gaming

If you were trying to find a Nintendo Wii to give someone as a Christmas present and were counting on buying that Wii at a retailer like Best Buy or Target, odds are you came away empty-handed and frustrated.

That was certainly my experience when I spent a day looking to see where it might be possible to find a Wii near San Francisco.

But always, in the back of my mind, I figured that for those who were truly desperate to get ahold of one of the machines, a small mint would fetch one on eBay.

I remember, however, … Read more

In addition to two new gaming desktops, today Gateway announced its first FX-branded gaming laptop. The 17-inch wide-screen P-170 FX will be available in three configurations, all with Nvidia GeForce Go 8800M graphics. The lowest-cost version will include an Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 CPU, 3GB of 667MHz RAM, and a 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive for $1,599. The awesomely named P-170FX MAX, meanwhile, includes a top-of-the-line Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 processor, a massive 400GB of 7,200rpm hard drive space, and an HD DVD drive for $2,999. The costlier model also gives you a slight bump … Read more

It might not have much competition yet, but the most entertaining Flash game of 2008 so far is the inventive puzzler/platformer Cursor*10. At first, the gameplay looks extremely basic. Simply click on the "up" staircases to make your way through 16 levels that contain only stairs, pyramids, and buttons. Exploding pyramids give you 1 point apiece, whereas reaching the 16th level provides 100 points.

I won't ruin the game by explaining how to play, but the basic innovation of Cursor*10 is that you'll most likely need to use each of your 10 allotted cursors wisely and efficiently in order to even reach the finish, let alone collect pyramids along the way. Each of your cursors exists within the same time frame, so that by the time you reach your seventh or eighth cursor, you'll see numerous arrows scattering about the levels, blasting pyramids, pressing buttons, and scampering up stairs.… Read more

Last month, some of Silicon Valley's biggest names showed up at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., for the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64.

What no one I heard mentioned, despite the presence of Pong designer Al Alcorn, was that October marked the 30th anniversary of what may have been an even more influential video game machine, the Atari 2600.

Now, over at GameSpy, Marty Goldberg has spun for us the story of the creation of that iconic console.

And when I say iconic, I do mean it. After all, who doesn't recognize the 2600'… Read more

Doof, says company spokesman Devang Chouhan, is all about "playing games and meeting people" -- in other words: fun. The UK-based "social gaming" start-up aims to mesh aspects of multi-layer online gaming with social networking, providing a highly personalized and visually rich user experience based on the Flex technology.

Liad Shababo, founder of doof, explains: "When we came up with the idea for doof we quickly realised there was nothing like it in the market, and there was a real hunger among social networkers for something new. We have spent months working to perfect the … Read more

BioShock. Crysis. Call of Duty 4. These and other suh-weet new games require a generous helping of video power. If your system is more than a couple years old, or you bought a budget desktop with an integrated graphics processor, you'll have to run your games at low resolutions without any of those dazzling eye-candy effects. That's assuming they'll run at all: Many of them require a video card with at least 128MB of RAM.

I recently upgraded my aging Pentium 4 box with a GeForce 8600 GT-based video card, much like the one currently available from … Read more

On Thursday, Ars Technica reported that game retailer Slackers had been ordering Nintendo Wiis, claiming to have run out of stock when customers came into the stores, and subsequently selling the Wiis at a high markup on eBay.

After their original story ran, employees of the retail chain have written in to give Ars more detail about the alleged practice.

Read more at Ars Technica

One of the longest-running jokes in the gaming industry is the development of the first-person shooter Duke Nukem Forever, the long expected next edition of the franchise. Originally begun back in 1997, the game first released a trailer at E3 1998. Developer 3D Realms released a different trailer at E3 2001...and it's been rather quiet ever since. Until yesterday.

On the 3D Realms forums yesterday, Duke Nukem co-creator and 3D Realms co-owner George Broussard unexpectedly announced that a new teaser trailer for the game would be released today.

The trailer was released shortly and has already cropped up … Read more

The behavior of computer-generated crowds in movies and video games could soon appear much more realistic, thanks to new software that gives each character a complex personality of its own.

Read the full report at Technology Review: "Virtual Extras"