Round-Up: PlayStation Ads Awarded, RE4 Sells 500K

Today's round-up includes news of an advertising award for Sony and the PlayStation, as well as relatively good news for the GameCube and Capcom regarding Resident Evil sales, and details on the latest product news and job postings. - Sony and the PlayStation took home the Advertiser of the Year Award from the Cannes International Advertising Festival, which honors creativity in advertising. PlayStation spots have won 26 Cannes Lions since the brand's launch in 1994, as well as three Grand Prix awards. Ken Kutaragi, the PlayStation's designer and current President of Sony Computer Entertainment, will receive the award. "During the past 10 years we have continued to create inspiring advertisements that communicate to users the new experience and excitement of computer entertainment," said Kutaragi. "I am pleased and honoured to accept this award, which is a great privilege to us all at Sony Computer Entertainment." - Capcom announced that Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube has reached the 500,000 sales mark in the United States and Canada, a healthy sales figure for Nintendo's current-gen hardware platform. "It's been rewarding to see that the incredible response the game has received from fans and critics has been mirrored by a phenomenal retail performance," said Todd Thorson, Capcom's director of marketing. Seen another way, though, the news has a slightly negative tint: despite being a high-profile game with universal critical acclaim, and the latest proper entry in a long-running, popular series, it still took nearly six months from the January 11th release to hit the half-million mark, partly due to the GameCube's relatively small installed base compared to the PlayStation 2 in North America. - Also updated today: product news, including information on Zygote and e frontier's open-source 3D human models and a lower-cost version of the Sega Animanium character animation software, as well as the latest industry jobs from companies including 3001AD, Blizzard, Junction Point Studios, Liquid Entertainment, Microsoft, Midway Games, Nvidia Corporation, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Surreal Software, and The Collective.