CrunchGear

CrunchGear

Link to CrunchGear

Google’s PAC-MAN logo will live forever

Posted: 24 May 2010 04:50 AM PDT


Google’s playable Pac-man logo surely cost the worldwide economy millions of man-hours last week. It was originally only supposed to up for only two day. That’s changed. It will now reside forever at Google.com/Pacman. We heart Google.

Bijoué: Audio Technica’s diamond-shaped speakers

Posted: 24 May 2010 03:21 AM PDT


Audio-Technica today in Japan announced [JP] diamond-shaped portable speakers, dubbed Bijoué/AT-SPF30, which are especially geared towards female users. Technically, the speakers aren’t special: you’ll get 600mW/φ28mm full range speakers running on two AAA batteries for 33 hours continuously.

Weighing just 105g, the Bijoué speakers is sized at 78×74×37mm. Audio-Technica doesn’t try to attract geeky female buyers just with the design and size but with a functional hook as well: when opening up the diamond speaker, users will find a small mirror behind the lid.

In Japan, Audio-Technica plans to sell the Bijoué/AT-SPF30 on June 16 in six different colors: black, brown, white, silver, golden and the inevitable pink (price: $30). If you’re interested but live outside Japan, I suggest contacting import/export specialists Geek Stuff 4 U.

Electric car runs over 1,000 km without recharge, shatters previous record

Posted: 24 May 2010 01:51 AM PDT

One of the biggest problems that stands between electric vehicles and becoming mainstream is limited battery life. But there has been some progress in that area lately: the Japan Electric Vehicle Club [JP], a civic group based in Tokyo, announced today a Mira EV customized by the group traveled exactly 1,003.184 kilometers without a recharge.

The club shattered its own record from last month when another electric vehicle drove 555.6km (345 miles) from Tokyo to Osaka on a single charge. The new record was made possible by driving the car at a driving course in Shimotsuma, Japan, which is apparently the world’s longest.

Powered by a Sanyo lithium-ion battery (built by assembling 8,320 cylindrical lithium-ion batteries), the car ran for 27 and a half hours at around 40km/h on average.

The club had a team of 17 people at the course who took turns at the wheel. It will ask the Guinness World Records to officially recognize the drive soon.

Video: Sprint EVO 4G rooted nearly two weeks before it’s released

Posted: 24 May 2010 01:20 AM PDT

Sure, the EVO 4G might not be seeing its official nationwide release until June 4th — but since when do silly matters like release dates bother the Android hacking community?

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

CrunchGear Week in Review: Cowboy Busker Edition

Posted: 24 May 2010 12:00 AM PDT

What’s the deal with Red Dead Redemption?

Posted: 23 May 2010 01:00 PM PDT

Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption came in the mail on Tuesday, and my first course of action was to call the Ron and Fez Show on Sirius XM. “Hey, guys, I see your names in the credits. You rock!” Calling the show and talking to East Side Dave (by the way, SAVE DAVE) and Ron was the highlight of my week. Well, it was the highlight of my week until I was able to pop the disc into my 360 (it’s also available for the PS3). As I told Ron on the air, Rockstar knows how to make a good video game. A really good video game, in fact.

What’s pretty funny about Red Dead Redemption is that I’ve seen it derisively referred to as nothing more than Grand Theft Auto IV in the Wild West. You know, as if GTA IV is a bad game! Was the hype surrounding that game warranted? I don’t know. What I do know is that it was a fine, fine game in a world filled with (polluted with?) generic modern warfare shooter after generic space marine shooter. There’s more to GTA than running over pedestrians and robbing hot dog vendors. Play the missions, let the story develop, and you’ll say to yourself, “There’s actually a pretty great script and some solid voice acting here.” Rockstar (along with BioWare) is the best in the business in that regard.

It’s 1911, and the old ways of the West are dying; its days of being “wild” are drawing to a close. That’s not good news for the game’s main character, a well-dressed ex-crook named John Marston who’s forced to track down one of his old running buddies for the increasingly powerful federal government. (I feel like I’m channeling Rush Limbaugh or that other bozo with “increasingly powerful federal government.”) You approach your destination, from parts unknown, on a train straight out of “There Will Be Blood,” eavesdropping on the conversations of an old woman who speaks of bringing “civilization” to the area and a young woman who asks her father to reconcile Christianity’s many contradictions.

This will not be a light day at the office.

Your train pulls up to a small town in the middle of nowhere, and off you go.

This sandbox-style game takes place in a literal sandbox: dirt and broken down rocks comprise the majority of the scenery, and cacti and other rubbish-looking plant life remind you that you’re not “back east” anymore. It’s a big sandbox, too, and as believable as Liberty City, with cross-map trips taking upwards of 10 minutes on horseback. Small towns—nothing more than a couple of shacks and a saloon—rise out of the nothingness and offer you a place to have a drink, buy guns and ammunition from a vendor voiced by noted gun nut Anthony of Sirius XM’s Opie and Anthony, gamble with local miscreants, and rest/save your game. Nowhere near a town? With a few button presses you’ve made a campfire, where you can save your game and fast-travel to a waypoint. Don’t fast-travel too often lest you diminish the game’s sense of scope. Exploration is vital, as it’s the only way to find and kill local fauna, whose hides you can collect and later sell.

