Gaming - Page 1234

In a surprising move, Internode has called a "cease fire" between gamers and the publishers of the Call of Duty franchise by setting up a deal with GameServers.com that will secure local services for the newest CoD venture, Black Ops (available in November).

If you remember, the last Call of Duty title, Modern Warfare 2 broke sales records, won an arm full of awards and gave gamers world wide wet dreams for months. But, for PC gamers - it was a change. Dedicated servers, which have been a staple of PC multiplayer gaming since the 90's was absent, instead a peer to peer network (where one players internet connection is the "host" and the others are "guests") was included.

The result was obviously heard world wide, where premier gaming network games.on.net and Internode have gone into partnership with GameServers.com

With Black Ops, Treyarch have confirmed the existence of dedicated servers, with Internode securing the GameServers.com deal last week.

The ISP issued a statement last week, "games.on.net and Internode are proud to partner with GameServers.com, exclusively offering Australian servers for 2010′s biggest game, Call of Duty: Black Ops". "By hosting these servers directly within Internode's award-winning, high-performance network, Aussie gamers can rest assured their Black Ops experience will have the lowest possible latency, and the smoothest connection available."

Internode customers will have unmetered access to the servers (as they do with current games.on.net servers), but of course other ISP's customers are still able to access them.

Included in the deal is the ability to rent local servers directly from GameServers.com and have them hosted by Internode.

Server Administrator for games.on.net Matt Lyons said: "This partnership between games.on.net and GameServers.com is a win for everybody, especially the Australian gaming public. By working with GameServers.com we are able to provide Call of Duty: Black Ops servers free to the public and accessible Australia-wide. This will ensure rock solid performance for both GameServers.com and Internode customers."

As a PC gamer, sorely hurt by no dedicated servers - this is good news. Hopefully it's a change for the better and something that becomes useful even for the console crowd. We may have 1TB plans and 24mbit ADSL now, but without great local servers and support from ISP's like Internode, it's all not worth it for gamers.

P.S - I hope you enjoy my mad MS paint skills. Comment on how much you love them below.

One of the reasons I steer clear of shooters on the console is that I am a mouse and keyboard man. I prefer shooters on my PC, but there are some PC games that are best suited to a gamepad or a joystick. Any gamer who has tried to play a racing sim or a flight sim will tell you the mouse and keyboard are not best for those types of games.

Fans of Xbox Live are soon going to have to dig a little deeper into their pockets to continue playing online. Starting November 1st, Xbox live is getting its first price increase in its eight year history.

Years back when Sony launched the PS3 one executive made the prediction that the PS4 would probably not have a physical drive for disc games like the current PS3. After the massive fail that was the PSP Go and its download only catalog Sony has rightfully rethought the download only market.

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Sony's Kaz Hirai has stated that the PS4 will have an optical drive and support physical media. He told MCV, "We do business in parts of the world where network infrastructure isn't as robust as one would hope." Hirai continued saying, "There's always going to be requirement for a business of our size and scope to have a physical medium. To think everything will be downloaded in two years, three years or even ten years from now is taking it a little bit to the extreme."

The PS4 isn't expected until 2016 and a lot can change in that time. Last year nearly half of all video games sold were download titles. The download market is growing, but many gamers will still want support for physical media. I know I am glad that the future console won't be download only.

Both AMD and Intel have been talking about new CPU/GPU combination processors for a long time. When we first heard of the combination processors chipmakers were predicting that they would be the end of the discrete GPU. Whether that will play out remains to be seen, but I doubt it. We would have expected the first CPU/GPU hybrid to come from Intel or AMD, but Microsoft has beaten both to the punch.

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Microsoft's Xbox 360 team unveiled the new SoC that will power the coming slim Xbox 360 250GB gaming console. The SoC is built by Global Foundries on the 45nm process and combines the GPU and the CPU onto one chip. The goal Microsoft had in mind was making the construction of the gaming console cheaper in an effort to eek all the profit it could out of the console.

Benefits for the gamer looking to buy a new Xbox 360 is that the SoC is more power efficient and more importantly allows that massive power brick the Xbox 360 uses to go on a diet. Less power needed will also mean the console should run cooler, which is a big deal if you cram your console into an entertainment center. Microsoft apparently had to add in a system that reduced the performance of the SoC to keep the new console inline performance wise with older systems. The new SoC uses 60% less power than the original console that debuted back in 2005.

