There have been lots of videos (by Nintendo and others) showing you the Wii, how to play, and the games. This is the only one that's worth blogging about.
I challenge anyone who watches is not to want to find more about the machine..... :)
At last! some solid information about the up-coming new graphics cards for next-generation PC gaming.
Story copy-pasted from DailyTech
DirectX 10 compliant GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS headed your way
DailyTech's hands-on with the GeForce 8800 series continues with more information about the GPU and the retail boards. The new NVIDIA graphics architecture will be fully compatible with Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 10 API with support for shader model 4.0, and represents the company's 8th generation GPU in the GeForce family.
NVIDIA has code-named G80 based products as the GeForce 8800 series. While the 7900 and 7800 series launched with GT and GTX suffixes, G80 will do away with the GT suffix. Instead, NVIDIA has revived the GTS suffix for its second fastest graphics product—a suffix that hasn’t been used since the GeForce 2 days.
NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX will be the flagship product. The core clock will be factory clocked at 575 MHz. All GeForce 8800GTX cards will be equipped with 768MB of GDDR3 memory, to be clocked at 900 MHz. The GeForce 8800GTX will also have a 384-bit memory interface and deliver 86GB/second of memory bandwidth. GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards are equipped with 128 unified shaders clocked at 1350 MHz. The theoretical texture fill-rate is around 38.4 billion pixels per second.
Slotted right below the GeForce 8800GTX is the slightly cut-down GeForce 8800GTS. These graphics cards will have a G80 GPU clocked at a slower 500 MHz. The memory configuration for GeForce 8800GTS cards slightly differ from the GeForce 8800GTX. GeForce 8800GTS cards will be equipped with 640MB of GDDR3 graphics memory clocked at 900 MHz. The memory interface is reduced to 320-bit and overall memory bandwidth is 64GB/second. There will be fewer unified shaders with GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards. 96 unified shaders clocked at 1200 MHz are available on GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards.
Additionally GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products are HDCP compliant with support for dual dual-link DVI, VIVO and HDTV outputs. All cards will have dual-slot coolers too. Expect GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products to launch the second week of November 2006. This will be a hard launch as most manufacturers should have boards ready now.
Hello fellow muslims,
Happy Eid. God bless you all. Especially those in Iraq, keep safe please.
SoB.
Yesterday me and Kelly watched Hoodwinked, the real story of Little Red Riding Hood.
The movie is CGI which would have looked good 5 years ago (hell, even Shrek looks way better than this), but don't let that put you off!
The movie is very clever, telling you the well-known story of Red and her Grandma and The Wolf, but from each character's perspective, and of course each one has a different story to tell! It's funny, not too long (1:15), and has one of the coolest CGI characters I have ever seen, the goat below who's cursed to sing all the time, and always "comes prepared".
Now for those that do watch it, I'm not saying this is Shrek 2 or Finding Nemo material, it's just a small, independent CGI about what really happened when Red visited Grandma. Download it (DVD rips are around, the movie's been out in the states since last year), and spend one hour of a lazy afternoon watching this. Be warned though, you might end up repeating the scene with The Singing Goat more than once. At least I did :)
SoB out
PS: PACES exam on Friday. No more from me. I want to pass badly.
Kudos to Ali B., who always sends me stupid emails that I ignore. This one is actually funny.
is a wonderful screensaver. This description is shamefully copy-pasted from the website, www.electricsheep.org:
Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.
I've been using this for a few days and it really is fun. Be warned though that you'll need broadband (or a 100kbit down, 100kbit up) connection to download and upload the Sheep. Otherwise, it's a great screensaver that looks very geeky. Exactly what we geeks like.
Remember a while back I told everyone about FEAR COMBAT? The free multiplayer component of FEAR?
I initially didn't really like it. Deathmatches were too quick (a bit like Counter Strike, one or two shots and you're dead), and team deathmatches were just uninspired.
Yesterday though, for some reason (boredom!) I started the game and joined a server that was running SlowMo Team Deathmatch. For those that haven't played the SP game, SlowMo does exactly what it says on the tin - slows everyone down except for you (bullet time if you like) and gives you time to kick some Alma-arse.
The genius of Team SlowMo is that no one has SlowMo to start off with, but there is a SlowMo booster that's in the level. The team who find it must keep on carrying it so that it charges. Once fully charged the carrier can activate it and give the whole team the SlowMo advantage. This causes the other team to move at snail pace, and hence have their arses handed over to them.
Problem is, the carrier of the booster shows on the screen of the rival team as a big red circle, so they can trace him down easily. This, of course, makes the game purely genius.
Instead of just blindly killing each other (ala Q3A, which is much better in that sense), the match turns in to a tense game of cat and mouse as each team tries to gain (and keep) control of the SlowMo booster. There's nothing more satisfying than killing the bastard carrier just as he was about to activate it. Add with this the great FEAR engine that gives you awesome graphics, effects, and sounds; and you're on to a very addictive game that gives a good fresh break from the fast paced and mindless deathmatches we've been playing for years.
So please people, especially those that come to SoB's Kitchen regularly, download the free FEAR multiplayer, install it, and let's have some fun on the public servers.