You already know how to use the map; it’s identical to GTA IV’s. Letters hover over it, located on the lower left-hand side of the screen, and point to mission-giving characters. You visit these characters, obtain a mission, complete the mission, then go on another mission until you move onto the next mission-giving character. This moves the story along, in short, well-acted cinematics—again, like in GTA. You’ll have noticed a pattern by now.

Mid-mission checkpoints are more frequent, thank heavens.

When I played the game at PAX East a few weeks (months? I’ve lost all track of time) back, one of the things the friendly Rockstar rep highlighted was the horse mechanics. I’m almost certain that’s the first time I’ve written the phrase “horse mechanics.” There’s nothing to it: you tap A to get the horse going, then hold A to keep steady the pace, steering all the while with the Left Stick. When in town you hitch your horse to a handy hitching pole—the horse will wait for you. Or, if out in the middle of nowhere, hitting Up on the D-Pad causes you to whistle out for the horse, which shows up a few moments later. It’s all very Zelda-like, an observation that rather pleased the Rockstar rep. There’s no harm in being compared to Zelda.

Aiming is less frustrating than it’s been in past Rockstar games. You whip out your gun with the Left Trigger. The default mode lets you free-aim with the Right Stick, but if you pull the Left Trigger while near, say, a bad guy’s head, the aiming reticule automatically locks on. Then you pull the Right Trigger. Then the bad guy dies. It’s all very poetic. In my view this is Rockstar saying, “Look, there’s no way in hell you’re going to have any sort of precision while aiming with the 360 controller, so let’s just automate the process for you as much as possible.” (There is, of course, a fully manual mode if you’re a crazy person.) Rockstar should be given credit for trying (and trying… since the days of GTA III for the PS2) to figure out how to make aiming with a controller as painless as possible, but let’s face facts: no control scheme will ever better a mouse and keyboard. This is not up for debate. Perhaps a PC version is warranted? The game looks good on the aging 360 hardware, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the visual bump with a modern day video card and processor.

The multi-player? I know that it exists, but I haven’t put in the time to write about it. My guess is that if you got a kick out of GTA IV’s multi-player mode then you’ll probably feel right at home here.

A few more things come to mind. One is that Rockstar seems to have perfected this particular type of gameplay experience. That is, going from person to person, doing mission after mission, developing a story along the way that’s better than much of what’s coming out of Hollywood these days—Rockstar has that on lockdown. For how much longer will that appeal, I wonder? The second is that Rockstar’s virtual worlds are the most convincing in gaming today. Red Dead Redemption’s lands aren’t as densely populated as Liberty City, but every single inhabitant has something on his or her mind, and will, if given the opportunity, talk your ear off. Voice actors not currently affiliated with BioWare (because they already know this) take note: this is how lines are supposed to be delivered. I’ve recently been playing through Halo 3 and I can, at times, feel my kidneys cringe in embarrassment at some of the dialogue. So bad.

How do I end this? I guess by saying the game could be Rockstar’s best effort yet. So if that appeals to you…

The Next-Gen iPhone shows up in all white – think it’s real?

Posted: 23 May 2010 11:58 AM PDT

Once the leaks start, they just don’t stop. After the first (and massive) leaks regarding the fouth-gen iPhone made their way out, more and more shots have been unearthed. As of late, however, a new variation has been poking its head up: a white-faced model.

While a few different shots have made their way out over the past few days, these ones are easily the clearest and most complete we’ve seen so far.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Complain about your dropped iPhone calls… with science

Posted: 23 May 2010 08:45 AM PDT

We just saw a great product at the TC Disrupt Hack Day. It’s basically a class action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tabulate how many times your phone crashed and how many times you’ve been generally hosed by AT&T.

The site is worstphoneever.com and it searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.

Do you have an iPhone? Then you know it’s the best portable computer ever made, while at the same time being the worst. phone. ever. because it drops calls all the time!

Here’s what you can do: upload log files of dropped calls for your phone, see how many calls you dropped, where, and when, and then see how they compare with your friends!

Then, when we have enough data, we’re going to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of all our users, run Apple and AT&T through the ringer, and you can get a slice of the action! Don’t get mad, get even!

It’s still pretty rough right now but it’s nice to see your worst fears about dropped calls in black and white. The uploader app works only under OS X now (you can manually upload from Windows) and requires a bit of knowledge about log paths and such, but it grabs all of your logs, scans them, and adds up downtime. Obviously thoere are a few privacy issues with sharing your logs, but why not early-adopt in the mass lawsuit space?
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)