Gaming deals of the week: 3.12.14
Sometimes you just have to wait until a retailer tosses together a bunch of tech that you’re eying before you make the leap. In terms of new gaming consoles, today could very well be the day. There are tempting bundles for both Xbox One and PS4 on the other side of the jump, alongside two other entertainment-minded gadgets to help boost those high scores.
If there are other gaming devices you’re after that we haven’t included here — join us and add them to your “Want” list. Every time there’s a price cut in the future, you’ll get an email alert!
Xbox One Bundle
Price: $630
Regular Price: $730
Engadget Score: 81
Buy: GameStop
Sure, you could go after one of the new Forza 5 bundles, but here you’ll nab the Xbox One, an extra controller, the aforementioned title, Zumba World Party to keep you fit and a 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription. All of that comes with a $100 discount off of the regular sticker price of snagging each of those separately. Don’t worry, you can Zumba from the privacy of your own living room. We won’t judge.
PlayStation 4 Bundle
Price: $550
Regular Price: $570
Engadget Score: 83
Buy: GameStop
Prefer the PS4 and FPS titles? No worries: There’s a bundle for you too. This option includes Call of Duty: Ghosts, a second DualShock 4 controller and one year of PlayStation Plus. Sure, $20 is obviously a modest discount, but that’s money you can spend elsewhere, right?
Apple iPad Air (16GB, WiFi)
Price: $450
Regular Price: $500
Engadget Score: 92
Buy: Best Buy (Silver), (Space Gray)
A tablet on a gaming deals roundup? You betcha. And a $50 price drop on the current-gen model is certainly worth considering, especially when you factor in the iPad Air’s A7 chip and stellar battery life for iOS gaming. According to our 90-day Price History, there was an additional $10 discount just last week, so you may want to keep an eye out if you’re really pinching pennies.
Turtle Beach Ear Force PX51
Price: $200
Regular Price: $270
Buy: Amazon
If you’re all set in the console department, might we suggest a useful accessory? The Ear Force PX51 is now seeing an attractive discount on a model that debuted in March 2013. There’s compatibility across a wide spectrum of devices with custom presets to wrangle the 360-degree Dolby Surround Sound. Use our Compare tool to see how this unit stacks up against other high-scoring gaming headsets.
Filed under: Gaming
MSI supercharges its high-end gaming laptops with NVIDIA Maxwell graphics
It happens every time. NVIDIA unveils its latest GPU architecture, and all your favorite gaming laptops are suddenly getting refreshed internals. And why not? The new silicon promises screaming performance, improved battery life and support for GeForce Experience’s ShadowPlay and GameStream features. Naturally, MSI couldn’t wait to get its hands on the new technology, and has outfitted its GT Dominator and GE Apache gaming laptops with NVIDIA’s new 800M Series GPUs.
That said, most of the GT and GE notebooks internals are the same as yesterday’s models: fourth-generation Intel Core i7 processors, dual-SSD “Super RAID” storage configurations and customizable LED keyboards. If you’re ready to leap into the next generation of PC gaming, however, you’ve got options. Fans of the GT60 and GT70 series can pick up machines rocking NVIDIA’s GTX 870M and 880M GPUs from $1,500. MSI’s slimmer GE Apache laptops will start at $1,300, opting for the less powerful GTX 850M and 860M GPUs. We fully expect even more laptop manufacturers to announce GPU refreshes in the coming days, but if you can’t wait, MSI is ready right now.
Source: MSI
Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 adds Firefox support, isn’t just for creating pretty demons
Yes, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 can be used to create large, dramatic demon gods, but that doesn’t mean it’s only used to create large, dramatic demon gods. It’s also used to create sneaky thief demos! Oh, and as Mozilla demonstrates this morning with video of Unreal Engine 4 running from within Firefox, the engine can be used for much smaller-scale applications as well (such as the basic 2D platforming game seen in the video below the break). All this is to demonstrate that developers can use web clients (Firefox at least) to create games that are “almost indistinguishable from ones [you] might have had to wait to download and install” — the demo is running without plugins at “near-native” speeds. Apparently Unreal Engine 3 support simply wasn’t enough? We’ll be sure to ask when Mozilla shows off UE4 in Firefox next week at the Game Developers Conference.
