You may have caught our previous post earlier this year on upcoming video games for 2008. Now that 2008 is almost upon us let’s take a look at some new additions to the list.
Ghostbusters - Fall 2008
Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters! It’s about time the Ghostbusters franchise released a video game to quell our appetite for chasing ghosts. Ray, Venkman, Spengler, Winston, and Slimer are all back for your enjoyment. Each Ghostbuster in the game will be voiced by the original actors. How sweet is that? For those of you that have been waiting years for Ghostbusters III the movie, here is some more great news (as if you can handle any more). Dan Aykroyd has confirmed that the video game is essentially the same plot as was originally created for the movie. The Ghostbusters video game trailer looks very appealing. This video game would have been great back in the height of the Ghostbusters franchise, but with the better technology and graphics today, it looks to be even more fantastic. Now remember, whatever you do, don’t cross the streams!
Available For: XBox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, PC
Publisher: Sierra
The buzz and previews around Assassin’s Creed looks like this could be the video game of 2008. An original and sexy plot line, fantastic graphics, and violence that will make any teenager smile definitely make this a game to check out. The premise of the game is that you (the main character) come from a lineage of assassins back in the period of the Third Crusade. You must assassinate the figures propagating the Crusades and destroy their conspiracy plans. The game environment and characters are supposedly historically accurate and based on real locations and people. How many times have you wished you were back in the Crusades and had a chance to fight the crushing religous tyranny? Every day.
Well, you still can’t play Halo 3 on it, but a UMass professor has a more practical use in mind for his PS3. Dr. Gaurav Khanna, an assistant professor at UMass, created an 8 node cluster using PS3s to run models to see if gravitational waves, which have been postulated for nearly 100 years but never observed, are strong enough that we could actually observe them one day.
In the past, Dr. Khanna had rented time on various supercomputing sites across the US, typically using a couple hundred processors and costing as much as $5,000 of his grant money.
Khanna’s cluster has been up and running for a little over a month. He says that the cluster is roughly equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on. Read more at Wired…
PS3 clusters have been created by other researchers as well. One of the pioneers is a North Carolina State University Professor, Dr.Frank Mueller, who created an 8 node PS3 cluster back in March of this year for a total cost of about $5,000.
Interested in the idea, but not sure about where to begin? Terra Soft Solutions is offering turnkey PS3 clusters. An 8 node cluster will set you back about $21,500 and a 32 node cluster $52,250. Besides the obvious cost of the consoles, for that price you also get a dual-proc Power Mac G5, a 48 port switch, Yellow Dog Linux pre-installed (developed and maintained by Terra Soft for the Power architecture family of CPUs), 7 cat 6 cables, mouse, keyboard, 19″ display, and 20 hours or technical support.
A new Google Code app is out, based on the open-source NES emulator InfoNES. It apparently lets you play old skool NES games on your iPhone, but at reportedly lower speeds and there’s no sound. This is still cool as hell, and you can be sure there will be improvements. iPhone NES Emulator [Google Code] Watch it in action below…
The Discovery Channel has launched a pretty cool new web-based game called Sharkrunners. The game lets you interact with real-life sharks being tracked with GPS so you can get a feel of what it’s like to be a shark-tracking marine biologist. The game is constant and continues even when you are logged out of the system. But you can also choose to be alerted of a shark encounter via SMS or email. The point of the game is to collect as much shark data as possible, along with getting funding upgrading your boat, and gaining crew members.
On September 20th a 1seg add-on tuner will be available in JApan for an extra $57 USD along with the PSP Slim. Kotaku says to “think what you’ll be doing with your PSP this Fall and what they’ll be doing in Japan. Watching a cruddy digital reception, that’s what!” They may be just teasing. But on a serious note: at least they have this technology implemented on some level where we, in the U.S., aren’t even close to where we should be in consumer technology.
Unveiled at E3, the latest Wii accessory is one to keep you in shape. The Wii Balance Board has dual sensors to detect your weight and balance as you exercise to the activities in Wii Fit. Nintendo said the new device is crucial in providing the “ultimate interactive experience”. Not sure that’s entirely true, but it’s still pretty cool. More shots [Engadget] and watch the video below…
Intel says they are researching a new anti-cheating system to detect and boot cheaters from online games.
According to ArsTechnica, “software demoed to our own Jon Stokes at Research@Intel Day would monitor data sent from the player’s computer to the server and would be able to detect anomalies, peg the players as cheaters, and then notify the server or admin so that the offending player could be kicked out of the game.” Full details are still vague.
It’s amazing what Younnat, a.k.a. Oleg Serdyuk, can achieve with some driving gloves and a PC steering wheel game controller. Those embedded sound effects might not be at all realistic as car noises, but they certainly went down well at the VDOH Festival DOM afterparty.
Sony has upset the Church of England with its war game, Resistance: Fall of Man. The problem according to the C of E is that the game features a shoot-out set in Manchester Cathedral, and Sony didn’t ask for permission. The Bishop of Manchester also complained that the move was irresponsible, although we fail to see the connection, because of the city’s gun-crime problem.
He then went on to say that the game includes ‘photo-realistic quality’, which may be giving Sony’s programmers more credit than they deserve. It’s the same, tired violent-games-cause-violence argument, coupled with a little copyright debate. Do you even need to ask permission to include a landmark building in a game? :: BBC
The S20 is shown in white with a hidden keypad, 2-megapixel camera, and lets you play original Nintendo games. The V9 features a 2.2-inch TFT display, 128 MB of internal memory, a stylus and TV-out on both models (sweet!). More Images [via Slashphone]
Unveiled at E3, the latest Wii accessory is one to keep you in shape. The Wii Balance Board has dual sensors to detect your weight and balance as you exercise to the activities in Wii Fit. Nintendo said the new device is crucial in providing the “ultimate interactive experience”. Not sure that’s entirely true, but it’s still pretty cool. 
