Andreas(R) writes “The Freeciv.net crew has benchmarked their web client, which is a rich web application using the HTML5 canvas element. This shows how fast Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer perform using the latest HTML5 web standards.”
andylim writes “recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a ‘Jumanji (board game) platform.’ The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you’re on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, ‘Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.’ Now that would be cool.”
Harmonix and MTV Games today announced that a six pack of songs from country greats including Kenny Chesney, Willie Nelson, Rascal Flatts and others will be added next week to the Rock Band Music Store of downloadable content for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system and WiiTM.
These artists are among the more than 390 bands currently available through the Rock Band platform. With more than 1,000 songs available, Rock Band is, without question, the industry leader in providing the best selection of interactive musical content, songs and artists.
Rock Band DLC Additions for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 System and Wii
This Rock Band Music Store update represents some of the hottest artists in the country music genre. Kenny Chesney burst onto the scene in the early 90s and has been a staple since, with hits such as “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” from 1999’s Everywhere We Go. Montgomery Gentry, composed of Eddie Montgomery and Troy Gentry, offer their 2004 single “Gone” from their fourth album, You Do Your Thing, while country/pop crossover sensation Rascal Flatts brings one of their most successful singles, “Me and My Gang” from the 2006 album of the same title. “Suds in the Bucket” (Sara Evans’ third No. 1 song on the country charts and the third single from 2003’s Restless) and Trace Adkins’ “Swing” (a single from 2008’s Dangerous Man) are also included in this week’s additions. Rounding out the pack is Willie Nelson’s timeless travelling classic, “On the Road Again,” from 1980’s Honeysuckle Rose.
Available on Xbox 360 and Wii (Feb. 2) and PlayStation 3 system (Feb. 4):
Strawdog Studios, an independent multi-platform game developer, is excited to announce that its classically addictive Arcade game, Space Ark will be launched into orbit on Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360 in spring 2010.
With your crack team of animal arkonauts, you have escaped your once peaceful solar system, which has been shattered by a wandering black hole, and are now looking for new places to live. With a trail of damaged planets left in the black holes wake, the space travelling animals board the Space Ark and fly across the galaxy on a mission to repair the damaged worlds. At each planet your arkonauts must bounce in the air and bag DNA combos, power-ups and all the fruit they can catch so ultimately inhabitants can return!
A fun homage to the bright and bouncy arcade games of the late 1980s such as Rainbow Island, Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid, Space Ark is an addictive, original arcade action game which appeals to both casual and hardcore gamers alike with its laid-back, stress free gameplay, and its addictive gem collection element.
Blitz 1UP, an initiative run by UK developer Blitz Arcade, announces the release of word puzzle game KrissX on PC and Facebook, and have partnered with Konami Digital Entertainment Inc. for the release on XBLA. KrissX (pronounced ‘kriss cross’), developed by Regolith Games Ltd., is a casual puzzle game designed to test your vocab and brain power to their limits with a plethora of mind-bending word games.
Help Wordsworth the Owl on his mission to solve jumbled word puzzles by following clues and swapping letters around. With over 3,500 words to unscramble and a variety of game styles including Quests, Time Attack Mode and Timeless Play, there is endless replay value. Uncomplicated controls mean instant pick up and play appeal so it’s an interactive and fun gaming experience for players of all ages.
Decipher brainteasers and test your knowledge with a host of great features:
The legend has been reborn! ZEN Studios, a videogame developer and digital publisher known for its innovative arcade, strategy and action games, announced today it is releasing Excalibur, the next add-on table for their wildly popular Pinball FX game on Xbox LIVE Arcade for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. Excalibur launches today and is available for 200 Microsoft Points.
“Ever since our launch back in 2007, we knew we had a great pinball game on our hands,” said Zsolt Kigyossy, Managing Director for ZEN Studios. “We love to return the support of our fans by releasing addictive add-on tables, and Excalibur is no exception. We hope everyone enjoys this fun and multi-faceted table as much as we loved creating it.”
Excalibur follows in the footsteps of fellow expansion tables Buccaneer, Nightmare Mansion, Street Fighter II Turbo and Earth Defense in delivering a fast and frenetic pinball experience. Earn your seat at the Round Table amongst the greatest knights in King Arthur’s court! Participate in duels or jousting tournaments for honor, and defend Camelot against the Robber Knights!
Excalibur features include:
Xbox 360 owners have had to watch from the sidelines over the last several weeks as PS3 players have shot each other through walls and scenery in the Battlefield Bad Company 2 beta EA and DICE have been running on Sony’s system, but we had intended to post some good news for Xbox 360 owners this morning in the form of a multiplayer demo releasing later today on Xbox Live. We would have, except the demo mistakenly appeared early on the Marketplace, meaning you can get in on some sweet multiplayer right now. We’ll have more media up for you later, but in the mean time, enjoy!
Following up on our discussion yesterday of annoying game distribution platforms, Ubisoft has announced the details of their Online Services Platform, which they will use to distribute and administer future PC game releases. The platform will require internet access in order to play installed games, saved games will be stored remotely, and the game you’re playing will even pause and try to reconnect if your connection is lost during play. Quoting Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “This seems like such a bizarre, bewildering backward step. Of course we haven’t experienced it yet, but based on Ubi’s own description of the system so many concerns arise. Yes, certainly, most people have the internet all the time on their PCs. But not all people. So already a percentage of the audience is lost. Then comes those who own gaming laptops, who now will not be able to play games on trains, buses, in the park, or anywhere they may not be able to find a WiFi connection (something that’s rarely free in the UK, of course – fancy paying the £10/hour in the airport to play your Ubisoft game?). Then there’s the day your internet is down, and the engineers can’t come out to fix it until tomorrow. No game for you. Or any of the dozens of other situations when the internet is not available to a player. But further, there are people who do not wish to let a publisher know their private gaming habits. People who do not wish to report in to a company they’ve no affiliation with, nor accountability to, whenever they play a game they’ve legally bought. People who don’t want their save data stored remotely. This new system renders all customers beholden to Ubisoft in perpetuity whenever they buy their games.”
itwbennett writes “On Friday, George Hotz, best known for cracking Apple’s iPhone, said he had managed to hack the PlayStation 3 after five weeks of work with ‘very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.’ Days later, he has now released the exploit, saying in a blog post that he wanted to see what others could do with it. ‘Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released,’ he wrote. ‘I have a life to get back to and can’t keep working on this all day and night.’” Reader MBCook points out an article written by Nate Lawson “explaining how the hack bypasses the hypervisor to gain unrestricted access to memory. It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it’s unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry.”
The Escapist’s Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are “quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now,” he writes, “but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles.” Young continues, “Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you’ll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don’t mind having ‘just one more’ program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them.”