Nicholas likes video games, soccer, UFC, and astronomy–particularly the study of asteroids. He went to NYU.
Real Madrid host Barcelona later today in the first of I think 87 classics to take place over the next few weeks. In other news, I’m leaving CrunchGear. → Read More
What’s going on here? Over at aperturescience.com a fancy countdown timer just counted down, and now there’s a message up top that says “Help release Portal 2 early! Play the 13 games in the potato sack to reboot GLaDOS.” → Read More
John Carmack, the id Software co-founder who essentially created the modern first-person shooter genre from scratch, has once again said that the iOS platform is the best mobile platform out there when it comes to game development. He said as much last year at QuakeCon, but here we are one year later and iOS is still king. Sorry, Fandroids. → Read More
There’s a good chance that your office or home is more tricked out, tech-wise, than the Oval Office. President Obama complained yesterday, in what the AP calls “off-the-cuff remarks,” that what the Oval Office lacks is a “really cool phone.” Can someone get the president a Droid or something? → Read More
Things are going great for Sony. It settled that icky business with GeoHot, and now it’s flying high on the sales of its PS3 and accessories. The Move, which came out last September, has now sold 8 million units as of April 3. Compare this to Microsoft’s Kinect, which sold a cool 10 million units as of early March. → Read More
You’re looking at the lightest shoe in all of basketball. It’s the Adidas adiZero Crazy Light, and it weighs a mere 9.8 ounces. With the Crazy Light, Adidas now has the market cornered on lightest-footwear in three sports: basketball, football, and soccer, soccer being the best sport of the three, of course. → Read More
Comcast is about to nationally roll out its 105Mbps (!) Internet service. The ISP hopes to have the service in several of its top markets, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, and Miami, bringing the total number of potential subscribers up to 40 million. Considering so much of legitimate media consumption these days is based on streaming, having a super fast Internet connection will only help to a point. → Read More
The Advocate General of the European Union Court of Justice, Cruz Villalón, says that national courts there should not have the ability to tell Internet Service Providers to filter their connections in order to prevent copyright infringement because such a move would conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. That was a mouthful, yes. It should be noted that the Advocate General’s opinion isn’t binding in the least, so this shouldn’t be read as EUROPE BANS INTERNET FILTERING. Hardly. It’s more for the Court of Justice to consider as it goes forward than any sort of official, or even unofficial, ban. → Read More
Intel now says it will support both its Thunderbolt interface, which first appeared on the recent MacBook Pro revision, and USB 3.0 sometime in 2012. Presumably if it supports USB 3.0 then it will support all previous versions of USB. → Read More
This is pretty great. You know Garry’s Mod, right? It’s basically a sandbox “game” built on the Source engine. It’s only $10, but apparently there are people out there who feel the need to pirate it. The mind boggles. Anyhow, the developer of the mod, Garry Newman, created an error message that would only manifest itself in pirated copies of the game. Go ahead and search Google for the “unable to shade polygon normals.” The people complaining are using pirated copies of the game. For shame. → Read More
Attention! Valve has announced exactly how Portal 2‘s Steam features will work on the PS3. PS3 gamers can look forward to cross-platform (with the PC) matchmaking and gameplay, real-time chat, Steam achievements, and access to the Steam Cloud for game saves. → Read More
A few details have emerged at MIX11 regarding Kinect for Windows—“few” being the operative word. For example, the beta SDK will include support for two-person skeletal tracking, making two-player games or Windows applications a distinct possibility. → Read More
Coming soon to an Nvidia-powered computer near you: 3D Web video! Cheers all around, half-slices for everyone. Nvidia made the announcement at NAB 2011, the same place where Apple announced Final Cut Pro X. The 3D video will be delivered via a plugin for the Microsoft Media Platform, aka Silverlight. → Read More
Good thing you kept all your old SNES cartridges, right? Hyperkin, the accessories manufacturer, has developed the SupaBoy, a portable SNES. Fingers crossed, it should be available this summer. → Read More
Looks like a Wii price cut is incoming. Reports late last night surfaced about a May 15 move to $150 (down from $200), and today internal documentation~! from K-Mart also shows the console moving down to $150. → Read More
AMD will add USB 3.0 to its AMD Fusion line of APUs. Huzzah! That makes AMD the first chipmaker to support the interface (though it’s been available in higher end motherboards from the likes of Asus and Gigabyte for about a year now). Yes, yes, Intel invented the spec, but its newfangled Thunderbolt interface seems to be getting all the love. Why would you bother with USB 3.0, then? → Read More
You may have heard that the Dutch Government now plans to outlaw music and movie (and whatever else) downloading. That seems pretty prosaic: since when was it legal to infringe on someone’s copyright? Isn’t that the whole point of copyright? No matter, for in the lead up to the Dutch announcement’s announcement a survey was taken. “What about the survey?” you may ask. Well, said survey reveals that a good number of artists believe that they’re not hurt financially by piracy, and that it’s about time to re-think the artist-fan relationship with respect to DRM. → Read More
The next big PC game will be The Witcher 2, which should be released on May 12 (and if you’re cool like me you will have already pre-ordered). Unlike a certain other big RPG this year, it actually looks like it was developed within the past few years. If you order it from Good Old Games (the company behind GoG, CD Projekt, also developed the game) it will be completely DRM-free. That is to say there will be no DRM whatsoever. No having to worry about limited installations, no having to worry about your Wi-Fi connection dropping and thus cutting you off from the all-powerful authentication servers, none of that nonsense. What a concept—treating your customers like customers and not potential evildoers! → Read More
Tick tock, tick tock. What are we waiting for? No, not for Fernando Torres to finally score for Chelsea (although we are, in fact, waiting for that to happen), but for AMD to release its latest GPU, the Radeon HD 7000. Digi Times, which is about as solid as source as you can get, says mass production will begin in May. That should put retail availability at July 2011 at the earliest. → Read More
Activision now says that Guitar Hero hasn’t been outright cancelled, but merely placed on hiatus. The publisher had said in February that it was going to disband the Guitar Hero business unit, and that the 2011 edition of the game had been cancelled. What gives? → Read More
