Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo
Microsoft showed off its new retro-tastic Game Room UI for Xbox 360 in playable form at GDC last week. While the “make a virtual representation of a gaming space” idea might seem ripped straight from Sony’s Home, there aren’t really any actual similarities — outside of the fact they’re both in 3D, at least. You dive disembodied through the different game rooms pretty intuitively, with different company collections on the bottom “level” of the mall-like UI, and upper levels set aside for your own collections of the games. Unfortunately, once you actually select an arcade cabinet, the UI gets rather overly complex, with all sorts of modes you can play the game in, sorts of scores to be tracked and an indecipherable menu tree that makes it a real chore to exit a game. We’re sure arcade fanatics, ready to pit their scores against the best of them and looking for truly in-depth functionality are going to love all this, but for us poor simpletons it’s a little much to take in all at once. Luckily, Microsoft saved the best for the actual gameplay. Not only does it nicely emulate inserting coins and even entering in codes on a virtual keypad, but when playing games in the non-ranked classic mode there’s a “rewind” function accessible at any time with the tug of the left trigger. The screen gets those VHS-style wavey lines and you can mend your errors instead of losing a valuable life or having to start from the beginning. It’s perfect for patching over the quarter-munching difficulty of some of these games, and it might even be enough to pull us away from our polygon-drenched gorefests now and then to don an inexplicable bear avatar and spelunk some Crystal Castles. Check out a video of Game Room after the break, and stand by for a launch of the service on March 24.
Continue reading Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo
Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Cowon V5 review
Cowon’s V5 has been out and about in South Korea for just over two months now, but thankfully for the Yanks who are downright flustered with the existing PMP options here in the States, the company has decided to bring this beaut stateside. Boasting a 4.8-inch resistive touchscreen (800 x 480 resolution), a Windows CE 6.0 underlying OS, HDMI / USB sockets (via adapters from a proprietary socket), a voice recorder, integrated speaker, 3.5mm headphone jack, 8/16/32GB of internal storage, an SDHC expansion slot, a battery good for 45 hours of music playback (or 10 hours with video) and a format support list that would drive you batty to read, there’s a lot (lot!) to love about this thing on paper. We were fortunate enough to get our hands on one of the first units to ship to America, so hop on past the break for our two pennies.
Gallery: Cowon V5 unboxing and hands-on
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Cowon V5 review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Dell introduces $339 G2410H 24-inch 1080p LCD monitor, we go hands-on
Just over a year ago, Dell pushed out its latest and greatest 24-incher, the energy-sipping G2410. Today, the Round Rock powerhouse has introduced that very unit’s successor (complete with a height adjustable stand), the G2410H. Still sized at 24-inches, this 1080p LCD monitor sports a variety of eco-modes, 5 millisecond response time, 160-degree (horizontal) / 170-degree (vertical) viewing angles, a native 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, ambient light sensor, 250 nits of brightness, a 1,000:1 contrast ratio and DVI / VGA inputs. We’ve had one in-house for around a week now, and for $339, it’s not a bad replacement to that 21-inch CRT that’s still weighing heavily on your desk. It’s not as sharp and brilliant as the (admittedly more expensive) UltraSharp U2711, but it was certainly clear enough for the average home user. It’s shipping now if you just can’t resist.
Dell introduces $339 G2410H 24-inch 1080p LCD monitor, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Wacom Cintiq 21UX hands-on
It’s almost too much to take in all at once. Sure, the $1,999 Cintiq 21UX pen display is priced out of reach for most of us mere mortals who “don’t draw good,” but the pure lustworthiness of this unit sure makes us try to forget that inconvenient fact. The expanded movability of Wacom’s latest is commendable, the pen input is naturally great, the screen is beautiful, and even those new rear-mounted touchpads seem helpful. It would take someone much more familiar with professional draw-ist-ing to really speak to the more specific merits of the 21UX, but from a mere standpoint of inspiring irrational desire in our hearts, Wacom seems to have done a pretty good job this time out. Check out a video of the screen in action after the break.