Razer refreshes its Blade gaming laptops with NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs, multitouch support
“Thin and powerful” aren’t words we tend to associate with gaming laptops, Razer has always been an exception. The company’s Blade and Blade Pro laptops have been challenging our preconceptions for almost three years now, but the shadow of compromise has hung over each iteration of the product in some form or another. Last year, it was the 14-inch model’s low resolution display — a thinly veiled bottleneck that kept gamers from over-taxing the machine’s GPU. That won’t be an issue for the laptop’s 2014 refresh: Razer announced today that it’s outfitting the Razer Blade with a 3200 x 1800 IPS panel with multitouch support, a Intel Core i7-4702HQ processor and NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 870M (3GB GDDR5) GPU. It’s a loud answer to the issues we had with the last generation. It also takes it one step further from the new 17-inch Razer Blade Pro.
Like the standard Blade, the 17-inch model has been outfitted one of NVIDIA’s new Maxwell GPUs, specifically the GTX 860M (2GB GDDR5). It’s also kitted out with twice as much RAM (16GB DDR3L), an Intel Core i7-4700HQ processor and Razer’s Switchblade User Interface — a miniature keyboard with 10 keys (each with their own LED display), an LCD driven trackpad / touchscreen and a small suite of apps. Here’s where things get interesting: buyers after Razer’s Switchblade interface will wind up with a lower resolution screen without support for multitouch. Razer told us the Pro’s matte display was a better choice for productivity, and pointed out that 17.3-inches was a bit large for touchscreen gestures. Instead, the Razer Blade Pro will come with a Switchblade “Charms” app for Windows 8, as well as new applications for productivity suites like Maya, GIMP, Adobe Photoshop and Premiere.
Razer’s Pro and Standard Blade laptops were always separated by size, processor configuration and the Switchblade interface, it somehow seems different this time around. With more video RAM, a touchscreen and a higher resolution display, the 14-inch Blade seems to be built with entertainment in mind, while the Razer Blade Pro leans more towards productivity with a larger (but lower resolution) screen, more RAM and apps tailored to the needs of multimedia professionals. While both promise to be capable gaming rigs, they aren’t quite targeting the same buyers. Figure out what side you belong to? Start saving: the Razer Blade Pro ships at the end of the month, starting at $2,299, with the 14-inch Blade following soon afterwards for $2,199. Check out Razer’s product page for pre-orders, configuration options and eye-candy.
NVIDIA says most laptops die after 50 minutes of gaming, claims new GPUs will double that
Thanks to the appearance of a curiously thin MSI gaming laptop at CeBIT a few days ago, we had an inkling that NVIDIA’s new batch of laptop GPUs were inbound. Indeed, the 800M series has just become official, with a number of features geared toward portability and battery life. For a start, the lower half of the stack — the 830M, 840M, 850M and 860M — has been endowed with the company’s latest Maxwell architecture, which allows gaming credentials to be claimed by thinner and lighter machines. The new Gigabyte P74 is a decent example: It contains an 860M inside a 21mm-thick chassis and we managed to play BioShock Infinite on it, running at 1080p and max settings with a frame rate above 40 fps — that’s a level of performance that NVIDIA says would have required a 55mm-thick laptop three years ago. The other big promise with this generation concerns battery life, and it comes courtesy of a setting called “Battery Boost.”
The Battery Boost setting won’t affect general-purpose stamina, but instead only springs into action when you load up a game. It lets you set a target frame rate, such as 30fps, and then it dials down the performance of the system whenever possible in order to meet that target, so you don’t waste power on frames that you can live without (at least while you’re traveling away from a mains socket). Based on some testing by Tom’s Hardware, NVIDIA says the average duration of battery-powered gaming on a current GeForce laptop is less than 50 minutes, but Battery Boost should be able to increase that by 50-100 percent in a relatively easy-to-run game like Borderlands 2.
Finally, NVIDIA is also bringing some desktop features across to its laptop range of GPUs for the first time. These include Shadowplay, which lets you record 1080p footage (as h.264 video) of your gaming exploits for broadcast on sites like Twitch and UPlay. Then there’s Gamestream, which lets you play games on your laptop remotely using an NVIDIA Shield handheld.
Google acquires Green Throttle Games, gaming set-top TV box possibly in sight
With rumors spreading that Google is working on a set-top TV box, supposedly centered around games, adding fuel to the fire is the recent confirmation that it semi-acquired Green Throttle Games.
PandoDaily first reported the news of the deal that was for an unknown price.
