There were three ways Nvidia presented at PAX that deliver the image to either eye. Two of those setups everyone should be familiar with, since theaters and home movies do this. There is the old way of tinting each image either blue or red, and then wearing glasses that have colored glasses so you can only see one or the other color. They had one monitor in their booth hooked up this way so that you can use the cheap glasses to see in three dimensions. The problem with this setup is that obviously it messes with the colors, and looks weird.

The other way theaters do it is using polarized lenses. They then interlace the video and use a special projector so that you only see certain portions of the screen with each eye. One of the other groups in the expo hall was showing off this setup. They were selling monitors that would work with the standard polarized lenses. I tried these out while at PAX; some of the demos that they were showing seemed kind of blocky or pixelated. I’m not sure if this was because it was interlaced, or because they were demos just to show off the technology, and not real games.

Nvidia was mostly showing off their 3D Vision glasses. These didn’t require any special monitor, though, in reality, anyone that would want one of these setups would have to buy a new monitor. These glasses work by opaquing the image to each eye alternately 120 times a second. By swapping the image from left to right eye 120 times a second the monitor just shows the image for each eye every other frame. Most CRT’s will have the necessary 100Hz or higher. With CRT’s people bought high refresh rates because they reduced strain on eyes, and were nicer to look at. With LCD’s the manufactures almost never bothered to go above 60 Hz. The problem is that for Nvidia’s 3D vision graphics you only would get half the fps the monitor naturally gets, so with a standard 60 Hz monitor that is only 30 fps which is far too low for most games.

This means that, fancy new LCD you just bought is becoming obsolete already. Ironically though, if you still have your old, huge CRT around, it will probably work great with that. The demo that they showed of the goggles on looked really good; you can see the image clearly, with no real distortion to the image. How well the 3D feel works somewhat depends on the game, but like mentioned above Nvidia has an advantage on the tech in this field. They are given the 3D model and told to render it for one point of view normally. All they had to do to get the stereographic images was to instead move the point of view slightly to the two sides and render two separate images instead.

While talking to the people in the booths it was interesting to note that this will work with many older games with no modifications. Since almost all Windows games already use DirectX it’s not that difficult to do the modification to double render for them. It’s interesting to note what could go wrong though. 2D objects may not work properly,  and similarly all Full Motion Video Sequences (FMV) are likely pre-rendered so will not work.

Overall I think the technology is pretty cool. And will love to play with it myself some more to see which games work with it, and which do not. Since it works with most Nvidia cards currently on the market, it’s also an accessible technology. The worst thing is that you have to probably buy a new LCD monitor. It’s also ironic that it works with older CRT’s more than the new tech, so for once, those who are technologically behind may have the advantage.

The nerds in us are wicked excited for this one.

“Hubble 3d” will be released to select IMAX theaters on March 19, 2010, with further availability on April 23 to coincide with the Original Launch of Hubble.

The IMAX camera shot film of the entire repair of the Hubble Telescope. With the shots of the intricate work in space they accomplished, the viewers of this film will feel like their standing in space next to the astronauts.

Said director Tony Myers, “We have waited a long time to get the IMAX camera back into space and finally the opportunity came with the amazing final repair mission of the Hubble Space Telescope.”

The movie will consist of the video shot of repairs and upgrades and even its first images after repairs were completed. This will allow the audience to really appreciate the significance that the Hubble Telescope has been to us over the last 20 years — it’s position above the Earth allows it to see space farther off than any telescope on the ground.

The nerds in us are wicked excited for this one.

In reality it’s a keyboard attached to your fingers. They are using hand gestures similar to American Sign Language to control your computer and your computer games. If you touch your thumb to your middle finger at the end it will trigger one key, or macro, if you touch it in the middle it triggers another one. They are claiming that there are over 30 combinations of gestures that the hardware recognizes; when I got to try it, the presenter showed me that he used 40 different ones. All the gestures consist of you touching the end of one of your fingers to the middle of another one, or to the palm of your hand.

The metal cables that are running through the glove were branded, as “military grade” the presenter said that he had abused his glove and was unable to break the metal cables. It seems like the fabric in it would tear long before the rest of the glove was damaged. They said that the glove is also the cheapest part–probably about $20–since all the actual intelligence and work is in the cable that goes from the glove to the computer.

They had areas where there were no contacts like above the palm of the glove with netting instead of the fabric so that your hands won’t sweat. The Fabric was also flexible enough that it can be used while typing. I had no trouble moving my hands when I put it on; it’s a thin glove so shouldn’t give much trouble doing dextrose activities like picking up objects, like say, going to the fridge for a drink. Though, with the metal contacts on it I’d avoid actually spilling water on it. They said that it is hand washable though since it’s durable metal, and just plain fabric, so if you do spill something on the glove you can still clean it.

To make it easy to leave the computer to get things the glove snaps on and off. The glove has a magnet and a proprietary connection on the back that connects to a USB wire. The wire again has all the logic for the glove in it.

The spots on the glove that they sewed into the fabric show where to press your fingers to. The software though is able to calibrate to how you actually press your fingers. Also if you miss the spot you could have two spots do the same action if you want.

The configuration software that they showed me has a picture of the glove, as a guide and then allows the user to calibrate the glove, set the macro’s or setup a configuration for the glove, or setup multiple configurations. The picture has dots for the points on the glove, where you can click on a dot and set the macro, or key in the assignment screen, or go through how you would do a given gesture in the calibration window so the glove fits your exact style of game play. They also were nice when you want to clear data from a point; they make you do that action so you confirm that is really the action you want to clear, and not a miss-click of the mouse.

Different games might need different configurations. One macro that’s good for one application could be bad for another. They have the configuration program as a tray icon in windows that you can click on to quickly set the configuration.

The Actions that are caused by certain movements of your hand can be triggered to a simple keyboard press, or to an elaborate macro, allowing you to execute a complex command with just a simple hand gesture. These macros and keyboard actions are powerful enough that people end up completely replacing their keyboard with the glove.

They were also claiming that it’s faster to learn a new game than a keyboard; I’m not as certain about this claim. It’s definitely a learning curve to starting to use for the first time, once you’re used to the gestures it’s probably easier to learn new games than that first game, and it is nice that with most games they decide that the keyboard hot keys are related to the action by being a letter in the command. This can be hard to remember 60 or so different commands and which key matches to them. In the peregrine they can be mapped based on their location on the screen, such that the index finger is row 1, the middle finger is row two, and so on. They could also be mapped based on type of action. The tricky thing in starting a new game this way is remembering which finger is which and arranging it such that you only have a max of 5 categories. The positional keys are also important if different characters in a game have completely different actions so that they can all be learned in a similar way.

Personally when I played with it, it felt awkward at first but I can see how it would be addicting. I liked how once I got used to it, it could be very easy to do different actions, very little thought to pressing your thumb and ring finger together. This also could be nice for people that have issues with their wrists. Since there is no object to press against, you can make sure your wrist is straight. On the other hand, if you’re lazy, you still might end out bending your wrists when you move your fingers which would prove to be just as bad as a keyboard.

Overall I think if you play a lot of PC games you should definitely give this a try. This may turn out to be the controller of the future. If they added in some motion sensors then they wouldn’t even need a mouse at all.

The charging system comes in two parts. The first, the WildCharger Pad, plugs into a wall like any other charging base station. The pad is a simple, flat surface that you lay your device on. There are no sliding parts, no grooves to line up, no orientation to match — you just toss your device onto the pad and it automatically starts charging. I tried placing my iPhone in many different directions and playing around with it, but I was unable to find a orientation separate from being of the pad where the WildCharger failed to charge.

The trick, which the engineers took no effort to hide, is the twelve strips of metal in the pad that generate a potential. The second component to the system is the case you attach to your device. The iPhone case I tested has metal contacts on the back of the case in a “T”-shape. They were spaced out in just the right proportions that at least one of them would connect to a different strip of metal on the pad, completing a circuit, and generating the charge for the device. Because the pad is larger than your devide, you can also cram as many devices on the pad as you want.

So while the WildCharger Pad is technically wireless, it still requires metal contacts to transmit the power. This means that you couldn’t put something over the pad and expect it to charge. Also, should the contacts on the case ever become oxidized, it will become unable to charge.

WildCharger's universal adaptor can let you charge just about any device.

Even with these possible limitations, the technology is promising.  The company is currently developing laptop chargers. Looking even further into the future, the company hopes to put all of these devices in cafes, restaurants, and bars, eliminating the need to fight over outlets. We’ll just hope no one spills something on them. That would probably be bad.

While I used the iPhone case, the company sells cases for the iPod Touch and Blackberrys, as well as generic adapter to most phones or other devices. The case is rubber which covers the phone while also preventing scratches and other damage to the phone. The case isn’t too difficult to remove, which is a good thing since in order to charge your iPhone or iPod Touch, the WildCharger has to be plugged into the dock port on the phone, preventing you from syncing with your computer while the skin is on the case. Though many other skins cover or otherwise obscure the port, it’s still is a hassle to have to take it off anytime you want to sync your device.

Overall, I think the WildCharge is a great product, and if the WildCharger pads start to show up at my local Starbucks, we certainly wouldn’t complain. At this point, you just have to ask yourself how much the convenience of not having to charge your device with a wire is worth to you.

Much like “The Shining” before it, “Orphan” is one of those horror movies that really messes with your head by playing on our perceptions of innocence and trust, only in this case instead of a loving, trustworthy father who goes batshit insane, it’s the sweet, innocent little girl that no one would suspect could be so evil.

“Orphan” is surprisingly entertaining, with plenty of suspense to get you on the edge of your seat, as well as shocks and frights to make you jump for cover. Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) is creepy enough to give us nightmares for a few nights to come at least.

Torn apart by the recent loss of their baby, John (Peter Sarsgaard) and Kate Coleman (Vera Farmiga) decide to adopt to fill the void. When they encounter the seemingly special, angelic Esther at the orphanage, it looks to be a perfect match. However, as the movie’s tag line goes, “there’s something wrong with Esther,” and when they bring their little bundle of joy home, things begin to change.

