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WoW on Zazoox stations
Soley saw something strange at the airport in Denver: a console with PC games on it, including none other than World of Warcraft. Apparently there was a kiosk with a bunch of different games installed on it, and for a small fee, you could jump in and play any number of games, from Valve's FPSes (including Portal!) to our own big MMORPG.The company doing this is called Zazoox -- they have a site that shows off all of their different consoles and offers them (for a price and a service charge) to vendors who can then put them up in public places. World of Warcraft isn't actually on their games list yet, so apparently it's just being tested in Denver and other places. Apparently, the price is 25 cents a minute, but as some of the commenters to Soley's post say, if you're entering your WoW password on what is basically a public computer and something goes wrong, it could cost you a lot more than that.Of course, overseas in Asia, this kind of thing is common -- the vast majority of WoW players there play in public cafes and Internet houses, and in fact the pricing scheme of the game itself there is per hour, not per month like it is here. But for some reason, this kind of ubiquitous public gaming has never taken off in the West -- maybe Zazoox's consoles will get people playing out in public.
Meet Zazoox, a new Internet caf gaming kiosk
You know, if you could use proper names in Scrabble, Zazoox would be a good one to play. We hadn't heard of them until today, when we read in the trade publication Kiosk Marketplace that Zazoox is a new pay-for-use game café kiosk that can play PC, Xbox and PlayStation games alike. The company behind the gaming systems, Zoox Stations, says that it's installed 300 Zazoox (Zazooxes? Zazooxi?) on US Army bases domestically and in Germany. Currently, a Zazoox comes with games that include Halo, Call of Duty 2, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, with each setup running a 26-inch LCD display, a PX620 mini-tower loaded with a Pentium IV 2.8 GHz and 1GB of RAM -- and the best feature of all time, a "PC Reset Switch." Including its speakers and encasing, the whole thing (sans chair) weighs a hefty 300 pounds. No word on how much a Zazoox costs, or if its worth the 31 points that it would get on the Scrabble board. (And yes, we know that there's only one Z tile in Scrabble, so back off, it's ours, son.)[Via The Raw Feed]
