Category: Hardware

Apparently 80% of Gamers Don’t Mind 3D Glasses

3D glasses

To me, one of the most exciting prospects of the Nintendo 3DS is that it can provide the promised benefits of 3D gaming without having to sport some new 3D glasses while enjoying its retro titled goodness. I have never been one to criticize the idea of 3D gaming simply for what it is, but rather because the glasses are just something that I’m not interested in wearing every time I fire up a disc. But maybe I’m alone in that.

It seems that a new study from the U-Decide Initiative has found that as much as 80% of gamers don’t view 3D glasses as a barrier to enter into the next dimension of gaming, and wouldn’t mind donning 3D glasses in order to do so. The study also found that interest in 3D was indeed greater when glasses weren’t part of the equation, but even still, the numbers are different than what I would have suspected. Granted, all studies like this need to be handled with a grain of salt, but I still found the idea to be interesting, nonetheless.

So what do you guys think of this? Are 3D glasses a breaking point for you when it comes to 3D gaming? Or is it more about the price involved in purchasing a TV that can support it? Challenge my assumptions! Do it!

Source – Industry Gamers

GamerSushi Poll: Which Do You Think Will Sell Better: Move or Kinect?

We are about a month away from the launch of Sony’s Playstation Move and in November, Microsoft will release Kinect. The two devices, rather than being similar, are actually quite different and seem to cater to two different mindsets of gamers out there.

Personally, I’m not looking seriously at buying either one of them, but if I had to choose, I think Move has that hardcore edge I would be looking for. Plus, I like buttons and I’m lazy.That being said, I think Kinect will outsell Move by a wide margin. The money of Microsoft and the allure of something so high tech will trap the casual game market more so than the precision that Move seems to offer.

So my question is…

Which do you think will sell more units?

View Results

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Dis-Kinect

Everyone is crapping all over Microsoft’s E3 press conference and though we mentioned some of this in our podcast, I thought it would help if we devoted a post to some of the concerns that gamers have about Microsoft’s foray into motion-controls.

Personally, I am amazed by the technology and the potential of Kinect. The voice recognition is very impressive and I think it can be utilized in better ways than simply telling your Xbox to pause a movie. Imagine navigation the Dashboard with it: “Xbox Marketplace” and bam! You’re browsing games or looking at your friends list. You can walk around the room and command your Xbox to start playing a disk without using a controller. I think that would be more useful than the admittedly cooler looking Minority Report-style interface. Sure that looks bad-ass, but using a controller is just faster and I am all about streamlining things. I’m not going to wave my arms around just because I want to look like something I saw in a movie. If I wanted to look like Tony Stark, I would shave my goatee like his and build and Iron Man Suit.
Continue reading Dis-Kinect

GamerSushi Asks: Your Gaming Setup

Over the weekend, I became the proud owner of a new 46″ Samsung LCD TV. Needless to say, I’m rather excited by this new development. For the past few years, I’ve been gaming on a 32″ Samsung LCD, so this isn’t much of an upgrade in quality (though the last TV was showing some awful image retention issues) as much as it was in size. What was once small is now huge in comparison. I played Mass Effect 2 like crazy today and loved every minute of it.

I know it’s goofy (and maybe more than a little obvious), but I haven’t been this excited about something I’ve purchased in quite some time. The wife and I have said for years that once we bought a house, we’d buy a big TV to match the new living room, so it was time to finally cash in on that deal. Hopefully by the end of the year we’ll pick up a new surround sound system, as ours is old and more than a bit dated.

Anyway, this upgrade got me thinking about you guys, and what you play your games on. So, tell us about your gaming setup. Go!

Abandoning Ship: Choosing a Different Console for Sequels?

assassinscreed2If I were in charge of the PlayStation division of Sony, I’d be feeling pretty good about myself right now. According to Gamasutra, more and more consumers seem to be buying up the hotly anticipated sequels to Assassin’s Creed and Modern Warfare on the PS3 as opposed to the X-Box 360.