Farmiga portrays Kate brilliantly, displaying enough craziness to hint at her troubled past, and she shines in this film, especially when supported by the three children. Sarsgaard, on the other hand, plays an unconvincing John, though to be fair he is just playing the role he was given. Throughout the film, John is presented with the choice of who to believe as strange things keep happening, and Esther’s false innocence gets the best of him every time, despite some situations that make the viewer wonder how he could be so myopic. Of course, one must suspend disbelief for a movie of this nature, but one still wants believable characters.

Without doubt, the toughest role, and best filled, was that of Fuhrman’s Esther. Switching between being the perfect little Victorian princess to the brilliant yet deranged monster is done with an impressive talent for someone of her age, complemented by the old-fashioned clothes she wears. The mannerisms and the way she speaks, and even the way that she carries herself, show off the abilities of this young actress, and the lack of sound and use of subtitles at times really draws you into her world as a deaf child.

Once again referring to that old classic, the setting of the story also reminds one of “The Shining.” It’s winter time, in a house that’s off the beaten path, which gives a sense of seclusion and entrapment. The film doesn’t simply rely on blood and gore or cheap tricks to achieve its thrills. It starts building suspense and momentum early on, slowly revealing more of the story, and the histories, of both Esther and the mother.

If you’re up for a good horror movie, this is definitely one to check out, and it has something for fans of all sub-genres. It may not be a masterpiece, but it’s worth the cash to get the adrenaline pumping, especially if you’re one of those people who enjoys a sleepless night or two. If you’re thinking of adopting a child any time soon, though, you may want to hold off.

(Blast doesn’t have anything against orphans in general, just this one.)

The controller feels a little strange at first; the board is kind of rounded on the bottom allowing it to tilt left and right, which you don’t get just from standing on a real skateboard. You can jump the skateboard by quickly moving the skateboard’s front upward. While the skateboard is in the air, you can tilt the board left or right to flip it in flight. The “Ride” as this new controller is called, can do everything a traditional controller was able to do, mostly because the controls are context sensitive. The accelerometers will even detect if the Ride has been spun around. This allows you to even do 180s and 360s.

In the demo they showed off, the player has to kick beside the board to get started, then lean forward and backwards to direct the board down the path. The game will then ask you to do a “manual,” which is raising the front of the board slightly; all I had to do was lean on the back of the board a little. Then it goes up a ramp, and you need to get the board to jump. This was accomplished by pressing on the back a bit to make it go up at just the right spot. After that you ride by a railing that you can jump up onto; like the earlier jump, just pushing on the back will launch you into the air and balance you on the rail. This part really is cool for the new controller, since you need to actually balance by leaning, rather than using an analog stick or button presses.

This looks like it’ll be another good example of getting up and truly interacting with a game. I like how you don’t have to ever pick up the regular controller at all once you start, much like in the aforementioned music titles. To go through the menu you can just move the Skate board around to navigate it. If the game is as good as it looked from the five minute demo, and offers enough of a challenge, and enough variance, this should help revitalize the Tony Hawk game brand.

The game will let the player use either the stylus or buttons to control the game. Each option has its benefits. The stylus is easy to point at the screen and has a nifty zoom feature new to the DS version of Peggle. If you press down on a spot for an extended period of time the screen will zoom into that spot, allowing you to make a better decision about your next shot of the ball.

Using the buttons to control, you can speed up time to help you get the shots you want. Use the directional pad to move left and right, or use the shoulder buttons to aim around. This is more accurate than the normal stylus mode, though it doesn’t zoom in–usually don’t need to zoom in since you can tap the button to see all possible shooting locations.

PopCap decided to use the bottom screen for all the game play and only use the top screen for the menus and graphics of the currently selected Master. This is kind of unfortunate as it would be nice to have the extra space of the top screen, but since the levels were designed for a computer monitor anyways it works for the original levels.

The actual game play is the same as the PC versions of Peggle. You shoot a ball at pegs, trying to get rid of all the orange ones. They did include both Peggle and its sequel Peggle Nights in the game, which is a pretty good deal and explains the title. It does seem to lack the final Master of Peggle Nights, though.

Peggle Dual Shot has a few new additions to the original versions. First, there is a new underground mode added. When you get the purple points peg it now keeps track. After hitting four of them, the free ball bucket disappears and you go into the underground mode when your ball falls off the screen. The underground mode looks more like a pinball machine with bumpers all over the screen and jewels to collect. When you hit the action button it makes all the bumpers hit the ball, and you can hit the button to move the flippers. The player uses the bumpers to try to collect as many jewels as possible before the ball falls through both screens. The underground is neat in that it uses both the top and the bottom screen.  If you collect enough jewels your score will increase during the final extreme fever scoring. They will also get you free balls if you collect enough of them.

The game allows you to send a demo to another DS, and even encourages this by using it as one of the ways to unlock the extra levels in the game. There are 10 extra levels beyond the original levels of Peggle and the Peggle Nights levels. These are levels created specifically for the DS version of Peggle.

One of my few complaints with this game is that when you zoom in, the graphics take a hit, which they do not do on the PC version of the game. Things start to look pixilated, which isn’t a deal breaker by any means but it’s something you notice. The graphics mostly look like the PC version otherwise.

Overall, if you’re a fan of Peggle and want to be able to play the game on the go, Peggle Dual Shot is for you. If you have never experienced Peggle before, you’re getting a great deal by having two PC games packaged on one DS cartridge along with new levels and stylus play, if you so choose, and trust me, you want to play Peggle, as it’s one of the most addicting puzzlers out there on the market.

Docking stations are nice if you use the laptop primarily at one location or have lots of things to plug into it that don’t move — input devices, webcam, monitor. This leaves the BookEndz with a good chance to market third party docking stations. This is a hard thing for the company to manufacture since the laptops don’t just have a docking port like most laptops that have first party docking stations. They are left with plugging into the external ports and then just moving them to the outside their device.

BookEndz still have some options that users can work with, though. With their MacBook docking station, they have a USB hub inside, so you can have 6 devices plugged in, while the MacBook only has two USB ports on the side.

The docking station has all the original laptop ports plus the mini DVI is converted to either a DVI or a VGA. You can only use one at a time. If you plug in both only the VGA is recognized.

The BookEndz also use a sliding switch on the side to plug in the speaker/headphone port. This is important since the MacBook enables the port based on a sensor that detects something plugged into the port. When the headphones or speakers are plugged in the laptops speakers are disabled.

The switch on the Bookendz unit I was given was a very sticky. It is hard to move from plugged in and unplugged. This will loosen over time with usage. The company said that the one I was sent may be an early model and the new ones are looser and easier to switch to plugged in, or unplugged. They do make it easy enough to just plug everything in at once.

I like that when I use a BookEndz I can go from standard laptop to having a big monitor, and normal keyboard. Using a USB video card, it’s possible for a Macbook to now have two large monitors plugged in, and then it’s easy take it away when you need to go.

One part that makes it hard with the newer Apple laptops is the much toted power plug. Apple does not appear to let any third party companies make Mag-Safe adapters. BookEndz have a space for the original power bricks to be used. This could have been done better. They seemed to have decided to make it easy for the user to unplug the power brick to take with the laptop, instead of leaving the power brick in the docking station. This means every time you go to unplug the docking station, not only do you unplug the docking station, but also the power adapter. This also requires sitting the docking station on top of the wire so it will all sit flat. I think they should have made the docking station hold the power adapters more snugly. That way you can just plug everything in at once.

The design of the plastic casing is fairly smooth and flowing like the MacBooks, but the devices have touches here and there that look more hobbyist.

Overall I think it’s a very good and useful product for what it does. I think it beats just plugging in each port separately every time I get to work. For what they had to work with I think they did a great job. I just wish Apple thought of this sooner.

By the way: Because of a reporting error, we removed the line “Apple hasn’t ever produced a docking station for their laptops.” It was incorrect.

The game has 18 locations to look for objects in. There are 20 levels, and for each level there are a few locations where you need to find up to 10 objects. When you find all 10 objects you go to another location until you find all the objects for that level. Once you find all the objects for a level you get to play a mini-game to finish the level. The mini-games consist of Memory Match, Jigsaw Puzzle, Tile rotate, Mah-Jongg Match, and Word Puzzle.

The search-and-find locations allow the player to move the zoom window around with the directional pad, the a/b/x/y pad, or using the stylus. If you click and drag you can move the screen around as well. To find an object, click on the screen where the object is. This mimics the use of a mouse on a computer, though with the stylus you can press directly on the area. The objects are sometimes small though, so they can be hard to find.  Some of them will also be hidden as decoration in other objects; for example, you need to find an ear, but the ear is found as an etching in a tree, or the star you are looking for is a decorative part of a chair.

The difficulty increases as the game progresses. Initially, umbrellas are referred to as “umbrellas” , then are labeled as “parasols.” Another example is “horse shoes” become “lucky shoes” or “esquire shoes.” They also will say find two eyes and one of them might be an eye ball, where the other one is the word “eye” painted on the wall.

The game does offer one helping part to the search. There is a hint button at the bottom that will move the screen so that an object is on the screen. Part of the screen will also shine, helping you zoom in on the object. If you have multiple objects left to find you never know which one it will focus in on, so it’s probably better to find all of the objects you can first, in order to avoid pointing you towards objects you already knew of. Don’t spam the hint button though, as the game penalizes you for its use, and has a delay set up in between uses.

The game does get a little tedious because of the limited number of locations. Once you’ve been to a location more than once you’ll start to remember where some objects are, which makes it easier to search there again. This also makes it easier when they change the names, because the player has seen the objects before and can remember what they found before and realize the new name. There are nearly 40 objects in every location though, so it’s still likely to have at least one new object each time you go to that location. Though with 10 objects per level it’s also likely you will see ones you’ve found before.

After the levels, you play a mini-game. These play out another portion of the story, and are designed somewhat like boss levels. They switch things up in these mini-game portions sometimes though; in Mah-Jongg or Memory, you will have to match up objects based on on association or similarities instead of just exact matches.

I thought the game was a lot of fun, and think it works better as a DS game than as a PC game. I was fairly addicted to it until I finished it, which goes to show how well a simple concept can work sometimes. My most significant complaint is that the game’s storyline was not that great, though it’s to be expected in this type of game as well. Beyond that, the actual gameplay is fun, so fans of the genre should give this game a look.

