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Posts Tagged ‘Foray’

Sony’s PlayStation 2 celebrates 10 years as a fallen, bygone generation of consoles looks on in envy

Dreamcast? GameCube? Xbox? They’re cute and endearing to look back on now, because they really never stood a chance. Sony practically redefined what it meant to be dominant in a console generation with the PlayStation 2, which was launched on March 4, 2000 in Japan (the US got it that October), went on to sell over 140 million units, and is still going strong. It’s strange to think that for what many people was their first DVD player turned out to be powerful enough to bring us the cinematic experiences of Shadow of the Colossus, God of War II and Final Fantasy XII, and enough of a kicker to make it into the latest round of Madden releases. Of course, its foray into online gaming took a second fiddle to Microsoft’s Xbox, and many of Sony’s high-minded, living room-invasion promises of the console (remember that FireWire port? The hard drive slot?) never really panned out. Still, we’d say it’s been a pretty good 10 years for this thing. Feeling extra-nostalgic? Check out Sony’s own timeline of PlayStation it pumped out for the 15 year anniversary of the brand last year. Brings a tear to our eye every time.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Sony’s PlayStation 2 celebrates 10 years as a fallen, bygone generation of consoles looks on in envy originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Activision "selectively expanding" brands onto iPhone

Filed under: Gaming, Software, iPhone, App Store

Activision is probably the biggest gaming company going these days, and in their conference call earlier this week, CEO Bobby Kotick briefly mentioned its foray into the world of the iPhone. We’ve talked a lot in the past about indie developers and how they find their way on to the App Store, but it’s the larger companies that sometimes have a tougher time of it, making larger games that don’t always make back their accordingly large development costs, much less make any money. Kotick says that Activision is still a bit leery, but that they will continue “selectively expanding our brands” onto platforms like the iPhone (he basically says that Guitar Hero is coming to Apple’s handheld soon), and that the company is looking into Apple’s platform more as a brand extension rather than a potential source of financial revenue. Case in point: Blizzard’s release of the Mobile Authenticator for their World of Warcraft. They’re not planning to release games necessarily, but just other ways for users to connect with the company and its brands.

Not that they can’t release successful games — Activision is also dropping the first downloadable map pack for its very popular World at War: Zombies game (based on the Call of Duty brand). The pack is $5 (on top of the $10 app price, though there is a free version available without the DLC to try), and adds a second map to the game, more than doubling the size of the in-game world, as well as adding more perks, content, and other goodies. Interesting to see the approach that a larger developer is taking with Apple’s platform.

TUAWActivision “selectively expanding” brands onto iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Building a great iPhone app

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch

CIO.com has posted an article (single-page reprint here) covering one company’s foray into the app development scene. Recently, clothing retailer Gap held an app development contest. The goal was to develop the “best” app to represent the retailer on the iPhone or iPod touch. Gap partnered with Mobclix, the mobile ad exchange operator (more here), to come up with the contest for the best Gap-branded iPhone app.

The contest ran for three months and had 100,000 submissions. While the winning entry isn’t available for download on the App Store yet, and Gap doesn’t currently have a release plan, CIO.com has a list of 5 attributes that contribute to a quality iPhone app. One of my personal favorites is the consideration for how far to stray from Apple’s UI guidelines. On the one hand you have an easy-to-use app that everyone can understand, but on the other hand you have to consider how “similar” you want to be to everyone else.

I won’t spoil the fun and tell you all of the different attributes, but if you want to check out the winning app, you can see the submission video in the second half of this post.

[via Macworld]

Continue reading Building a great iPhone app

TUAWBuilding a great iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Augmented reality browser Layar puts 3-D objects around you

Childhood fantasies of playing Pac-Man in the real world are about to be fulfilled.

Augmented reality browser Layar will let developers stick 3-D graphics and information onto your surroundings in a way that’s viewable from a phone this November.

The nascent field of augmented reality can make a phone’s viewfinder resemble Terminator-vision, with information overlays covering the area around a user.

Up until now, Layar, from Amsterdam-based SPRXMobile, has focused on more practical applications like using augmented reality to find restaurants or real estate listings. This would represent its first serious foray into gaming and entertainment, which is a territory more well-trodden by competitors like Germany’s Metaio. (Metaio released its own browser and tagging service call Junaio last week.)

The company will use a combination of a smartphone’s accelerometer, GPS and OpenGL (which is an industry standard for developing 3-D computer graphics) to create the effect. To accommodate limited processing power on phones and data connections, Layar recommends limiting the complexity of 3-D objects to 1,000 polygons.

SPRXMobile has about 15 employees and is angel-funded.

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