsoft’s second-place Xbox 360 and the surprising leader, Nintendo’s genre-busting Wii. The PS3 is even trailing sales of the venerable PlayStation 2 at this point.

Sony says sayonara to father of PlayStation – [CNet]

The PS3, as advertised, is smart. The console, a Scorpio (released 11/11), likes long walks on the beach and processing medical research about proteins in its free time. Over 250k PS3s are currently employed in Stanford University’s Folding@home project to improve processing power. Like the SETI program, Folding@home uses networked systems of volunteers to create a larger computing grid that works as one virtual machine. We should all be out folding proteins because, from the Folding@home website:

when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Unfortunately, even “the most powerful distributed-computing service on the planet” can’t drive up PS3 sales, which still significantly trail the Wii. At least it has its tech specs to fall back on. The PS3 remains the Jeff “I’m f***ing smart” Skilling of the video game industry, boasting:

Calling PS3 machines “games” is a bit like describing an F15 fighter jet as a “lighter than air machine.” Sony has said that PS3s have as much as 30 times more processing power than an average PC and can’t get AIDS.

In other console news, Nintendo released earnings this morning, showing a 77% increase in net profit over the same period last year and a near doubling of revenue.
PS3 a Hit for Stanford Grid Project – [Yahoo]
Nintendo 1Q profits pumped up by Wii – [Yahoo]