Nintendo made a great console with the Wii, but one major mistake made was that the Wiimotes run on two standard AA batteries. This means that they require replacing on a regular basis. It’s a pain if they die in the middle of a game, creating much frustration if there are no batteries to replace them with. For a while I used rechargeable AA batteries but that still requires swapping them each time they die.

There have been multiple companies that have come out with different battery pack solutions to deal with this problem. The thing that they all fail at is working with Nintendo, or third party, “Wii condoms” (the unofficial name for the silicon shells people put on their Wiimotes). In all, newer games Nintendo recommends you use a Wii condom. They have swapped the graphics of the Wiimotes in game to show using their condom. With most charging stations on the market, you have to take the Wii condom off to charge the Wiimotes. This means you either don’t use the Wii condom at all, or you end up forgetting to charge them, and get dead batteries.

Teknocreations has come out with a solution that solves both of these issues. The InCharge uses the same technology that is in some electric toothbrushes. It’s the same technology that MIT was advertising recently to run a light bulb wirelessly across the room. This is same technology that makes electric magnets possible. Surprisingly, it’s actually just basic high school physics behind it. It’s not used regularly because the amount of electricity lost using this method is many times greater than the amount used.

Physics says that a changing electric current will create a magnetic current. An electric magnet just is a wire wrapped around a metal rod so it moves around in the same direction creating a fixed magnetic field. The interesting and important part of this is that the reverse holds true too: a changing magnet field will cause an electric current.

The InCharge uses this idea to have an electric magnet create currents in the base station that cause an electric charge in the batteries. This is not the most efficient way to charge your Wii batteries since electricity is being wasted converting from electrical to magnetic, then back to electrical. Luckily, the batteries in the Wiimotes are small enough that the amount of energy that is required to charge them this way as opposed to the metal contact methods won’t be noticed by most people. To put in perspective, the power adapters for most of your electronics waste almost as much converting from 110 volts to the voltage the device uses.

The batteries held up well under my tests, though they did have the same problems of all other Lithium batteries. If left unused for any length of time they will slowly lose their charge, but only over long periods of time. This would mostly account for the discrepancy that they claimed 24 hours of charge time. I only managed to get a little more than 12 hours over a two-week period. This should be still more than enough when you consider that you should place the Wiimotes back on their charge station when not in use. So the biggest question on battery life is how long you will sit playing the Wii in one sitting, since the charger is able to easily charge them back up for you over night.

I did find that the meter on the Wii wasn’t accurate on these batteries though. The meter seemed to work fine on other batteries I’ve tested in the past. On the InCharge, the Wii still said half charge when they started to run out of power, and shutoff while playing games. So if you don’t place the remotes on their base station, you shouldn’t trust this meter.

The big benefit though is the fact that now you can leave your Wiimotes in their Wii condoms while charging. I tried a couple different Wii condoms to see that they each kept the Wiimote close enough to charge. The Wiimotes will still charge as long as they are within about one centimeter away from the base station. So now you can have different colored Wii condoms to tell your Wiimotes apart and still use a battery pack to charge them.

The other nice thing for families with small kids is the contacts are no longer exposed so you can’t get any gunk on them stopping the batteries from charging. Though personally the worst I’ve ever had from the contacts is a little rust that can be sandpapered off, it’s still nice to have one less thing to worry about.

One concern I’d raise about this is that the InCharge, because it uses a magnetic field, is like a microwave oven. I wouldn’t sit it next to your computer, or any electronics. Teknocreations says that the magnetic radiation isn’t harmful, but a computer too close may still have negative side effects.

Overall, I think the InCharge is a great device. It still has the trouble that if you have three or four people in your family it requires two InCharges since they only charge two Wiimotes each. On the other hand, if you only have two people playing the Wii, which seems more common, there will be no issue and you won’t have extra wasted parts.

The election here is focused mostly on who will be the next governor. The last election came down to a matter of 133 votes, after 3 recounts and a couple bags of missing ballots showing up mysteriously at the last minute.

The race is a rematch between Democrat Chris Gregoire and Republican challenger Dino Rossi.

First term Governor Gregoire served three terms as state attorney general, starting in 1992. Rossi served in the state senate for seven years.

The real issues under debate are about who will do a better job in office, not who will do it the “right” way. The candidates both claim they will lower taxes and keep a balanced budget. Gregoire claims she has money set aside for this, Rossi claims he can spend the budget better. Both of the candidates are claiming to want to fix roads here in the Seattle area.

Seattle has problems with roads. There is a lake between the city of Seattle, and the”East Side.” There are only two bridges to get across. The Route 90 bridge is in decent condition, but the 520 seems like it could fall apart at any time.

We also have a stretch of road in Seattle similar to the old 93 going above Boston. Unlike Boston though, Seattle has Earthquakes. The last one damaged this road and everyone believes it won’t last another one.

So the big question is who can relieve congestion on the roads, and fix the broken roads. Who will keep taxes at a minimum to accomplish all this.

While the rest of the nation is being inundated with ads for McCain or Obama, Washington is mostly getting ads for or against Gregoire and Rossi. If you turn TV on for 10 minutes you will see at least one ad for and against each candidate. It also gets interesting when you have, say, one ad against Rossi saying he opposes stem cell research followed by one from Rossi saying he supports stem cell research.

With the difference last time being just 150 voters it’s anyone’s guess who will win this time around.

Massachusetts native and computer engineer Bradley Ouellette recently relocated to Washington.

These two products are essentially the same, even though they don’t look it and the PlayStation 3 version uses the original internal battery, and 360 version uses a Nyko replacement battery. They’re both meant to give you an externalized recharge of your controllers.

I currently have Nyko’s Wii Charge Station, and the PS3 and 360 charge stations all sitting next to each other on a shelf.

The 360 and PS3 controllers can each be charged using USB, or with the 360 by removing the battery and sticking it in a separate charge station. The Nyko charge stations are nice because you can basically just store your controllers on them when they aren’t being used.

This is a good place to use Lithium Ion batteries. Even if there’s still some juice left, you can recharge them on the fly, as opposed to older technologies that do better if you let them completely die before charging them.  This makes the life of the battery less important since you will have it charging when your not playing, and as long as you don’t do a marathon gaming session the battery will never run out on you.

The problem that Nyko had to deal with when designing the Charge base was figuring out how to charge conveniently the PS3 and the 360 controllers, which weren’t designed with a simple plug in interface. With the 360 they just were able to add their own batteries with convenient contacts for charging, much like the Wii base.

The PS3 since it has a non-removable battery required them to be more creative. They came up with an interesting solution of placing an adapter on the USB port of the PS3, but this method adds a small part to their product that can be easily lost.

My main disappointment with the Charge Base, specifically with the PS3 version, was that it’s not compatible with Nyko’s owns Zero controller. If it was a different company’s part then I wouldn’t be
surprised, but I would have expected Nyko to make sure it works with their own controller, which they were heavily encouraging people to buy when it hit the market as the first rumble controller for the PS3. Unfortunately though the adapters don’t fit on the Zero, so it must still be charged by plugging the controller into a USB port.

Overall, if you use official controllers for your game systems either Nyko Charge Base is a great accessory, especially the PS3 one since the PS3 turns off its USB ports when it’s off, (the time when I
would expect most people to charge their controllers.)

My only real big complaint was that it doesn’t support their own controller.

Have you ever wanted to take Guitar Hero with you when you left your house? Maybe play it on an airplane?

With Guitar Hero On Tour, Activision is attempting to bring the Guitar Hero franchise to the Nintendo DS using a touchscreen interface and a guitar pick stylus teaming up with a new, sometimes awkward fret adapter that plugs into the DS’ Gameboy Advance slot.

The guitar fret adapter has a strap to attach it to your wrist so that it will hold the DS to you while you pick and strum away. The strap was one of the first things I had trouble with. It’s supposed to keep your DS steady so you don’t it while trying to play the guitar, allowing you more freedom for this portable device. Unfortunately, this puts off the stress and strain of any movement on the GBA connector. This would be fine with the original Game Boy, for instance, that had a piece of plastic to stop the cartridge from being removed while the game was on. But here, there is nothing but the tight connection to hold the GBA cartridges in.

This means the fret adapter flies out of the unit, even sometimes during slight movements. This of course freezes the system and requires you to reset it and start over, which is especially annoying if
you are doing well.

The design of the controller also forces the player to hold it at an awkward angle, since you need to see the upper display to know what to play.  When I tried to move the DS around like the game suggests, holding it at different angles, it became hard to see the screen.

The DS is also an added weight in the user’s palm that can make pressing the strum keys feel awkward.

Carpel tunnel anyone?

The design of the game and layout also could use some work. The creators obviously wanted to emulte the feel of the Original Guitar Hero Games, but the DS doesn’t really have the screen real estate to do what they attempted to do. They have the keys coming down like the other Guitar Hero games, with the virtual actors on stage behind. The problem with this is that the lower screen is entirely taken up with the strings that you need to strum. This leaves one screen to read what keys to press, and see the background movements. And, with the angle at which the notes move across the screen, there is very little time between the player starting to see a key and having to press it. This is also made
awkward, again, by the angle at which the DS is positioned when it’s attached to the user’s wrist.

Putting the issues of a first generation niche game aside, it is still cool to be able to play Guitar Hero anywhere now, and the future versions will hopefully improve on some of these problems. 

Personally, I would like to see a more minimalist display on the top screen, with just the keys you need to play, allowing them to be bigger and easier to see. Seeing the virtual character on stage isn’t needed for a DS game. Guitar Hero On Tour should model itself on many of the best DS games, which use minimalistic graphics.

Rock star wannabes everywhere should look forward to the next version that will hopefully fix these problems.

But for now, there are some.

CodeWeavers is a Windows emulation tool that lets users run W32 applications in Linux or MAC platforms.

The challenge is that if President Bush can achieve any of their goals before leaving office the company will give away a free copy of their software to anyone who wants one for 24 hours. The goals are:

Reduce the Price of Gas: “Gas costs about $3.79 a gallon in the Twin Cities, (Minn.) a full buck more than this time last year. If the average price here drops below $2.79 per gallon, this goal is met.”

Reduce the Price of Food: “With the rise of fuel prices has come a similar rise in food prices. A gallon of milk is about $5 these days. It was $3.50 a year ago. If the average price of a gallon of milk comes down to $3.50 gallon in the Twin Cities metro, this goal is met.”