Gamasutra’s article focuses on something called “franchise lineage”, which for us laymen is “gamer intent to purchase sequels to successful games”. The direction of the lineage seems to be changing for Assassin’s Creed 2, which shows the biggest shift. According to GamePlan Insights, the company that ran the research, fifteen percent of those who own the X-Box version plan to buy it on PS3 while only seven percent of PS3 Assassin’s Creed owners are purchasing Assassin’s Creed II on the X-Box.

While Assassin’s Creed II seems to be in the forefront of this movement, the report also indicated that Modern Warfare 2 shows a varying trend as well. The big question is this, though: why is the X-Box 360 losing sequel sales to its competitor?
Continue reading Abandoning Ship: Choosing a Different Console for Sequels?

PS3 Slim Due First Week of September, Price Dropped to $299.99

ps3_prints_moneyWell, after months of speculation, it’s happened. Sony dropped the PS3’s price to $299.99 and announced a 120 GB PS3 Slim. Does this change anything for any of you guys? Do you think this will allow Sony to surge past the 360? Or are they destined for 3rd place for this cycle?

PS3 Ready To Launch Offensive?

ps3-price-cutDespite what you may have heard, the PS3 has held it’s own against the 360 despite having a higher price, less blockbuster exclusives and having to build an online network from the ground up. But two of those have been corrected and now all that stands in the PS3’s way is the price. Which brings us to a few items:
Sony has revealed that they have managed to get the cost of a PS3 down to $270 per unit. They also have doubled their usual order of components needed to build the consoles. The topper is that they are having a 3-hour keynote in Germany on August 18th. What does this all mean?

It appears as if a price drop for the PS3 is imminent. And it could be the very thing needed to propel the PS3 past the 360 and perhaps even take on Nintendo, far off in the future anyway. Keep in mind that the PS2 sold over 120 million units. Most of those people are probably just waiting for a price drop. Many people say $100.00 would be do it, but I think Sony should go for the jugular and drop it $150.00. Even in these dark economic times, that would cause a serious boost in sales and just in time for the Christmas season.

Would a price drop get you guys off the fence and buy a PS3 or are you not even interested in it? Is there a magic number you are waiting for?

Valve Not Sold On Natal

valve_head_homeNatal blew some minds at E3 and caused all kinds of fanboy skirmishes across the Internet. Is it real? Does it work? Will the games be any good? One of those questions has now been asked by Valve, who have had a closer look at Natal and while impressed with the tech, they need to see more. Namely, a game that really shows off what it can do, as Chet Faliszek says:

There’s a lot of coolness around it, but I’m not sure about the game that comes with that, and I’m not sure, personally, how much I wanna move around. I’m a lazy, lazy man. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to be fatigued playing a game.

Anyone can crap out a tech demo, but how can you use this in a game that won’t annoy us lazy gamers? What do you guys think of Natal and what would you like to see done with it?

Source- VG247

Why Motion Control Can’t Truly Work in Hardcore Games

natalMotion control. Everybody’s doing it, I’m told. For months, some of us have bemoaned the coming tidal wave of motion control and what it could mean for the gaming industry and games as a whole. On the positive, it could bring more casual folk into gaming and on the negative, it could just dumb down games as we know it.

GamesRadar has written a particularly convincing argument against motion control after their time with the PS3 and 360’s new motion hardware at E3. They pretty much assert that the demos at E3 have proven that motion control can’t work for hardcore gaming, and this is why the Wii is so full of minigame collections. When you think about it, even the hardcore games on the Wii just use the motion controls as kind of a bonus, while relying on traditional movement with the nunchuck and buttons. Typically, the only way to really eliminate the pain of movement with motion control is to stick the game on rails (a la Wii Sports). Here’s a tidbit from the article about our traditional analog sticks and face buttons:

As much as Molyneux and Iwata might bemoan the evils of the button fascia and dual analogue set-up, both elements evolved into the cultural landscape of gaming for a reason. They seriously bloody work for controlling modern games.

So what do you guys think? Can motion control work for hardcore games? Or will they inhibit the movement we’ve come to enjoy from our normal controllers?

