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October 31 Golden Joysticks, ahoy!Posted by: Nik Taylor Just got back from the Golden Joystick awards, which went pretty much as expected with Call of Duty 4 wiping the floor with everyone. Out of its nine nominations, Activision's all-conquering shooter picked up an impressive four awards, including Ultimate Game of the Year (isn't simple "Game of the Year" a good enough title for that award?) GTAIV picked up a couple of gongs - including beating CoD4 to best Xbox game. There weren't any huge surprises - except Super Smash Bros. Brawl beating Super Mario Galaxy to the best Nintendo game title. Also, the nomination of Spore in the "Most Wanted" category (reserved for games yet to come out that everyone's excited about) seemed a little odd, seeing as it's been around for ages. And do we really need a "Retailer of the Year" award? Play.com won, in case you're wondering. Frankie Boyle did the hosting duties this time around. I'd repeat some of his jokes, but if you've seen him on Mock The Week, you'll know most of his stuff is pretty unrepeatable. Actually, if you've seen him on Mock The Week, you'll have already heard most of the routine he did anyway. I thought he'd lay into the crowd a bit more, but after a gag about gamers not being able to find girlfriends went a little flat he seemed to back off. Anyway, we'll have a full round-up of the winners on the site on Monday, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, check out the best of this week's T&G content...
October 30 Golden Joysticks 2008: our picksPosted by: Jane Douglas Tomorrow lunchtime we'll be at the 26th annual Golden Joystick Awards, part of the London Games Festival, to see which titles pick up which prizes. The Golden Joysticks are the people's awards of game honours, with each of the prizewinners voted for by the gaming public. Some 850,000 votes were cast this year. 'Popular choice' in 2008 is surely shorthand 'lots of awards for Grand Theft Auto IV', isn't it? We shall see, but the general calibre of nominees on the various shortlists says much about what a year it's been for videogames. That is, a very good one indeed. Stay tuned for the winners and news from the awards show itself. For now, here's the list of prizes, nominees and our picks (or predictions). The Sun Family Game of the Year Nuts All Nighter Award October 29 Rock Band 2 gets release datePosted by Nik Taylor Rock Band 2 has finally got a European release date, with the game coming out for Xbox 360 on November 14. Note the word European though. Apparently, EA has decided the UK isn't European enough, so we get a different release date. Good news? No, the UK won't get the game until a week later, on November 21. Quite what's going on there, I'm not really sure, but Rock Band and weird release dates are fast becoming synonmous. Non-Xbox gamers only got their hands on the original game last month, after all. If you want the swanky new wireless peripherals, you've got an even longer wait - until some time in December, in fact. In the meantime, you'll find the instrument controllers from the original game work with the sequel anyway. Quirky launch dates notwithstanding, the game should be a goodun, especially with the new option to play through the World Tour mode in single player. As for songs, expect the same track list as the US release which had 84 songs plus another 20 free downloads from 'emerging' bands (i.e. people you've never heard of). You can see a full track listing here, but I'm particularly looking forward to thrashing System of a Down's Chop Suey and The Offspring's Come Out and Play. Modest Mouse, Interpol and Foo Fighters are also on there. Nice. October 28 A first peek at Windows 7Posted by: Jane Douglas At its Professional Developers Conference today, Microsoft showed off a first public demo of Windows 7, the operating system to follow Windows Vista in the next year or two. Microsoft spokesman Ian Moulster walked us through some of the system's "key pillars". Backwards compatibility Touchscreen support
See-through to desktop News story: Microsoft demos latest Windows 7 build Window docking and resizing Connecting PCs and devices What won't you see in Windows 7? News story: Next Windows 'won't be annoying' October 24 So many games, so little timePosted by: Jane Douglas With Fable 2, Dead Space, Far Cry 2 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles all released today, not to mention Fallout 3 coming out next week, there's not a moment's respite for the dedicated gamer. Then again, if LittleBigPlanet had arrived as planned, there'd be even less time for sleeping and eating. At least we gain an extra precious hour when the clocks go back this Sunday, right? But games aside, what of Tech & Gadgets this week? Let me show you:
October 17 Best of this week's T&GPosted by: Jane Douglas This week's biggest tech news was probably Mac's new 'unibody' MacBooks - and this week also saw the publishing of our review of the T-Mobile G1, the Android-powered smartphone hitting the shops in the near future. Our Unplugged columnist, trapped in 1978, found himself at a loss without the distractions of 2008 technology - and suffered a temporary Facebook relapse... As for the best of this week's T&G features, well:
October 14 Eurogamer to judge best game scriptPosted by: Jane Douglas
The shortlist of nominees is heavy on Rhianna Pratchett, who's work on Overlord and Heavenly Sword (with Andy Serkis and Tameen Antoniades) is up for consideration. Also on the list is Steve Ince for So Blonde and Tom Jubert for Penumbra Black Plague. It's a mixed bag, and a shortlist with the emphasis on short, dont you think? Given the calibre of writing in so many eligible games we've seen over the last year. Who'd win Best Videogame Script if you were on the judging panel? October 10 Head in a supercolliderPosted by: Jane Douglas If you've ever pondered what happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator, ponder no more. Here's your answer - and the outcome is, disappointingly, not fantastical superpowers. A friend pointed me in the direction of this splendid bit of gaming fanart - more accurately, fanart for the underserviced Mario/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover genre. Once you've got your head around the concept of Julian Oliver's mindbending levelHead spatial memory game, you'll notice it's pretty freaking cool. And, since it is Friday, how about the best of the week's Tech & Gadgets? 'Galaxy riddled with black holes'Posted by: Jane Douglas
