One of the most anticipated and overly-hyped games of the year has finally arrived – Dragon Age Origins from Bioware. Like any other game ever made, there are good and bad points. For fans of role-playing games (such as me), the facts that it was made by Bioware and was being called the ’spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate’ was enough to get me to pre-order as soon as it was possible. But there were several things that made me very wary – in particular a puerile advertising campaign that focused on blood spray, heavy metal, gore and sexual overtones to the point I thought the game might well have been called ‘Dragon Age: Blood & Boobies’. Now that the game has been released, I have already played ~30-40 hours and wanted to share a few quick thoughts. Continue Reading

I spent a year running, and being the primary writer for, a site devoted specifically to iPhone apps. I remember the mad rush when the App Store first went on line. Populating the database had to be done by hand since the App Store wasn’t easily copyable, and no RSS feeds of new apps were yet available. The process was painful. Copy the app’s information, grab a screen-shot, grab a link to its location in the App Store, put all the data into the site’s database.

I sent the better part of four days of my summer vacation manually putting in all the apps that were there… all 552 of them.

Fast forward less than a year and a half and there are now more than 100,000 apps available in the App Store. That’s a pretty remarkable growth-rate. No, it is down-right unbelievable. It shows that Apple has hit a homerun with the iPhone/App Store combination. It could also, however, be Apple, and the iPhone’s Achelles heal. Continue Reading

Anyone who has played in a ‘real’ band knows that adding a stage monitor drastically changes the way you hear your group. Similarly, playing the popular wave of band-based console games such as Rock Band with only the surround-sound of your home theater can make it hard to get all of the details you need to follow your line. Altec Lansing has come to the rescue with the Stage-Gig speaker system that is specially designed for those games. Read on to get the great-sounding details!

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If you know Element is something other than iron and aluminum, and that Zoo York isn’t a tough neighborhood in the Bronx, and that Ollie isn’t a character from Popeye … then chances are either you or one of you kids is well acquainted with the world of skateboarding! Anyone who has played Wii games such as Skate It knows that while the Wii balance board is a great controller, it lacks a certain ’something’ in terms of emulating the action of the skateboard. Thrustmaster announces a controller that augments the balance board to produce the most realistic possible skateboarding experience!

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Anyone who has been around digital music for any part of the last 20 years knows the name Novation. They hit the scene first as a maker of inexpensive and portable MIDI keyboard controllers, but over the years have grown to be SO much more. Now they are out with their latest cool product – LaunchPad. Let’s take a quick look!

Here is a snippit from the press release:

The Novation Launchpad is an easy-to-use audio controller that plugs into your computer and comes complete with Ableton Live performance software. Launchpad couldn’t be easier to use. It consists of an 8-by-8 panel of simple buttons, each of which can be used to launch an audio event – a sound sample, a rhythm, melody loop, and more. Start a rhythm from the library of provided samples, then layer additional sounds on top, edit to taste and, voila! You’ve created a song. You can even use your computer’s microphone input to add live vocals or other sound sources.

Launchpad is a powerful tool designed for real musicians doing live performance of computer-based music. But it’s so reasonably priced and easy to use, Launchpad’s biggest audience will likely come from outside the music industry – in dorm rooms, living rooms and basements. Multiple Launchpads can be connected at the same time, so people can create Launchpad bands where one person launches rhythms, another bass lines, and a third melody samples; it is the ultimate in improvisational performance. Getting started is easy: Just load the Ableton Live8 program into your computer, plug Launchpad into the USB port, and you’re ready to go. The color-coded buttons tell you what’s happening in real time. When a button is yellow, it means a sound clip is loaded. Press the button; it turns green to show the sound is playing. A red light indicates the clip is recording.

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If you track video games at all, you will know three things: first, as my GearGames Weekly indicates, we had a typically anemic summer release schedule; second, the release of Madden NFL Football signals the start of the Fall game season; and finally, the last few months have seen a virtual defection of games into early 2010 for a variety of reasons, including the most honest assessment that the economy is lousy and they don’t want to risk lousy sales. History is a good teacher in this regard – video game sales are dominated by fourth quarter performance, and the first half of the year was dismal. So the easy assumption is that publishers want the economy to pick up more before trotting out their biggest potential sellers.

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If you are a fan of modern classical composition, you are likely aware of the minimalist movement and composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Adams,and Philip Glass. Glass gained fame in the 70’s for his operatic work ‘Einstein on the Beach’, and has been heard in many films with Academy Award nominations for Kundun, The Hours, and Notes on a Scandal. His work is not nearly as avant-garde as Riley, nor as rhythmically challenging as Reich, nor as epic as Adams, instead offering a combination of stark soundscapes, touching melodies, and passionate movements.

