When I was just a little man, Nerf weapons were the coolest toy you could have. I don’t remember ever having a motorized Nerf cannon, but it appears the kids these days aren’t as forgiving.
Hasbro have shown off a new range of Nerf tools of child warfare, including a Wii accessory and the Vulcan EBF-25. The Vulcan doesn’t fire 200 bullets a second, but it can fire 25 darts without reloading, and even comes on a handy tripod for extra accuracy.
It will be available before christmas (of course) for the price of $US40. It does require batteries (6 x D) , but you can bet your life they aren’t included.
For more info, click over to Crave.
You have heard of streaming audio, and maybe video, but what about streaming games? There are currently companies making streaming products, but I’ve never heard of anything that can do what this system can.
Imagine playing any PC game ever release on your PS3 with good frames and quality. Welcome to the reality of SteamMyGame. The basic idea of the product is you have a Windows machine that takes the game and then turns it into a video and control stream. It means that your older machines can play new games, that is of course, if you have a fast enough machine in the house to run it.
There are many options for this incredible piece of software, such as the ability to play games over the Internet, without worrying about PC requirements and without having to downloading the game at all. It will create a new market for ‘rent a game system’ and options for future consoles to be dumb terminals.
If you want to have a play, you can jump over to the StreamMyGame website and download the program for free. If it is as good as it says, this could be the best thing since slice bread (for PC game streaming).
For more info, jump over to Akihabara News.
For the poor people out there who can’t get a Wii, I would like to show you these numbers. Amazon, one of the biggest online retailers in the world, on December the 10th was selling 62.5 items per second. Now compare that to the fact that when Amazon had the Wii in stock it was being shifted at 17 items per second. Lastly, ask yourself why Nintendo haven’t really dropped the price on the Wii yet?
For more info, click over to the Gamasutra Website. Thank you Kotaku for the picture.
It is something that most gamers would know already, but CNET have made a nice article, collecting what they believe is the top 10 of 2007. The list is a mix of PC and Console, with games such as Mario Galaxy, Crysis, Call Of Duty 4, God Of War 2, Rock Band, Halo 3, The Orange Box (Half-Life 2 collection), Mass Effect, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and of course BioShock. It also come with a pick of some pretty pictures, so if you haven’t read about these games already, this is a good chance to.
For the full article, click over to Crave at CNet.
Who wants to be able to stream internet radio, schedule television recordings and use OPML RSS feeds (whatever that is) from your PSP? Firmware 3.80 brings that to the table as well as other things. Updated features include streaming Internet Radio player, video scene search, RSS support for OPML and pictures, 1Seg tuners can use an EPG to schedule Japanese mobile television recordings (only on the Slim) and PlayStation Spot now available at BB Mobile Point (Japan only). Is it enough for most people, especially anyone outside of Japan to warrant losing your custom firmware? Probably now sorry.
For more info, click over to the Engadget Blog.
You heard it right, and don’t pretend like you didn’t have a inkling that this was going to happen eventually. Apparently Game Informer’s January ‘08 issue has a feature on a so called Command And Conquer: Tiberium. It will be number 8 in a unbelievable long and successful series.
Tiberium will be unique to most of the other C&C’s by following in the footsteps of Renegade and becoming the second Command And Conquer to be a FPS (first person shooter). It is said to be set 11 years after the end of the third Tiberium war, and “described as Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter meets Battlefield meets Rainbow Six Vegas.” If you are going to make a FPS based on a mix of other games, you can’t really go past the listed ones.
There isn’t much else know, but I will keep my good ear open (a long story based around a lot of fireworks and tequila), and will post an update when more is known. I would say that there will be more info when the Game Informer is officially released.
For more info, click over to the famous Joystiq Blog.
Who wants to download brand new full version games, without having to use a PC or wait for Phantom Entertainment to make a comeback? That is where WiiWare comes in, which is basically full game downloads to your Nintendo Wii. Earlier I talked about the games that were coming to it and a bit of info on the system, but now Nintendo has released a few other snip bits that should quench your fanboy thirst.
Each game will have a size limit of 40MB, which will fill its 512 MB of storage pretty damn fast (unless they let you use either a USB HDD or an SD card). Apparently, the devs will release a maximum of 1 game a month, with a max budget of $US100,000. Seems to be a lot like Xbox Arcade and less like a cool new full featured game download service. Guess we will have to wait for the rain of game reviews before we can make any judgement.
For more info, dance over to the Kotaku Blog.
Come December the 2nd and the Xbox 360 will be able to do what both the Wii and PS3 have been able to do for months. The 360 will get a dashboard update that will allow it to download and play Xbox 1 games. The games currently announced are Fable, Indigo Prophecy, Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath Of Cortex, Burnout 3, and Halo: Combat Evolved.
The advantage that Microsoft has is that the Xbox 1 is a lot newer console when compared to the PS1 games you can get for the PS3 and the N64 and older you can get for the Wii. That also touches another problem though. The Xbox 1 had a DVD drive, so games were relatively large compared to the older generation consoles. This means you been have very fast internet and the Elite model (for the 120GB storage) or you may be up the creek. I guess in the end the deal breaker will be the price it costs to to buy the games.
For more info, click over to the Joystiq Blog.
Firstly, for the people who don’t know what DiVX is, it is a codec which is used by most piraters to released movies onto the internet. It is also a very good codec for making very big DVD’s, into smaller more manageable movie files. It seems that Sony will be giving the PlayStation 3 the ability to play them back soon, which means a few things.
It means that, when compared to the X360 (though it may come soon), it will be a more capable media centre machine. It means that people can take their whole DVD collections and put them on the PS3 hard drive, and never need to put another DVD in there very valuable Blu-Ray drive. It means that game developers can add 10+ hours of video to a Blu-Ray disk and still have space for ridiculously large games.
Currently developers can now use the DiVX decoder, but there is no news when the rest of the PS3 owners will have the ability to use it. Expect an update people.
For more info, click over to the Joystiq Blog.
Here are some numbers of the Playstation 2 AKA PS2. It was announced in 1999, and was then released in 2000 which saw it sell 900,000 copies in the first weekend (in Japan of course). It is the fastest console ever to reach a 100 million units sold, and is currently sitting around the 120 million mark. With those numbers it doesn’t come as a surprise that Sony have done yet another refresh on the product.
The new PS2, which gets the model number SCPH-90000, and will feature a internal AC adapter, making it easier to take around with you, plus it is lighter while staying the same size as the current modell. Even though it isn’t ground breaking, it is nice to see Sony improving on such an old product and keeping the loyal fans happy.
The price of the new PS2, despite rumor of a $US99 price point, will retail for the same price as the current PS2 ($US140). It will launch November 22 and will come in three delightful colours, which are Charcoal Black”, “Ceramic White” and “Satin Silver”. I’m still waiting for the magical $US99 price point before getting into the slightly retro gaming market.
For more info, click over to the Saving Progress Website.