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Gazillion Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media form joint MMO studio
When Gazillion Entertainment's existence was first revealed to the public, the immensity of the company made many of us wonder whether or not their ultimate goal was world domination. Which brings us to today and Gazillion's newly announced joint MMO studio project with Abu Dhabi Media, a partnership aimed at bringing massively multiplayer online games to Arabic countries in the Middle East.Well played Gazillion, well played. We can just see their CEOs now, stroking their skinned cats, arching a single eyebrow. What will their next project be? Our guess is a death ray on the moon, or maybe an asteroid rigged with massive jet engines and aimed at the Earth until their villainous demands are met.Whatever Gazillion Entertainment's future plans are, we're pretty sure they involve some kind of space-located doomsday device.
Dinner with the multiboxers
I wish I'd been invited to this at BlizzCon -- TGDaily sat down with a group of multiboxers last weekend, and lived to tell the tale. I don't think multiboxers are the most hated people in the game (Paladins and Warlocks probably get to trade off that title), but it's true that just like twinks, they can draw some ire. Blizzard has given them a free pass in the game (most likely because they're spending ungodly amounts of money keeping up their fleets of characters), but apparently multiboxers are just people. People willing to shell out lots of money and time on overpowering themselves inside a game.And that's really where the issue lies -- most of these people aren't no-lifers, they're just folks with money to burn that want to trounce a battleground all by themselves or run Karazhan solo. But at the same time, there is a sense of superiority that comes across -- they brag (under their breath in a crowded restaurant) that they can beat anyone else's player, and they claim that "other people can only see a quarter of the game," which just patently isn't true. This is a generalization I'm making, of course, but playing 10 characters by yourself seems to give an inflated sense of self-worth in the game (after all, aren't you 10 times better than someone playing with just one character?) and that could be the reason that multiboxers have the reputation they do.
Dell says XPS 700 will NOT ship overclocked
We can't blame TG Daily for reporting that the Core 2 Extreme-powered version of Dell's XPS 700 gaming desktop will ship with a factory overclocked processor; after all, the placard in front of that demo machine at the World Series of Video Games did indeed mention an overclocked Conroe, with the promise that "system specs like this [will be] available within the next 30 days at [Dell's website]." After Cnet received a review unit of the new configuration that had not been overclocked, however, they called up Dell to set the record straight once and for all. According to company spokesperson Liem Nguyen, although "Dell has unlocked the BIOS so that customers can overclock the processor themselves...at this time Dell is not factory overclocking the system." So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth: Dell's not actually doing the dirty work here, but it is giving customers the opportunity to tweak and possibly fry their machines themselves.
Laptop Vista Premium certification will require hybrid HDDs
Far from being a niche technology that just happens to fully thrive in Windows Vista, it turns out that those hybrid hard drives we've been following for some time will actually be required equipment for laptops wishing to sport the Vista Premium logo. TG Daily caught up with Microsoft's Windows Client Performance program manager Matt Ayres at TechEd 2006 to pin him down about recent updates to the Windows Logo Device Program Requirements, and sure enough, Ayres confirmed that the new wording does indeed mean that hybrid drives will be part-and-parcel of Premium-labeled mobile systems released after June 1, 2007. As you may or may not recall, these so-called ReadyDrive HDDs manufactured by Samsung, Seagate, and unnamed others offer up to 256MB of on-board flash memory for faster boot times and better battery life thanks to buffering that reduces the amount of necessary drive spinning.[Thanks, Mack S.]
HDMI issues at GDC? Or simply no cable?
The PS3 dev kits on display at GDC apparently skipped the HDMI connection for some of their demos, casting doubt on how far along Sony's come with its hardware and digital standards compliance.During GDC, Sony brought along a few PS3 demo units to show off audio and video, which TG Daily spied from a distance. As you can see above, the PS3 graphics demo unit used a standard AV Multi-Out connector while the "two HDMI ports right below the AV Multi-Out port were unused." TGD apparently offered to lend Sony officials an HDMI cable of their own to connect to the system, but they were turned down.Of course, there's also a conflicting pic which Chris Grant took for us on Joystiq Central that seems to show that very HDMI connection being used, probably with another unit. (Scroll down to the second pic here to see it.) So what's the real story? Was Sony lacking enough updated HDMI 1.3 hardware and/or 1.3-compatible TVs to show off the HD goods, or were they simply short on cables? Maybe their budget was a bit tight for GDC (what with Phil's focused keynote and abundance of GDC sessions from Sony), so hopefully we'll see everything hooked up nice and tidy for E3.[Thanks, Michael, Racky, pheen, and DocEvil; via TechSpot and CD Freaks]
CES: First generation Blu-ray players may not be "full featured"
TG Daily is reporting that the first generation of Blu-ray players, just announced, will not include hardware support for the vaunted BD-J interactive layer. Apparently the key word to look for when shopping for Blu-ray players later this year is "full-profile". Based on what's been reported, we can expect full profile players to launch at around $1800, while "basic" players may be closer to $1000. Is the Blu-ray spec as done as we've been lead to believe, if the players launching possibly six months from now aren't going to support one of the key features?Also in Blu-ray news, they expect to support streaming media over internet connections, as a way to get people to connect their players to the internet (and update their encryption). The last interesting note was about thier insistence about only wired connections and that they need to keep high definition off the WiFi airwaves. That is really weird to me, even if it only ships with a wired connection, how can they stop someone from using a wireless bridge? It seems silly. I really have the feeling we'll end CES not knowing much more than we already suspected about Blu-ray or HD-DVD.
