cstGaming

*The internet never fails to amaze me…

How awesome would it be to meet a girl that likes to play video games as much as you do? How would you like that girl to be ”hott”?  They don’t exist, right? WRONG! I honestly can’t believe this exists; but there is a BETA service on the web right now that gives you the ability to play video games with hot girls. GameCrush is a pay service that allows the nerdiest of nerds to have your ultimate dreams come true. It also gives an opportunity for sexy female gamers to make some cash. It’s similar to gaming prostitution but at least you don’t have to get naked, or do you?

A Player (yes, they’re called “Players”) buys points–500 cost $8.25–and uses them to buy “game time” with a PlayDate (yes, they’re called PlayDates). Xbox titles including Modern Warfare 2, Gears of War 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Halo 3 cost 400 points and last up to 10 minutes. PC-based casual games like Checkers, Battle Ship, Billiards Pool, Four Across, and Tic Tac Toe cost a little less.

Players browse through PlayDate profiles, and once they find one they’re interested in they can send a gaming invite. Right now the system works with the Xbox 360 and the site’s own games, but the developers say they’re hoping to have PS3 and Wii integration soon.

If the PlayDate accepts the invitation, she can set her mood to “Flirty” or “Dirty” and it’s game on (though any real gaming girl would set her profile to “Hurty” and kick your ass). The pair can chat, play, or both for the amount of time purchased. When their time is up, the Player is invited to send the remaining 100 points to his PlayDate as a tip. The PlayDates can then trade their points for real-world cash.

After a gaming session, a Player can rate his PlayDate on a number of criteria, one of which is flirtiness, so future Players will supposedly know what they’re getting. I think I’ve seen a similar service advertised on Craigslist for different kinds of play dates.

Does it sound shady? Sure. Is it sleazy to pay women to chat with you over a game of Gears of War? To a degree, you bet. But if there is one thing that gamers know how to do, it’s waste exorbenant amounts of money on pointless shit.

Chatroulette, anyone?

We’ve all wondered for some time now when the day would come when the DVD just isn’t enough and I think it’s about that time…

Let’s have a little history lesson first off:

It all started with the DVD and the PS2. The orginal PS2 disc’s weren’t infact DVD’s, but a Hybrid disc that Sony developed specifically for the PS2. They did make the PS2 compatible with DVD’s as an added feature but eventually this “added feature” became the standard media format to develop games on. The orginal X-Box used it and with the “earlier” realease of the X-Box 360, they also followed suit. Time passes and Sony who is falling behind in the gaming market boldly moves ahead and decides to develop games on there “next-gen” media format, the Blu-ray Disc. Mircosoft inturn adopts the HD-DVD and the format wars begin. Utimately the Blu-ray Disc wins because of Disney (my opinion, but do you blame me?) and Mircosoft allows returns on all the HD-DVD players that they sold for their X-Box 360′s. So here’s the result: PS3 with minimal console sales using Blu-ray, and Mircosoft using the DVD with rather large console sales. Everyone’s okay with that, right? Wrong. Microsoft’s big asset this time around was the number of Playstation exclusives that they turned into multi-console games and the number of exclusives the company acquired; The same move that Song made on the gaming world during the era of the PS2. The problem lies in the fact that their is such a dramatic difference between the DVD and a Blu-ray disc we as consumers always knew that one day this quality would play a large factor in game development itself.

This is a comparasion chart of two media mediums: (it’s a bit dated but it’s still accurate)

The medium that a game is on can make the life of a gamer much more enjoyable. Anyone remember when Half-Life 2 came out and if you bought the CD version you had to sit through a 7 CD install? Then you went over your buddies and he had his DVD version sitting there in it’s “one disc glory”. The X-Box is feeling these same effects. Developers are either packaging multiple DVD’s in one box and requiring installs of the additional discs to the harddrive or limiting the product as a whole. These limits can even be seen in graphics or features throughout the game.

One of the biggest examples of this issue is in the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XIII. The game itself is slated to be around 25gb total. This either means one dual-layer blu-ray disc or 3 DVD’s. 2 of those DVD’s will need to be preinstalled; a total of 18.3gb of data on your harddrive whether you like it or not. Rumor has it that the game was developed on a different graphics engine to compensate for the space restrictions of the DVD. If you search the internets you can find several sites with comparasion screenshots between the two versions but little can be distingushed between the 2, so if they did use a different graphics engine they did an awesome job with the equivalent. As a developer that has to be a major pain. (<-Great Movie) 

Games like God of War 3 are releasing with 35 gigs of content and if Microsoft doesn’t see this as a problem they should. They may have the “real” next-gen console lead but if they don’t look over their shoulder and try to fix some things the PS3 is going to sneak up on them with the consumers and the game developers leading the rush.

I stole this from The Consumerist who stole it from Game Informer. Isn’t the internet grand?
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i wonder if this is a Japanese remake too?

The Xbox 360 breaks five times as often as its closest failure-prone competitor, the PlayStation 3, a print edition-only Game Informer survey found.

