CNN is cool. In addition to the huge touchscreen “Magic Wall” (which was originally military technology), CNN’s Wolf Blitzer gets to play with Holograms today during their coverage of the presidential elections. CNN’s Jessica Yellin is the guinea pig, appearing virtually with Blitzer. Read more… → Read More
After months of watching from the sidelines, Sony seems to have come out with a winner in the console wars with this LittleBigPlanet. Aside from amazingly detailed gameplay, you can program your own minigames into the game like this odd mechano-Gradius that looks like a puppet show. → Read More
Flickr’d I know at least some of you are looking forward to the release of Wrath of the Lich King in just a few weeks. Please be advised that Blizzard is holding some sort of launch extravaganza at four locations in the U.S.: the Best Buy at 529 5th Ave. in New York; the Fry’s at 3370 E. La Palma Ave. in Anaheim; the GameStop at 151 Powell St. in San Francisco; and the GameStop at 10000 Research Blvd. in Austin. Game devs and execs will be on hand at these stores to sign copies of the game. Blizzard also says the numerous other stores around the country (and world for that matter) will be open at midnight. Now, will I be waiting on line to buy the game at midnight? Absolutely not—I’m more than happy to wait for the UPS guy to bring it to my door after ordering it on Amazon. Though I wouldn’t mind seeing a bunch of cosplayers live and in person. → Read More
Pay close attention to this video, citizens of Azeroth! It shows just how divisive this presidential campaign has been: Human against Dwarf, Tauren against Orc. It’s madness. And this, in a time when all of us should be focused on eliminating the Scourge. But seriously, folks, it’s a fun video that will definitely be appreciated by World of Warcraft fans. That McCain has a stamina of 100 is pretty genius. → Read More
There’s nothing wrong with playing World of Warcraft occasionally. It’s when you start to picture yourself—not your character, but you yourself—as The Defender of Azeroth or some nonsense that we have a problem. Take the recent Zombie Infestation. In order to goad players into hating the Lich King (he’s the main antagonist in Wrath of the Lich King) and wanting to “invade” Northend (the continent that debuts in the expansion pack), Blizzard devised this in-game event wherein zombies are running all over the place, infecting you and yours with some disease that turns everyone into zombies. → Read More
I have no words. This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. I get pretty diffuse light in my apartment, so this wouldn’t really be necessary — plus, my place is the size of a postage stamp and this thing would probably trip me up or crawl in bed with me at night. I guess that wouldn’t be so bad. I love everything about this little robot. Oh my god, how can you not? [via MAKE: Blog] By the way, if you ever have to resize an animated gif in a hurry, this is great. → Read More
Doug Beaver over at a Facebook Engineering blog casually mentions that they have just had their ten billionth photo uploaded. Not only that, but since they keep 4 copies of each in different sizes, that’s 40 billion files just for the photos. Then he drops these little nuggets: 2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day They have just over one petabyte of photo storage They serve over 15 billion photo images per day Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second Kind of puts things into perspective, right? I remember I was pumped when I got my 100,000th visitor to my mp3 blog, Robosexual. A year of my own traffic, tripled in a single second by Facebook. Nick at Roughtype notes, “I did a quick scan of the 10 billion photos and found that 3 billion of them included an image of beer, in keg, can, bottle, or pitcher form, 1.5 billion included an image of a bra, and 675 million included both beer and a bra.” I’m… I’m just so proud! → Read More
Blizzard named yesterday’s gigantic World of Warcraft patch “Echoes of Doom.” How prescient. Right, so Blizzard “dropped” patch 3.0.2 yesterday. Servers were done for a good 24 hours while the company’s elves did their magic. The full patch notes, as always, are available online. Among other things, Stormwind now has a harbor and my Hunter, Fredfresno, has a new hair cut; hints of the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King abound. Life is grand, in a horribly depressing sort of way. But my God in Heaven, after four years of running this game, Blizzard still has a hell of a time keeping everything up to speed on patch day. Servers went up and down; character lists were incomplete (“hey, didn’t I have two alts on this server?”); and the lag, once you were able to log in, was marked. Call pet, wait four minutes, feed pet, wait three minutes, log out and read an old copy of Proust you’re so annoyed. General chat was filled with people (for a change) expressing their frustration. You know, “This patch sucks,” “F-ck Blizzard,” “We’re trapped in Shatt.” The gold farmers had even stayed home. That’s defcon right there. Right now, a little before 1:00pm EDT, the game (several servers) seems to be running better. It’s just weird to see Blizzard still have such a hard time not completely shanking it on patch day. → Read More
World of Warcraft players, prepare to take November 13 off from work or school, for that’s the day that Wrath of the Lich King goes on sale. The $40 price tag is about what I expected. We’ve covered the game here and there, mainly some of the bigger features (because we all know the level of minutia we could get into when talking WoW), but this is it. And if the game itself isn’t enough for you, there’s a $70 collector’s edition that includes a 208-page art book, an in-game pet, a behind-the-scenes DVD, the soundtrack on CD, a mouse pad, and some exclusive trading cards. I can’t say how happy this announcement just made me, especially since I wasn’t expecting to see the game until at least the Springtime. → Read More
