As usual, there should be assassinations aplenty in the new game. The beta gives you nine characters to play around with, all unlocked from the start. They all share the same behavior, but their abilities can be customized. There’s the Sentinel, Vanguard, Guardian, Vizier, Thespian, Deacon, Bombardier, Trickster and the Champion.

You also get three maps which include Knight’s Hospital, Antioch and Constantinople and four modes that were created in response to gamer’s feedback: Wanted, Manhunt, Deathmatch and Artifact Assault.

In addition to all of these other features, the beta also delivers 8 abilities: Tripwire Bomb, Closure, Disguise, Fire Crackers, Throwing Knives, Smoke Bomb, Poison and Morph.

That should get you nice and excited about this latest title in the series. Makes me want to play it right now.

[via Playstation Blog]

But we can’t say the same about “realistic” peripherals. Imagine playing Need for Speed using a guitar controller, or Guitar Hero using a steering wheel peripheral. These specialized controllers are too specialized for their own good; it doesn’t help that they’re quite pricey. So how will the gamepad-less revolution succeed? Israel-based Cam-Trax technologies has a simple answer: let’s just make it so we can use anything as a controller.

Cam-Trax is currently developing CamSpace, a computer program that allows users to use pretty much anything as a controller for PC games. The best way to understand how CamSpace works is to see it in action:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

As you can see, users first “show” CamSpace the object that they want to use as a controller; once CamSpace remembers the object, you can customize the controls depending on the motion or gesture that you’ll make. Unfortunately there’s no detailed explanation on CamSpace’s interface so I can’t tell you more about that.

I’m guessing that the object has to be brightly and evenly colored; I think CamSpace uses the object’s color to distinguish it from its background.

But the important thing is that Cam-Trax’ technology has the advantages of both a “realistic” peripheral and a gamepad: it’s versatile, yet you can use an object that’s more appropriately shaped or structured for the game you want to play. It’s also cost-effective: instead of buying a different controller for every game, all you need is CamSpace and a webcam.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I don’t think I can play an FPS that way; my arm would probably cramp up after 5 minutes. Anyway, I hope CamSpace becomes integrated not only in future PC games but in future console games as well. It won’t totally kill off companies that create third party peripherals because there will always be gamers who want a more sophisticated controller. But if you ask me, I’m down with using a cardboard wheel if it means saving myself a hundred bucks. Maybe in the future we can even use real instruments to play Rock Band.

CamSpace is currently Windows only; you can download it for free at their website. Remember it’s in beta, so don’t expect it to be problem-free.

[via gizmo watch]

The netbook was able to provide decent performance, from normal web surfing while data was being transferred in the background, as well as opening 400 pictures in Bridge, and even editing in Photoshop CS3 despite the fact that the little guy only had a 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU, 1 Gb of RAM, and a couple of Hello Kitty stickers. Don’t believe me? See for yourself!

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

You can skip to 5:40 for the Bridge and Photoshop action, but if you watch the start of the video you’ll see that the set-up isn’t perfect; HD and Flash HD streaming videos are basically reduced to slideshows. Can’t have everything I guess. But still, the fact that Windows 7 beta runs perfectly well on such weak specs is really good news. I’ll be bootcamping 7 for sure. Unless of course Snow Leopard is better. I think Apple should capitalize on this kind of free publicity and have a 10.6 beta version released, even if it’s just closed beta.

First off is Top Sites, a modified version of Opera’s Speed Dial. Like Speed Dial, Top Sites displays links in the form of previews of websites arranged in a grid; up to 24 previews can be displayed. Top Sites’ advantage over Speed Dial is that it tells you if any of the previewed websites have been updated by displaying a blue star on the upper right corner of the websites’ preview.

You can also “pin” a website to it’s current position so you’ll always know where to look for it. As cool as it looks, for me Top Sites needs to be tweaked: you can remove websites from the grid at anytime, but for some reason you can’t manually add websites like in Speed Dial.

Top Sites has to “learn” which websites you frequently visit. Bookmarks are enough for me, but since my 6-year old niece also uses my Mac to surf the net, it would have been nice if I could just click on existing previews and replace them by typing in the URL of the websites that she likes so she doesn’t have to do the typing.

Safari did not escape Apple’s Cover Flow mania, although this time it’s actually quite useful because it’s used to scan not only through your bookmarks but through your browsing history as well. It’s a great way to look up the tab of any obscure blog or website that you accidentally closed, and you can look at a page without having to load it again.

Safari 4′s Full History Search can even recognize captions, so for instance if you’re looking for a certain picture but you don’t want to flip through hundreds of previews, you can type in the picture’s caption and Safari will look for the page for you.

The next feature is immediately noticeable as soon as you open a new tab: Chrome’s tab-on-top look has rubbed off on Safari. You can snicker all you want, but the set-up really makes sense and makes you wonder why the developers of Firefox didn’t think of it before anyone else.

As you can see, having the tabs on top of the browser is less distracting, and it also frees up a significant amount of viewing space. Hackintosh Netbook owners will certainly thank Apple for that extra space. But like Top Sites, in my opinion this new (for Safari) feature still needs to improved.

You see, by moving the tabs to the top of the window, they also become the area that you drag to move the entire window. This quickly becomes annoying because whereas in Firefox you can click anywhere on a tab to drag and drop it to a new location, in Safari you have to click at the tab’s “handle”  - the tiny triangle on the right side edge of a tab – before you can drag and drop the tab. If you click anywhere else you’ll just end up moving the whole window, which is what happens when you click the “forehead” of any window, whether in OS X or in Windows.

Speaking of Windows, Safari now sports native interfaces on its Vista and XP versions.

Here’s the XP version:

Finally, Safari 4 uses a new browser engine that Apple has dubbed “Nitro”. Here’s what Apple has to say about the Nitro: “Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider. In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance — the best on any platform — loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3.”

Personally I didn’t notice any significant difference between the load times of sites in Firefox 3 and in Safari 4. But Safari 4 is fast and really stable for a beta. Okay so it’s not really stable, but it’s stable. I actually had to switch to Firefox to finish this article, because when I clicked the “insert hyperlink” button on WordPress, Safari rendered the pop up window (where the url is typed in) behind the black veil that also pops up when you click the button. The black veil blocks input to everything else except to the pop up window, but since Safari put the pop up window behind the veil as well, I couldn’t enter the hyperlink and I got stuck with the stupid veil. Hooray for auto save. So is Safari 4 beta good enough to be a default browser? I say try it out yourselves. You can download Safari 4 beta here.

But even if Apple manages to fix the things I complained about, I’m still not going to use the final version of Safari 4 as my default browser. Why? No add-ons. Apple still has time to fix Top Sites and the tab dragging, but without things like Noscript, Flashblock, Adblock Plus, Download Statusbar, Better GReader, Better Youtube – I could go on and on –  I’ll always think of Safari as a backup browser. IE, on the other hand, should only be used once: on fresh installs, to download Firefox.

The Beta will feature three maps, Valhalla, High Ground and Snowbound and all three maps will only be playable in Matchmaking mode for now. You’ll get a chance to check out new weapons, at least one new grenade type and some “hidden features” in the Beta as well.

Bungie has also posted some really nice new screen shots and a video clip of multi-player mode in action (and quite a bit of behind the scenes footage.) Although it owes quite a bit to the Unreal franchise, I love the new “Man Cannon” which replaces the transporters as a means of getting around the map quickly. You can now look forward to shooting players out of the air as they’re trying to transport.

See you on Xbox Live on May 16th!