Gaming Technology Blog

Okay, I admit it: I have a strong tendency to assign to blame for every gaming- related crime I hear about to Grand Theft Auto. I don’t know why, I just do. Thankfully, though, this one doesn’t seem to have a GTA connection, just a Lame Pathetic Crook connection. The guy walks into a video [...]

Interesting tidbit from the World News Network… they claim that in the Asia Pacific region, online activity is on the uptick with online gaming leading the way, while online video and music fall to the wayside due to rampant piracy. Hm. Maybe online audio and video execs could learn something from the gaming industry about [...]

It’s interesting to me that the PC game version of the latest Narnia film, “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” is being released before the film actually comes out in theaters. Could it be that the publisher expects demand to be so great that players will want their Prince Caspian fix any which way they [...]

A recent study by an Australian Psychology graduate suggests that gaming addicts, for all their shortcomings, are not the antisocial nerds we tend to make them out to be. Of the 621 adult respondents to the study, 15% calimed to spend more that 50 hours a week playing video games, but only 1 percent exhibited [...]

If you haven’t heard about Video Games Live, it’s just about the coolest concert series there is. They play video game music, live, on a full-on classical orchestra with all the works, hi-tech lights show and everything. It’s one of those few gaming-related things (like conventions and such) that simple cannot be recreated as a [...]

Gaming is such a broad and complex world, full of accomplishments and human achievement, that the people behind the Guinness Book of World Records has an edition of records dedicated purely to gaming-related stuff. The Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2008 is now available and if you forgot to give your gamer dad something for [...]

I don’t play very many fighting games anymore, but if it’s Street Fighter-related I’m all ears. Or in this case eyes. It’s Street Fighter 4! It isn’t really the fourth installment, but what the heck? And what with all the hubbub about that other megafranchise that sports the number four (GTA4, for the hopelessly underinformed), [...]

The Nintendo Wii, Microsoft’s XBox 360, and the Sony Playstation 3 all contain too much bromine, according to environmental watchdog group Greenpeace. Bromide is classified by Greenpeace as a chemical that’s hazardous to the environment,and the PS3 had the highest levels of it. The XBox and PS3 also had beryllium-containing alloys, which Greenpeace found worrisome. [...]

A far as Microsoft is concerned, the video game retailer GameStop has put a stop to the Zune game. Gamestop says it decided to cease Zune sales because it wasn’t a gaming gadget. It has been selling Zune, however since 2006, when the gadget first launched. Gates and co., though, have thus far shrugged the [...]

Carnegie Melon University researchers hope that gamers visiting their new website, www.gwap.com, can help make computers smarter. How? By playing online games. For example, in the game “Tag a tune”, humans add tags to describe whether audio clips are “sad”, and so on. This helps computers learn to do stuff better, like image and audio [...]

Is Microsoft developing a motion-sensitive controller similar to Nintendo’s Wiimote? The project, supposedly codenamed “Newton”, has been making the rounds but Microsoft Game Studios head Shane Kim sort of put down the rumors, though he stopped short of a full denial. Meanwhile, Yu Suzuki’s masterly Shenmue series is supposed to be up for a Nintendo [...]

Recently rumors have been flying about a planned “slimmed-down” version of the Microsoft XBox 360 gaming console. The sleeker model was supposed to have been in line for a 2009 release. But a Microsoft representative quashed the rumor by telling tech blog Engadget the whole thing was a hoax. Unless, of course, the rep was [...]

Japan’s $6.9 billion arcade gaming isustry has been hit hard by the increasing popularity of TV gaming consoles, particularly the Nintendo Wii, according to reports. Sega Sammy Holdings Inc. plans to close a quarter of its outlets, while rival Namco Bandai Holdings has announced that it will shut down roughly 20 percent of its arcades [...]

PMOG stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game. You play it by… not playing? You join, you browse the internet doing everything you usually do (or not), and your online actions are translated into in-game events like level-ups, missions and apparently even some kind of PvP melee combat. It certainly brings new meaning to the term [...]

Pictured above is a possible before-and-after shot of Kid Icarus, if the rumors pan out. It seems the game’s possible developer, Factor 5, will be pitching a Nintendo Wii remake of the classic NES platform game. That would be mind-blowing–especially considering Kid Icarus has been around longer than many gamers! NES fans will certainly feel [...]

Reports from Taiwan suggest that an ASUS subsidiary there is in the process of developing a version of Microsoft’s XBox 360 gaming console that supports Blu-ray discs. There’s been news before of Lite-On making a stand-alone Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360, but this is the first news to go in the direction of built-in [...]

A factory fire in South Korea last month caused enough damage to affect the global supply of lithium-ion batteries, and analysts are predicting a lithium-ion battery shortage that could last at least three months. Thankfully, large companies with multiple suppliers won’t feel the pinch, but if you do your gaming on low-cost machines like the [...]

It seems Grad Theft Auto 4 is giving back to the community that made its success possible: the video game console industry. Manufacturers of the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft xBox 360, the two platforms for which the game is available, have reported an increase in console sales. This increase has be traced directly to [...]

Not many gamers are aware just how much they owe this man, Ken Kutaragi. “Father of Playstation” as he is also known in Japan, Kutaragi was responsible for bringing cd-rom-based gaming to the world, changing the face of the gaming industry and leading Sony to the top of the gaming industry. But all that changed [...]

  Microsoft has announced price reductions for its XBox 360 gaming consoles in four Asian regions by as much as 20 percent. Consumers in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore can expect the lowered prices to take effect this week. A similar price cut was implemented in Europe last month, with price tags going [...]