Recently in Video Games & Gaming Category

If you're serious about video games, I mean really serious, like making a career of it serious (creating, not playing), then you don't want to miss Game Developers Conference 2006, which opens tomorrow at the San Jose (CA) Convention Center.

Exhibits are open tomorrow through March 24 (as is the career pavilion).  Thursday night is Suite Night, where you can mingle with professionals from leading game industry companies and hear about the newest technologies and games.  Some 12,000 pros are expected to attend the show -- if you go, let me know ...

www.gdconf.com

If my memory serves me well, wasn't Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP), the two most desired holiday gifts of the 2005 season?

Having moved up through the various Nintendo home and portable boxes (GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy SP, Nintendo, Nintendo 64) and shut out of the Xbox frenzy a few months ago, we opted for the PSP over the weekend.

At first blush, all I can say is wow! -- from the large, brilliant screen to the features -- music, photos, video, Internet and (of course) games, this is an incredible product that may cost a bit ($250 retail), but packs a wallop! The only thing missing from this gadget is a cell phone ...

We'll get more into this at a later date ...

www.http://www.us.playstation.com/psp.aspx

Are you a great video game player? How about professional grade?

If you’re ready for the major leagues of video gaming, then get set for Major League Gaming, taking the excitement and enthusiasm of competitive video gaming into the world’s first professional video game league.

The 2006 tour will make seven stops in major cities across the U.S., with the best gamers in the world signed to exclusive deals.

The 2006 pro tour dates:

• New York (March 24-26)
• Dallas (April 21-23)
• Atlanta (June 2-4)
• Los Angeles (July 14-16)
• Philadelphia (August 25-27)
• Playoffs: Chicago (October 6-8)
• National Championship: Las Vegas (November 17-19)

Get in the game at http://www.mlgpro.com/.

Everybody loves Solitaire (maybe even as much as poker) and now Red Mercury has released , the first full-featured, gadget-size solitaire card game for Microsoft Windows. Taking a cue from conveniently sized Windows gadgets, these new games are designed to easily integrate into your daily multitasking workflow.

As small as a credit card (and as thin as a photon), miniSolitaire fits nicely among other active desktop applications. Though small, miniSolitaire is densely packed with great game play features.

In fact, miniSolitaire introduces a new generation of mini-applications -- intuitive, useful programs that do not get in your way. Mini-applications are full featured, robust applications that launch quickly and exit quickly. The only thing mini is the graphical interface. And, if you want to make miniSolitaire big, you can resize it to be huge -- big enough to fill a 20-inch monitor and still look great.

• Fun to play small. Cards are easy to read and moves are easy to execute no matter what size the game is played. The intellimove system has been specifically designed for mini-mode play.
• Never gets in the way. miniSolitaire can be resized and positioned anywhere on the screen and when the game is not active, the game window gently fades away.
• Instantly accessible. miniSolitaire launches instantly right where you left off and can be exited just as quickly enabling you to get back to other things. Every game played is automatically saved.

A full trial version of miniSolitaire can be downloaded free at http://www.minisolitaire.com. Unlimited play can be purchased for $19.95. Freecell and Spider versions are also available on the website. All versions require Windows 2000, XP or Vista.

www.red-mercury.com

If you’re a serious gamer – and I mean a really serious gamer, Voodoo PC has the rigs you need to rule the world! 

The company’s flagship model, the Omen Extreme Gamer, is the most advanced liquid cooled PC available today. It features system-wide liquid cooling, including ATi Crossfire and NVIDIA SLI, the motherboard chipset and the CPU.

It’s the quietest high-performance PC and one of the most distinctive looking (no boring putty or black boxes for VD PC).

The mirrored interior and a special "Eye of the Storm" window give this a look that you've never seen before any standard "out-of-the-box" computer.

If that's not enough, then just check out these standard features:

• Performance-tuned multi GPU video
• Features best of ATX and BTX form factor
• Performance-tuned Athlon FX
• Brushed, anodized and machined chassis
• Voodoo f:5 supercharged intercooling
• Built to ISO9000:2001 standards

Priced from $5100 (that’s not a typo).

www.voodoopc.com

Sony's PSP may be all the rage, but word out of Japan (via PC Magazine and Reuters) is that Nintendo has some things up its sleeve for its own portable unit, the DS.