The poorly manufactured, red ring of death-prone console has a 54.2 percent failure rate, compared to 10.6 percent for the PS3 and the Wii’s 6.8 percent.

The magazine surveyed nearly 5,000 readers to get the data. And while the 360′s rate is alarmingly higher than the others, it’s still bafflingly low because it blows the mind to imagine that 45.8 percent of the consoles have not broken. Also, Microsoft’s numbers are inflated because 360s are used the most of the three consoles. Results said 40.3 percent of 360 owners use the console three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 owners. Meanwhile, the plurality of Wii owners (41.4 percent) play their consoles less than an hour a day.

Microsoft also seized the gold medal for unhelpful customer service, taking nearly a month to repair or replace a console, while Nintendo and Sony stuck closer to a week. Only 37.7 percent of Microsoft customers found the company’s customer service was “very helpful,” compared to 51.1 percent fo Sony and 56.1 percent for Nintendo.

The most shocking number from the survey — and frightening from a consumer perspective — is only 3.8 percent of Xbox 360 owners said they’d never buy another Xbox because of hardware failure.

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SO what have we gathered from this article: 1.) If you buy a 360 the chances of you getting the R-ROD (that’s what we call the red ring of death here at cstGaming) is quite similar to that of a coin flip. 2.) The people that buy 360′s could care less that their hardware is shit. 3.) Regardless of how superior the PS3 is the 360 still rules the realm of TV based consoles. 4.) Nintendo Wii is not real.

Okay so yesterday Sony all but announced their plans for the PS3 Slim.  Now they didn’t actually say that… but the rumor has been circulating since the beginning of June and a source told Playstation Insider that Sony has planned “Something that hasn’t been done before.” The suggestions they tossed at them were the PS3/HDTV Bundle? PSP Go Price Cut? PS3 Slim?

They replied with:
“N, Y, Y, (?)You’ll see “

4 answers that will truly keep us guessing. All that is definately known is that August 9th the 80gig version of the PS3 will stop selling in Japan and the 160gig version isn’t available there, so what are they going to replace it with? They did a slim version of the Playstation and PS2, why not the PS3?

August 18th should shead some light on the subject. Gizmodo believes that the system will be shown off at the gamescom expo in Cologne, Germany.

With Sony showing off new tech and delievering price cuts left and right you might see a quick shift in the market share for the current “real” next gen consoles. $50 off 160gb PS3 Package

okay, i know this is a shopped wii with a ps3 top on it... but cmon, it still looks kinda cool, right? ...right

Fake Youtube Video for the PS3 Slim… Silly Asians

Okay, regardless of the lack of “quality” games that surround the PS3, people have to start to realize and acknowledge the hardware that lives inside this beast. This system has been on the market since November 11th 2006 (coming up on 3 years now) and Intel is finally catching up to the speeds and processing rate that the PS3 puts out. Intel! The worlds largest semiconductor company…is finally catching up. Seriously, though, how much of a punch is the cell processor packing that the worlds leader, 3 years later, is just coming into the picture in performance specs?

Orginal PS3 Dev Kit

I remember the original development kits that were released pre PS3 and those puppies were pretty hardware packed at the time. Dual 7950GT’s, 512MB of RAM, and a Cell Processor. As a PC Gamer, mainly, i would have loved to get my hands on those graphics cards. But, who would have thought that the PS3, 3 years later, would be unrivaled hardware wise, even compared to comsumer grade PC’s? I surely didn’t.

PC Games Hardware (a German PC Gaming News Site) was the first to post this interesting information. Below is a rough translation of the article written to compare the video encoding capabilities of the Core i7 965 XE processor to the Cell Processor located inside a PS3. The results are astounding.

“Cell processor faster than Core i7 965 XE
H.264 video: New Playstation 3 codec uses for transcoding

 

A novel transcoding tool Fixstars allows for the conversion of video material on the Full HD format, with the help of a Playstation 3 in real time.

 

Now put Linux Developer Fixstars a video converter called Codecsys CE-10, which was to encode movies into MPEG-4-AVC format (H.265) The Cell processor uses a Playstation 3 – this format will be predominantly on Blu-Ray media and IP-TV via video-stream uses. The CE-10-encoder sends out from a Windows PC, the output data via Ethernet to the console, which finished the encoded data back to the PC sends back.

 

According to the announcement of Fixstars reached the Cell processor of the Playstation a performance of 29 FPS, that is 1.2 times real-time conversion – so that the cell would have a similar performance as the CUDA Badaboom encoder in combination with an Nvidia Geforce GTX 285, so colleagues from heise online. By comparison, Intel’s current top-CPU, the Core i7 965 XE, does it still at 18 FPS – normal desktop CPUs even create only about 5 FPS.

 

Prices Fixstars said the developer still does not know the Codecsys CE-10 will be on 22 Of June will be – more information, see the datasheet.”

Original Article
The Datasheet

So, i guess the question is when will the processing power of the PS3 be trumped? Another 3 years? I guess we’ll have to wait and see…