Our friends at MSN released a new blog service called MSN Space to accompany the new version of MSN Messenger (which is on public beta stage). The service will support comments, trackbacks, stats and direct posting from camera phones. The way things are moving, in ten years Microsoft will control the world, Bill Gates will be the president of the United States and there will definitely be a galaxy named after the Redmond company (like Chuck Palahniuk suggests on Fight Club). Read more »
Author Archives: barbutti
The future of games, my friends
EA’s CFO Warren Jenson made a presentation at the Credit Suisse First Boston Annual Technology Conference of what the next-generation console games will look like. And I gotta say… I’m impressed. He also talked about the future of online gaming for consoles and about how EA plans on selling its games… online! Read more »
Swallow the camera, man!
Olympus, the world’s top endoscope maker in the world is designing a disposable camera pill to look inside the human body. The device would replace current endoscope systems and will also have the capacity to extract fluids from body parts (storing them in a negatively-pressured space) and to deliver drugs in specific areas. With only 2.6 centimeters long and 1.1 centimeters in diameter, the camera pill will be released in about two years, says Olympus. Another company, RF Systems, plans on start commercializing its own camera pill on early 2005, in China. That’s gotta be weird! Read more »
Halo 2 – $5.2 million per hour
Halo 2 is the fastest selling product in history of the American entertainment industry. After 2.38 million copies sold, 125 million dollars were made just in the first 24 hours of the release! The game leaked a couple of weeks before (not only the English edition, but also the French one), but that didn’t seem to spoil the sales! That makes Halo 2 into easily the fastest-selling media product ever in the United States, another major victory for the videogames industry which builds on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ recent trouncing of UK videogame and box office records alike. Thousands of fans crowded up at midnight in front of many Read more »
Firefox 1.0 !
It is finally here! I know you were all waiting. You won’t be disappointed for it is the best browser ever! Go Firefox! Read more »
GTA: San Andreas breaks UK record
The PS2 sequel to the top selling game Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas, sold in its release weekend 677,000 units in the United Kingdom! That is by far the record for a game release in the queen’s island (the old record was from GTA: Vice City, with 250,000). In gross revenue terms, the game would have generated around UKP 24 million in the UK alone over the weekend, and projected across the world that figure could be as much as UKP 106 million, or put in international currency terms, $195.5 million or 153.97 Euro. Put in context, if a movie were to gross that much at the box office, it Read more »
Half Life 2 with cheap system
Half Life 2 is less than two weeks away from hitting the streets and many of you are wondering how the game that is supposed to be the best game of all time is going to run on your current system (that is, of course, if your system is not an Athlon 64 / Radeon x800XT). The Inquirer made an article putting old systems to the test with the Source Engine and the results were very surprising (“stress test results” are the numbers that matter): It is obvious that even running at a bearable frame rate, the game looks really bad on the GeForce 4 MX because of the DirectX Read more »
NFS: Underground 2 demo
Electronic Arts released yesterday the playable demo for Need For Speed: Underground 2. For 346MB you can drive a Nissan 350Z through Free Roam, Quick Race and Online Mode. Since my computer is *really* slow for all the new games, I still didn’t got a chance to play it (the same way I still didn’t play CS:Source), but Underground 1 was so amazing that I think it’s impossible for EA to ruin this one. Read more »
Windows XP SP2 vs. SP1 performance comparison
Short Media threw 108 performance benchmarks at Windows XP Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 2. The results: The test PC equipped with Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 was an average of 0.5% faster than the same hardware with Service Pack 2 installed. The percentage difference between faster and slower is insignificantly small. Less than 2 or 3 percent in some benchmarks could be dismissed by most but when gamers are looking to squeeze every extra frame out of their machines…it may count. Read more »
Half Life 2 has gone gold!
No kidding! Gamespot confirmed that Half Life 2 is already on gold stage! Ever since the release candidate for Half-Life 2 was submitted to VU Games in mid-September, a piñata has hung in the lobby of Valve’s headquarters. The plan: to bust the sucker open when the game achieved gold status. Earlier today, GameSpot learned from a locally based source that “the piñata has been broken” and the game has gone gold. Further evidence of the game’s completion was a press release issued this afternoon touting the first review of “the entire game.” Though nothing official has been announced yet, it appears the fat lady is at last clearing her Read more »
