Year: 2008

CES 2008: Voltaic Solar Bag saves Earth, but not your money

Voltaic’s Generator bag

Out in the gadget wilderness there are all sorts of energy saving solar-powered concoctions designed to save the Earth like some kind of inanimate superhero, with each claiming to be more super than the last. It’s no surprise then that CES 2008 brings with it its own contenders for the next batch of gadgets to appease the likes of Al Gore.

The Voltaic Generator bag (pictured) promises to produce 14.7 watts of energy from the giant solar panel on the front of the bag, that’s enough to charge a laptop from a whole days worth of sunlight. According to Voltaic, no other bag can do this.

Every wannabe superhero comes equipped with accessories, where would Batman and James Bond be without theirs? The bag includes adaptors for phones as well as a car charger and is compatible with USB devices.

And just in case you find yourself in one of the less sunnier climes like this London-based blogger there is a battery inside should you run out of solar energy.

Of course not everyone can be superhero. Priced at a whopping $599 that’s still the case. Why are environmentally-friendly gadgets always so expensive? 

Email Sucks

Ever go on a vacation and didn’t have a laptop, Blackberry, or any other device that you could read your email with? I thought it would be fun to go on vacation and escape it all. Little did I know that there would be a massive uncontrollable build up.  400 emails later, I began to write this post without a doubt that email is obsolete and inefficient.

I’ve stored thousands of emails all tucked away in folders and many, many sub-folders. Years later, I’ve come to realize, what’s the point?! Why do I store this information and forget about it?

Email is impersonal. Social networking websites have taken over and writing on someone’s wall is now more important that sending out forwards with hundreds of contacts. See their face, quickly respond, and forget the whole thing ever happened.

It’s great not having to pick out spam and delete pointless messages with social networking sites. I’ve just spent hours going through all of these emails. Random messages, some important while others not so much.

Reality has now come back to bite me in the ass.

Email

Crysis v1.1 patch online.

Crysis

After what feels like forever the very long awaited patch for Crysis has been sneaked out during CES week. While most of the games journalists of the world have been looking at this years big up and coming titles the 140mb patch found its way onto a few websites. What isnt listed is a fix for the sound stuttering and mute issues during online play and a fix for the AA vehicle destroying itself when it fires. We can only hope. Also nothing has been said to its compatibility with the recently released MP map pack.

Fixes:
– Damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW has been made consistent
– F12 (screenshot) now works in restricted mode as well
– When player melees during gun raise animation, their gun will not be in a permanently raised position anymore
– Memory leaks and potential crashes

Updates:
– Improved SLI / Crossfire support and performance
– Improved overall rendering performance (DX9 and DX10)
– Enabled VSync functionality in D3D10

Tweaks:
– Reduced grenade explosion radius in multiplayer
– Clamped water tessellation to avoid cheating in MP
– Reduced LAW splash damage vs. infantry in PowerStruggle mode
– Slowed Rocket projectile speed down in MP slightly

Credit goes to Shacknews for the bug fix list.

Download links:

http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/11604/Crysis+Retail+Patch+1.1

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/crysis/download.html?sid=6184406&tag=top_downloads;title;0

Add The Pipeline – Video Games to your page

Cloverfield monster attacks Chuai Station, could be Ninja!

A Ninja in Cloverfield?

Ah, Cloverfield – there has been no better viral marketing in the world. In fact, I’d warrant that the viral marketing itself has gotten more people on than the movie ever will. It’s coming out in only 11 days now, and we still know what/who the great monster guy is.

Continuing the viral marketing, a new video (or rather, series of videos) have appeared across the Internet, that take the form of news channels reporting that the Chuai Station that belongs to the Tagruato Corporation has been mysteriously wrecked. According to Tagruato’s site, Chuai Station is located quite a ways off the North American East coast (a good place to start ravaging New York) and was “opened” in September 2007.

While of course, we have no doubt that the monster should be at work behind this, Tagruato Corp. released a statement:

There has been an altercation at the Chuai Station. Although details are limited at present time, be assured that Tagruato is taking every measure necessary to ensure the safety and well being of all staff and crew. Specialty teams have been deployed, and are working aggressively to restore harmony at the site.

The cause of the problem is currently being investigated, although it is suspected that an eco-terror cell is responsible for the disturbance.

We have top investigators on our side. Everything will be resolved shortly, and all problems will be fixed. If you have any questions, please contact us at +81-3-5403-6318 for further instructions.

For those of you not in the know, Tagruato Corp. doesn’t actually exist, and it’s only part of Cloverfield’s vast viral marketing campaign.

 

That’s the Spanish version of the video, with the German and Italian versions also available (they all have slightly different footage, so you’ll want to check them all out). Very conveniently, there is no English version yet.

If you observe the videos carefully, you’ll notice that there are gun-toting ninjas escaping the station. Perhaps this is all a secret ninja conspiracy, whereby they secretly control the world? As you know, Ninjas are too fast to be seen – and if we are seeing them in the video, they’re probably decoys! There is a ninja conspiracy afloat, people. Be very, very careful.

The Moral Cost of Video Games

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Well, at least they’re not harping on the violence anymore. Christian Science Monitor, perhaps perceiving that that trope has run its course, offers a rather novel critique of our beloved hobby- the lack of consequences.

But what games conspicuously lack is moral consequence. Once you’ve killed someone, stolen something, or blown up a building, that’s usually the end of it – you’ll rarely get to see the emotional impact of your actions on the characters around you.

Every bit of mayhem becomes just another item on a video-game to-do list. Games ignore moral consequence and emotional nuance to focus on the purely visceral. There are only two types of decisions you can really make: the strategically correct one or the strategically incorrect one. There is no “right” or “wrong” – only success or failure.

Get the full story here.

Indie Watch- Advance Wars Meets Pool? I’m in Love.

You will not sell a publisher on a title unless the marketing weasels know how to pitch it to the retail channel. If it fits into an existing, established game category – an RTS, an FPS, an RPG, action adventure, driving, sports – then they know how to sell it. But if you’re doing something novel – forget it.

An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation

Thus saith Greg Costikyan, founder of Manifesto Games and one of the foremost advocates of independent game development. According to its proponents, indie games present a haven from the stultifying pressures of risk-averse publishers more interested in games-as-commodity than games-as-art. Free from corporate suits, marketing execs, and the epidemic of sequelitis that has afflicted the gaming industry for far too long, they claim that developers can realize their visions and lead the gaming industry into a new golden age of innovation and compelling new content.

That’s if you believe the hype.

But even if indie games frequently fall short of these lofty aspirations, they can usually be counted on to produce a quality product. Most of the time, they operate like PC’s Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network- offering smaller, less technically accomplished games with free demos and cheap prices, and low system requirements to boot. In addition to the wildly experimental games, these outlets also serve traditional markets now all but abandoned by the big corporations. Here, the 4X and Turn-Based Strategy genres never died; here, point-and-click adventure games flourish; here resides many throwbacks to the days of 16-bit RPGs.

Despite producing some compelling, if fairly niche, products, this platform has been almost completely ignored by the gaming media. We here at StuffWeLike.com hope to fill this void in a new, hopefully regular feature called Indie Watch, where we point you towards some of the best games the field has to offer.

ballisticwars.gif

Today’s featured game, called Ballistic Wars, is an odd amalgam of turn-based strategy, pool, and puzzle gameplay. So odd, in fact, that I’m not even going to try to describe it; it’s best that you experience it for yourself. While it’s not the best game in the world, it’s worth the download for the novelty alone. Check it out here.