Category: Video Games

Inching out the newly released Nintendo Wii, and thoroughly trouncing Sony’s troubled Playstation 3, it looks like Microsoft took the lead in holiday sales with their Xbox 360 console in the U.S. market over the 2006 holiday season.

Check out this video clip of some of the horrifically painful load times for the new Sonic the Hedgehog game, running on the Xbox 360. Not only are the load times terrible, the shear quantity of load screens that occur to complete even a simple task are ridiculous.

The guys at Bungie gave U.S. troops over in Iraq a special New Year’s treat, and let them try out Halo 3 in a special sneak preview. Someone managed to grab a couple of quick video clips (from their cellphone?)

If you’ve always wanted to build up a huge collection of vintage console games, now is you chance to do it in one fell swoop. Some guy over in Hamburg, Germany has decided to sell off his collection of over ninety classic (and not so classic) video game consoles on eBay.

Around 7:00pm Central Time today (12/27/2006), the online game play portion of the Xbox Live service went down for the count, and as of this writing, (about 4-1/2 hours later), the service remains down. According to most reports, other portions of the service, such as chat, messages and downloads appear to be functional.

Just because Christmas is over, doesn’t mean that the new releases on Xbox Live Arcade are done. This morning, Microsoft released an updated version of the Namco arcade classic Rally-X. The Xbox Live Arcade game is actually based on the sequel, New Rally-X, was released back in 1981.

Wii hacker, LiquidIce has set up an integration between his Wii console and his home automation systems. The system lets him control his lights, thermostat, security and home entertainment systems, all from his Nintendo Wii. The system is actually a web-based interface written in PHP and Flash running on a MySQL database.

Just in time for Christmas, Playstation 3 owners are getting a small glimmer of happiness in the midst of all of the lumps of coal that Sony has dealt us so far. On December 24, they’ll be offering the Gran Turismo HD Concept game as a free download on the Playstation Store.

Our favorite modder of all things video game has to be Ben Heckendorn (aka “Ben Heck”.) He’s brought us portable Xbox 360s, Atari 800s and the original portable version of the Atari 2600 VCS. Ben’s latest endeavor was to take his original Atari VCSp (his first portable 2600,) and update it into a cleaner more modern design.

Now that the Nintendo Wii has been on the market for a little while, we’re starting to see to truly cool hacks using the Wii remote’s motion and accelerometer sensors to control things other than the original console.

Recently, it was revealed that Gears of War for the Xbox 360 had broken sales records with over 2 million copies sold since “Emergence Day” back in October 2006. Now it looks as if the dude with the disturbingly large head, the ruler of all things meat, Burger King may be giving Marcus Fenix and gang a run for their money.

Until now, most carrying cases I’ve seen for the Nintendo DS Lite have been either ugly, impractical, cheaply constructed, or all of the above. One company has finally realized that there’s a huge market for a quality carrying case for the popular portable gaming console.

At the Binary 2.0 Conference in Japan, a presentation was given using the Nintendo Wii remote controller to operate a Sony Playstation 3. The catch? The controller was installed as a device using a custom Python driver under Linux on the PS3.

If you’re sick and tired of changing the AA batteries in your Wii-mote, you might want to check out Joytech’s new charging dock for Nintendo Wii controllers. The Joytech Wii Power Station comes with two rechargeable battery packs, and provides docking bays to charge two remotes at once.

Space Giraffe is the latest game from Jeff Minter’s Llamasoft, creator of such classics as Tempest and it’s various derivatives as well as the cool light show visualizations you see in the Xbox 360’s music player.

Microsoft has released another update to add some titles to the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility list, enabling a variety of original Xbox titles to play properly on the 360. The newly added and updated titles include: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Burnout 3: Takedown (updated) Conker: Live and Reloaded Dead Or Alive Ultimate Destroy All Humans!