Create More Jobs: “We started the year with 138,002,000 people in the U.S. working non-farm jobs. Since then, total non-farm employment has decreased by 366,000. If so much as a single job can be created this calendar year – meaning if employment can be at least 138,002,001, this goal is met.”

Rejuvenate the Housing Market: “Median home values in the Twin Cities have fallen 12 percent year over year – from $233,000 to $205,000. If that median returns to $233,000, this goal is met.”

Bring Osama Bin-Laden to Justice: “Every American would like to see Osama Bin-Laden captured or terminated. We won’t be picky about how President Bush gets him. If it happens, this goal is met.”

CodeWeavers is a virtualization software company with a product similar to VMware, Parallels or Microsoft’s Virtual PC/HyperVisor. It’s based on the open source Wine application for Linux, but CodeWeavers is released for Linux and Mac OSX.

Code Weavers emulates the Win32 API for other systems, not the entire system. This tends to leave them with less compatibility since they may have missed part of the spec, but results in much greater speeds. The speeds of CodeWeavers games or apps tend to be closer to the speeds of the native applications, since they don’t actually emulate the system they basically are writing the windows api’s for other systems.

More information on the details of the challenge can be read at, http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/

It plays like a standard 2D platformer, Zombies are the heroes battling villains in the form of alien brains that have come to invade Earth.

Gamers play as three zombies, each with his or her own skills and talents as well as unique super powers. The toughest thing about how to play the game is figuring all the moves each character has.

The first zombie, Finnigan “Fins” Magee has several tentacles on his back, which allow him to climb up the side of a wall, or to hang from ropes crossing the area. A typical “Fins” move is to duck down and shoot tentacles in the three directions up, left and right, attacking anything it hits — useful for getting brains that fly above him. His super power is the ability to vomit burning acid after ingesting spicy food, which can melt through metal grates and light objects on fire.

The second character Lori “Lefty” Lopez, can extend her arm to reach areas that are too far for a normal character to jump. This ability allows her to climb stair-like areas and grab ledges when she falls. Her supper power is a Rivot gun, which is limited in that it will only shoot forward or backward and at the same height.

The last Teenage Zombie is Zack “Half-Pipe” Boyd, who moves around on his skate board and attacks enemies by flinging his board out. His mode of transportation allows him to move down inclines really fast and jump over ramps, and also to squeeze through tight holes the others wouldn’t fit into. His super power is big wheels for his skateboard, which allow him to roll over otherwise deadly traps, and mow down the enemies as he goes along.

The game lets players switch between the zombies at nearly any time as long as they are in a non-action state. This means you can’t be hanging from a wall as Fins and switch to Lefty to reach something.

The super powers come in the form of items that you pick up and get one use out of.

Teenage Zombies also contains mini-games throughout, which can be played for as long as you want. Ths mini-games use the touch features of the DS more than the regular game. They allow the player to move logs around to free brains for the zombies to eat or click on bombs and icons to perform manuvers.

Overall, Teenage Zombies is a fun little platformer. The zombies and the comic book style
are interesting, but it gets old after a while.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Developer: InLight Entertainment
Platform: Nintendo DS
Genre: Adventure
Players: Single player
Launch Date: April 15, 2008

Playability: 4 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 4 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 3 out of 5 stars
Overall: 3.5 out of 5 stars

There are different patterns to tell your “Patapons” to do different actions. Square Square Square Circle is the command to move forward, whereas Circle Circle Square Circle is the command to attack.

It sounds much easier than it is. There is a background beat going on in the game, and you need to keep the pace. You must hit the drums to that beat, and then allow the Patapon’s to repeat the command to you as they do the action. If you just hit lots of buttons than it’s not recognized as a command. Hitting them to fast or two slow so they are off beat will make your Patapon stumble, and you have to start over.

If you do 10 commands right in a row you go into Fever mode. In fever mode your Patapon all get stronger. This unlocks special bonuses called “miracles.” You need to stay in fever mode sometimes or else your Patapon will die when a miracle ends.

Patapon takes the story of a race of creatures that are in a small isolated area surrounded by enemies and almost surely going to die soon.

There is a legend of a great deity that once led them to power and “IT” at Earthend. You become the deity leading the Patapons through your drumming on different keys on your PSP.

The game is very precise on the beats and it’s very easy to miss a command, and lose the combo by just missing the beat by a little amount. Issuing the wrong command can sometimes be deadly.

Luckily most of the time if your Patapon die then they drop a helmet that you can pick up and then restore them to life when you get back to town.

Some enemies will eat your Patapons, helmet and all. If you fail to grab it in time, the Patapon is gone forever. With as few Pataon as you have in the game you don’t want to lose any of them. You can create more Patapon by hunting for meat and special items, and money known as K-Ching. All three of these are needed to create a new Patapon.

When you create a Patapon the types of material used will influence the abilities of the Patapon. If you use better materials the Patapon will be stronger, or faster, or have a higher defense. You’ll need to collect all kinds of materials though to create the different types of Patapon you want. There is also a certain amount of strategy to creating your army. When you go into battle you can only use three types, and certain types are better for different things. Some are strong for hunting, but weak in a battle, others are strong at battle, but weak at hunting.

Hunting can be annoying, as you need meat and K-Ching to create new Patapons. The hunting levels are pretty much the same, you walk across the screen trying to kill as many birds or boars as you can before they run away. This can get monotonous, as you’ll need a lot of K-Ching for creating some Patapon, and you need the meat to create them. So every so often you just have to go on a bunch of hunting missions to then go back to the regular game.

The graphics in the game are fairly simple, but they fit the style and make it amusing.

The Patapon are basically huge eye’s with legs and arms. The eye is also important because it will change as a status symbol. The eyes look towards the drumming beat as you drum, and they will turn angry when they are within attacking range of an enemy. The music in the game is a lot of fun, but definitely detracts from the portable nature of the game. You need to play with the beat meaning that outside influences can mess you up, and even kill you. If something distracts you, or you can’t hear the music for a second you will likely lose your concentration and the beat of the game. Also if something moves you, or bumps you or such you might hit too early or too late. This game seems to be better for sitting at home, or with headphones waiting somewhere. I wouldn’t recommend for playing while your walking around, or even on bus or train could be hard.

Overall, the game is a lot of fun, and for the cost of the game well worth it.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Sony Computer Entertainment
Platform: PSP
Genre: Strategy
Players: Single player
Launch Date: February 26, 2008

Playability: 4 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 5 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 4 out of 5 stars
Overall: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Echo Chrome looks at a world like ours but as if what we see from the 2D view affects the three dimensional world. Objects fall straight down or jump straight up the screen regardless of what direction that is in the actual world. If you can’t see a hole, it doesn’t exist. If two objects look like they’re connected, they are.

The player can’t directly control the character, only pause their movement. The only control in the game is to change the view of the world, moving so that two platforms appear connected to allow the character to walk from one to the other. If you move a hole behind another object the character will walk over the hole as if it doesn’t exist. If your character walks off a hole, it will fall straight down, just like an Escher painting. Sometimes the character will actually fall upwards if you can make a higher up level object appear below it.

The game has very simple graphics, just simple blocks rectangles in different sizes.  There is also the starting point for the character, and up to five waypoints — known as “Echos” — to follow to the finish. The object is to finish through all the waypoints in the shortest time possible.

There are also holes and jump pads. These are just circles on the top of rectangles. If the circle is black it’s a hole. If it’s white, it’s a jump pad. The game is very simple in it’s rules but some of the levels get very complex. Once you finish the standard levels included in the game, you can start playing the player added levels.

The game includes an editor. Since the physics of the game and the graphics are very simple, it’s easy to add your own levels. Simply move blocks around to make your platforms, and then add objects like Echos, jump pads and holes. Once your level is complete, the game asks you to play through it to show that ti’s completable. Then you save it and share it. The game’s developers pick the best user content and promote it periodically.

I highly recommend the game. It’s easy to learn but difficult to master. It’s subtle, casual and addictive. Maybe brush up on your geometry?

Quick hits:

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: JapanStudio
Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: Puzzle
Players: Single player
Launch Date: May 1, 2008

Playability: 5 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 3 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 3 out of 5 stars
Overall: 5 out of 5 stars Editor’s choice

The controller has metal on the top and plastic for the rest of the body. The Metal is touted as a way to keep your hands less sweaty, and cooler. The bad thing about the metal is when you first pick up the
controller, it feels cold. The metal is fine once you’ve had it in your hand for a while.

The battery life on the Nyko is great. The Controller comes with a USB cable for charging and a 2xAA battery holder in case you forget to charge the controller. Remember, the PS3 can’t charge the zero when the it’s turned off.

One serious issue with the Zero is that it uses a USB adapter to communicate with the PS3. It is wireless, but it still requires a dongle. The dongle — like most wireless devices — needs to be synced with the controller. Unlike the Sony wireless controllers the controller sync information can not be stored on the PS3 itself. This means that sometimes, when it loses connection, you have to walk over to the PS3 and press the sync button on the dongle. Most of the time though, it only takes a press on center button of the controller to reconnect them. The USB dongle also means that the Zero is unable to turn the PS3 on, since there is no power to the USB ports when the PS3 is turned off.

The controller is heavier than the Sony SixAxis, or the Dual Shock PS2 controller. Though the weight isn’t uncomfortably heavy. The added weight it expected, as the Zero has metal as part of the body, a battery, and motors for rumble.

The vibration works just as you would expect. Many games, even older ones, come with support for rumble already. It’s like a new dimension on your old games. The Zero doesn’t shake as much as the Dual Shock
did, but that is likely to conserve the battery life of the controller.

The controller uses a color-coded number to identify itself and back-lit bottons. Those would be helpful for somepeople if they actually look at the buttons. I think we’re past that at this stage of our gaming development.

The best thing about the SixAxis controll in the Zero is that there really isn’t much to say about it. It simply just works. It feels and reacts just as the original PS3 controller. Despite the need for a dongle, it works great. If you need an extra controller or want to do some vibrating, give the Zero a try.

4 out of 5 stars 

At $19.99, it’s cheaper than buying a new guitar for either game, and it works!

If you already have some PS2 controllers, then get this to give them more life. Many people bought PS2 controllers for games and haven’t been able to use them with their PS3. The universal adapter works with all features on the controllers, even ones the other adapters are known to have trouble with. TAC is guaranteeing 100% compatibility with all Guitar Hero 3 or Rock Band features.

