I assumed that you could just hit up any WiFi spot and use the service if you were able to access it (either because it was free or you paid) Not so, my friend, not so. It looks like you will also have to lug along a WiFi-enabled laptop and Nintendo’s own WiFi USB Connector.

Laptop Required For Non-McDonald's DS WiFi - Kotaku

Way to seize the lead there Nintendo. It will work in McDonalds, but not in Starbucks, in airports, in hotels, or you know, anywhere very reasonable. Why bother to let people use their DS wherever they want? Bah!

technorati tags: games

So we're well into the Christmas 2005 Onslaught in gaming land. I've got GTA for my PSP, I've got Civ IV (Oh my goodness - I lost all of Friday and Saturday to Civ IV and had to institute strict quarantines on it to get any work done whatsoever.), and this week is the release of Ravnica, the new card set in Magic Online. Mario Kart hits DS in a couple of weeks, Animal Crossing is in early December and it's just so much stuff to play!

On that note, without GameFly I would have likely bought Shadow of the Colossus. And if I had bought it I'd probably still be trying to convince myself it was a good purchase. But I didn't, I rented it from GameFly instead. That means I can fight the first two battles and say to myself "Meh. It's OK, but the camera sucks, the horse riding is just annoying and it's not really that fun. It supports widescreen and progressive scan, but it still looks like crap with all those moire-tastic textures. ICO got away with the shimmering textures because the light bloom was innovative then. Now it's just another lens flare - everybody has it."

So it goes back into the envelope and back to GameFly. I'll try out Incredible Hulk next, and I know I'm behind the curve on that one, but it just never made it to the top of the queue somehow.

If anybody out there who reads this bought Civ IV and wants to try some multiplayer let me know :-)

Technorati Tags: games, shopping

"It's a possibility, but it won't have any relationship to gaming," Maruyama is quoted as saying. "If the Xbox 360 uses a next-generation DVD drive in the future, it will only be used for watching movies that run on next-generation DVDs. The format for games will remain as [standard] DVD. That's not going to change."

GameSpot:Video Games PC PlayStation 2 GameCube PSP DS GBA PS2 PS3 Xbox 360 PlayStation 3

This makes more sense to me - as 3rd party developers would likely ignore HD-DVD anyway. Some sort of upgrade or add-on for movies makes some slight amount of sense (although the pricing probably will suck if the evolution of standalone DVD players is any indication).

This would also jibe with the recent interview with Jay Allard over at IGN where he claimed there was no storage problem, that developers needed to work on their compression. This is a garbage claim, in the absence of a HD and an install process. The long and short is any "better compression" you can do on Xbox 360 you can do on PS3 so at the end of the day the PS3 will have something like 3-5 times as much storage as 360 per disc. It's a pretty simple piece of math. So anyway, Allard is blowing FUD at the gullible, but at least it's an internally consistent strategy. And FUD from Microsoft? Act surprised!

I'm still not buying one - and we're 3 weeks from launch.

Technorati Tags: games

Sorry if you get the comments feed and got the multiple spam comments this evening. I had seen a couple this week, but they ramped up tonight while I was out seeing the Sarah Vowell reading. I'll look into closing off the older comment threads and maybe upgrading the anti-spam technology.

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