Gallery: Wacom Cintiq 21UX hands-on
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Wacom Cintiq 21UX hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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InstantAction streams full games to any web browser, gives indie developers a business model (video)
Look out, OnLive — you’ve got company. InstantAction is having their coming out party at GDC, and we stopped by for a lengthy chat about the technology, its future and the hopes / dreams of the company. Put simply (or as simply as possible), IA has developed a browser-based plug-in that allows full games to be played on any web browser so long as said browser is on a machine capable of handling the game. In other words, you’ll still need a beast of a machine to play games like Crysis, but the fact that you can play them on a web browser opens up a new world of possibilities for casual gamers and independent developers. You’ll also be notified before your download starts if your machine and / or OS can handle things, with recommendations given on what it would take to make your system capable.
Oh, and speaking of operating systems — games will only be played back if they’re supported on a given OS, so you won’t be able to play a Windows only title within a browser on OS X or Linux. Rather than taking the typical streaming approach, these guys are highlighting “chunking.” In essence, a fraction of the game’s total file size has to be downloaded locally onto your machine, and once that occurs, you can begin playing. As an example, we were playing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition — which is the sole title announced for the platform so far, though Assassin’s Creed was demoed — within minutes, and since you’re curious, that’s a 2.5GB game, and we were on a connection that wasn’t much faster than a typical broadband line.
More after the break…
InstantAction streams full games to any web browser, gives indie developers a business model (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Unreal Engine 3 up and running on webOS, and we’ve got video!
Palm just showed us the Unreal Engine 3 running on webOS, which apparently took a couple weeks to port over to the platform using that fancy new PDK. It runs at a pretty smooth clip, with just a tiny bit of artifacting in our enemy’s death animation. As an added bit of wow factor, Palm has it currently setup to demonstrate the game at 1 fps when in card view. Like most touchscreen shooters, this doesn’t really solve the problem of simulating dual analog sticks, but it’s still a fun and good looking engine for a mobile device. We’re still unaware of any games that have been built for the mobile engine, which has now been shown for iPhone, Tegra 2, and will be headed to the iPad as well, but we have to assume we’ll be seeing some before too long. Check out the webOS video after the break.
Continue reading Unreal Engine 3 up and running on webOS, and we’ve got video!
Unreal Engine 3 up and running on webOS, and we’ve got video! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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PrimeSense talks full-body motion control at GDC, gives us a video demonstration
PrimeSense was formed in 2005, and unless you’re a sickly obsessed silicon junkie, you’ve probably never heard of them. All that changes today. We sat down with the company at GDC to learn more about the chip that it produces, and we left with an imagination sore from being stretched so severely. Put simply, the company manufacturers a microchip that, when paired with off-the-shelf optics, can create a 3D grid that a computer can understand. The purpose here, as you can likely glean, is to enable PlayStation Eye-like interactions, or as the company suggests, a “more natural” way to interface with devices you use every day. Rather than grabbing the remote to switch channels or snapping up that HTPC keyboard in order to flip through your stored DVD library, PrimeSense would rather you kick back on the sofa and gently flick your hands in order to turn to this week’s Gossip Girl or sort through those classic horror flicks.
Gallery: PrimeSense press photos
It’s important to remember that PrimeSense isn’t in the business of creating hardware, but today we were shown a reference design that looks an awful lot like an enlarged webcam. The device is completely USB powered, and while the unit shown in the images and video here was obviously a standalone device, we were told that it would be possible to integrate the solution into displays and the like in the future. They also mentioned that the depth location — which enables it to map out a room and detect your entire body — was done on-chip, with only the associated middleware taxing the CPU. Still, they’ve had success running this on Atom-level processors, so there’s certainly no big horsepower hang-up preventing it from hitting up a variety of markets.
More after the break…
Continue reading PrimeSense talks full-body motion control at GDC, gives us a video demonstration
PrimeSense talks full-body motion control at GDC, gives us a video demonstration originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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