You may remember that Green Throttle released a bluetooth game controller last year that turns your Android into a portable console, which we reviewed, and it’s much like the MOGA and MOGA Pro, with setup working with the aid of the Arena app from the Google Play store. The Atlas controllers sold individually for $39.95 each or in a pair for $79.95 (with a free HD TV connector). It’s safe to say that Atlas never took off with the likes of its competitors, including OUYA and PowerA. Please note that the Atlas app was taken down from Google Play in November, so the controller is now “functionally useless.”
Green Throttle Games, which launched in late 2012, is the brainchild of Charles Huang of Guitar Hero fame and Matt Crowley and Karl Townsend, who worked on the initial iteration of the Palm Pilot. While Google wouldn’t disclose the terms of the deal to PandoDaily, it did confirm that one part of the acquisition, that the former Green Throttle staff, including Crowley and Townsend, will be joining the Google and that Huang has not joined them, but retains rights over the Green Throttle business.
It will be interesting to see what Google will do with its newest semi-acquisition since it now has some experts with experience in Bluetooth, controllers, video games and the allowing of “easy mobile control of a large screen interface.”
via PandoDaily
The post Google acquires Green Throttle Games, gaming set-top TV box possibly in sight appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Bend it like robo-Beckham with the U14 Free Kick toy
Axpro is a Taiwanese company that makes flash drives, so it’s surprising to see it building app-connected toys like U14 Free Kick – a game that’s a weird hybrid between Frujit Ninja, Subbuteo and Robot Football. Making Fruit Ninja-style swipes on the iOS app determines the power and direction of a free-kick made by a robotic footballer, in the hope of getting it up and over a defending wall. It’s been designed for groups of soccerball fanatics who want to show off their ball-curving prowess without doing the real thing, and seems ideal for late night pub competitions. Unfortunately, it won’t become commercially available until Axpro finds a contributor, so we might have to clip our nails and dust off that Subbuteo box after all.
Sharif Sakr received a yellow card for simulation during this report.
Google has acquired Green Throttle; will we see a gaming-centric Google TV?
You may remember almost a year about we reviewed an Android gaming system made by a company called Green Throttle Games; the system was simple enough, combining Bluetooth controllers with Green Throttle’s own app to create a console gaming experience with any Android device you possessed (you can check out our full review here). Green Throttle has actually since then removed their app from the Play Store which makes their entire system worthless despite still being sold on Amazong. Even so, their work has caught somebody’s eye as Google has acquired Green Throttle Games in what’s reported as their endeavour to recreate a Google TV set top box.
We’ve known for some time known that Google has aspirations to recreate Google TV into something that can legitimately challenge the Apple TV, and something that has some Green Throttle-inspired gaming capabilities would definitely give it an edge in the media streaming space. The report says that Google will be making use of Green Throttle’s parts and labour to help create the set top box.
What do you think about Google acquiring the gaming-centric technology of Green Throttle? Would you be more likely to get a Google TV if it had gaming capabilities? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Source: 9to5Google via TalkAndroid
Google buys an Android gaming platform, possibly with a set-top box in mind
Green Throttle Games was late to the Android gaming platform party, and paid the price for it — the company effectively wound down at the end of 2013. However, its efforts may not have been in vain. Google has confirmed to PandoDaily that it has acquired key parts of Green Throttle’s business, including its parts, labor and two co-founders. The crew in Mountain View hasn’t said what it will do with its new resources, but PandoDaily sources claim that Google wants to refine the Bluetooth controller for its long-fabled (and possibly gaming-focused) TV set-top box. Whether or not that’s true, the move suggests that Google’s interest in games is extending beyond software.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, Peripherals, HD, Google
Source: PandoDaily
Xbox Live problems keep many Xbox One owners from calling in their Titan
Just as the Xbox One’s biggest game release arrives, network problems are keeping many owners from signing in. The Xbox Support Twitter account reported an issue around 5PM ET, and according to the service’s dashboard it’s still ongoing. While many players who already setup their consoles and logged in to the game (including some of our editors) are able to connect and play Titanfall — although the game’s cloud seems to be holding up, if not Xbox Live in general — or other games without an issue, others are unable to sign in, particularly brand-new Xbox One purchasers who can’t get much of anything going. The support team’s message has been promising updates every 30 minutes or so, but so far there’s no ETA on a fix. Steam appears to have just come back online after downtime of its own — perhaps we could suggest some Dark Souls II on PC in the meantime?
Unable to sign in to Xbox Live on Xbox One? We’re on the case to get this issue fixed as soon as possible! http://t.co/99xfLNeme4 ^PC
– Xbox Support (1-5) (@XboxSupport) March 11, 2014
Via: Joystiq
Source: Xbox Live Status
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