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 »
The New Xbox Experience, a.k.a. the new Xbox 360 Dashboard, hits today. If you've got an Xbox 360 that's connected to the Internet, you're going to be prompted to update your console as soon as you turn it on.
No exceptions; this is what your machine will look like until either it dies, you die, or Microsoft decides to make ANOTHER Xbox Experience.
Unfortunately, unlike Batman, you didn't have time to prepare. Here are the ten things you should know about the new Xbox experience so you can be set for today.
1) Installation is quick. Owners with hard drives that aren't 100% full will be able to update with no problem, but Xbox 360 Arcade fans that rely on memory cards can get in on the free 512MB card deal from Microsoft. We'd recommend you go for the 20GB hard drive for $20 if anything.
The update won't be as fast as the 10-second patches you're used to for standard Xbox Dashboard upgrades, but clocking in at somewhere between five... More »
A Nintendo rep has said that the only way gamers will be able to download the Wii Speak Channel is with a "Wii Download Ticket Number" that is printed in a pamphlet that comes with the Wii Speak microphone.
This apparently means that if you buy the peripheral it used, you won't be able to use it as you can't download the Wii Speak Channel.
To quote: But there’s a catch, a fine print surprise. There is a pamphlet packaged with the peripheral that includes a 16-character code, a “Wii Download Ticket Number,” to be used for downloading the Wii Speak Channel.
According to the pamphlet, this code “cannot be replaced by Nintendo or your retailer if it is lost or stolen.”
Just under two days ago we reported that some LittleBigPlanet Custom Levels were being moderated (deleted) due to EULA violations.
Today, Media Molecule Dev Sam_Protagonist has posted on the LittleBigPlanet Workshop the following clarification:
Oasis is the name both of a band and of a soft drink (at least in Europe), however any level using the title "Oasis" would be absolutely fine right now unless it included music by Oasis the band, or the likeness of the drinks bottle.
There is a lot of exaggeration at play here with exactly what's going on with moderation. Firstly, no level is moderated unless it has been reported using the Good Grief tool, at which point it will only be blocked from online play if it is in violation of the EULA.
To date there have been fewer than 200 levels which have been blocked - considerably les... More »
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Nine years ago, the DVD of "The Matrix" shattered records and catapulted the budding DVD format into the mainstream. Can "The Dark Knight" do the same thing for Blu-ray?
The Blu-ray release of "The Dark Knight" is slated to Dec. 9, and as Video Business [via High-Def Digest] reports, Warner Brothers has more than a million Blu-ray copies of the Batman blockbuster teed up for retailers—reportedly, the most ever for a Blu-ray movie to date.
Indeed, "The Dark Knight" is perhaps the biggest gotta-have Blu-ray title yet, bigger even than "Iron Man" (which has sold about 500,000 Blu-ray copies so far, according to Video Business) and "Transformers."
But here's the big question: Will the popularity of "TDK" translate into a tipping point for Blu-ray, as "The Matrix" (which was the first DVD to ship more than 1.5 million units back ... More »
I am a huge PC gamer. I don’t necessarily have the most powerful rig to run the latest and greatest games with all the bells and whistles turned on, but it serves me just fine.
However, there are some of you who will stop at nothing to have the ultimate gaming PC. For those people I present to you... the nVidia Quadro FX 5800.
What makes the nVidia Quadro FX 5800 so awesome, you ask? Well, for starters it has 4GB of onboard memory, and has a bandwidth of 102GB/s.
Or to translate: It’s the most powerful graphics card on Earth.
So how much do you think this bad boy costs? $400? $500? $800?! ...no. Try $3,500.
Yeah, $3,500. For $3,500 you could buy a whole computer — and a damn good one, at that. But, if you have the money to burn (and I mean that literally) and you want to see if a graphics card that was designed for medical computers can handle Far Cry 2... why not?
Note: I know it’s not a ... More »
Rumor has it that Windows 7 will drop in the middle of next year, but last month Microsoft released a "preview" tester build of Windows 7. After living in the Windows 7 Preview for a week now, several features and niceties jumped out at me which promise to make Windows a better place to work come 2009.
Here are just a few of the things to look forward to in Windows 7.
10. Ding-dong, the Sidebar is dead.
One of the first things I hunted down and killed in Windows Vista was the Sidebar, which loaded by default and docked Vista's Gadgets to the right side of your desktop. In Windows 7, the sidebar is no more, and gadgets, should you want them, can roam free across the desktop. This time around, the gadgets feel less distracting to me—the CPU meter and calendar gadgets are my favourites, though this screenshot shows many more.
9. Calculator, WordPad, and Paint got overhauled.
It sucks that Windows 7 is stripping the built-... More »
I don't know about anyone else, but I've been holding onto two copies of Persona 3 for quite some time now. The original came in this nice box with an art book, and then FES came out and I just couldn't bring myself to give up to original. So there you go.
Will the same thing happen? Atlus says no.
"We are today able to announce that at no point in the future will we announce the release of a "FES" version of Persona 4," said Tim Pivnicny, Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "The very finest, most definitive version of Persona 4 will be the one released on December 9, 2008."
Now if only we could convince them to quit letting places like amazon release awesome pre-order junk, I will be extremely happy. I want my tele-teddy darn it!
Press Release: Atlus Announces That There Will Only Be One (Very Awesome) Version of Persona 4
Unprecedented announcement-of-no-announcement shocks industry
IRVINE, Calif. - Nove... More »
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