The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘gaming’

Here’s an interesting modification for a Guitar Hero controller. An anonymous modder posted a project to Instructables showing how to convert a full size controller to a small size. The modder converted his to a smaller size for his two year old daughter, but whatever your reason is, it looks like a fairly easy thing to do.

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DIY: Turn your Guitar Hero controller into a Ukulele

God of War III comes out today (YES!), and with all the hoopla surrounding it, I thought this would actually be a good time to recommend/pay tribute to the other God of War games.

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A tale of God of War

Intel cut loose some benchmarking samples of their new, top of the line CPU, the i7-980X Extreme Edition. This is not a CPU intended for the causal use, but rather aim directly at the gaming market

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Intel’s new Gulftown i7-980X CPU reviews well

The slew of music recording / creation apps for the iPhone all share the same weakness. They rely on the internal microphone, and a recording quality microphone it is not. The Guitarbud from PRS Guitars gives you a direct input into your iDevice without taking away headphone capability

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Guitar/headphone interface for iPhone

Razer announced today that they are going to be releasing Mac drivers for all of their future products. This comes on the heels of the announcement that Steam is coming to the Macintosh as well. Razer specifically mentioned the upcoming line of StarCraft II peripherals, which makes sense in light of the fact that Blizzard has always released a Mac version of their games at the same time as their PC versions.

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Razer announces drivers for the Mac

We’ve told you about the iTable before , and PQ Labs. They showed off their latest stage in the development process at CeBIT this year, by installing the screen into a coffee table. The newest version can register up to 32 touch points and actually determine the shape of the object being placed on the screen.

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The iTable continues to develop and show gaming potential

Platogo, the social games platform, has released its Platogo Wrapper that enables casual games developers to easily integrate their games with Facebook by inserting a few lines of code.

Essentially, it lets any casual game take advantages of the basic social features offered through Facebook, such as the ability for a user to invite and play with friends in their social graph and see how their scores compare, challenge each other, and display their gaming achievements on their Facebook wall.

Online private sales is a growing business model that is rapidly becoming a staple of online shopping. Ideeli, Gilt Groupe, Vente-Privee, HauteLook and others are quickly gaining millions of users each and attracting significant amounts of venture funding. But the one issue I find with these sites is that it’s annoying to have to check each site every day for sales. I subscribe to almost a dozen different sites, which means sorting through the notification emails each day and then logging in and trying to shop on each site. Often the sales take place at the same time, so I need to prioritize which site has more appealing goods for a given day. Today, MyNines is emerging to streamline the private sale space by offering a Kayak.com for private sale sites.

MyNines aggregates products from various online sample sale sites and allows shoppers to find them all in location. Users can search and filter by designer, category, highest discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed. MyNines currently aggregates from 14 different private sale sites including, Billion Dollar Babes, Ebay FashionVault, Wired For Wine, Gomatta Girls, Guiltless Purse, Left Lane Sports, Reverse, Enviius, BeautyTicket, BonVoYou, Editor’s Closet, DD Push and JomaShop.

You can also set up customized alerts to notify you via email or SMS whenever products or designers of interest go on sale from the sites MyNines partners with. The site makes money off of affiliate fees on CPA basis. The site also wants to generate revenue down the line from providing white-lable platform solution to traditional retailers.

The idea behind MyNines seems brilliant, especially considering the success of Kayak when it comes to the online travel industry. But one of the challenges of the model is signing on the private sale sites to release their API to MyNines. But the startup’s founder Apar Kothari says that she is currently in talks with a number of other well-known sample sale sites.

It’s unclear whether the private sale market will be open to the type of convergence that has taken place in the travel industry. First and foremost, most, if not all, of the vendors will need to be on board with the aggregation model in order for it to succeed. As of now, MyNines has been able to attract some of the more well known players in the space, including Billion Dollar Babes and eBay’s FashionVault. And if consumers respond in a positive way, then other sites like Gilt and HauteLook may jump on board.

Yup , 90 million Windows 7 licenses sold. I think that means we can call it a success. Microsoft made the announcement this week at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, & Telecom Conference in San Francisco

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90 million Windows 7 licenses sold. Were you one of them?

Valve is in the midst of a media blitz at the moment — not that you’d notice, since their idea of a media blitz is secretly launching a complex alternate reality game, or emailing single novelty screenshots to six different media outlets. You could be forgiven for expecting a full-site skin for 1UP, or a week-long series of “developer diaries” on IGN — that’s what every other game company out there thinks makes games sell. At any rate, GDC is coming up and the expected announcements are Steam on OS X (definite) and possibly a peek at Portal 2, Half-Life: Episode 3, or both (speculative).

Of course, the idea of Steam on the Mac makes fanboys of all stripes froth delicately at the mouth — but while an excellent game-distribution client like Steam would be welcome on the Mac, it may not be the gaming renaissance people are hoping for. It’s worth taking a bit of time to look at, since gaming is increasingly a major source of revenue and a wedge to increase market share. Let’s take a look at what Steam is up against.

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