Just a quick note to you World of Warcraft players. Blizzard will now let you transfer your PVE character to a PVP realm. Keep in mind that you still have to pay $25 per transfer. Now, how wise it is to transfer from PVE to PVP, I don’t know, especially if you plan on engaging in any serious PVP combat. Odds are you’ll have to re-spec, find new gear, etc. just to be competent against other players. Plus there’s the whole, “Oh, that’s a living, breathing person I’m playing against, not some cheap AI mob.” But I guess it’s better than trying to level all the way up to 70 again. via videogaming247 → Read More
Despite being some four years old, the userbase of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft continues to grow, if only at a so-so rate. One of the game’s lead designers said as much at the Games Convention, allaying fears (well, message board banter) that maybe, just maybe, interest in the game had peaked. The game had some 10 million subscribers as of last January. Now, that may not be completely indicative of how many people actively play the game—I keep paying for my account but seldom actually play—but that doesn’t much matter to Blizzard. As long as you’re paying your $15 a month, Blizzard’s as happy as an Orc in Orgrimmar. And who knows what’ll happen when Wrath of the Lich King comes out. I imagine there will be folks who buy it, install it, and play for like an hour then let the account continue to collect dust. That’s my plan. → Read More
It seems that tucked away in the folds of IFA, there is a tiny laptop taking the ancient Commodore family name. Some enterprising Norwegians wrote it up, and included in the post what appears to be the hottest girl I have ever seen. I don’t know if you can tell (I’m really good at photoshopping) but she’s not actually holding the Commodore — I just craftily made it look like she is so I could put her on the front page. I think she works for Siemens (giggle). Click below for more and better pics of Commodore’s baby lappy. → Read More
Why, oh why, did these lady deprived dudes, not only create the system to physically run in World of Warcraft, but then film themselves for all of us to make fun of them. Why? via Gizmodo → Read More
http://gamevideos.1up.com//swf/gamevideos11.swf?embedded=1&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&src=http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/videoListXML%3Fid%3D20981%26ordinal%3D%26adPlay%3Dfalse This is the opening cinematic to World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the upcoming expansion pack that will ruin countless lives. (I’d say it would ruin mine, but you can’t ruin *nothing* so hah.) Like every Blizzard-created cinematic, it’s really, really good. via Kotaku → Read More
Remember the RAM-SAN 500, that flash RAID array that basically is the fastest thing on the earth right now? Well, if you’re a special effects artist or run a huge, high speed media database or something, you might need a little more space than they have available. So what do you do? You stack eight of them on top of one another and you run that thing as one hell of a high-speed storage solution. It goes at 800,000 I/Os per second, has 12GB/s of bandwidth, and uses only 2.5KW of power – that’s about three high-end power supplies’ worth. Don’t have quite that amount of scrilla? Well, you can always pick up the more budget solution, but it’s only 6.5TB of high-speed flash memory. Normally I’d flip my bit over something like that, but after seeing that RAM-SAN array, everything else seems to have gotten its volume turned down a bit. → Read More
Wow, this is really, really goddamn cool. I love how the “skeleton” created by all the photographs is visible, a ghostly meta-world based entirely on aggregate data and an insane amount of processing power. You can switch between day and night, rotate smoothly, zoom, it’s color-corrected, it looks fantastic. I’ll let the guys in the video explain just what is going on, but man do I want this on my rig. Deep respect to Microsoft Research and UW for putting this together. Check out the higher-res version at their site. [via Reddit and I started something] → Read More
This is what the Death Knight looks like in World of Warcraft, as seen from the game’s choose your toon screen. → Read More
When I was a boy, Legos were good for having crash-em-up derbies (Instructions: You and your friends take a big green board each and build cars. The owner of the Legos gets all the good wheels. Crash the cars into each other. Repeat.) Now they have the damn things solving Rubik’s Cubes like some sort of manic hog-skinning machine that needed some time off. The full instructions and code are here but I enjoy just watching this thing go. via Make → Read More
What’s up with Blizzard’s Web site? For the past several days, the splash page on Blizzard.com has shown this mysterious, ice blue image. (I’ve been AFK since Monday, so this is all news to me.) As such, Internet speculation is in high gear. Is it Diablo III? Maybe a new race from Starcraft II? No one knows, which makes all the speculation particularly fruitless. Given that I’ve never played Starcraft nor Diablo, I couldn’t tell you what any of the symbols in the picture mean. Unless the Alliance logo shows up, I’m useless in figuring out this puzzle. via Kotaku → Read More
