Wii 2 Unlikely For 2011, Maybe In 2012 303

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 19, 2010 @08:28AM from the still-a-few-more-old-franchises-to-resurrect dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As discussed on Slashdot earlier this year, the lack of a next-generation Wii may be hurting Nintendo. That doesn't seem to concern the company's US chief, Reggie Fils-Aime, who said this week that a Wii 2 might not appear until 2012. He wants to sell a few million more consoles before a successor is launched. So, no Wii 2 for 2010 or 2011 — meanwhile, the PS3 and Xbox consoles get motion control support and other content enhancements. What does that mean for the success of Nintendo's gaming console business? Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?"

16863092 story

Astronaut Sues Dido For Album Cover 264

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 06, 2010 @10:40PM from the get-me-off-that-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Astronaut Bruce McCandless is suing Dido for her album cover that uses a famous NASA photograph of a tiny, tiny, tiny McCandless floating in space. McCandless doesn't own the copyright on the photo, so he's claiming it's a violation of his publicity rights ... except that he's so tiny in the photo, it's not like anyone's going to recognize him."

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7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail 320

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday August 19, 2010 @07:40PM from the gasoline-and-head-shots dept.

Whether they spoil in the heat, freeze in the winter, or get taken out by a human-friendly venue of vultures, a zombie outbreak is unlikely to succeed. Here's 7 reasons why we should stop worrying about the shambling dead and start concentrating on a real threat: sparkly vampires.

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Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours 154

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday June 27, 2010 @11:26PM from the first-in-line dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac, and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."

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Nintendo 3DS GPU Revealed 133

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday June 24, 2010 @04:01AM from the powered-by-sunshine-and-bubblegum dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The GPU for the Nintendo 3DS has just been revealed, and it's not made by Nvidia, ATI, or even Imagination Technologies. Instead, Nintendo has signed up Japanese startup Digital Media Professionals (DMP) in a deal that sees the company's PICA200 chip churning out the 3-D visuals. For the first time in Nintendo's history, the 3DS will feature a GPU with programmable shaders, rather than a fixed-function pipeline, meaning the 3DS is more graphically versatile than the Wii. Among the PICA200's features are 2x anti-aliasing, per-pixel lighting, subdivision primitives, and soft shadows. As well as featuring DMP's own 'Maestro' extensions, the PICA200 also fully supports OpenGL ES 1.1. The architecture supports four programmable vertex units and up to four pixel pipelines."

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New Wii Menu Update Targets Homebrew Again 258

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday June 23, 2010 @06:29AM from the glad-to-know-you're-still-watching dept.

Nintendo has tried to block homebrew during firmware updates in the past, often unsuccessfully. Now, as it rolls out version 4.3 of the Wii System Menu, stopping homebrew modifications once again seems to be its primary goal. From Nintendo's support site: "Because unauthorized channels or firmware may impair game play or the Wii console, updating to Wii Menu version 4.3 will check for and automatically remove such unauthorized files." Since it's hard to bill that as an upgrade, they vaguely add, "In addition, there are some behind the scenes enhancements that do not affect any prominently-used features or menus but will improve system performance."

13561032 comment

Comment Re:Of course it's missing copy and paste (Score 1) 319

by Sorcerer13 on Monday June 21, 2010 @08:55AM (#32639560) Attached to: Windows Phone 7 Lacks Copy-and-Paste

I've got the same phone and I use the copy and paste function frequently. For example, if someone sends me a text message asking me for someone's telephone number. Say that person doesn't have a smartphone, I don't want to send them my contact as a vcard because I don't know if their phone can accept it. So, I open up the contact, highlight the phone number and hit copy. Then I switch back to the sms function of the phone, hit paste and select send. It's simple and it takes all of maybe 30 seconds.

When my upgrade comes around, I might just switch to android even though I have really enjoyed my WinMo phone.

10963592 story

Decrying the Excessive Emulation of Reality In Games 187

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @06:10AM from the plumbers-with-shrooms dept.

An editorial at GameSetWatch makes the case that game developers' relentless drive to make games more real has led to missed opportunities for creating unique fictional universes that are perhaps more interesting than our own. Quoting: "Remember when the norm for a video game was a blue hedgehog that ran fast and collected rings and emeralds? Or a plumber that took mushrooms to become large, and grabbed a flower to throw fireballs? In reality they do none of those things, but in the name of a game, they make sense, inspire wonder, and create a new universe. ... We’ve seen time and time again that the closer you try to emulate reality, the more the 'game' aspects begin to stick out. Invisible walls in Final Fantasy, or grenades spawning at your feet when you go the wrong way in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are examples of kicking the player out of that illusion of reality, and letting them know that yes, this is a game, and yes, the rules are designed to keep you in the space of this world, not the real world. In reality, as a soldier I could disobey my orders and go exploring around the other side. I could be cowardly and turn back to base. Games shouldn’t have to plan for every eventuality, of course, but it’s not so hard to create universes that are compelling but where the unusual, or even simple backtracking, is not so unfeasible."

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Why the First Cowboy To Draw Always Gets Shot 398

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 04, 2010 @04:00PM from the more-guns-less-crime dept.

cremeglace writes "Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."

2199925 comment

Comment Seaman (Score 1) 44

by Sorcerer13 on Monday December 05, 2005 @03:37PM (#14187267) Attached to: The Dreamcast 7 Years Old and Still Marching

I fondly remember the days when my Gillmen used to put me down and make fun of me. The Dreamcast had some of the most innovative and engaging quality software. It definitely wasn't given enough time to reach its potential, I'm sure devlopers could have really wowed us with its capabilities. I remember DOA2 looked far better on the Dreamcast than the PS2 version. I just don't think peeople gave it a fair chance.

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