March 23, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 5:40 am
Will people fall for 3D televisions in their homes the way they’ve fallen for Avatar? Maybe not. I certainly can’t imagine buying another $600+ TV so soon after taking the HD plunge. But a cheaper, palm-sized approach to 3D might placate the mainstream, and that just might be what Nintendo is planning. Hours ago, Nintendo’s [...] read more →
March 15, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 1:40 pm
The exhibition hall at the Game Developers Conference was built to astound— full of the biggest and smallest games companies in the world. Huge walls were covered in HDTVs, each displaying a crazier tech demo than the last, and many required 3D glasses, a la Avatar. (One demo went even further, combining 3D goggles, a [...] read more →
By Sam Machkovech at 12:05 pm
Microsoft’s MIX10 Conference in Las Vegas has begun to unveil details about the company’s forthcoming Windows Phone 7 Series, but the basic takeaway is the same as what I reported last week: lots of apps and games are coming, because they are so easy to translate from existing Microsoft coding platforms (if you must know, [...] read more →
March 14, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 11:10 am
Last night, after moderating a music conference panel about online journalism, I hiked across the college town of Denton, TX, along with a few thousand others, to see a free Flaming Lips concert. Both events were part of the North By 35 Music Conferette, a hundreds-of-bands weekend put on by Sub Pop Records artist Chris [...] read more →
March 13, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 5:33 pm
When I arrived at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference last Tuesday, I had no idea what to expect. Closest I’d gotten to an event like this was Seattle’s PAX, but that’s a “gamer” fest, full of things to play and do. This was the domain of the game maker: the developer, the coder, the bump-mapper, [...] read more →
March 12, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 11:52 am
Last night, I watched—and tweeted furiously with Seattle game companies—as they dominated the industry’s most prestigious awards show in San Francisco at the Game Developers Conference. Try as I might, those tweets didn’t get me a chair at Penny Arcade’s luxurious banquet table. (Penny Arcade, one of six winners from Seattle, won the Ambassador Award [...] read more →
March 10, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 4:34 pm
GameNerd Sam Machkovech is on the scene at the annual Game Developers Conference, which brings the newest and brightest programmers to San Francisco every March. The panels and discussions cater to the geekiest of geeks, but the event also functions as a farm league for big companies to find the next big thing. Thus, Seattle [...] read more →
March 9, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 2:57 pm
After touching down in San Francisco this morning, a strange man in a top hat directed me to my destination, adding the following: “You’re one of the gamers, right?” Not quite. The annual Game Developers Conference has its games fans, sure, but this is a closed-door affair meant for the people who design, distribute, and [...] read more →
March 8, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 4:58 pm
As we guessed last week, Bellevue’s Valve Software has now officially announced that its game store, and many of its games, will come to Mac in April. What we didn’t guess was this bit of technical brilliance: All of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the [...] read more →
By Sam Machkovech at 2:46 pm
This week: Teabags, Kurt Cobain, and a 3D quest made by a bunch of French people. Rayman 2 ($7): I’m not that old, but holy crap. Not even ten years ago, this game was among the shiniest and prettiest games on the “high-end” Sega Dreamcast system (and I praised it when I was a games [...] read more →
March 7, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 11:25 am
If you’re curious about Nintendo’s forthcoming plans, sometimes it’s best to flip through its latest patents. This week, a patent came to light for a “cartridge for electronic game machine,” which looks like an elongated cartridge for a Nintendo DS game system—complete with the same 17-pin connector at the bottom (yes, I counted). The weird [...] read more →
March 6, 2010
By Sam Machkovech at 9:15 am
When did the first deathmatch video game come out? The popular answer is in 1993 with DOOM, the first-person shooter that popularized online combat; others point to a few ’80s games on early computers, though those were limited to two players at a time. Over the years, SIMNET has been phased out of the networked [...] read more →
