Actually all the new Nvidia mobile chips are still G92 cores. The highest end part, the GTX 280M, is a rebranded 8800M GTS in a 55nm package, which has been out for like 2 years... I have one on my old HP HDX "Dragon" notebook (the one with the ridiculous 20" screen... that's no moon) And no, the GTX 280M / 8800M GTS is not as fast as the desktop 8800 GTS... let alone anything with a newer core.

Not sure if this link will work, but here's a bit on Tom's hardware with benchmarks discussing this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-280m,2353.html

Kind of sad the world's "most powerful gaming notebook" has a weaker GPU than one I got on closeout from Newegg over a year ago. Though the i7 is faster than my C2D...

Actually the previous generation of cheap Sonys cleaned up on dpreview's budget compact roundup in pretty much every category.

Digital zoom is mostly useless, but without a RAW mode, it does technically produce better results to do it on-camera than later in Photoshop. Anyway, it's one line from a press release. Sheesh.

Frankly, I can't stand the UI on Panasonics/Canons, and think Canons are grossly overrated as a whole. Equivalent Sony models routinely beat them on every metric, yet somehow the Canons still end up with a higher overall rating, despite having inferior image quality, performance, construction, and features. Fanboism, so objective.

Panasonics have (usually) better zoom ranges and image stabilization, but the models I've used all were quite laggy/slow and had oddly limited apertures.

I owned a cheap Sony from two generations ago, and would not buy one again. Don't get me wrong, it was an excellent camera, except the budget models had a lower-resolution 115K pixel screen which actually made getting non-blurry shots in marginal conditions surprisingly difficult compared to the 230K pixel screens... I couldn't discern how steady I was holding the camera nearly as well, and counteracting those fine motor movements is difficult without feedback. (optical image stabilization isn't magic)

Anyway, I'd save my money for a better model, personally -- unless they've improved the screen resolution since then (the article doesn't say and the camera's not up on Sony's site yet).

But the cheap Sonys are kings of that market segment.

It's funny how some people claim to support the troops, then ask them loaded questions about rape and murder in interviews and post the kind of tripe that Stormy Weathers and Imran did. When the cameras stop rolling, they stab the troops in the back. Hagen, wus tatest du?

Most insurgents are from foreign countries or are paid to fight; towards the beginning of the conflict they were paid several hundred dollars to fire an RPG-7, once, at an American convoy. In interrogation reports, Army intelligence officers describe them as being relatively uncommitted by ideals and mostly motivated by the dire financial situation in the region, making them very cooperative if treated well, and stating torture was entirely counter-productive.

In Afghanistan, the mujahideen Carter, Reagan, and Charlie Wilson supported are actually a bonafide political party now, and are indeed quite thankful to America. In fact, in polling support for US troops by Afghanis has ranged as high as 86%, where support for the Taliban has always been extremely low -- less than 9% (all these numbers come from the BBC, btw). The Taliban is a foreign regime backed by the Pakistani military. Why can't you support the US military as well as the people of Afghanistan?

American empire? Give me a break. Enough with the "Bush is Hitler" crap. News flash: Obama is president now, Bush isn't in office. Try a little MoveOn.org right there, chief. I bet the US and France patrolling for pirates is "unilateral aggression" and "crimes against humanity" too, huh? Must be nice to be able to invent fictional charges without bothering with things like oh, the legal system, that whole court thing and innocent until proven guilty must be a real drag for you. But I'm sure the troops appreciate your slander. Oh wait, no appreciates anything you say.

President Obama thinks highly of US forces and is in fact, increasing strength in Afghanistan and reassessing the Iraq situation, increasing his commitment over what he stated in his campaign.

Don't like Bush? Fine. I didn't like Bush, and I never voted him. But maybe it's time you got on board with President Obama.

So my question to all of you paranoid schizophrenics (PRO-TIP: take your haloperidol) still posting American hate and conspiracy theories is this:

Why don't you support President Obama?

(And before you mod me down for being a Republican, I'm not, and actually voted for Obama. It's just that I happen to agree with Obama's policies, and these guys are so out of touch I damn near look conservative for agreeing with Obama's positions.)

Uhh, US troops can in general take more bullets than the OpFor; it's called body armor (USMC: Modular Tactical Vest) with SAPI plate inserts that block multiple shots from an AK-47 and most small arms, even with armor piercing rounds like the M855/SS109.

As far as getting back up goes, US troops also carry powerful hemostats like QuikClot that have been shown in medical studies to prevent exsanguination from a severed femoral artery.

Course, there's a bit of difference between mitigating blood loss and magically being healed faster than Claire from "Heroes."

This makes me cry. I have a 50" Vizio plasma now, which has been excellent (LG glass), but I was planning on upgrading to Vizio's apparently now canceled 60" 1080p plasma. Seeing the LCD craze makes no sense to me-- they're worse in every way. I have a high-end beast of a LCD monitor for my desktop (Samsung 244T, 550 cd/m^2! None of that TN panel crap) but plasma is where it's at for HDTVs.

Comparing HDTVs at the store, the plasmas always blow away the LCD TVs. Why on earth are the LCDs selling better? Seriously, who would buy them? Anyone who compares them specwise will find plasma superior, and even the layman comparing them visually will find the plasma looks significantly better. Do the stores and salespeople get a larger margin on the LCDs or something?

