Articles tagged with: gaming

We’re extremely cautious about the veracity of this one but, while we’re awaiting a reply from Sega itself, we thought we’d flag up a story on tech-gossip site the Register that claims the former console king will launch a new handheld media-player-cum-games gadget next year.

Called the Sega Vision, it will feature eight key functions, including a music player, digital camera, games console and a built-in TV tuner. As The Register notes, it sounds like something intended to take on Sony’s PlayStation Portable.

However, as we said, we have a few doubts over the reliability of this story. More after the cut.

We posted a short piece about Asus’ new N-Series laptops yesterday, along with a short video showing the N20 Centrino 2 model. To recap, this is a low-cost range of four models (at the moment) produced by Asus’ laptop division – a totally separate division to the team that produces the Eee PC.

Today we have the base model in the N-Series – the N10. This uses an Intel Atom N270 processor rather than a Core 2 Duo, which means it’s really a netbook rather than a laptop. However, the design is very much along the lines of Asus’ other (and much more expensive) ultra-portables and like the N20, it’s rather stylish.

More impressive is its specification, particularly the graphics chip. In addition to the same so-so Intel 945 graphics found on other netbooks, the N10 also has a discrete nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics chipset – enabled with the flick of a switch (and a reboot). The result? The N10 is the first netbook we’ve seen that’s capable of playing 3D games at reasonable resolutions and frame rates. More info and a video of the N10 in action after the cut.

Asus first showed off its Eee Stick controllers earlier in the year at Computex but its now given them an official launch.

The "world first" is described as an: "easy-to-use yet highly versatile Plug and Play wireless controller for the PC platform that translates users´ physical hand motions into corresponding movements onscreen" - er, a Wiimote then...

Just how much more bad news can the N-Gage brand sustain before Nokia gets around to writing off the whole shebang as the shambles that it has been from pretty much start to finish?

Well, add this little nugget to the N-Gage List Of Duffness: if you upgrade your N-Gage-supporting phone, you can kiss goodbye to your cherished collection of N-Gage games. Well, unless you’re prepared to pay for them all over again, that is. Nice one, Nokia.

To the sound of at least half-a-dozen yawns Nokia and Konami have jointly announced that some of the latter’s game franchises will be remade for the former’s tainted N-Gage gaming platform.

Or to put it another way – and specifically to put it the way the Konami version of the press release puts it – “Konami will begin provisioning of Metal Gear Solid Mobile for Nokia's mobile game service, N-Gage, scheduled to start in late June 2008. Metal Gear Solid Mobile is original content created exclusively for the mobile platform and based on the Metal Gear series”.

Judging by the number of emails we receive asking how to do it, lots of people are trying – and failing – to get their Xbox 360 games console online via a 3G modem. It should be straightforward, but it seems that Xbox Live doesn’t always work as expected over a mobile broadband connection – which is a problem if that’s the only internet connection you have access to.

The good news is that it is relatively straightforward to get an Xbox 360 online using a 3G USB modem. The bad news is that it’s not just a case of plugging a modem directly into the Xbox 360’s USB port – there are no suitable drivers, and no way to install them even if there were. But there is a one way to do it.

Power gamers with deep pockets are likely to be salivating at the propsect of owning Dell's latest games PC - a special edition World of Warcraft-themed laptop. The XPS M1730 is emblazoned with World of Warcraft artwork (Horde or Alliance) and includes an Intel Extreme Edition Core 2 Duo processor (up to 3.4GHz), NVIDIA SLI graphics card and 512MB dedicated video RAM with DirectX, full HD 17-inch widescreen monitor, built-in camera and microphones, plus Blu-ray drive. There are also optional RAID and solid state drive configurations. It's on sale from 11 December in the US with prices starting from a jaw-dropping $4499 (£2250). Whoever said power gaming was cheap?

[Dell]

AGEIA has announced plans to make its PhysX hardware available for laptops. Like its desktop PC counterpart, the PhysX 100M is a dedicated processor that enables games to use ultra-realistic physics.

According to AGEIA CEO Manju Hegde, the chip: “further expands our position in the gaming market and we look forward to seeing new laptops bring gamers the freedom to enjoy incredible physics action on the go.”

The desktop chip has hardly set the world on fire though, and very few games so far support it.

[Custom PC]