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Eball sports simulator goes mobile and inflatable
By Loz Blain
May 18, 2007 You may recall our enthusiasm last year when we reported on eballgames and its development of an interface between a real ball and ball games – think of it as a CHI (Computer Human Interface) for any real world ball game and you’re close. Motion and speed sensors take your kick, throw or golf swing and play out the results on the big screen, for better or worse. The crowd will roar or express their disappointment, and the commentator gives you a pat on the back or a serve for missing. The ball goes into a net and is ready for the next player to have a go. It's simple, quick fun and it continually breaks records for drawing crowds wherever it is installed. Now the company has taken its VR sports simulator and developed it into a number of inflatable structures so the promotional killer-app can be quickly set up anywhere, indoors or outdoors. Eballgames is already working on many different sports and is keen to discuss development opportunities with interested parties. We see it as the ultimate Wii peripheral for kids that want to play ball games. Indeed, there’s plenty of opportunity for the development of remedial and skills development games using this technology. Read More
Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s announced
By Tim Hanlon
May 11, 2007 It was only recently that we became properly aquainted with Guitar Hero 2, but that doesn't mean we're any less excited about Activision's announcement of the third game in the series, Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s. Details are scarce, but read on for a sneak peak at the tracklist. Read More
NVIDIA releases the world's fastest Graphics Processing Unit
By Mike Hanlon
May 4, 2007 One of the prime motive forces in computer technology is the gaming industry. And by releasing the world’s fastest graphics processing unit, NVIDIA has ensured that it is in the driving seat. Available on May 15, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is priced at US$829. Given that the graphics industry evolves extremely quickly, it is quite an achievement for a company to leapfrog its own performance milestones as NVIDIA has done with the GeForce 8 Series GPUs. Read More
Guitar Hero 2 Review (Xbox 360)
By Tim Hanlon
April 30, 2007 As you might imagine, we're surrounded with technology at the Gizmag office...and we thought we'd learned to do a pretty good job of soldiering on despite all the distractions the wired lifestyle brings. Alas, those times are over now, and we refer to the period as BG (Before Guitar Hero). For the uninitiated, Guitar Hero is rock and roll condensed into a video game, complete with plastic guitar controller and a drummer who always turns up to practice on time (and doesn't hit on your girlfriend). The original Playstation 2 game sold over one million units in its first year, and the sequel sold over 1.3 million units in 2006 - 800,000 in December alone - and it's hooked everyone from the neighbors seven-year-old to members of the prog-rock super-group Tool. Now it's here on the Xbox 360 in crisp 720p resolution with 10 additional tracks - if you've listened to guitar music at all in the last thirty years, read on for the full review, video and track list. Read More
Bardou-Jacquet’s must-see Shell Ferrari Commercial
By Mike Hanlon
April19, 2007 It’s Ferrari’s 60th birthday this year, and we’re pleased to report the company to be in extraordinarily good health. One of the most recognised brands on the planet, Ferrari’s name is synonymous with automotive performance, technological innovation, elegant form, and excellence in seemingly everything. On the racetrack, Ferrari has participated in every event in Formula one history, having won 23% of these races, with more race wins, fastest laps, pole positions and championships than any other marque. Formula One is the world’s most expensive sport by a fair margin – fielding a vaguely competitive car costs half a billion dollars a year, and several teams have spent a billion dollars in a year and still been embarrassed by the speed of Ferrari. Formula One is also the world’s most watched sporting event and the resultant brand recognition is enormous. Ferrari does not advertise but its marketing department is fittingly innovative in showcasing and developing the brand in many ways with the recent examples including a Ferrari theme park for grown ups in Abu Dhabi, the worldwide Tour of Ferrari, and dressing up a series of the world’s showcase buildings, including the world’s tallest building, Taipei's 508 metre 101 Tower. The anniversary celebrations have also spawned one of the world’s most outstanding adverts, not from Ferrari, but from its long-standing Formula One fuel partner Shell. Costing US$3.9 million, the two minute longform commercial involves a cavalcade of Ferrari’s most famous race cars driving flat-out through the streets Rome, Monaco, Rio, New York and Hong Kong and is yet another example of Antione Bardou-Jacquet’s astonishing talent. He was previously best known for the Honda “Cog” commercial. The commercial can be seen here – warn the neighbours, then turn up the speakers very loud for a wonderful experience. Read More
14-year-old Ribena vigilantes cost GlaxoSmithKline NZ$220K in false advertising case
By Mike Hanlon
April 14, 2007 When 14-year-old New Zealand schoolgirls Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan handed in their surprising Science Fair project results in 2004, they hardly expected to strike a financial blow for the consumer, but that's exactly what happened when global pharmaceutical juggernaut GlaxoSmithKline admitted to 15 charges of breaching the Fair Trading Act at the Auckland District Court earlier this month. The girls' project tested the vitamin C content of 8 different juices against the claimed amount on the packaging and were surprised to find that despite GSK's assertion that Ribena contains 7 milligrams of Vitamin C per 100ml, they were able to find "no detectable level" of the vitamin. Go to it kids! Be inspired by Jenny and Anna and keep 'em honest. Read More
Reinventing the ball for new recreational pursuits
By Mike Hanlon
April 12, 2007 Bizit Air Products have come up with a fun idea - inflatable plastic balls with up to a 4.5 metre/15 foot diameter that can accomodate dancers, motorcycles, and even cars for a showstopping presentation that's hard to ignore. Fully sealed, the balls allow an occupant to walk on land, water, or even a sea of hands, all the while looking like they're trapped in a soap bubble. Read More
Neuromarketing: What's it all about?