What we don’t know yet, is if the adapter works with things like dance pads and drums.

As for Wii Connectivity, there will no online play on the Wii. With the current dearth of support for online play on the Wii, this isn’t surprising.

Even though Nintendo tried to push Wii as an online system, except for Virtual Console games and Wii Ware, this  seems to be lagging way behind.

The will also be no DLC, since Nintendo hasn’t used the Wii store for DLC for games yet. This is a shame but isn’t surprising either.

The Wii version of Rock Band will be offering five extra songs to make up for these lacking features. It is still unannounced which five extra songs they will be though.

The Wii’s drums have been rebranded for the Wii, making them white.

None of these accessories will require a Wii Mote to work. This is opposed to the Guitar Hero 3 Guitars that require a Wii-Mote plugged into them.  The guitars are similar to the PS3/PS2. This should make the Rock Band for the Wii a great deal for anyone that only has a Wii. or if the Wii is more convenient for family playing, or with local friends.

If you have a PS3, or 360 though you may still want to get one of those for the downloadable extras.

The clan believes that a male will be born to wield the sword, but Nariko is born, to the disappointment of her father. The story starts with Nariko fighting the final battle with the Heavenly Sword. She is defeating all the enemies when the sword overtakes her, and the game stars with her recalling the previous five days.

Nariko’s clan is being assaulted by King Bohan’s armies, who seek Heavenly Sword themselves. The game switches between melee style and ranged attacks after that. When your in ranged attacks, you can use a system called “afterthought” to guide the projectile. This uses the motion sensor of the Sixaxis controller. The afterthought is often necessary to hit a particular target. The game doesn’t let you zoom in on targets, so you shoot in the general direction, and the afterthought does the rest.

When in afterthought mode, you are looking at the world from the view of the projectile, so just guide it to where you want to hit. It isn’t perfect control — it seems more like nudging the projectile in the direction you want to go in. It is continuous control though, so if you push it too high, just push it back down. Once you get used to it, the game allows great precision for hitting the target.

The melee part of the game is a hack and slash where you just need to kill all the enemy’s coming at you. There are combos that can be used, and many enemies will come at you at once.

The graphics in the game are phenomenal. It feels like watching a movie. The sound effects are also top notch making the realism of the game great.

Overall the game is very flashy, it looks really good. I’d say it was only about average playability though. It looks great, but the shooting parts are annoying, and the fighting parts get boring. It’s also a very short game. Heavenly Sword is one of the best-looking and best-sounding PlayStation 3 games, but it’s still not IT.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Sony
Developer: Ninja Theory
Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: Action/Adventure
Players: 1

Playability: 3 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 4 out of 5 stars
Sound: 5 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Launch Date: September 12, 2007

The first level of this game is his escape with Cynder. It’s supposed to be escaping a nightmare — they made the level so dark though, it’s nearly impossible to see in most lighting on the original DS. I found this very annoying.

The game played similar to other Spyro games though. It is a 3D world that Spryo jumps, flies and moves around in. Spyro is a good game for younger gamers. The fighting style isn’t well put together — it tries to use the pen/touch features, but you end up slamming buttons all around.

The puzzles are done well though. They use the pen and are long enough. They also use it better, moving pieces of the puzzle around on a grid to solve it. They are fairly easy puzzles, but again the game is aiming itself for a younger generation.

Overall, the pen fighting is a pain, but the rest of the game was fairly solid platformer. It’s still pretty generic, and the lighting early on is awful.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Sierra
Developer: Amaze Entertainment
Platform: Nintendo DS (reviewed), GBA, Wii, PS2
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
Launch Date: October 2, 2007

Playability: 4 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 4 out of 5 stars
Sound: 4 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 3 out of 5 stars
Overall: 3 out of 5 stars

Ellen is a girl who’s mother died when she was young, and recently she received a letter that was addressed from her mother asking her to come to Doolin Village. Ellen follows the note to see what she thinks is her mother fall off a cliff on the side of the village. Determined to find her mother, Ellen goes to the Land of the Dead. She then receives magical cloak that allows her to travel through the lands of the dead to pass messages from the dead to the living and from the living to the dead.

Keats starts his journey from a mysterious phone call asking for help and for him to come to Doolin village. There he finds Ellen and follows her to Netherworld in search of adventure.

The game allows you to play chapters for each player, and then you can select which player you wish to continue. They are each separate paths that must be completed for the game, and each one individually progresses. You can either do one side to completion, and come back to do the other character, or play one chapter, and then switch to the other character to play the same chapter.

The graphics are fantastic as most PlayStation 3 games are. The world is very vivid, and it feels so real. When your character walks across gravel, you can hear the stones under their feet. When walking through grass you can hear the grass swaying around you.

The game has two storytelling styles in it. When it wants to do a cut scene, it is either a cinematic that will match anything coming out of Pixar or Dreamworks, or it’s a comic book style story.

The mixture of the two is weird and a little annoying. The comic book does add a little style, but the graphics are still three dimensional. The player can fast forward or skip back a panel if they either already saw it or missed something.

Folklore is a role playing game, so there is a lot of strategic fighting. The interesting thing about it is that the game uses the enemies as weapons to fight with. You start with two of the weakest “Folks,” as they are known. From these you need to beat others, and take their power.

To steal enemy power, the player needs to capture their soul. This is done by holding the R1 button, and then jerking the controller upwards. This is an interesting use of the Sixaxis controller that seems fluid and fits perfectly — it’s about time…

Anyway, the main story follows your two characters fighting to get to the boss of each level. Keats is hoping to bring home a great story, and he is fighting to beat the head boss, the Folklore. Meanwhile, Ellen is just trying to get a chance to speak with her mother. Both characters are willing to risk death to achieve these results.

There are also plenty of side quests in Folklore — your characters relay messages as mediums to the dead.

The game plays out during the day and night. Some actions can only be done in the day and others only at night. There are different characters depending on the time of day — ghosts, fairies, people, etc.

Overall, I think this is a great game and lots of fun. I didn’t like the way it had so many storytelling modes, but it’s still an amazing RPG.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Sony
Developer: Game Republic
Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: RPG
Players: 1
Release date: October 9, 2007

Playability: 4 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 3 out of 5 stars
Sound: 5 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 4 out of 5 stars
Overall: 4 out of 5 stars

This will serve as a huge problem for the HD DVD format. Warner Bros sells 18 to 20 percent of all home videos. This now leaves only Universal, The Weinstein Company and Paramount (and their child companies like Dreamworks) supporting the now falling behind HD DVD format.

Paramount switched to HD DVD only when they received a $150 million payoff last summer.

Conversely, the Blu-ray camp now has Sony Pictures, Disney, Fox, Lions Gate and now the Warner exclusivity.

Sony owns MGM and Columbia TriStar. Disney Owns Touchstone, Pixar and Miramax. This gives Blu-ray a much stronger position as far as this generation’s format war is concerned.

Prediction: If Paramount goes back to both formats or somehow decides to make just Blu-ray when their HD DVD contract expires, the war will be over quickly.

Toshiba was quick to respond, and they’re pissed off.

“Toshiba was quite surprised by Warner Bros.’ decision to abandon HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray, despite the fact that there are various contracts in place between our companies concerning
the support of HD DVD,” the company said in a statement Friday. “We will assess the potential impact of this announcement with the other HD DVD partner companies and evaluate potential next steps.”

The next step appears to be a step back. The HD DVD group canceled its CES press conference.

The reason behind Warner’s move — it looks like they’d rather support one than risk both next-gen HD formats failing.

People seem to like downloadable content from places like the iTunes, and Xbox Live has done well so far at selling videos. If the format wars continue, it looks like consumers could skip both Blu-ray, and HD DVD and go straight to downloadable.

“The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger,” Barry Meyer, Warner Brothers chairman, told Yahoo! Tech. “We believe that exclusively distributing in Blu-ray will further the potential for mass market success and ultimately benefit retailers, producers, and most importantly, consumers.”

Consumers just don’t want to buy the same movie — often a movie they may have had on VHS — a second, third or fourth time. Warner says that both formats are having an impact that caused consumers to say, “let’s wait a bit to buy anything, even a standard-definition DVD.”

Well, we can’t have that now, can we?

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — A large crowd formed at 8 a.m. Friday outside of the Pan Am Hanger here in Portsmouth, where Barack Obama was scheduled to appear.

Obama read through his speech to the unstoppable cheers of the crowds in front of him. “The American people began down the road to change,” he said. Entrance polls in Iowa showed that 51 percent of voters seeking “change” caucused for Obama Thursday.

People were there to show support, yes, but also to meet the man.

There were also others that were less certain still wanting to learn what he stood for and if they should back him on his run for the White House.

“I got here at 8:30 … I’m still trying to decide who to vote for,” said “Angelynne,” who was standing on line to greet the senator. She said that she was enjoying the attention the candidates were giving New Hampshire voters. “People in other states have to pay money to see these people, we get begged!”

With a debate scheduled for Saturday, many of the candidates are showing up in New Hampshire to prepare and use the opportunity to get voter support. Even the cold did not deter people from filling the Hanger. The temperature hung in there at four degrees.

Obama started out talking about where he came from and how that influenced who he is. He said that he didn’t always live in Chicago, but he wanted to work at the grass roots level.

“There were a group of churches who had come together to try deal with the devastation of steel plants being closed, and for three and a half years I worked as an organizer, with them to bring job training to the unemployed, economic development to communities that had been torn apart,” he said. “It was the best education I ever had … One of the things that I learned was ordinary people can do extraordinary things when given a chance.”

He said many times throughout the speech how he was trying to bring all of America together. “We are one nation; we are one people; the time for change has come.”

He talked about the different people that came to the caucus where he stood shaking hands — the high school seniors, unsure of how a caucus works; the Democrats; the Independents that believe in him; and even the Republicans, who broke party lines to caucus for the Democrat. He said that he was trying to make “a new working majority, go out and remake America, and then change the World.”

He believes in “Hope over Fear,” “Unity over division,” — that he will be the president that “Will be willing to disagree with you, without being disagreeable.”

“I won’t tell you what you want to hear, I will tell you what you need to hear.” He said he will be the president that doesn’t owe his election to big businesses and special interests.