I strongly disagree with this review and think the review is "deeply flawed".

So the reason the game is "deeply flawed" is because you found it difficult, don't like puzzles, and found out that a 90 pound asian chick punching a SWAT team member with a M249 wasn't particularly effective?

This isn't a FPS. I'm not sure why you call the game flawed because a platformer has different gameplay than BioShock or Call of Duty 4.

"We found that Tiger Woods 2008 was deeply flawed because it did not contain AK-47s or M4s, and swinging the club was more difficult than using the Telekinesis plasmid in BioShock. Additionally, the golf courses lacked the gritty feel of a war zone or underwater city, and we were disappointed that Tiger Woods could not meet up with the weapons merchant from Resident Evil 4."

Jeeze. Even on hard, the PS3 version (with the "super hard mode" controller) was fairly easy, significantly easier than other platformers like Mario 64.

The puzzles are similar to, but less difficult than Portal. Like Portal, you have to adjust to the way you solve them. In Portal, it's the portal gun; in ME, it's Parkour. Mario can't wallrun or move like Faith, so this threw me off at first. What seems to be the downfall of most people is they don't understand the concept of momentum, because few games use it to the more realistic extent ME does. The Parkour elements are actually realistic as well (go search for "David Belle" on YouTube), so the "puzzle" solution, while initially non-intuitive, aren't completely arbitrary.

The combat is far easier than you'd think once you get the hang of it. On easy difficulty, taking out the entire SWAT team isn't too hard; just get momentum, drop kick one or do the slide-kick (which is more reliable and stuns), then follow up with punches. If they're still not KO, do another slide kick (even with no momentum) to stunlock them. Once you drop one SWAT team member, preferably the dude the M249, cleaning up the rest of the team and their single wave of reinforcements isn't exactly challenging. On hard, you have to avoid or be careful in approach to some encounters, but it's still relatively easy compared to say, trying to play Counter-Strike online after a couple month break. Getting stunned is NOT guaranteed death, not even on hard. Faith regenerates health somewhat faster than Claire from Heroes, so provided you can use agility tactically and don't expect her to be wearing power armor, the combat isn't that bad. You can also simply run away from most of it.

The core of the game is exactly like Portal: you scan the environment, devise a strategy for navigating through it, and execute it. If you fail, you adjust it. Even the most difficult parts of the platforming are still easier than most of Mario 64, and I don't recall anyone complaining about the difficulty of that. Mario 64 had many parts that were less obvious than ME as well.

In observing friends playing it, the primary two mistakes they made are 1) not understanding momentum and 2) not being able to move and look at the same time. Once you understand these two elements, the rest of the game is easy.

Yeah, the length was a bit short, but that was my only disappointment with it. Graphically it's quite nice, the music was decent (especially "Still Alive", another thing it shares with Portal), and the gameplay elements are fantastic. The Parkour elements are quite realistic, and it got my adrenaline flowing quite a bit, so it was an enjoyable simulation of being an asian female reincarnation of David Belle or something. (unfortunately, now the game is so easy even on hard I don't get a rush from it)

I'm very disappointed the upcoming DLC is some abstract geometry crap, and not urban environments, which is sort of the point of the Parkour that's the base of the game.

The game I played after it was Tomb Raider Underworld, and I had to stop, because while I thought TR Legend had good controls, after playing ME, the game felt like it had the controls of the early Resident Evils and was frustratingly sloppy. The core gameplay mechanics of ME are incredibly well tuned, imo.

Anyway, I can understand not liking the game, but complaining it has jumping and puzzles that make you think a little isn't really valid, nor is praising the graphical look on one page, then criticizing the same parts you just praised on the next.

I'd suggest watching the movie "District 13" then replaying it with the expectation of cross-breeding Mario 64 and Portal, not a linear FPS.

This dude is 17 according to his profile. I foresee him spending a lot of money on collecting guns when he gets older ;)

Before recently purchasing my PS90 (civilian legal semi-auto version of P90) I made a model of it; though nowhere near the quality of this guy's work, it just made me want the "real" thing even more. Unfortunately it did not come with the frog trooper.

I looked up the specs on the PVR in the iPhone vs. the PSP's GPU... the PSP GPU has 10x the triangle render speed and 2x the overall megapixel fillrate. I don't see how the iPhone is faster for 3D gaming... 2D maybe, since it has a faster CPU and more RAM.

I own an iPod so I'm hardly an Apple hater, but I'm just not seeing evidence for his claims with the data I've read.

Intel Core 2 Solo ULV.

I did some research on this when SSDs became available (in Sony notebooks), to see if it'd be worth buying one for my Fujitsu which has a slow 4200rpm hard drive.

Basically, if you do the math on power consumption, the hard drive accounts for a minority of a notebook's power use, and thus no matter how efficient you make it, it wasn't using all that much to begin with.

The slight advantages of marginally better power consumption and faster random access speeds did not seem worth the cost and loss of storage capacity to me. But to each their own. For some people the random speeds may be important, and that extra battery life worth the difference. Or perhaps you could be using it in an adverse environment and need the shock resistance. But for most of us, I suspect we'll stick with the cheaper and higher capacity HDD option for a while longer.