Video game consoles left running round-the-clock can send your annual electricity bill soaring. That's probably no surprise for most gamers. But the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based conservation group, has conducted a study of gaming machine energy use to raise awareness among gamers and pressure manufacturers into making more energy-efficient machines.
The NRDC's study found that Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii machines in the U.S. use about as much electricity in a year as every home in San Diego combined. Much of the energy comes from machines that are left on, but not in use, the NRDC said.
Of the three consoles, Sony's PS3 was the biggest energy hog, followed by Microsoft's Xbox 360. Nintendo's Wii is by far the most energy efficient-and even uses less electricity than its predecessor, GameCube.
To quote: With more efficient devices and by utilizing existing power-saving features, consumers ... More »
The new version of YDL was released. I think the most important new feature is that you can now use the memory of the RSX-GPU as a swap partition.
You should notice a great increase of speed while using linux.
The free version can be downloaded in four weeks. For now only owners of YDL.net Enhanced Accounts can access YDL 6.1.
Press Release: AUSTIN, Texas - 19 November 2008 - From the show floor of SuperComputing 2008, booth #1915, Fixstars today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.1 for Apple G4/G5, Sony PLAYSTATION3, PowerStation, and IBM Power Systems. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, YDL v6.1 offers several end-user and development tool improvements over the previous v6.0.
"This marks the final release of Yellow Dog Linux by Terra Soft and the first by Fixstars," states Owen Stampflee, Fixstars Solutions' Director of Engineering, "In my five years with Terra Soft we have made incremental impro... More »
Per Grace Chen (Senior Manager, PlayStation Store) today:
Hey, everyone. It’s time again for the PlayStation Store weekly update.
Add-on Game Content
LittleBigPlanet Sack in the Box Costume (free)
A community costume for SackBoy!
File size: 1.04 MB
LittleBigPlanet LocoRoco Costumes ($2.99)
A costume kit for SackBoy! Contains 5 different costumes.
File size: 1.04 MB
BioShock PS3 Challenge Rooms ($9.99)
Experience the intense, terrifying world of Rapture like never before with the all-new PLAYSTATION 3 exclusive Add-On Game Content featuring three unique Challenge Rooms and some very cool extras. In “A Shocking Turn of Events,” rescue a trapped Little Sister in a disturbing carnival in Rapture. In “The I in Team”, defeat a Big Daddy using only your wits. In “Worlds of Hurt” plow through eight rooms filled with the worst Rapture has to offer.
File size: 402 MB... More »
VideoGamer can exclusively reveal that from January 2009 all newly released PS3 games will be required by Sony to support the console's Trophy system.
Earlier this week they received a tip from an anonymous source within the UK video game industry that, from January 2009 onwards, all newly released PS3 titles will be required to support the PS3 Trophy system.
Today a Sony Computer Entertainment Europe spokesperson confirmed that this information is accurate, stating: "Yes from Jan 09 all games must have trophies."
This news is sure to be met very positively by PS3 gamers who are currently having to put up with sporadic Trophy support from this winter's biggest releases.
Mandatory Trophy support will also put an end to post release Trophy patches that force gamers to replay games to earn the Trophies.
Nintendo released a recent update that once again tries to secure some existing bugs on the console, breaks some things, deletes others. This time they’ve also gone around and modified the TOS. As usual, mass panic ensues.
The people who are panicking can be divided roughly into two groups (non exclusive):
- The pirates
- The clueless
This should go without saying, but we don’t want to have anything to do with the former group. Nintendo is obviously going to fight piracy (and that’s going to hurt homebrew). We’ll have to deal with the homebrew part, but don’t expect that to help piracy in any way. It may, or it may not. And if it doesn’t, pirates will have to deal with fighting nintendo themselves.
The usual messages about WADs, “backups”, and all that crap are going straight to /dev/null, and we’re seeing... More »
2K Boston Assistant Producer Keith Shetler shared the following via PS Blog today:
Hey there! What’s that you say? You love challenging gameplay... and failed underwater utopias?
Then prepare to experience the world of Rapture like never before with the BioShock PS3 Challenge Rooms Add-On Content pack available tomorrow, November 20, for $9.99 only on the PlayStation Network.
I’m Keith Shetler, Assistant Producer at 2K Boston, and I’m very excited to introduce two new play modes with this DLC pack: New Game Plus and Challenge Rooms. Both add new twists to the game millions already love!
New Game Plus allows you to start a new supercharged playthrough of BioShock. Ready for this? You begin the game with any weapons, abilities, and inventory that you collected during a previous playthrough. Always wish you could obliterate Dr. Steinman with your uber grenade launcher? Now you can!
There's general agreement that Sony stumbled out of the gate with the PlayStation 3. Months of intense hype were followed by a late launch (fully a year after the Xbox 360) and a staggering $600 price tag for the deluxe model.
Even worse, the PS3 didn't initially have any real must-have exclusive titles, and despite the power of its vaunted Cell processor, multiplatform games from third-party developers didn't look appreciably better than the respective titles on the Xbox 360.
Since then, the company's been modifying the PlayStation product line to better fit the competitive market landscape. As of August 2008, a new "bargain" PS3 is available with a larger, 80GB hard drive, and a "deluxe" model is due in November, doubling the capacity to 160GB.
Both, however, lack backward compatibility with PS2 games and do not come with flash card readers. If those features are a must, it might be best to pick up the 80GB "Metal Gear" bundle version on eBay w... More »
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