Hope was an ever-present theme. He acknowledged that the other politicians are criticizing his experience, calling him a “Hope Monger.” They want him to be “Seasoned and Stewed.” They want to “boil all the hope out of me,” he said. “Hopes that I saw in the eyes of the people walking into the caucus.”

What does Obama believe hope is? “Hope is that belief that we can work for and fight for that which was denied to us.”

He ended his speech talking about old fashion politics and shook hands with everyone in the crowd that he could.

The device lets you mix your music on your iPod or other music player, and up to six people can listen to it on their own headphones. You could also select to mark other audio jacks as inputs an allow your friends to provide their own tunes. You can then Mix multiple inputs from the other jacks on it, or just listen to one source on all 6 jacks.

One port is set is input only, and then the others are selectable. This gives you the convenience of using it either to mix multiple audio sources together up to 6, or to listen to one audio source on up to six headphones, or output to a speaker. This could make a cheaper receiver, or audio selector for someone, just swapping the jack from output to input to select it.

Questions remains as to whether or not any signal power or quality is lost is all ports are used, as opposed to only one, but you gotta give Belkin style points on this one.

RockStar is coming in March. (Source: iLounge)

Much to the surprise of many, the guitar for the Playstation 3’s Guitar Hero III will not work with Rock Band.

Adding to the drama, Harmonix recently claimed that Activision is actively working to keep things this way. Activision, for its part, said December 14 that they offered to help Harmonix fix the problem, and Harmonix refused.

It looks like the kids won’t play nice.

In a statement released on December 12, Harmonix announced that they finished a patch for Rock Band that will allow it to work with third party guitars, including the Guitar Hero III instrument. Harmonix claimed the work was completed, approved by Sony and scheduled to be released on Dec. 4 until, they claim, Activision objected to the release of the patch.

“The patch remains with Sony, but we have been told that it will unfortunately not be released due to Activision’s continued objection,” Harmonix said.

Harmonix is saying they believe that all guitars and peripherals should be compatible. They are backing up this claim by planning to release all details of their controllers and assist any development team desiring to work with them. They also asked that Activision release an update for their Guitar Hero III game to add support for Rock Bands guitar.

Activision says that they offered to reach an agreement with Harmonix to support the Guitar Hero III guitar in Rock Band, but Harmonix refused their offer. They are blaming Harmonix for being unwilling to discuss an agreement to the compatibility issue. Activision stated,

“We have been and remain open to discussions with Harmonix and MTV Games/Viacom about the use of our technology in Rock Band,” said in a statement released to Blast by Activision spokesman Jordan Dodge.”We are focusing our efforts on innovating hardware and software that are designed to work together, work flawlessly and provide an enjoyable gaming experience.” (Click here for the full statement)

So now we have both companies claiming they want the compatibility but that the other is stopping them — Harmonix blaming Activision for blocking the update, Activision blaming Harmonix for not agreeing to work with them on the compatibility.

Clearly, Activision and Harmonix are not making beautiful music together.

This is much larger implications. Activision’s merger with Blizzard makes it one of the largest interactive entertainment companies ever. Harmonix is owned by MTV Games, which is owned by Viacom, and Rock Band was partially distributed by Electronic Arts/EA Partners (if you look on the Rock Band box, you’ll see EA’s logo).

Gee, the two biggest gaming competitors are not cooperating? Whowouldathunkit?

Blast Magazine staff writer John Guilfoil contributed to this report.

Are you frustrated with the off the shelf routers you can buy in the store? Does your hardware crash on you at the worst possible moment? Does your Best Buy router not have the option to stop your room mates downloads from slowing down your internet? Well, one way to avoid the limits of off the shelf routers is to build your own.

Technically, you can build a router out of any old desktop or laptop computer that you have lying around by adding some routing software. This is often done with Linux and there are specific builds of Linux and OpenBSD that are written for this purpose. Examples include m0n0wall and pfSense.

If you want to keep the size still as small and unobtrusive as one of the off the shelf routers, you need to buy a router board. A router board is smaller than a regular computer and uses less power. The PC Engines Alix2 board that I’m looking at in this article is only 6″ x 6″ and powers off a small power supply or can be powered off an Ethernet wire.

The Alix2 is the replacement for PC Engines WRAP boards. The Wrap is a small networking-optimized board — basically a small computer.

The entire system is less than 1″ tall. The Alix comes with either 433 or 500MHz AMD CPU and either 128 or 256MB of ram. This may not seem like a lot compared to modern desktops, but it’s actually quite powerful for what we’re using it for. Remember, we’re going for low power, low heat.

The main operating system is stored on a CompactFlash card on most models. There is one model that has a IDE port to plug a in laptop hard drive if you really want to go nuts. A hard disk will use more heat, space and power, however.

These systems are very customizable considering their size and power usage. They can be purchased with two USB ports, up to three Ethernet ports, a miniPCI slot, and some models have a full size PCI slot.

The BIOS that these systems run on is set to automatically forward video to the serial port. This is very nice for building headless systems, so a monitor isn’t needed to check on the machine, only a computer with a serial port. They also support power over Ethernet, so the machine could be installed as a wireless access point with only a single Ethernet wire going to it.

As a power user, I wasn’t satisfied with the configuration on the store built router systems. If you know a little about networking and don’t mind playing around there are a few options for alternate systems to run that offer far more customizations. The router can be installed with OpenBSD for those that are die hard security fanatics and don’t mind a little work setting it up, or with a program called Monowall that aims to replicate Cisco routers — it also can be installed with your favorite version of Linux.

This is not for the faint of computer knowledge.

Using the PC Engines a board, a Mini PCI wireless card, a wire to adapt from the card to a standard antenna, the antenna and a box to put it all in.

The box comes with the baud rate for its serial port set to 38400. The baud rate will determine how fast the screen updates when you type commands in from your computer. pfSense uses 9600, and since I do not need the screen to update frequently I went into the BIO and changed it 9600 to match. If you don’t have the right settings on your computer for the device plugged in the screen will display random, unreadable text, and typing anything won’t work. So if the operating system is running at a different speed than the BIOS, you won’t see one or the other, without changing the settings on your computer each time.

With them both at 9600, I’m able to just set my computer to 9600 and be done with it. Most serial devices seem to use either 9600 or 38400, or what’s reffered to as 8N1 — 8 data bits, No parity and 1 stop bit. These settings should also be again matched to what your doing.

To enter the BIOS menu just type S when the system is running though the Memory Test. It will print a menu as below:

(9) 9600 baud (2) 19200 baud *3* 38400 baud (5) 57600 baud (1) 115200 baud
*C* CHS mode (L) LBA mode (W) HDD wait (V) HDD slave (U) UDMA enable
(M) MFGPT workaround
(P) late PCI init
*R* Serial console enable
(E) PXE boot enable
(X) Xmodem upload
(Q) Quit

Just type the letter of the setting you want. Then Q to quit.

After setting the BIOS, I prepared the CF for pfSense. The developers officially support the WRAP, and now the ALIX systems, so getting an image to flash to the card was very easy.

Flashing the card was easy, depending on your operating system, in Unix/Linux or OSX dd works fine — in a terminal “dd if=filename of=/dev/usbdevicename”

Once the image is on the CompactFlash, stick it into the ALIX board, plug your internet into one port and your laptop, or your local network into another, and turn on the system. The ports are all labeled 1-3 on the board. When pfSense comes up the first time, it will ask through the serial port which Ethernet port is which and default settings. Just use the defaults on the settings if you’re unsure, and it can autodetect the proper Ethernet port.

Once the network is setup you can safely disconnect the serial port and do all further work through pfSense’s web interface. Just open the browser to the IP address you assigned to the box. often 192.168.1.1.

The pfSense website has a tutorial on Installing to the WRAP.

pfSense has a basic setup wizard that is run the first time it’s started. This can be run again at any time by going to system setup wizard. Once the setup has been run the basic LAN to WAN routing should work, and all your computers should be able to get to the internet. This is where all the fun stuff starts.

pfSense takes the powerful, yet east to understand (compared to other filtering systems) OpenBSD packet filter and puts a GUI on it.

It asks for the IP address or addresses involved, the port numbers involved, the protocols involved, which interface it is going through, which means whether this is traffic going to the Internet on the LAN port, or coming in on the Wan port destined for a computer inside. The rules can then block the packets, log the packets or allow them to pass. It can also do special actions on the packets, such as wait for all pieces to a packet that got broken up, and reconstruct it on the server before passing it on, or changing the “random” id in an outgoing packet, so others can’t intercept the packets as easy. Some OS’s use predictable numbers when it’s supposed to be random.

This allows you to say “I don’t want my kid accessing this particular game I don’t like so I block that computer from talking on the port the game uses.”

Under the same menu there is also traffic shaping. This is very useful, but a little tricky to setup and understand at first. This can be setup to, for instance, only allow downloads to take up a portion of your internet and prioritize web access or make access to a favorite web site highest priority at the expense of all other connections.

I found the ALIX suitable for my needs on a Verizon FIOS network. I haven’t had any speed issues or the random crashes.

Quick hits:

Hardware Manufacturer: PC Engines
Software Developer: pfSense
Genre: Networking

Performance: 5 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Reliability: 5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 4.5 out of 5 stars

But try as you might, many people just don’t feel the Wiimote — or even the Gamecube controller — feels right. That’s because we played these games for countless hours with the familiar two buttons of the rectangular NES controller and the breakthrough six buttons of the SNES. Or, if we really got fancy, we might have had a NES Advantage arcade-style control platform.

The Wii RetroPorts from RetroZone are simple small wire adapters. You can buy an NES or SNES version. Just plug it into the Wii with your original controller and you’re allset. The adapters don’t come with a controller, but you can use any controller with either a NES or SNES plug. The adapters just plug in as GameCube controllers, and you can use them for any Virtual Console games that are configured for the corresponding amount of buttons. (Genesis?)

I tried a few NES and SNES games in the Virtual Console. They played just the same as the original system. I felt like I was playing my original console games without having to blow on the cartridges.

The Original NES controller feels sooo much better in my hands than the Wii-Mote for Super Mario Brothers.

At $19, this is a perfect product.

