Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Shanghai-based social market researchers Kai Lukoff and Lucas Englehard from BloggerInsight, a company spun off from
Veiled Games sent word of their new game, Outnumbered [iTunes link], on the iPhone app store, and it seems intriguingly different. It’s basically a multiplayer arcade game, which pits two iPhones or iPod touches against each other via Bluetooth. One player takes over the role of the O.N.E., a singular robot armed with weapons and special attacks, and the other player controls M.A.N.Y., which is a top-down view where you can control waves of attacking units and robots. The two players duke it out, with the first controlling his robot around the arena, and the second overseeing the armies and buying new units with collected currency. When the single robot is dead, players switch sides, and whoever earns the most points while fighting (for attacking, moving, or a few other criteria) wins the game.
Interesting idea. Of course, you’ll need a friend with their own iPhone or iPod touch to do all of this, and you’ll have to be in the same room, as the connection only works (so far) over Bluetooth. If you’re still confused as to how it all works, there’s a nice tutorial video up (although that voice gets to be a bit much after a while) that explains how the game goes down. Most of the big iPhone titles we’ve seen this year mostly focus on single player gaming, so it’s cool to see an attempt like this to try something that more than one player can share. Outnumbered is available in the App Store [iTunes Link] right now for 99 cents, and a lite version (that will allow a second player to play along, although one of the two players must own the full version) is due out soon.
Gamepro’s got the news that Electronic Arts is fast-tracking Dragon Age: Origins for release on the Mac — they’re now saying that it’ll be out as a download as soon as next week, on December 21st. I’ve been playing the game on PC (it came out for both PC and consoles in November), and it is excellent — an instant Bioware classic, and definitely the best roleplaying game of the year, especially if you enjoy good Baldur’s Gate-style epic. Of course, you can pick up the PC version right now and play it in Boot Camp, but given that we’ve been needling developers to hurry up with their Mac versions, we have to give EA credit for this one. A month late is much better than, say, a few years late.
We’ll also point out that this version will use Transgaming’s Cider wrapper technology for the port, and they don’t exactly have the best track record for quality Mac releases. But again, an A for effort on the release date. If you want to play it natively on the Mac, you’ll be able to buy the game in either standard or deluxe versions, with the deluxe including extra bonus content and the “Warden’s Keep” downloadable content pack (both versions come with the “Stone Prisoner” pack already, and the content packs open up more quests and items in the game itself). December 21st is the listed date: look for a link on their website then.
As Foursquare has shown so far, gaming elements are an intriguing part of location-based services. And more recently, Gowalla has started moving more towards that space as well. And just in time for the holidays, they have a new game that can earn users presents.
During what is calls “The 10 And A Half Days of Christmas (Because 12 Days Were Too Predictable),” Gowalla is giving away gifts to users who do one of two things: 1) Follow Gowalla on Twitter and tweet in 140 characters or less about why they should receive a prize. 2) Use Gowalla to check-in to venues around your city to attempt to find one of the “Golden Gifts.” The latter makes perfect use of Gowalla’s virtual goods system that has users picking up, dropping, and swapping items. If you check-in at a place and find one of these Golden Gifts, you will see a button below that reads, “Open Open Open!,” and clicking on that will get you the prize.
Broadcom’s busting out some big muscle on the video chip front today, launching both a 1080p smartphone camera chip and a single-chip Blu-ray player chip. The BCM2763 mobile phone chip supports full 1080p video recording and playback, as well as 20 megapixel stills with face / smile detection and image stabilization. There’s also support for 3D gaming at 1080p, and HDMI support is included so you can plug into a TV and actually see all those pixels — and a 20-to-50 percent reduction in power usage means you’ll be able to play video over HDMI for “up to 16 hours,” although we’d like to see that claim tested in a real handset before we totally buy it. Broadcom’s also hyping its new BCM7630 single-chip Blu-ray solution, which offers BD decoding and support for streaming apps like Netflix, Pandora, Vudu and CinemaNow all on a single chip — and manufacturers can combine it with the new BCM7632 for 3d-Blu-ray support. Single-chip means cheaper Blu-ray decks — so sure, we’ll take it. No word on when any of these chippies are going to end up in production hardware, but we’re hoping to hear more about that at CES.
