technology, gadgets, opinion, news, you know … the stuff you like!
XBox 360
Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Fable 2.
PS3
Fallout 3, Resistance 2, Little Big Planet, Resident Evil (this game is just better on the PS3).
Wii
Guitar Hero (any), Rock Band 2, Rayman’s Raving Rabbids (1 or 2 but not both).
If you don’t have these you’re not doing your console justice.
Anyone surprised over this? Anyone? They’ve been doing this for years.
“One of the controversies that’s been swirling around the Chinese Olympic Games since they began is the age of several of China’s gymnasts. According to Chinese officials (and, of course, official passports and ID cards), both He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan are 16, and therefore old enough to compete in the Olympic Games. Unfortunately for China, there’s a growing body of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, including online evidence a gumshoe hacker discovered lurking in the cache of Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google.
If these allegations prove true, it would scarcely be the first time China has lied about the age of an athlete. In 2000—three years after the minimum qualifying age for Olympic Gymnastic competition was raised to 16—Chinese gymnast Yang Yun won a bronze medal for her performance on the uneven bars. Yang’s passport showed her as 16 years old at the time, but the gymnast herself later admitted on Chinese national television that she and her coaches had lied about her age, and that she had been just 14 at the time. There’s also evidence that Chinese gymnast Li Ya was just 13 when she competed at the World Championships in Anaheim back in 2003.” (link)
When Dustin Waller went on the Internet looking for online games for his new PlayStation, he had no idea police investigators were watching.
About a month after Waller’s fiancee got the PlayStation at 3-D Games in the Salisbury Mall, Statesville Police came knocking at Waller’s home in Cleveland.
Statesville Police Detective Scott Reed told Waller his PlayStation had been stolen in Statesville, and they wanted to know how he got it.
Not only that, the detective took the PlayStation without offering any way for Waller to get back his $350.
His fiancee, Christie Myers, bought the PlayStation 3 game console June 27 from 3-D Games in the mall as a gift for Waller. The store sells new and used merchandise. (link)
With the gaming industry growing so rapidly, and more people spending time with their consoles and PCs instead of going to movies or watching television, it’s no surprise that developers and publishers are interested in branching out into different forms of media. EA is jumping into Hollywood with both feet, having announced that the company signed with United Talent Agency to develop its properties for film and TV shows.
The history of game-based films is uneven, to say the least. Early misses like the Mario Bros. movie and Doom didn’t do much to help things, although the film adaptation of Silent Hill was surprisingly watchable. The first trailer for the Max Payne film also has fans cautiously optimistic. EA already has many deals in place, including a film version of The Sims with 20th Century Fox, and its new IP Dead Space is getting the royal treatment; the story of the game begins in a comic book series illustrated by Ben Templesmith, to be continued in a feature-length animated film, then finishing up with the game itself. Should these side-projects bring the game success, it’s probable a bigger-budget live-action movie would at least be discussed. (link)
So when are they gonna release this program against the online poker websites? Hmm? I can already hear the money rolling in. The amount of money involved here is ridiculous and so tempting that I’m sure the programmers are gonna cave and eventually try it out one weekend. After a few wins and a few bucks, they’ll get caught and then get banned from every poker site. This is like virtual case of the MIT students caught card counting, except with texas holdem.
“One of the proving grounds for artificial intelligence is games. Classic games have a fixed set of rules, and these make it easier for researchers to develop new techniques and algorithms that enable computers to play (and hopefully win) various games. Tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess are all games where researchers have developed software that is capable of winning or drawing when paired off against the best human players in the world. Last weekend, researchers at the University of Alberta added another classic game to this list: poker. In a series of matches that took place over the Fourth of July weekend in Las Vegas, the researchers’ Polaris poker program won against a group of top-ranked online poker players.” (link)
