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Far Cry 4: Crouching tiger, hidden Blood Dragon
If there's one game that doesn't quite fit into Far Cry's exotic zoo of flammable locales, it's Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The standalone spinoff (often confused for DLC) dragged the franchise's jungle-stalking into a neon cyber-parody of 1980s action, stripping off a serious face to reveal a toothy grin and bulging cheek. Players loved it, and some wondered why that couldn't have been THE Far Cry 3. As much as I like what I've played of THE Far Cry 4, I wonder about a full surrender to Shangri-La, the strange, mystical reflection of the game's "real" Himalayan world. These excursions into Shangri-La are absolutely integrated into the main storyline – not DLC – and spread across five unreal episodes. There may yet be another Blood Dragon, but Far Cry 4 comes with weirdness built-in.
HTC preps a few more models (hint: CDMA Touch!)
HTC's model naming convention has always been just a little tricky to commit to memory, and with this latest batch, it certainly ain't getting any easier. A couple of these we've heard about before -- namely the Nike, Kaiser, and Shangri-La -- but the rest are brand new to us and very exciting. First up, the S640 "Iris" is a CDMA rendition of the Excalibur and Cavalier, tossing in EV-DO rev. A and WiFi atop Windows Mobile 6 Standard. The "Vogue" is essentially a Touch (TouchFLO UI and all) with the same EV-DO rev. A guts as the Iris -- good news for Verizon and Sprint customers, we'd imagine. GSM users have reason to celebrate here too, though, in the form of the "Volans" and "Polaris." These two are upgrades to the Vox and Artemis, respectively, adding in much-needed 3G radios and faster processors. Finally, the P6550 "Sedna" appears to be some sort of industrial device with support for a credit card reader -- though with a 3 megapixel cam and 3G data, we wouldn't mind having one ourselves. Release dates are up in the air on most of these, but our money is on late '07.[Via The Boy Genius Report] Update: Crikey, the Shangri-La's slide reveals that the device -- HTC's entry into the UMPC fray -- runs both Vista and Windows Mobile 6. Sound vaguely familiar? [Thanks, Kevin]
HTC Shift -- the cellphone company finally goes UMPC
It's been a long time in coming, but after HTC's long, gradual feature buildup all the way from the very first Pocket PC phone in 2002, they're finally putting the "computer" in High Tech Computer by making the jump to ultraportable PC-maker. That's right, HTC's first foray into the UMPC market, the Shift (codename Shangri-La), is officially announced today. We don't yet have hard details on release date or price, but we do know it should be available in Q3 (we'd estimate for under $2,000). As for features, we know not to expect anything out of the ordinary (except lots of 3G), although the form factor is pretty notable: not too many UMPCs have a sliding keyboard, and none that we can recall have a tilting display in this orientation. Some specs: VIA CPU (the one we tried had a 1.2GHz chip) Vista business (yes, it was running Aero) 7-inch sliding, tiling wide-touchscreen 30GB drive Tri-band UMTS / HSDPA, quad-band GSM / GPRS / EDGE WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 Biometric reader, front-facing camera We got a chance to play with an engineering sample of the Shift the other day; while we couldn't take any shots of it, we could say that the slide and tilt screen felt rock solid. Unfortunately, the full keyboard just had way too many keys packed in to type remotely accurately on. Stay tuned for more on this one; from today on HTC's playing a whole new game.
