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).

He also talked about the future of online gaming for consoles and about how EA plans on selling its games… online!

Another company, RF Systems, plans on start commercializing its own camera pill on early 2005, in China. That’s gotta be weird!

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 stores in the UK waiting for the spending the night playing their Xboxes.

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 would instantly be classed among the all-time greats – that’s how big Rockstar’s game has become.

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 7 support, but if you already have an Athlon XP 1800+, all you will have to do to play HL2 is get a Radeon 9600 or a GeForce 6600.

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.

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 throat.

For those of you who don’t know, gold is the stage where the CD/DVD production takes place. After Vivendi Universal Games confirms this information, it’s likely that they will state a concrete release date.

Not that I want to ignore the Xbox, but certainly we believe that a rush to a new system is a mistake.

It’s the second time this year that a high executive from Nintendo attacked Microsoft’s new generation console. Former Nintendo Europe boss, David Gosen, said last June at the ELSPA Game Summit in London that in every cycle some manufacturer not profiting from the current cycle is eager to kick-start the next one.

Xbox 2 is probably a big mistake for Microsoft, specially because it is almost impossible for it to be backward compatible with the current Xbox version, but that doesn’t take away the charm of its hardware: multi-processor and ATI’s next generation graphic chip (codenamed R500). And I’m still stuck on an 800MHz CPU and a GeForce 4 MX. How sad…

Those little women at the Tokyo Game Show with those portable consoles strapped to them… What you didn’t see is that those women were having to go recharge the batteries every two hours! (…) We have gone on the record to state that the Nintendo DS will have battery life comparable to the Game Boy Advance SP. Nowhere will you find any mention of the other machines power life. And you have to wonder why…

I think that it’s passed the time for Sony to say something concrete about the battery life… at least admit that it doesn’t last more than two hours. We want the truth!

The long, drawn-out Half-Life 2 release date saga appears to be drawing to a close at long last, with Vivendi-Universal Games’ expected to formally announce a November 26th release date for Europe, with US gamers getting the game three days earlier on November 23rd.

PC Gamer UK already published the first review of Half Life 2 on the October edition of the magazine. They gave a score of 96%, which is only as high as Half Life1!

In Addition to the first review, there are 45 new screenshots of the game out on the net! I just saw them and I’m blown away! Can’t wait to play this thing!

Retail Boxes

• Standard Edition: includes HL2 and CS:Source. Ships on six CDs, in one of three box-art packages (Gordon, Alyx or the G-Man).
• Collector’s Edition: includes Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 1: Source, a Half-Life 2 T-shirt and a Prima book sampler. Ships on a single DVD.

Steam packages

• Bronze: HL2 and CS:Source.
• Silver: HL2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 1: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Valve’s back catalog currently available on Steam.
• Gold: HL2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 1: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Valve’s back catalog currently available on Steam, Complete Strategy Guide from Prima Games, 3 different Half-Life 2 posters, Half-Life 2 hat, Half-Life 2 postcard, Half-Life 2 stickers, Half-Life 2 Soundtrack CD, Chance to win a trip to Valve! (1 trip offered for every 5000 Gold packages purchased).

The Steam packages purchases begins next week but all the games, except CS:Source, won’t be available until the retail release. Notice that CS:Source will be released before HL2 and will be playable sometime next week. It’s being almost two years since I dropped my Counter Strike addiction, but I think that CS:Source is here to bring me back to sleepless nights drinking coffee and complaining about stupid campers/team killers :) .

The strange thing to notice is how Valve doesn’t seem to care about Vivendi’s threats of not releasing Half Life 2 for another 6 months. I’m really curious to see how things turn out.

EA plans to follow up The Sims 2, which is a PC-only product, with a new evolution of the Sims franchise for consoles – The Urbz: Sims in the City. The title, which features exclusive music from popular hip-hop group The Black Eyed Peas (who also appear in the game) will launch on PS2, Xbox, Cube, GBA and Nintendo DS this November.

It’s good to remember that The Sims is the best selling game of PC history. I wonder what’s the fuzz all about…

Valve has announced that it will deliver a release candidate version of Half-Life 2 (HL2) (a game required under the 2001 SPA) to Sierra/VUG within the next few weeks. If Valve delivers a release candidate version that complies with the contract and is a Final Milestone, then VUG will have six months to release the product under the 2001 SPA. Valve is pressing VUG to release the product early within that six month window, and its representatives have made a number of public statements without our consent or concurrence that the product will be published and released to the general public in September of this year.

Well, it seems that if Valve doesn’t do what Vivendi wants (read here), they will postpone the release of Half Life 2 as much as they can. Like Chuck Palahniuk would say: “Blackmail” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

The system can calculate PI in 25s and scores 18508 on 3DMark 03 with a Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition. Oh, the PI calculation is of 1M digits.

Based on the award winning RADEON X800 architecture and designed to closely adhere to Microsoft’s DirectX 9 specification, the RADEON X700 includes advanced architectural elements and features previously reserved for products twice the price of the RADEON X700. The eight pixel pipe and six vertex pipe architecture is unique for products in this class, enabling unprecedented processing power than any other mid-range priced graphics processors on the market.

Versions

• X700: 400MHz core and 128MB of 700MHz DDR memory. Price: $149
• X700 Pro: 420MHz core and 256MB of 864MHz GDDR3 memory. Price: $199
• X700 XT: 475MHz core and 128MB of 1.05GHz GDDR3 memory. Price: $199

Reviews

• Anandtech
• Techreport

NVIDIA’s GoForce 3D 4500 WMP enables a whole new level of interactive content not previously possible on cell phones, PDAs, or other handheld devices. For the first time, mobile content developers can harness a powerful 3D medium to create rich, dynamic, lifelike worlds and characters. Additionally, mobile devices powered by the new 3D WMP will be able to synthesise amazingly realistic environments with objects that behave according to complex physics and intelligent characters with true-to-life personalities.

It also supports MPEG-4 and H.263 video formats, 3.0 megapixel JPEG images, programmable shaders, bilinear and trilinear texture filtering, texture compression, six simultaneous textures and a 40-bit colour pipeline for high-resolution detailed images.

Gabe Newell confirmed today on our forum, that the Half-Life 2 release candidate was handed over to Vivendi Universal 15th of September. Vivendi Universal would still have to approve this release candidate, which could take several weeks. When the release candidate(s) are approved, an gold announcement should follow.

Ugly but cool… he he

Capcom recently confirmed that it plans to make a presentation of PSP software on the main stage, and, although details are scant, the publisher is expected to show off one or other of its three tentatively titled handheld games – Vampire Chronicle (Darkstalkers), Devil May Cry and Viewtiful Joe.

Metal Gear Solid Acid will also be on display and everybody is anxious about Grand Turismo 4 Mobile being on the show, but nothing official was confirmed.

Each robot is 1.3 meters tall, weighs 63 kilograms and can move to its destination with the help of eight cameras in its head and a newly developed high-speed three-dimensional image processing system, the companies said. The robot can get on an elevator and press elevator buttons by itself. It can transport documents and other things by pushing a luggage carrier.

Fujitsu intends to sell the robot for 2 million yen (around 18 thousand USD) sometime in June of 2005. I wonder when Fujitsu will sell robots that can clean up bedrooms and do homework.