The coming Thursday is a massive day for video game releases in Australia. It’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for me, and SingStar for Kevin - what are you going to be picking up?
It’s a big day for Australian releases today. I’m just about to nick down to the shops and pick up a copy of Super Mario Galaxy - which of the following will you be picking up?
Need for Speed: ProStreet (PS2, PC, Wii, 360, DS, PSP)
A forum poster by the name of “slugz” has proven that all you need to do is ask, and you will find the answers that you seek. He wrote an email to Valve asking nicely as to whether we could expect any additional achievements on Steam for the classic Valve Source games, and received this very promising reply from a Valve staffer:
“We’re planning on adding achievements to all of our games you touched on in your mail [Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Day of Defeat: Source and Counter-Strike: Source]. We’re just now coming out of the post-shipping haze, so these should start showing up on Steam pretty quick here. We’re also planning on adding a bunch more to TF2, starting with an achievement pack for the Medic in the next week or so.”
If you are sick of being tethered by cords if even for the need to charge then this emulating PMP might be for you. You see the HK Power can be charged by solar power and can even charge other devices through it. It sports a 3.5 inch QVGA screen, a Gameboy and NES emulator, microphone, SD slot and can play 25fps AVI files. Sure it’s a little light on the gaming but maybe some crafty homebrewers can do something about that. We aren’t really sure where the solar panels are, or when and where it’s out, but it sure will be weird leaving an electronic device in the sun on purpose.
Proliferation of ingame advertising is one thing, but using said advertising to recruit spies is another. Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence agency, intends to do just that. Virtual billboards in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent, will be used to seduce Xbox 360 and PC gamers into a life of surveillance and information gathering. Apparently, the recruits they are looking for are:
computer-savvy, technologically able, quick thinking…We find increasingly we have to use less conventional means of attracting people . . . to go beyond glossy brochures and milk-round stalls.
It’s amusing that they would assume people who enjoy taking part in virtual espionage actually have the balls to do the real thing - although its highly probable that those recruited will be crunching numbers and handling the technical side of intelligence-gathering.
Researchers from the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that enables users to control the movements of Second Life avatars in real time. Through electrodes contained in a headset, it reads activity from the motor cortex, part of the brain responsible for planning movement. So all you have to do is imagine a movement, and it will be translated into the appropriate coded output. The video shows how far this technology really has come, but how much more development is needed before we can expect Halo via mind control.
Attending a virtual worlds conference in San Jose, Microsoft exec Daniel Schiappa hinted that they are considering deploying some sort of virtual world, the likes of Second Life and Ultima Online.
The avatars and social networking would first appear on PC’s, then spread to Xboxes and finally onto mobile devices. Apparently they’ve been considering their plan of attack for some months now, but Schiappa was quick to add that “if a year from now we don’t have anything, then we probably won’t have anything”.
Yearn for the days when LOLCats weren’t used to sell Geometry Wars, but created solely for the lulz? Wipe away your fringe, because those crazy kids at Destructoid have collated a bunch of video game related LOLCats to ease your melancholy.