Seems a card is planned to make the unit Wi-Fi capable and another card with an antennae will provide digital TV. Now I know what the second screen in the DS is intended for ...

If you love to play soccer, then G10L.com is for you!  The free web site invites soccer players and fans from all corners of the globe, including the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Russia, the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Kenya and South Africa, to lead their teams to the finals of the world cup championship.

The G10L.COM website is a free sports web portal with an innovative and uniquely new concept in the field of online gaming. This next-generation multi-player web game enables players from around the world to unite under one team and play as one community against other communities.

It’s free to play. Every player entering the site creates a new team or joins an existing team.  Weekly and monthly prizes are awarded, with the first prize being the popular Sony PlayStation game consoles. In my first few games (0-3-1 record) it took a while to get the hang of defense (especially) and thought my goalie could have done a better job (win as a team, lose as a team ...)

Now if there was some aerobic exercise too …

SIPThat's popular blogger, Erik Lagerway pondered in a blog post last year if the Sony PSP would one day run a VoIP (Voice over IP) client. In fact, he hinted while working at Xten (now CounterPath) that they could should be able to "hack together" a softphone for VoIP on the PSP handheld gaming console. Erik wrote in May 2005:

Looks like Sony has their crosshairs clearly focused on providing a feature-full portable communications and entertainment system. Since we can browse the web on this thing, and it has a USB port, Wi-Fi and a TCP stack you would think we should be able hack together a softphone for VoIP. Video will come later, camera attachment. I will keep you posted.

War! What is it good for! Absolutely nothing!

Great song (great cover by Bruce Springsteen; brilliant original by Edwin Starr) and a great idea -- and very appropriate in CE for what's going on with the next generation of DVD.

Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Lions Gate are set to release 50 films in the Blu-ray DVD format (supported by Sony), while Paramount has plans to release 10 films in the rival HD-DVD format (supported by Toshiba) sometime this spring.

Nobody seems to have learned from the earlier video tape format war, when Sony's Betamax format took on all of the VHS-format supporters. And reversing the "may the best man win" motto, the technologically superior Betamax lost out to the people's choice -- VHS. In all fairness, Betamax did hang around for a while and had an even longer life as a professional format.

What's in it for us consumers? Confusion over which format will win out, delays in making a decision (if any) to move into this next-generation product, yada yada yada. Not that I pity retailers, but they face the same confusion -- and they have to decide about stocking both hardware and software sometime soon to support both formats.

Anybody have any good stories from the Betamax-VHS war?

I don't know about you, but when I'm watching a DVD or playing a video game I want full surround sound with the bass cranked way up so I can "feel" the explosions of a frag grenade or feel the footsteps of the T-Rex as he stomps closer. There's only one problem with enjoying lots of bass and high volume - the people around you; husband, wife, neighbors, etc. might not want to hear it or feel the bass reverberating through the floors, especially late at night which is "prime-time" video gaming time! Sound was meant to be felt, especially when immersed in a video game. So what's an bass addict to do?

Well, no worries, just put on the Audio FX Force Feedback Headphones ($49.95) which will let you "feel" every explosion and every impact due to its unique force feedback characteristics - all without disturbing the neighbors or waking up the kids or "significant other". Massive force feedback from powerful bass vibrations let you literally feel the gaming action. The Audio FX's bass amplifier interprets frequencies below 20Hz (human ear cannot hear, but can feel these frequencies) and transforms them into vibrations that you can feel through the headphone earpiece. Although these headphones are designed for gaming, you can certainly use them for VoIP applications such as Skype or Google's Gtalk.

The headset features a circumaural earphone design, an adjustable noise-cancelling microphone, and an inline controller for adjusting both the volume and vibration. In addition, There are also multicolored LED level meters on the outside of the ear cups that are synchronized to the sounds coming through the headphones. The headset uses the USB port to power the lights and vibrations, but interestingly enough it also connects to the sound card's analog ports for the microphone and headphones. I'm surprised they didn't run both the audio and power for the vibration over the same USB connector, but perhaps there isn't enough USB power one one port to do both and have effective vibration force feedback.

The headset is a bit bulkier than usual but this is necessary to to accommodate the force feedback capabilities. If you have ever pondered whether to play a video game at 10pm and thought to yourself, "It's not the same without being able to crank up the sound and feel the explosions" then you need to pick up a pair of AudioFX Force Feedback headphones - you won't be disappointed.