This week I got a notice that Amazon had the Philip Glass “The Orange Mountain Music Philip Glass Sampler Vol.I” for FREE, and being a fan of his work but only having a small collection of his recordings, I immediately grabbed the MP3 download and loaded it on my iPod. For nearly a week I have been thrilled with the nice variety of textures, styles and tones in the 21 song collection.

If you are interested in checking out modern classical music that offers a deep listening experience without veering too far into the ‘out there’ world of the avant-garde, I strongly recommend checking this out – it IS free, after all!

Another interesting tidbit: while driving around this weekend, my older son commented that the Etude No. 2 sounded very much like something my younger son had been writing on my MIDI system, and during his weekly piano lesson my younger son actually reproduced the opening segments from memory and mentioned it to his teacher. Cool stuff!

Source: Amazon.com
Image courtesy of PhilipGlass.com

Welcome back to the GearGames weekly video game release feature here at Gear Diary! Anyone who is a fan of role-playing games (RPG) is very excited for this week as perhaps the biggest RPG release of the year (we can debate whether Risen is bigger in the comments) – Dragon Age: Origins. The folks who have brought us the Baldur’s Gate series, Neverwinter Nights games, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Jade Empire and more are back – with the ’spiritual successor’ to Baldur’s Gate. I am rushing to finish everything else on my plate so I can be ready for this one on Tuesday. Recently it was announced that the PS3 version was un-delayed, which is nice since it means everyone gets it this week!

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So how are you spending you Halloween? If you are planning to spend it staring bleary-eyed at your computer monitor playing the 2008 online first-person shooter Combat Arms, now you can do it without missing out on the Halloween festivities! Nexon America has announced that their Halloween Update will include Pumpkin Head uniform pieces as well as other items. Read on to find out what is included!

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Hold on a second – don’t check your calendar, you haven’t time-warped back to last year! Indeed, merely 6 months after the launch of the DSi, Nintendo has announced that on November 21st they will release the DSi LL in Japan, for the equivalent of $220. Read on for more details!

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When does a fictitious video game go too far? That question has been asked for decades now, since the screen images shown were barely recognizable blocks of pixels simulating every possible human activity. New footage from one of the most anticipated games of 2009, the upcoming shooter ‘Modern Warfare 2′ for the PS3 / XBOX360 / PC brings that question back to the fore.

The scene shows the player as part of a group in civilian clothes with body armor coming out of an elevator in an airport and proceeding to gun down groups of civilians. The group proceeds to walk casually through the airport, gunning down unarmed civilians – including several people trying to help others who were injured. While the violence isn’t anything new, the implied context and visual realism is stunning.

Video currently still available from MapModNews. but since Activision has been trying hard to root out and eliminate all sources still active, it likely won’t be there long.

So what do you think? Is there a point when video game violence ‘crosses the line’? Should the game be rated AO (adults only)? Should it be banned? Will it be the object of politicians posturing on both sides of the aisle? Any other thoughts?

Source: GamePolitics

There are many games from the history of computer role-playing games that deserve the attention of a full retrospective, looking back in depth at what made the game great and putting it into modern context. However, for every ‘Ultima IV’ or ‘Arcanum’ there are a hundred games like Hexplore – minor releases that added something at the time but were not significant enough to merit much attention even a year after they came out. Certainly I had never heard about it until recently when it was mentioned in a thread on a PC RPG forum. As part of my love affair with my netbook, I am seeking these games out, playing them and will be writing about them here. Continue Reading

Recently I’ve been working on a Netbook Gamer for one of my favorite games, Divine Divinity. I was writing a comment about one of my favorite scenes from the game … and decided to seek out a video to show the scene. But rather than making you wait for the Netbook Gamer review, let’s take a look at it now in the spirit of Halloween!

Welcome back to the GearGames weekly video game release feature here at Gear Diary! OK, you might be wondering why this is the only place NOT highlighting DJ Hero for this week. Well, while that game looks amazingly fun and will sell millions, I chose the expansion to one of the absolute best games of 2008 that got relatively little attention because it is a turn-based strategy game – King’s Bounty: Armored Princess. Of course, since we are in the midst of the Fall Gaming Avalanche, those are but the tip of the iceberg!

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Recently I was preparing to take a business trip over a weekend for a conference, and figured it would be a nice opportunity to watch a couple of DVD’s that the rest of the family didn’t have any interest in seeing yet again – Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’ and The Marx Brothers’ ‘Night at the Opera’. My assumption was that I would use the Mac program Handbrake, which has done very nicely getting video from our DVDs to our kids’ iPods for long trips.

At the same time I had the opportunity to look at WinX DVD Ripper Free Edition, and I figured: what better way than to test the two free utilities side by side. I will comment on that comparison in a bit, but wanted to focus on a more recent opportunity to try out WinX DVD Ripper Platinum, based on a version supplied to me for free by the publisher. Continue Reading