This morning, I particularly enjoyed this story: our galaxy may be riddled with huge black holes hidden at the hearts of immense star clusters, say two astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Centre. It's long been suspected that there's a single supermassive black hole tucked away in the centre of our Milky Way spiral galaxy, but Loeb and O'Leary suggest that there might be some 300 further black holes dotted around, each gravitationally attracting hundreds of thousands of stars. October 08 Brand new Prince of Persia trailerPosted by: Jane Douglas
Out today (you'll find it jointly first here on MSN and on IGN) is a brand new trailer for Ubisoft's next-gen Prince of Persia reboot, out on December 5. So - are we excited yet? If I'm not mistaken, the soundtrack is Breathe Me by Sia, the sometime voice of Zero 7. It's lovely, no two ways about it, if a less-than-obvious theme for an action adventure platformer. That said, it's no more of a leftfield choice than Sigur Ros on the earlier Prince of Persia trailer. Nor Massive Attack for that trailer for Assassin's Creed (another Ubisoft game) last year, for that matter. As for the game itself, well: we've recently had a hands-on with it and a chat to producer Ben Mattes - look out for our preview tomorrow. Edit: our Prince of Persia preview is ready to go! World's first charity Alternate Reality GamePosted by: Jane Douglas Fancy taking part in the first ever online Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for charity? A British Red Cross project scripted by one of the creators of KateModern, the game is called Traces of Hope. Set in Nothern Uganda, it challenges players to use online detective work to reunite teen refugee Joseph, caught up in the aftermath of the civil war, with his mother. "In developing the game we've gone to a lot of trouble to place clues, teasers and solutions around the internet, so the boundaries between the game world an the real world become very blurred," explains Matt Connolly of Enable, the digital design company behind Traces of Hope. Traces of Hope is set to begin any day now - players who sign up at www.tracesofhope.com will be contacted by Joseph with news of his situation, kicking off the online treasure hunt. October 07 Wii Speak gets December launchPosted by: Nik Taylor I'm typing very slowly today as my head is still buzzing from a night of hammering Horde multiplayer mode on Gears of War 2. More on all of that soon - everyone present at last night's review event had to scrawl a shaky cross on a pact that says "no reviews until November 3". If we don't play along, they set a Brumak on us. But safe to say, you'll be playing a lot of Horde when the game comes out on Nov 7, and the campaign mode ain't too shabby either. Take a look at our preview, in the meantime. Anyway, back to the subject of this posting, which is news of another announcement from the currently rather excitable It's out on December 5, along with its own channel. Putting aside the argument that Nintendo really should have had voice functionality included with the Wii from launch, this looks like being a pretty cool addition.
The mic itself is a desktop effort that picks up the voice of everyone in the room - so a bit more sociable than traditional headset style action. Having said that, it would be nice to have the option of either/or. Still, Wii finally seems to be getting there as a decent online gaming platform, which is no bad thing.
October 06 Blackbird 002Posted by: Jane Douglas
Blackbird 002 hits UK The Blackbird 002 began life as the pet project of a Hewlett-Packard engineer Tom Szolyga, who set out to create the 'ultimate gaming PC'. His first incarnation of the Blackbird (the 001, presumably) was evolved into today's Blackbird 002 with the help of Voodoo PC, the high-performance specialist firm acquired by HP in 2006. Spec-tacular The upshot of which is that Crysis Warhead, for instance, looked fabulous and played stunningly well at Tech & Gadgets' recent hands-on with the machine. Modders in mind It's got the premium pricetag to match, of course. HP says the Blackbird comes 'at a price competitive with upper-end consumer desktops', but could a modding enthusiast build a (technically) comparable computer from scratch for less than £3,199? Very possibly - though without the exclusive HP/Voodoo features, natch. October 03 Xbox goes sub £100 (and the Wii's cheaper too)Posted by: Nik Taylor You can now buy an Xbox 360 for under £100 - and from an unlikely source. Sainsbury's has slashed the price of the Microsoft console by £30 - offering the Arcade version for £99.97. If you want the higher specced 60GB version, you can get that for £139.97. Need a Wii instead? That's down £30 as well - on sale for £149.97. No change on the PS3 though. It's an unexpected move from Sainsbos, coming so soon after Microsoft made its own reduction of the Xbox 360 price. Hopefully, it's a sign of things to come and we'll soon find ourselves in the middle of a full-on credit-crunch price war. Bring it on. Anyway, now the weekend's here, take a look at what we've had on Tech & Gadgets this week.
Microsoft owns MSN and Xbox. The views expressed in this blog are not necessarily the views of Microsoft.
October 01 Go go Action Cam!Posted by: Jane Douglas We recently took Oregon Scientific's Action Cam ATC5K out for a high-speed spin on the Thames in a rigid-hulled inflatable boat. The camera is a rugged digital camcorder designed for affixing to handlebars, crash helmets and the like - with the intention of capturing all your action in slightly-less-than-glorious (though certainly good web-quality) 640 by 480 resolution. It's the first in Oregon's Action Cam range to feature a 1.5-inch LCD screen on the rear, and has an improved (53-degree) viewing angle. Better yet, it's waterproof down to three metres, which makes it a very neat, self-contained underwater camera - it can take stills too.
It's possibly even a tad weighty for strapping to the side of your head for long periods (it comes with all manner of straps and mounts, by the way) but, then again, I'm no extreme skateboarder. Maybe they could handle it... The Action Cam ATC5K is powered by two standard AA batteries, comes with a 4GB SD card (which stores about two hours of footage) and retails for about £150. |
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