online gaming
OnLive Release Date & Price Announced
March 11, 2010
Remember the online gaming service we covered a few months ago called OnLive that moves your gaming to the cloud? Well it just got real. In case you missed it, OnLive aims to deliver over the air gaming to users in a similar way to general cloud computing.
Data and games are stored on OnLive servers and the images are beamed to gamers around the world who compete in an online environment. The Beta went up quite a while ago and it seems the waiting is almost at an end for US gamers, as the official OnLive launch date has been announced as 17th June 2010.
For $15 a month users will be able to access the OnLive community, however games themselves will cost that little bit extra which is a given considering developers are still going to want their money’s worth out of their games. However this does raise some concerns with potential gamers.
Continue reading »Steam Coming To Mac OS X (Digital Games Distribution)
March 9, 2010
I know, I know, Christmas happened way back in December, but presents are better late than never! In case any of you Apple fanboys out there missed the news, Steam announced yesterday morning that they’re bringing their service to the Mac along with a great library of games which will be available to purchase like PC users running Steam.
In case you’ve not used used it before, Steam is probably the best digital games distribution platform out there, which most of the big and small games publishers are now using to cut out the need for physical media distribution for games. Not only are publishers using it to release new games, but also to find a market for their older games, for example Lucasarts re-released some of their older classic titles. It’s fair to say that we’re big fans of it here at Zath.
Continue reading »Playstation Network (PSN) Log-In Error Fixed (PS3)
March 2, 2010
IT’S ALIVE!!
Sony have managed to fix the problem that had plagued so many of the older style “fat” PS3s and stopped them from logging into Playstation Network. In the end it doesn’t seem like it was a massive problem, just inconvenient as some PS3 users were only offline for around 24 hours.
Apparently what had happened is the internal clock was recognised 2010 as a leap year which is why is what resetting the date to 31/12/1999.
After finding out it had been fixed I was eager to find out if everything would come back such as my trophies and the like. So this morning I powered up my PS3 and reset my time and date via the internet in the Date and Time Settings, which it obviously wouldn’t do yesterday, and then checked to see if my Ratchet and Clank trophies were there…………..they weren’t!!!
Continue reading »Playstation Network (PSN) Global Log-In Error For PS3
March 1, 2010
Many of you might have woken up today with an error which is stopping you from logging into the Playstation Network. I’m among those people and it happened to me in the early hours of this morning and was left rather annoyed.
I thought it was just my PS3 that was playing up as I’m still able to jump onto the Internet using my console, but not PSN. But the most annoying this is, I was just about to complete Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time on the challenge mode which would have given me my final trophy and unlocked my first ever platinum trophy, but I was stolen of the pleasure. Not only that, it seems to have wiped all the trophies I required for A Crack in Time so I’m probably going to have to go through it all again to get the trophies.
Continue reading »Madden American Football Game For Facebook Confirmed
February 8, 2010
EA top dog Peter Moore has confirmed that they’re to expand the Madden american football gaming franchise onto the social networking site Facebook.
There’s been no official date as to when we’ll be seeing Madden’s american football game appear on Facebook, but expect it to be a “simpler experience” in comparison the console version of the game. EA recently bought the Facebook games company Playfish for $300 million dollars so I think we can assume that this won’t be the only EA title to appear on Facebook in the near future.
Continue reading »O2 Testing 4G Mobile Broadband Network (UK)
February 7, 2010
The massive UK mobile phone and broadband network of O2, along with telecommunications provider Huawei, have uploaded a video onto YouTube showing the next generation of mobile broadband, which is commonly known as 4G.
The video showed a test of the connection involving activities such as streaming high definition video over the web. The test showed speed results of just 8Mbps, much less than the potential 150Mbps that was earlier forecast.
However, this is of course a step in the right direction. At this 8Mb speed we can compare these mobile networks to the average-Joe’s home broadband speed. Other possibilities in the video are real time gaming made available through the 4G networks low latency.
Continue reading »Is Society’s Internet Addiction Affecting The Children?
February 3, 2010
This generation of kids (and in fact even the ones before them) have often been portrayed as fat couch potatoes by the media at large, children who are slowly loosing the ability to use language and their legs correctly and who are developing a distorted view of the world based on bad communication skills, the Internet being for porn and mass killings with terrorists in Russian airports.
There will always be people to defend them – mostly a mix of gaming enthusiasts, the occasional scientist and games manufacturers PR departments – but the results of a recent survey are fairly condemning where they show that kids are spending nearly eight hours online every day!
Continue reading »OnLive Mobile Phone Demo Of Cloud Gaming
November 16, 2009
A few weeks ago you may have read my article on ‘OnLive’ moving gaming into ‘the cloud’. The global gaming network played via the internet eliminating the need for exceptional hardware spec to play the latest modern games. If you didn’t then I recommend reading that before this revolutionary announcement.
Today, founder and CEO of the company Steve Perlman, announced and demonstrated the OnLive service, not only on a regular PC but on the iPhone too. This extends the service from the current TV or PC/Mac platforms to gaming on the go too, not only on the iPhone but also on a number of regular mobile phones which have yet to be announced.
Continue reading »OnLive – Video Gaming Moving Forward Into The Cloud?
October 8, 2009
At the game developers conference this year, we learned about a revolutionarly video gaming service called OnLive which could provide games on demand. Created by Steve Perlman, mainly recognised as being the creator of Quicktime, comes a service backed my gaming giants such as Electronic Arts, THQ, Eidos, Ubisoft and Codemasters.
In essence, OnLive is an online game streaming service. The hardware itself is still in Beta testing and consists of a pretty small box unit and wireless controller.
They say that to play the highest quality games, users will require download speeds of around 5mbps or more, which is fairly reasonable as by the time the product is released, that will be a very modest connection indeed for any serious gamers.
Continue reading »Belkin N+ ADSL Wireless Router Review
July 14, 2009
I’ll be honest from the start with the review of the Belkin N+ ADSL modem wireless router – it has a flaw and it’s a pretty fundamental flaw if you want to use it for one particular purpose like I did, but more on that later…
I bought the Belkin N+ ADSL wireless router as a replacement for the aging Belkin N1 ADSL modem wireless router which needed replacing as the “quirks” it had were finally proving too much to live with, but rather than talk about that here, I’ll update the original review after I’ve finished this one.
Suffice to say despite my reservations of buying Belkin again, I looked around some of the big well-known review sites and they seemed to like the Belkin N+ with some of them having it as their wireless router of choice. Therefore I thought I’d give them another chance.
Continue reading »