Quick hits:

Developer/Distributor: RetroZone
Platform: Wii, Gamecube (Uses NES or SNES-compatible controllers, depending on which one you buy)
Genre: Gaming accessory

Overall: 5 out of 5 stars

The game starts as you find a map leading to El Dorado, the supposed lost city of Gold. You follow the map to an island where you find the Spanish Conquestidors long beat you to the treasure. But if they did, what happened to it? Could they have missed anything?

You find another clue, but you get double crossed by a friend and sold out to pirates.

Stealth and patience are key here in battling enemy pirates and villans. Your character can hide behind rocks, boulders and other objects and then shoot them down. If you just walk into an area not paying attention, you will find yourself dead before walking three paces.

You can either shoot the pirates or beat them senseless. If you beat them up they drop more ammo. (The theory is that if they didn’t shoot at you, they used less of their ammo.) You can also carry two guns at once — a pistol and one special gun, which can be a machine gun, shotgun or more later in the game. You can only carry two guns at once, but you can also throw grenades for added damage.

Granade throwing uses the six axis controller. When you throw them, you tilt the controller to decide how high you throw while the regular controls decide direction. The tilt is also used when you’re balancing on narrow objects like a log. If you can’t balance the controller, Drake will fall.

The game isn’t just about shooting the bad guys. It’s designed to be a puzzle. You have to interact with your environment to get through the game. Either hanging on walls to get around something, or moving levers and shooting lanterns.

Gameplay is VERY linear. You can’t go wandering off in random directions, and the game will not let you interact with stuff outside the direction you’re heading. It is kind of weird to be in the jungle looking at this path and invisible walls on the sides, you can’t just squeeze through the trees. Also on the sides you often will jump up, and it looks like it’s trying to grab a ledge, but it’s grabbing at air.

The environment is very well designed though. When you walk through water or go for a swim, the water splashes around you, and Drake is all wet when you get out. Your clothes will slowly dry as you walking around too.

Characteristic of many a PlayStation 3 game, the graphics and detail are just fantastic throughout. The characters have facial expressions, the enemies will hide behind objects just as you will, and they will try to sneak up behind you.

The Cinematics in the game look like they are playing off a Blu-ray movie.

The game usees the environment to affect the player’s perception. When a big gun goes off near the player, he’ll lose hearing for a while. When Drake is hurt the screen turns black and white, and his beating heart can be heard.

The game generally plays like a movie that you can control. It’s not like some games that use too much cCinematics and not enough gameplay. The cinematics are only used where there wasn’t anything for the character to do, and it adds to the detail of the conversation getting a closer look at the characters faces.

Overall I think this is one of the best games on the PlayStation 3. My only complaint was that it was completely linear, which isn’t even a complaint in and of itself. The graphics and sound were both fantastic, and the game was very well done.

Quick hits:

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Naughty Dog
Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: Action/Adventure
Players: 1
Launch Date: November 16, 2007

Playability: 4 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 4 out of 5 stars
Sound: 5 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 5 out of 5 stars Editor’s choice

Rock Band builds on the phenomenon started by Guitar Hero by using four instruments in 13 gameplay combinations, giving you deep and detailed playability. This includes solo play of each instrument, competitions and co-op play, forming your own band.

The game includes two guitar parts (bass and lead guitar), drums and a microphone. But you can’t form a band with two of the same instrument.

When I sat down to try the drums they were interesting but very tricky. You need to hit different drums at different beats, which is hard for someone that doesn’t know anything about drums.

It turns out that the game focuses on the foot pedal and the left most drum. If you concentrate on those you can afford to miss the others without failing out as easily. At first I was trying to hit everything and missing most of them. After I started concentrating on the left drum and the foot I would still miss a lot, but I could get through a song.

The Drums seem very reliable and will take a good amount of abuse. Harmonix said that they had broken sticks on the drums but didn’t break the instrument. They even play the drums with real drumsticks. The Rock Band kit comes with real 5A Drum Sticks.

They were also talking about people that had played the drums a lot are now able to play real drums. Harmonix said that if you play under expert mode it’s the same as the real drummer is playing.

Failing songs will bring down the rest of the band and can easily force the whole band to fail if not restored soon enough. Cooperation and team effort are vital in Rock Band.

The singing part has been improved on from older titles like Karaoke Revolution also. The game can detect pitches and a certain amount of phonetics. It can detect consonants and vowels, so it will have some idea if the player is singing the right words.

In Karaoke Revolution the player could just hum and be fine. The people at Harmonix were talking about that when they testing the game. The singing part in Rock Band doesn’t pay attention to octave, so men can sing woman’s parts and vice-versa.

The microphone doesn’t have controls on it, so it needs a regular system controller to navigate. They didn’t want people pressing the buttons by accident. We had enough trouble in the demo with people hitting the Xbox button on the guitar.

The Band World Tour is Rock Band’s biggest feature. You get together two or more friends to play in a band. Then you can go on a virtual tour. When on tour you earn money and fans depending on how well you play. Some venues will earn you more money or more fans.

It’s really realistic — if you play a charity concert than it will earn you more fans but won’t earn you any money.

The World Tour starts from a hometown that you pick. In your hometown you can play in certain clubs, and as your popularity gets bigger, you can pick bigger venues. The first ones are small dingy clubs, and then it moves to theaters and then hopefully to stadiums if your good enough.

There are over 40 different venues in the game and they are all very different from stone clubs in Germany to old wood carved walls in a Scandinavian club. The clubs are often based on real places.

Harmonix spent money licensing the songs. They got real tattoo artists to design the tattoos, and they got real artists to design the 2D stickers in the game. They decided against getting permission for the real locations. They also felt that real locations would have some negative connotations, if someone doesn’t like that particular club they may be annoyed at playing in it.

As you play through the venues once in a while before one it will pop up with a message saying if you get so many stars on this concert that you can get a tour bus. These messages also usually have a negative side if you fail. One that we saw was that if you finish the concert it would double your money, but if you fail you’ll lose all your money. As a band you then have to decide if the risk is worth the reward.

When the band gets a van they can leave their home city and start branching out to other cities. Eventually they even get a jet, and this allows them to leave the continent and go anywhere in the world.

When playing a concert it often is many songs in a row, unlike in solo play or in regular coop play. When the first song is finished you don’t leave the venue, you start the next song. This means you have to get both or more songs right to do well in the venue. You have to play the set.

When you form a band or play solo, you have to create a character. The characters are very customizable. You can select skin color hairstyle, be tall or short or be skinny or fat. The game even allows customizing the eye color. The player can pick a style for the character, from rock, metal, goth or punk. This will determine how he or she moves on the stage and what special moves they do.

Once the basic person is decided, they can go and get clothes. There are four stores in the game. The interesting thing with the rock shop is it looks like the Garment District in Cambridge, Mass. They admitted they loosely based the style from the Garment District, and the Canal Street Jeans, in New York City. They hired real apparel designers to help design the clothes and make sure that their clothes look authentic.

The special effects in the game are really nice, and the playing heads up display is transparent so you can see the stage very easily. It’s still easy not to pay attention to the stage when you’re playing though cause of concentrating on your part.

I found this game a blast, especially if you can get four people together to play as a band. Don’t give up right away — the drum part is really hard for new players, but even after playing it just one day I found it really fun.

I love this game.

Quick hits:

Publisher: MTV Games
Developer: Harmonix
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PS2
Genre: Music simulation
Players: 1-4
Launch Date: November 20, 2007 (PS3 and Xbox 360), December 11, 2007 (PS2)

Playability: 5 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 5 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 5 out of 5 stars Editor’s Choice

Elizabeth Raftery, Daniel Peleschuk and John Guilfoil of the Blast Magazine staff contributed to this report.

H.264 is the video format used by many modern video players, such as the iPod, iPhone, PSP, PS3, and the AppleTV. Unfortunately a lot of time is spent converting video files from other formats to play on these devices.

Even though both devices look the same on the outside, they aren’t compatible with each other’s software. The Elgato supports higher resolutions than the ADSTech, such as the iPhone. The ADSTech Version can produce video for the iPod though that will work fine on the iPhone. Elgato uses the native Quicktime video encoder to front end its hardware. This means any program that can export selecting Quicktime profiles can use the H.264 Hardware to speed up the process. The ADSTech uses a third party program that only includes the profiles that the USB encoder supports.

The Elgato H.264 Turbo can recognize DVDs and put the main movie in chapter marks from the original DVD.

ADSTech treats DVDs as individual Video files. This means that your movie will likely be multiple files, instead of one total file. It also has no idea what to do with the IFO and BUP files on a DVD, so it will complain about these if you simply drag and drop a DVD onto it. They both work fine for converting one video format to another, such as one H.264 to another resolution, or a Divx file to a H.264.

Both companies claim that users can get up to four times faster encoding using their hardware over your computer’s CPU.

On my Dual core Macbook 2.0ghz, both USB Encoders performed about the same. I got about half the time using the hardware as using software methods. I was using the free software HandBrake to run software conversions as a comparison. In my case, I’m using a fairly new computer, and I’m still seeing a 2x speed improvement. If the USB encoders were used on an older computer the difference between software, and hardware would be more pronounced. Actual times, though, will vary depending on the hardware you are using. Even if the H.264 is offloading the encoding, your computer’s CPU or video card will still need to decode the original video files.

One complaint: neither solution will work directly with an encrypted DVD. If users want to convert a store-bought DVD to play on their iPods, or iPhones, they will need to either use a software solution that converts and decrypts at the same time, or decrypt to the hard drive, and then convert the video using their software.

Overall, the Hardware is great for people who play a lot of video on their iPod/iPhone, PSP, AppleTV, or PS3; it saves a lot of converting time. If you have more than one of these devices it also makes it easier and faster to convert from one to another, since the resolutions supported on the iPod are not supported by the PS3. If you have an older laptop, or desktop you will also find this useful. Those with newer computers, who mostly convert to one device from DVD probably won’t gain any time with the decrypting and converting time.

ADSTech: 3 out of 5 stars
Elgato: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Personally I always figured the point of having a wireless controller was so I wouldn’t have to plug it into the system when I was playing. I’m also not comfortable leaving the PS3 on when I’m not playing it.