Source- GamesRadar

More Photorealistic Graphics, Please

gow2Epic Games, the dudes behind Unreal and Gears of War, are probably some of the biggest graphics whores in the industry. I mean, with all the eye candy they constantly throw at us in their games, it’s hard to doubt that they love making games, and love making them look good. But can they look better?

While the graphics are great in games that use the Unreal Engine, photorealistic graphics aren’t quite here yet, even with this generation’s powerful hardware across consoles and PC games alike. However, Epic’s Tim Sweeney, in a recent interview with Gamasutra, has a couple of ideas about when we’ll see photorealism in real-time:

We’re only about a factor of a thousand off from achieving all that in real-time without sacrifices. So we’ll certainly see that happen in our lifetimes; it’s just a result of Moore’s Law. Probably 10-15 years for that stuff, which isn’t far at all.

Even though I’m not much of a graphics guy (I feel gameplay is way more important), this idea is pretty interesting. I’d like to see what kinds of new art directions developers take with that much graphical power at their disposal. What do you guys think?

Source- Gamasutra

7 Crazy Gaming Rigs

pcI’ve finally decided to update my PC in just a couple of months, seeing as how it’s been almost 4 years since my last significant hardware upgrade. I’m actually pretty excited about this, as I’ve spent a little more time lately on my PC and have been getting the itch to play certain games that I haven’t had before.

Since I’ve been curious about all of this business again, it was neat to see that Wired had an article titled The Best Gaming Rigs Money Can Buy up today, where they detail a few of the craziest machines in the PC gaming world. While some of them have atrocious cases and can obviously be made for much cheaper given some tweaks, it’s still pretty nuts to see some of these things. I really can’t justify spending up to 10k on a computer.

What do you guys think? When was the last time you PC gamers updated your machines? What is your next upgrade going to be?

Source- Wired

Doubting OnLive’s Potential

onlive1Last week, Warner announced the new micro-console, OnLive. As we all know, OnLive gets rid of the need for a console, as all of the hardware is actually taken care of through cloud servers, which play the game and send a video signal back to your TV. Well, opinions have sounded from gamers far and wide, and while many are skeptical, few doubt that this thing could have potential in the long term.

But what do the experts think? There’s an article over at Eurogamer in which some of OnLive’s claims are analyzed, particularly the ability to encode video at a fast rate and then transmit the signal to your TV from the cloud servers. Apparently, in order to achieve this kind of encode, the encoders would have to be working at 1000 fps. Even the current best encoding technology on the market can’t come close to doing what OnLive claims to do.

Hit the jump to see what the author says on the matter.
Continue reading Doubting OnLive’s Potential

Introducing: OnLive, The Future of Gaming?

onliveSo, has the wave of the future arrived? Warner Bros. sure thinks so, as they presented the new micro-console, OnLive, at GDC with a huge freaking publicity splash. What makes OnLive so special? Well, perhaps the fact that it’s not technically a gaming console, but a small attachment for your TV or PC, rendering the “hardware arms race” obsolete.

Think of OnLive as Hulu or Youtube, but for video games. Rather than playing the games on your console or PC at home, games are stored and played via cloud servers, and relayed back to you through a video signal. The servers are responding to what your controller is doing through the OnLive micro-console. So essentially, you’re seeing a video of the game being played, all at 60 fps, and at 720p or standard definition, depending on your Internet connection speed. Meanwhile, the actual game is taking place on the OnLive cloud servers.
Continue reading Introducing: OnLive, The Future of Gaming?

Check Out The Top 10 Graphics Cards

gfxcardI know that there are quite a few of you PC-obsessed gamers out there, so this one’s for all of you.

I haven’t updated my graphics cards in a while (still sporting a Radeon X1600), but for those of you who are on the market for an upgrade, TechRadar UK released a list of what they deem to be the 10 best graphics cards for your buck.

Definitely a handy list. Makes me wish I had the money to build a new PC again. Ah, the memories. So do any of you already own any of these? What kind of graphics cards are you dudes sporting?

Source- TechRadar