By Mike Hanlon
April 12, 2007 Have you ever wondered about the relationship between sex and cars? Intuitively, we all know there’s something going on there, but new research in the area of neuromarketing is beginning to shed light on the subject and it appears there’s a connection. Brain wave recording devices have been available for decades but new technology can now pinpoint more precisely which brain regions are active as people respond to products or make brand choices or are exposed to advertisements. The neuroscience dream of being able to peer into the functioning brain has been made possible. When Daimler Chrysler recently showed pictures of their cars while measuring brainwave activity with an fMRI scanner, they found that sports cars stimulated the reward centre of the brain, which is also the area stirred by drugs, alcohol and sex. The front view of the cars, with distinctive facade and headlight “eyes”, subjects showed brain activity in the facial recognition centre of the brain. Read More
HP unveils plans for the gaming interface
By Mike Hanlon
April 10, 2007 Hewlett Packard is expanding into online, mobile and PC gaming. With the international gaming market estimated at US$36 billion, a figure so immense it eclipses the GDP of entire countries, it is easy to see why. HP acquired VoodooPC last September (2006), and last week revealed a number of initiatives that have obviously resulted from the two companies integrating their core skills. The developments promise much more immersion for gamers in the future with HP showing a large, curved screen designed to fill a gamer’s entire field of vision, a high resolution “super projector” purpose-built for projecting multi player games on a large surface and a method of superimposing “multimedia digital experiences” on physical landscapes, enabling people to play a game throughout a city with wireless handheld devices. Read More
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of World War II Review (Playstation 3)
By Tim Hanlon
April 10, 2007 When this landed on my desk to review, I had my doubts - of the forty million or so World War II games released during my years of gaming, I can count the ones I've enjoyed on one hand. Thankfully, Blazing Angels stands out from the noise just by not being a first-person shooter, and rekindles the almost forgotten air-combat genre. If piloting one of 50 authentic World War II era aircraft through several key battles over historic sites like Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, Midway and Berlin sounds like your thing, read the full review. Read More
Playstation 3 continues to top Folding@Home statistics
By Tim Hanlon
April 10, 2007 Folding@Home is a distributed computing project where people donate spare clock-cycles from the CPU or GPU in their Internet-connected PC's, the result of which is one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The Folding@Home client for the Playstation 3, released as part of a recent system update for the console, quickly raced to the top of the statistics. Shortly after, just as the network of over 20,000 consoles was about to hit the team's goal of one petaflop, the Folding@Home team reevaluated the performance of the console - dropping it to half the original figure. In spite of this, the Playstation 3 remains the greatest contributor to Folding@Home, and currently provides over half of the processing power available to the project. Read More
fl0w Review (Playstation 3)
By Tim Hanlon
April 4, 2007 The concept of games as art is rarely touched upon, undoubtedly due to the rarity of games one could bring up in a discussion of the concept with a straight face. fl0w is one of the exceptions - a Master of Fine Arts thesis by USC School of Cinematic Arts graduates Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark. Originally realised in Flash, the game has improved in leaps and bounds after its jump to the Playstation Network, and it's here to manipulate your mood. Read More
The Xbox 360 is back in black
By Tim Hanlon
March 29, 2007 After more rumours (and denials) than you can shake a stick at, Microsoft have officially announced the new Xbox 360 Elite, and somehow managed to leave us with more questions than answers. What we can safely tell you is that it's got an HDMI port, comes with a 120GB HDD...and it's black. Read More
Integrated Marketing Communications and Consumer Control become major marketing issues
By Mike Hanlon
March 28, 2007 Once upon a time, not long ago, media was dominated by newspapers, television and radio. Advertising agencies made one advert and ran it many times. Life was easy, lunches were long and cheques were fat, but the proliferation of new media and the growing complexity of the media landscape is quickly becoming the biggest challenge faced by marketers. A survey conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) polled over 100 senior marketers to select from a comprehensive list of subjects to rank their top three issues that directly impact their marketing decisions and plans. Integrated marketing communications jumped from the fourth spot in 2006 to the top of the list this year. Read More
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Review (Xbox 360)
By Tim Hanlon
March 28, 2007 If you have ever doubted just how much advantage the Dominator system equates to on the battlefield, here's your opportunity to sample it first hand. Was the development of the real Dominator and the interface to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 linked? We don't know but when our games editor saw the real system demonstrated, he visibly paled. Ubisoft has already given gamers in Australia 10,000 good reasons (AUD$10,000) to play this game in an upcoming Xbox Live tournament. This no doubt left the majority of our readers, who can't play online games competitively and don't live in Australia, entirely unconvinced. Here's our games editor with a full review. Read More