Luckily Nyko came out with a product for just such an issue. They have the Dual Charger AC, a very simple plug for the wall that provides two USB power sources. It even comes with two USB to mini USB plugs. So just plug it into the wall and then plug in the controller. Very simple, very well built. Since the controllers are just USB, the dual charger charges them just like the original PS3. Not much more can be said about it, it is simple and does what it was designed to do and does it well.

The Dual Charger could also be used to charge any other device that powers itself off USB. So I give it a 10 out of 10 — nothing lacking on Nyko’s part.

5 out of 5 stars

Every Friday this month till the infamous Friday after Thanksgiving, they will be selling five items for a greatly discounted price. This week, they have Fisher Price Nascar Ride-On for $144.72, Sanyo 50″ Plasma HDTV for $998.00, Acer Laptop $348 and a few HD DVD’s for $14.96.

But the most interesting offer is that the Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player will sell for $98.87. They all say while supplies last, and the HD-DVD player and the HDTV are only available at select stores.

Unfortunatly, they don’t specify which select stores….

Best Buy is offering the same HD-DVD player for $99, but their website lists it as sold out.

There are a few reasons someone might not want to buy the official one, and instead go with Nyko’s remote solution. The Nyko remote consists of a USB dongle that recieves the Infrared Signals, and a nicely designed remote. The remote has all the necessary PS buttons, and also includes the play/pause and chapter skip buttons.

However, one of the biggest reasons for going with the Nyko remote is that it opens the door to several other devices. If you have a Logitech Harmony remote, or another programmable universal remote, the NyKoUSB dongle lets you use them to control your PS3.

Unfortunately, I had a ton of trouble getting my Logitech 688 to work with the dongle though. So overall I give the Nyko BluWave a 7 out of 10. The included remote is really nice, but it does not work easily with my Logitech Universal remote.

3 out of 5 stars

Be warned: once you start playing Peggle you’ll have a hard time stopping. If you have ever watched or heard of a pachinko machine, the game at first glance looks similar to that. It features lots of pegs that the balls that fall from the top have to hit, but that’s where the comparison stops.

Whereas pachinko is completely based on luck, Peggle is a highly skilled game. The object of each level is to hit every orange peg. When a peg is hit, it will be removed from the board, and points are given after the ball leaves play. The ball is aimed and then shoots out with some force. This allows it to bounce more than a real pachinko ball would.

Only if you were the rainman of geometry could you actually predict where the ball is going to travel. The game is also made interesting by having the “Free Ball Bucket,” which gives the player a free ball if the ball lands in it. This is useful on all levels, and on some challenges, it’s the only way to beat the level. The Free Ball Bucket also has sides off of which it can bounce balls, and this can get more pegs before the ball leaves play.

After all the orange pegs have been hit, the game goes into an extreme mode, where the Free Ball Bucket is removed, only to be replaced with a set of holes worth 10,000-100,000 points. This can quickly increase the score, and it may be needed for some of the score-related challenges.

The dual mode allows up to two people and the computer to play on the same level together. They take turns shooting the ball. This is interesting because you need to be careful what shots you open up, as your opponent will get to go after you. You also want to be the person to get the last ball, in order to get the end-of-level bonus. Unfortunately, the dual mode will not work between two computers, so both players have to be sitting there to play it.

I give the game a 9 out of 10; I love the game, and it’s very addicting. I wish they had allowed dual mode to work over the Internet, though. There is also, quite unfortunately, only a set number of levels, though, in all fairness, there are a lot of them.

PopCap has also released a guide for playing Peggle at www.popcap.com/extras/pegglestrategy

Quick hits:

Publisher: Popcap
Developer: Popcap
Platform: PC
Genre: First-person shooter
Players: 1

Playability: 5 out of 5 stars
Learning Curve: 5 out of 5 stars
Sound: 5 out of 5 stars
Graphics: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Overall: 5 out of 5 stars Editor’s Choice

The game mirrors the movie’s depiction of rooms in the Hogwart’s. The paintings and stairs move; players sometimes have to wait for the latter to be in the right position to continue.

The game uses the Marauder’s Map to help the player navigate the large school. When the map is opened, the player selects an area or a person to find. A star on the map points out the location. When the map is put away, footmarks in the ground lead towards the area that was marked on the map, making it easy for the player to find.

The game uses locations and other characters to create quests and levels. When players find a character, the character will often have a task that must be completed, using the spells Harry already knows. One task involves Harry cleaning a trophy room before the Filch returns.

At times, the game seems disconnected. The scenes sometimes cut from one area to another, suddenly changing time and space. The game skips large amounts of time, particularly when characters are in class, and often doesn’t seem to flow. The game does use the Daily Prophet to speed up getting information to the players.

The game doesn’t really seem to have any perception of time. When Harry cleans the trophy room, there is no timer to say how long the player have left, and the Filch appears just after the cases are repaired.

There are minor differences between the Wii and the PS3 version. The more fun Wii version has the player moving the remote like a wand to cast the spells, the PS3 has the player moving the analog controller, in similar motions. Unfortunately, EA doesn’t have the Wii sensing down as well as Nintendo, probably because the Wii is still a relatively new system. Often it takes a few tries for the game to realize what spell is being cast. Casting spells by simply moving the controller in the PS3 is easier and less aggravating. That version also has better graphics than the Wii, but not always as many as it should. Some of the characters look like block figures, but he backgrounds in the PS3 version are clearer. The game otherwise plays the same with both versions.

The game is designed to allow players to beat it at their own speed and in their own order. The simple models for the characters make it easy to get multiple platforms released simultaneously. While the game could be better, it’s still fun and Harry Potter fans will likely enjoy it.

Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Electronic Arts
Platform: All major platforms
Genre: Action/Adventure
Players: Single-player
Launch Date: June 2007
Rating: E – Everyone

The armlet has some powers to transform the wearer into a knight with extra powers. In the case of Jeanne it allows her to move again if she kills an enemy. If she can kill the enemies in one strike, she can cross the board and kill all the enemies in one round.

The game plays like the old shining force games, with animated storylines and characters that move and talk. Text bubbles also pop up from time to time in the battles when significant events happen, such as killing a certain enemy. The battles are shown on grids overlaying different lands, with different sections of the grid affecting the battle. High land, for instance, gives archers more range. Roads allow the characters to move faster. And some areas aren’t crossable. Each character in the game can move a certain amount of spaces in a turn, and only a set number of turns are allowed to complete the battle. This limits how long a player can take to finish the fight.

Before playing, each player can check the movement of every character on the board to develop a strategy of where to place his or her piece. All characters start at full health at the beginning of a battle, even if they died in a previous battle. This means gamers can sacrifice a player to finish the battle. The game recommends saving often. Once the battle has begun, the only saving possible is quick save, which is deleted after loading. This is so it isn’t used as a way to reset half way though the battle if a particular fight ends badly.)

During attacks, players are told the expected damage to opponents, and the odds of success, as well as the expected damage from the opponent and odds for the counterattack.

The odds of hitting the opponent are affected by each character’s stats, the landscape, and other characters near by. Players on higher ground have an advantage, and are likely to do more damage and take less. If there are other characters near one of them when defending, the other characters will help defend, and the odds of connecting go down.

On top of normal fighting, the battles include magic and special abilities. Each character can have special abilities added, which use magic that is regenerated as the turns pass, starting at zero. The items can be used once to heal, cause damage to an enemy, or change the stats on a character.

While the storyline is a bit lacking, Jeanne D’Arc will be a hit with any fan of adventure games.

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.
Developer: Level-5 Inc.
Platform: PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) handheld entertainment system
Genre: Strategy Role-Playing Game (RPG)
Players: Single-player
Launch Date: August 2007
Rating: T – Teen

It wouldn’t be good to get a brand new iPhone scratched up after a week, so I tried iSee from Contour Design.

In an odd note, the directions show how to take the iSee apart and put it back together. This was a bad packaging decision because the directions are packaged inside the iSee, and you need to open it to find the directions that show you how to open it.

Putting the iPhone in the iSee is actually easy. The back slides off and the iPhone just sits inside. Then the back just slides back on.

The case is raised on the front, allowing access to the power button, touchscreen and speaker. The side has a hole for the volume controls and the ringer disable button, while the back has a hole for the camera. The top and bottom also have holes for the dock, the headphone jack and the hold button.

All of the holes are curved with beveled sides. This is important on the front; the raised sides mean it is less likely to scratch the main screen. If the iPhone is dropped with the iSee on it, it will hit the sides and not the screen. Also, if it slides around it is sliding on the iSee not the iPhone, itself.

The iSee also comes with a handy belt clip.

Unfortunately, the side of the clip where it holds the iSee extends too far and makes it hard to press the keys on that side of the screen. This can be an aggravation when typing. The clip swivels on the back so the clip can be attached vertically or horizontally.

If the iPhone happens to hit a sharp point, however, the iSee might not be of any use. I also found it irritating when I couldn’t get to the side keys when the clip is on.

I think the iSee is a great product. It does a good job protecting the iPhone from most possible causes of damage. It doesn’t have anything over the screen so it is still possible to scratch up the screen. Apple seems to have done a good job on the screen though and made it hard to damage.

Overall, I give the iSee a 9 out of 10. It does a great job of protecting the iPhone without being obtrusive.

For an iPhone web site game, they did a very good job. Unfortunately it has many limitations, but they are all based in the way the iPhone deals with third-party games.

The game only plays in the portrait mode. If the iPhone is switched to landscape half the board is off the screen. The game plays by touching one of the jewels you want to move and then the one you want to swap it with. Since it’s a web application there is no timer on the game. It also seems like you should be able to drag the jewels, but the iPhone recognizes drags as trying to move the web page. It also runs slowly; this is a factor again of it running through the Internet.

Otherwise, Bejeweled for the iPhone plays just as good as any other implementation of bejeweled–giving the player more points for combos or for getting four or more in a row. When the bonus bar at the bottom fills it will remove jewels for you as a bonus, giving points for each. This also mixes up the board opening up new matches.

If you like Bejeweled, this is a good adaptation to the iPhone. So I give it a 7.5 out of 10. It’s well done. The game would be better if Apple lets PopCap write the game directly for the iPhone. Since the game is available for free from their site check it out.

Note: You can only find the game via the iPhone’s Safari browser – PopCap’s website can tell if you’re coming from that browser, and in that case the option for the free Bejeweled for iPhone appears. Special thanks to Garth Chouteau over there at PopCap for the info.