Now that’s a shocker, isn’t it? A gaming laptop that isn’t particularly friendly on your wallet? It’s true, Origin’s Eon18 is not the machine to consider if you’re ready to make the step up from a netbook but aren’t yet willing to step into quadruple-digit price tags. As tested by Laptop, the Eon18 was half-way to five-digits thanks to its $5,952 cost, but that money gets you a an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 chip running at 2.53GHz, dual 160GB SSDs, a pair of GeForce GTX 280M graphics cards, a lovely airbrush job on the lid, and a power brick that on its own, at three pounds, weights more than some of the competition’s machines (no concerns about inadequate juice here). That configuration delivers unbeatable I/O performance but, when it came to the all-important gaming benchmarks, was found to be comparable to Alienware’s M17x, and thus not exactly worth the $1,000 premium — unless you really dig flame jobs.
[Thanks, Mark]
He showed the music suits, the Hollywood players, the mobile crowd, and the hand-held gaming giants how it’s done. Next up? The publishing industry. But what after that?
Steve Jobs loves planes, hates license plates, and has some strong opinions on education. If it were up to you, what industry would you like to see Steve tackle next? What products would you love to see from the mind of Steve Jobs? The iCar? iUniversal Health Care? iToilet?
We had a chance to sit down and talk with Chandra Rathakrishnan of Fusion Garage yesterday for a more in-depth discussion than our previous meeting provided, and we learned a few interesting tidbits about both the Joojoo, as well as the company’s highly public troubles with Michael Arrington (before the latest move). Amongst the more juicy items discussed, we got further technical info on the Joojoo itself, including the fact that the system has 1GB of RAM, a separate GPU for graphics processing (which Rathakrishnan says is capable of at least iPhone level gaming), and an interesting slot along the side. Just what kind of slot, you ask? Well apparently there are plans for a 3G equipped version of the Joojoo on the horizon. Chandra says we won’t see it in Q1 2010, but the second version will appear on the market during the next calendar year. Additionally, the company is supposedly in talks right now with media publishers — an interesting note considering that the Joojoo looks surprisingly like those Time Inc. and Condé Nast digimag demos we’ve seen recently. Chandra also claims that the company is working on deals that could lead to subsidized versions of the tablet, even without the inclusion of 3G. Of course, given the current legal status of the device, you can add all this speculative talk to a growing list of question marks.
There’s plenty more in the video, including some further insight into the confusing situation with Michael Arrington over the creation and ownership of the device, and more clarity on how exactly that rumored Atom CPU is handling 1080p playback without stuttering. It’s pretty darned interesting, actually. Check out the full chat after the break!
Did you get your ODROID order in promptly when they went up for pre-sale back in September? Hope so, as the first lucky developers should be getting theirs any day now. Just 300 units of the 833MHz handheld are shipping, including the various cables, additional hardware, and documentation needed to start filling the thing with fun games that look an awful lot like other games, but totally aren’t. One of the first is Speed Forge 3D (which totally isn’t Wipeout), shown after the break exhibiting some laggy accelerometer-based controls — but 720p output via HDMI sure is sweet. Orders are still being accepted at $349, said to be shipping in roughly five days, meaning if Santa logs into his PayPal account quickly enough you might still find one of these under your tree.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
TechCrunch writer Paul Carr forced me to write about his on-stage panel discussion at the Le Web conference, and as usual when people threaten me with violence, I was happy to oblige. But it was really a good thing he twisted my arm, especially considering the fact that there was more than one TC’er in the panel: TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher was also very much present.
The other panel members were all Europeans, too, which may well have something to do with the fact that the topic of the conversation was Europe. The session was titled ‘European Gang Live’, which I suspect was Carr’s idea, even though he stopped consuming alcohol recently.