New research substantiates Video Games as key advertising vehicle
By Mike Hanlon
March 23, 2007 New media research and measurement firm Interpret’s Gameasure report is likely to make a few marketing managers think about the most effective way to spend their precious budget. The report reinforces the significance of video games as a medium for marketers seeking to reach and influence key demographic groups, particularly young males. The report measures actual reach, frequency and demographic makeup of over 80 video game titles and shows that games reach well beyond reported retail sales figures. Read More
Video Game Penetration grows and grows
By Mike Hanlon
March 19, 2007 Once regarded as frivolous and inconsequential, the game console is fast gaining mainstream media clout and the third generation of consoles has further expanded its penetration into homes with 150 million US citizens now having access to at least one console - more than half (52.4%) of the total U.S. television population. As a medium it is particularly strong among key demographic groups with more than two-thirds (67.7%) of all men 18-34 and 80 percent of men 12-17 years of age. The number of video game consoles in U.S. television households has expanded by 18.5% in just two years, according to a new report. Specific console penetration details have not yet been released. Read More
Australian Xbox Live tournament offers $10,000 first prize
By Tim Hanlon
March 5, 2007 - Ubisoft-published game Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) was released last March, and went on to sell 1.4 million copies in its first seven weeks. Sales figures of this caliber generally guarantee sequels, and sure enough, this Thursday (March 8th, 2007) sees the release of GRAW 2. You've probably already played the multiplayer demo released on the Xbox Live Marketplace in February, but there's no question those who haven't will have a newfound interest in the game now there's a chance to win AU$10,000 playing it online. Read More
Piano Wizard integrates the video game and piano lesson
By Tim Hanlon
March 3, 2007 - Parents rejoice! Finally a video game that you can give to your kids with no immediate hesitation or eventual regrets. The results of long hours spent in front of the game aren't just honed reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination, but the gift of fluency in the most beautiful and timeless language of all...music. Read More
Nyko Wii Charging Station simultaneously recharges two Wii remotes
By Tim Hanlon
March 3, 2007 - In this day and age, disposable batteries are environmentally irresponsible, yet remain a desirable retail item due to convenience and price point - and those of our readers with Wii's or Xbox 360's will know how many AA's regular use of these consoles can chew through. This makes us a little surprised that Nintendo left this one up to the third-parties, but equally glad Nyko have stepped up to the plate with their Wii Charging Station. Read More
Is Sony adding rumble to the SIXAXIS?
By Tim Hanlon
March 2, 2007 - Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and Immersion have agreed to conclude litigation at the U.S Court of Appeals, and have entered into a new agreement to explore the inclusion of Immersion's technology (read: rumble) in PlayStation products. This is in stark contrast to Phil Harrison's recent comments regarding rumble as a "last-generation feature", which were widely criticised as a desperate attempt to hide the fact that the lack of rumble in the SIXAXIS was a design decision based more on legal proceedings with Immersion, than last/current-generation feature sets. Read More
Australia's Best Games of 2006 - Interactive Entertainment Awards
By Tim Hanlon
February 26, 2007 Last Friday, more than 350 industry types hit Doltone House in Sydney, Australia for the Interactive Entertainment Awards. Twenty awards were handed out - twelve industry voted, and eight based on GfK sales data from January 1 to December 31, 2006. Read on for the unsurprising results of the industry voted awards, and the surprising winners (and some truly bizarre categorisations) of the best sellers. Read More
Crackdown (Xbox 360) Review
By Tim Hanlon
February 23, 2007 - If you haven't heard about this game yet, you must be living under a virtual rock. We covered the release of the demo last month, but to sum things up, you're a cop with constantly evolving superhuman abilities, cleaning up crime in a city overrun by it. Today sees the game released on shelves worldwide, and our Games Editor has had a few days head-start to determine whether the cool premise was backed up by an equally cool game. Here's the scoop. Read More
New Wii channel - Everybody Votes
By Tim Hanlon
February 14, 2007 - Nintendo launches a new channel for the Wii Menu today, the Everybody Votes Channel, which allows up to six players per console to vote in regional and worldwide polls...a tired premise with an interesting touch - the ability to predict the results of the polls, and track your accurate predictions in a "How Tuned In Are You?" section. Read More
Register for Playstation Network in Europe, get Casino Royale on Blu-ray
By Tim Hanlon
February 13, 2007 - Even with the delayed launches of the Playstation 3 in PAL territories, Sony is still light on solid launch titles, with Resistance: Fall of Man and Motorstorm being the only exclusives receiving substantial acclaim from reviewers. To shift the focus back to their current strengths, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe have announced that the first 500,000 PS3 owners to register with Sony's free online service "PLAYSTATION Network" will receive a copy of the latest James Bond blockbuster "Casino Royale" on Blu-ray. Read More
Freedom Glen
- November 25, 2009 @ 02:47 UTC
