Technologizer

Spawn: It’s SlingBox for Your Console Games

Monday, September 14, 2009

The most potentially interesting thing I’ve seen so far at the TechCrunch50 conference is Spawn Labs’ Spawn HD720 box. It’s also one of the easier things to explain: Just as a SlingBox lets you redirect your TV signal to another PC on your home network or anywhere on the Internet, Spawn lets you broadcast console [...]

Computers on Game Shows: What a Concept!

Monday, April 27, 2009

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When IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov back in 1997, my reaction was pretty dispassionate: As someone who’s played only a few games of chess in my life, I simply didn’t have a deep understanding of the game or an emotional attachment to it. But when the news came out over [...]

Fake Me Out to the Ball Game!

Monday, March 30, 2009

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With a bit more than a week to go until the first pitches of the baseball season, I’m in a sporting mood. So I’ve prepared a slideshow on the hottests sports toys of three decades ago–the early electronic sports handhelds produced by Mattel, Coleco, and others. Never have LEDs engaged in such heated competition, from [...]

Smallball! Handheld Sports Games of the 1970s and 1980s

Monday, March 30, 2009

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When it comes to sports simulations, there’s an inverse relationship between realism and charm. The handheld sports games that toy companies cranked out in the early days used a single LED to represent each player, not thousands of polygons, but they had more personality than today’s console titles–and they were plenty addictive, too. This slideshow [...]

Toys R’ Us Toying With Used Game Sales

Monday, March 2, 2009

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When it comes to buying and selling used video games, Gamestop has failed to win me over. The store pays criminally low rates for used games, especially recent releases, and it’s all the more infuriating when you see that same game sold back again for more than double what you’re offered. A couple of weeks [...]

Christmas Isn’t Everything, EA Realizes

Thursday, February 26, 2009

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Good news for people who don’t like juggling a half dozen top-shelf video games at the tail end of the year: an Electronic Arts manager says the company might be backing off the holiday release strategy. The big takeaway from last year’s success of Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto is that AAA games don’t have [...]

California Video Game Law Smacked Down, Again

Monday, February 23, 2009

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Back in October, a federal appeals court listened to arguments on a three year-old bill that would put government labels on mature video games and ban their sale to minors. At the tail end of last week, the court ruled that law unconstitutional. Judge Consuelo Callahan said while the games that concerned lawmakers are “unquestionably violent,” [...]

Microsoft Reportedly Keen on Wii-Killing Motion Cam

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

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Here’s a fun little rumor: Microsoft is said to be mulling an acquisition of 3DV Systems, an Israeli company that makes “virtual reality” imaging technology for digital cameras. The implication is that advanced motion controls are coming to the Xbox 360, or perhaps Microsoft’s next console. The report comes from Haartez, a respectable Israeli newspaper, but [...]

Red Ring of Death Nightmares Are Over, Says Microsoft

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

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Are the Xbox 360-killing problems that cause the infamous Red Ring of Death gone? And will people who send in their consoles for repairs have to cycle through the process multiple times to get a real fix? Over at Edge, Kris Graft put those questions to Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg, who said the console’s biggest technical woes [...]

Acclaim’s Music Game Approach Could Please Labels

Monday, February 16, 2009

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The massive multiplayer music game RockFree has been in public beta for a while now, and will launch for real in a few weeks. When that happens, players will get a taste of the revenue model that’s built to please record labels more than that of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, VentureBeat’s Evan Van Zelfden [...]

Midway Files for Bankruptcy

Thursday, February 12, 2009

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This is no surprise, seeing as the company was looking at $150 million in debt last December with just 50 days to pay it, but today Midway Games filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Chairman, President and CEO Matt Booty called the filing “a difficult but necessary decision,” adding that it buys the company time to figure [...]

Sony vs. Microsoft: A History of Trash Talk

Saturday, February 7, 2009

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When Microsoft boasted of 1 million sign-ups for the Xbox 360’s Netflix application — covered briefly Thursday in Harry’s “5Words” news roundup — Sony struck back, saying the Playstation 3’s movies and rentals download faster and don’t require subscription fees. Ouch. But this was just the latest in an endless back-and-forth between the rival companies. Taken [...]

Activision Looking for “Bullshot” Artists

Thursday, January 29, 2009

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Every once in a while, a video game publisher will be outed for producing doctored screenshots of a popular title. There’s usually some sort of outcry, followed by assurances that this happens all the time, and eventually we forget about the whole thing. So even though I’ve definitely heard of this phenomenon before, I was shocked [...]

Is EA Trying to Sims-ify Spore?

Friday, January 23, 2009

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My, how Spore is multiplying. When the much-hyped evolution sim was released in September, along with it came Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS and Spore Origins for mobile phones. In November, we got the Spore Creepy & Cute Parts Pack — basically a cache of extra appendages to tinker with — and come springtime we’ll [...]

Has Microsoft Flight Simulator Been Canceled after 29 Years?

Friday, January 23, 2009

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Reports this morning have it that Microsoft’s venerable Flight Simulator game may be realistically simulating the fate of Pan Am, Eastern, and TWA: Supposedly the Microsoft layoffs announced yesterday include the program’s entire development team, and it’s therefore being discontinued. I hope it’s a false alarm. I’ve never sat inside FS’s cockpit even once, but [...]

Xbox Live Gets Into Inauguration Day Spirit

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

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After a hard day’s work, and a bit of watching the Inauguration Day festivities, I popped on my Xbox to find some of the presidential pomp and circumstance billed prominently for free viewing over Xbox Live. The handful of video clips include the swearing in of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the performance by Aretha Franklin [...]