Games

Razer has announced its Tiamat 7.1 gaming headset. Aimed at the most hardcore gamers, it incorporates what is claimed to be the "world's first discrete 7.1 surround sound" system implemented in headphones. While most manufacturers utilize digitally-generated virtual surround system, the Tiamat features five individual drivers in each ear cup, adding up to 10 drivers working in unison. Read More

In an industry obsessed with polygon counts and frame rates, Nintendo's Wii console and DS handheld were the proverbial knives at a gunfight. They were grossly underpowered compared to the competition, meaning Nintendo could sell them at a profit from day one. Their innovative control methods ensured they still sold like hotcakes. An animated GIF of Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata holding a DS that printed money became the go to picture to run alongside quarterly announcements of Nintendo's gargantuan profits. If a disheveled man emerged from a time-traveling DeLorean with tales of a near-future Nintendo struggling to sell its latest handheld, I'd have been more surprised about the Nintendo thing. So what on earth happened? Read More

San Francisco's Sifteo Inc has confirmed that its cube-based, interactive educational gameplay system we looked at back in March is now ready for release in the U.S. and Canada. The Sifteo Cubes system takes timeless building blocks play and learning and gives it a modern update - with a color display, embedded computer system and sensing technology. Read More

It's been more than 20 years since Jordan Mechner used videos of his brother running and jumping as a reference to design in-game movements for the Prince of Persia video game. Things have come a long way since 1989, with sophisticated motion-capture technologies being developed. One of the latest innovations in digital modeling technology is a miniature 3D motion-capture figure dubbed QUMA, which is connectible to a PC via a simple USB plug. Read More

Backseat Driver is the first "toy" by ToyToyota, a new brand from the Japanese automotive company. It's in the form of a simple GPS-based app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, and allows kids to take a virtual drive linked by GPS to the current driving route in the real world. Read More

Artur Nishimoto, a graduate student at the University of Illinois' Electronic Visualization Laboratory, has developed one of the most unique RTS games set in the Star Wars universe. Called Fleet Commander, the tactical space battle game initially worked on a 52-inch TacTile multi-touch display, but it has been ported to function as a multi-user game played on a 20 foot (6 meter) wide LCD touch wall. Read More

Nintendo's 3DS has been in the wild for a while, but now that the hype surrounding the device has died down a bit we decided to cast an eye over the console that promised to revolutionize portable gaming when it was released earlier this year. The 3DS follows the clamshell form factor Nintendo first introduced on the Game Boy Advance SP back in 2003 and the look and feel of the console will be pretty familiar to anyone who has used any of Nintendo's DS line, but the 3DS sees a couple of useful design changes in addition to the headline-grabbing 3D capabilities. Read More

Last month we reported on the Aurasma augmented reality (AR) app, and compared it to the special sunglasses in the John Carpenter movie They Live, that let their wearers see the aliens secretly living amongst us. Well, the new appBlaster iPhone accessory is much, much more reminiscent of that film. It's essentially a toy gun, that your iPhone mounts on top of. Running the free Alien Attack AR game, the phone will proceed to show you the virtual otherwise-invisible aliens that are all around you, overlaid on real-time video of your your real-life surroundings. You then use the gun to shoot the little goobers before they nab you. Read More

Is there such a thing as free will, or are our actions predetermined by the way our brains work? If recent research conducted at North Carolina State University is anything to go by, it might seem that the latter is more likely to be true – at least when it comes to gaming. After analyzing the behavior of 14,000 players of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, an NCSU team was able to predict the future actions of those players with up to 80 percent accuracy. Read More