If you were so inclined, you could hack your PS3 right now to allow you to play games from the HDD or install homebrew software that you might want. The catch is that most of those hacking solutions involve opening up the case and voiding your warranty. That can be a big hassle for a lot of gamers.

The Sony PS3 Slim has been on the market for a while now and if you have been waiting to buy one or to upgrade your existing fat console, this may be the time to do it. I know I am eyeing one of the new PS3 slim bundles after my first generation 60GB fat PS3 died a premature death recently. Sony is offering a free game bundle good now through August 21 if you buy directly from Sony online.

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The games that you can choose from cost up to $59.99 on their own. Titles you can choose include MAG, Uncharted 2, White Knight Chronicles, MotorStorm Pacific Rift, Heavy Rain, and ModNation Racers. Those are all some of the better titles that have landed for the console in a while. The price for the bundle with any of those games is $299.99.

When you hit the add to cart button the price you see will reflect the game and the console separately, but once you land at the checkout the bundle price shows itself. That's not a bad deal if you are needing a new console. The downside for many who are upgrading from an older console is that those popular games may already be in your library.

3D this, 3D that; as time goes by the push for 3DTV in the household looks to be cementing itself deeper and becoming a new standard. There are several early adopters already in the way of 3D-enabled displays and Blu-ray player updates. Even Sony is getting all serious about it with firmware updates for the PS3.

But how about Microsoft and its more beloved than ever Xbox 360 (thanks to a little known add-on called Kinect)? - Well, in Microsoft's opening press conference at E3 they made no mention of making 3D a standard feature on the 360 and were 100% focused on Kinect.

We just got done telling you about how Microsoft will begin selling its new and improved Xbox 360 later this week, but let's go over some of the Kinect for Xbox 360 details right now.

After two weeks, we have a 6-way tie for first place!

Mark, Brandon, Jonathan, Don, Jacob and Chad are all tied for first place! And the rest of the guys are hot on their tails with one each. Remember, the top 5 win a free Razer Abyssus gaming mouse, so this contest isn't over yet!

In our first batch of pre-Computex Taipei 2010 coverage this week, we visited ASRock who had some pretty cool new stuff on display that it will show at the big Asian IT show next week. The second thing we were shown was ASRock AIWI.

We have held onto this news for a little while now, but today we can share news with you all that a new Taiwanese based tech company is bursting onto the scene called BitFenix. The company is making bold claims when it comes to the gaming hardware and peripherals products that it soon intends to bring onto the market.

With GDC (Game Developers Conference) underway this week, OnLive took this opportunity to unveil the launch date and pricing for its upcoming service which is unlike anything else available on the internet at this point in time.

Rumors surface all the time in the tech world and some are more believable than others. Some rumors start out of the blue and others are based in at least a little bit of fact. The new Sony rumor circulating today has a bit of fact behind it.

ASUS has bestest its ROG series of notebooks with the introduction of the new G73Jh which is all about giving the best rounded gaming platform using some of the latest and fastest mobile hardware available.

I have often wanted to put a computer in the living room so I could play games on my big screen. I never did it because I don't want my massive gaming desktop sitting in the living room. A company called iGugu has unveiled a new device called Gamecore that can solve this problem.

Nintendo ruled the roost for the first couple years of the Wii's availability in the gaming console market. Recently the demand for the console has slipped greatly leading to some rough quarters for Nintendo.

NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently made the statement that he wants Tegra to be 50% of the company's revenue in the coming years. It looks like not only does he want this to happen, but the engineers working on the Tegra project are also committed to this goal. With the release of the first Tegra and its inclusion in Microsoft's Zune HD we got a first glimpse at the power behind this idea.

But what is more for the first time NV actually released a road map for a product. They showed us just before the Zune HD where they planned on going. On this map was an entry labeled Tegra 2 2010. At the time my thoughts were that we would see this around the end of 2010 (Q3 at the earliest). It seems like might be way off the mark. Instead of waiting for Q3 NVIDIA could be showing off Tegra 2 as soon as January 2010. This introduction would be at CES with the tiny little computer being shown off working in Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) smart phones, and Personal Media Players.

While the details on the Tegra 2 are short we do have NVIDIA's claim that it will be twice the power of the original Tegra (big surprise). As far as rumors go, well there are plenty of them. We hear there will be two Dual Core Arm Cortex (11) CPUs dual GT200 based GPUs (possibly for SLI or to enable Cuda acceleration or Physx) as well as s host of other features. All told the future of Tegra 2 looks exciting.