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Most in the industry recognize that Microsoft's Kinect and Sony's Move and 3D pushes are ways to extend the lives of their consoles. Capcom Europe head David Reeves, however, only expects the stop-gap solutions to last a few more years. Speaking about the new technologies in a GamesIndustry.biz interview, Reeves said, "Capcom is definitely going to embrace it and just as the first-parties are doing, we see it as another blip before we come into the next cycle. Anything they can add to revive and pique interest in the games until we have another clash of the titans in two years time." He says he hasn't been given any inside knowledge of future hardware plans, but expects "two to three years" before we see new systems. "All the first-parties have got to be working on something," he said. "The tricky thing is when do you put a stake in the ground on technology? That's the problem. You can be waiting a few extra months to implement something, but you've got to set a date to go with a certain chip at a certain point otherwise you're going to miss the key milestones." Reeves also cites titles like Wii Fit and Guitar Hero as making the most money for the industry in the last few years. "And then on the other side you've got the Activision and EA hardcore titles," he said. "They're in a box. Publishers don't want to give up their core values but they need to reach out to this wider market." He says only the games that are "purpose built for Kinect and Move" will be successful on the devices. He may be right in his predictions. Sony's proposed 10-year life cycle for the PlayStation 3 didn't necessarily mean new hardware wouldn't be introduced before it was over -- the PS2 lived healthy along the PS3 for quite a while, after all. The Xbox 360, on the other hand, is borrowing time with Kinect and treating it like a new hardware launch, but they're likely preparing for the next generation as well. Nintendo is the biggest mystery, since years of speculation about a Wii HD have constantly turned up nothing.
You'd think Satoru Iwata would be making some serious bucks for being the top guy at a company as successful as Nintendo. According to an recent shareholder meeting the president and CEO don’t bring as much bacon home as you would expect. Andriasang interpreted a story out of Japanese site Asahi regarding Nintendo's shareholder meeting. Their report puts Iwata's annual salary at just ¥78 million (about $768,000), with an additional ¥109 million (a little over $1.2 million) in performance-based bonuses, reaching a grand total of ¥187 million (roughly $2.1 million). For comparison, Sony president and CEO Howard Stringer makes a cool ¥816.5 million (more than $9 million) annually. Yoichi Wada takes home ¥240 million ($2.7 million) each year as CEO of Square Enix. Meanwhile, Apple's Steve Jobs only pulls in $1 a year from his position as chairman and CEO of the company.
We've always wondered whether Microsoft's multitouch table would actually ever arrive, dreaming of Minority Report hijinx all the while, but after seeing what the company's Applied Sciences Group is currently cooking up -- a touchless telepresence display -- we'd rather drop that antiquated pinch-to-zoom stuff in favor of what might be Surface's next generation. Starting with one of Samsung's prototypetransparent OLED panels, Microsoft dropped a sub-two-inch camera behind the glass, creating a 3D gesture control interface that tracks your every move by literally seeing through the display. Combined with that proprietary wedge-shaped lens we saw earlier this month and some good ol' Johnny Chung Lee headtracking by the man himself, we're looking at one hell of a screen. Don't you dare read another word without seeing the prototype in a trifecta of videos after the break.
Well I’ll be damn even with antenna problems, screen related issues, and only 600,000 pre- orders Apple managed to sell 1.7 million iPhone 4 in sales this Saturday. Sunday transaction haven’t even been added up yet, I guess its another reason why Apple and Steve Jobs can walk around with that smug look on there faces. The sells number eclipsed the 3GS with only sold about 1 million units its opening weekend. I know Apples competitors aka Google has a ominous feeling larking over there shoulders with the threat of another launch by Apple.
One of the biggest aspects of the Nintendo's 3DS, that is not talk about much, is the built-in tilt sensor. Until most developers have been silent on the matter or they do not have any plans in the works to utilizes the feature. Team Ninja is the first developer to reported they intend to implement motion controls in Dead or Alive 3DS. Picked up on by Blogger "Silconera" a Japanese investor who spend some hands on time with the 3DS; claims to have spoken with Tecmo representatives about their plans for Nintendo's upcoming handheld. According to a Tecmo employee, players will be able to tilt controls to jiggle female characters' breasts in the 3DS version of Dead or Alive. Shocking right ?, Nope not really Team Ninja games like Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Extreme Beach Volleyball all have utilized motion capabilities for similar effect. Plus bouncy boobs are kind of Team Ninja's calling card.
Looking the Mini-e Pc up and down you can tell its a space saver, and doesn't it look cute standing upright like in this picture. eMachines latest, um, machine "looks like a computer of the future, or at least a idea of what desktops my look like later on down the road. Tell me it doesn't look like something you would see in BattleStar Galactica or Star Trek. The Mini-e ER1402 measures at 7.1 inches and weighs 9 pounds. While it won't handle the latest installment of Crysis running at full spec of course, but stuff like Hulu, and Youtube you'll be ok. What about the spec on this bad boy?the computer features a 1.7GHz AMD Athlon Neo processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, NVIDIA nForce 9200 graphics, 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. There are four USB ports and HDMI output (VGA, too) for connecting to your TV or monitor. A wireless keyboard and mouse are included as well. So picture this baby over-clocked running at about 2.0Ghz with 3GB of Ram; its like I said before you wont be able to run Crysis at full specs but it will run most high ends games at the lowest setting. I say "better playable than not right," and at $299.99 need I say more.
I feel bad for Microsoft and Sony right now accorded to an news report that suggests most gamers are aware of Sony's Move and Microsoft's Kinect peripherals, but few intend on buying them. Despite the core gaming community have a high awareness of the two new peripherals, both failed to break top twenty charts say analysts at EEDAR. The report also said more gamers in total are interested in Kinect than Move, only because more Xbox 360s are in more homes than PlayStation 3s. "When weighed on a relative basis (number of consoles vs. interest in the new controllers), Move and Kinect "showed near equal popularity"EEDAR stressed. The data does not mean the Move and Kinect will have poor sales, but as new game come out the purchase sales will go up. Please note that EEDAR's report is based off of traffic data from IGN.com, which tends to skew "hardcore." Purchase intent may be much higher among the more "casual" gamers once they're aware of the products.
Well, we've gone a full month since the last episode of NVIDIA's and Intel's ongoing public feud, but it looks like Intel has now stoked the flames once again (albeit inadvertently) in a paper presented at the recent International Symposium on Computer Architecture. That attempted to debunk the "100X GPU vs. CPU myth," but it also contained the tidbit that GPUs are "only" up to 14 times faster than CPUs in running application kernels, which NVIDIA has more than a happily latched onto. In a blog post, NVIDIA's Andy Keane says that it's a "rare day" when a competitor states that their technology is only14x faster, and that he can't recall another time when he's "seen a company promote competitive benchmarks that are an order of magnitude slower." Of course, he then further goes on to note that Intel's tests were done with NVIDIA's previous generation GeForce GTX 280, and that the codes were simply run out-of-the-box without any optimization -- but, still, he seems more than happy to accept this bit of "recognition." In Intel's defense, however, the overall finding of the paper (linked below) is that the performance gap between a GTX 280 GPU and Core i7 960 processor is actually just 2.5X "on average," which NVIDIA hasn't highlighted for some reason.
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