Hardcore gaming gets even more serious as Hot Hardware has the details on an awesome brain-to-computer interface:

OCZ Technology has laid claim to being the first company to bring a “brain-computer” interface to the retail market and they have aimed it squarely at the gamer. The device is called the NIA, which is an acronym that stands for Neural Impulse Actuator, and instead of buttons, sticks, gyroscopes or motion sensors, it reads the body’s natural biosignals and translates them into commands that can be used to control PC games.

[...]

The NIA is able to detect three types of biosignals generated by your brain, facial muscles and eye muscles via a special headband. The user can bind these signals to any keystroke using the driver and configuration software.

Before you beginning doubting the claims, Hot Hardware did a month study on the product and actually found it to improve gaming performance at a cost of $150… and for any real gamer, that’s chump change when they’re buying $7000+ gaming computer.

That means the next time you’re thinking they are hacking, he’s not — he’s mind gaming!

Taking it beyond gaming, this device could be used to implement odd strokes that are odd to type on the keywboard (caps key, shift key, alt + shift for typing in Chinese…).

That would be a fun device to add to my regiment at work as well… Borgtown here we come!

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Saw an article via Wired about PMOG, or passively multiplayer online gaming which by installing a Firefox plugin and by just browsing the web, you essentially are now playing a game ‘passively.’

PMOG is an infinite game built on individual network histories, transforming our web surfing into ongoing social play. With a game head-up display in Firefox, players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions. Ordinary web sites become caches for items and currency. PMOG fuses an MMO into our WWW.

I must say that the idea sounds enticing, but at the same time realize from an advertiser’s/marketer’s perspective how easily this could be abused by giving or selling the data gleamed from the plugin to other people by noting the sites they visit.

That said, I’d be interested in this a little more if it had a bit of a sci-fi edge to it rather than a more kiddish/Harry Potter feel.

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As a major fan of the expected release of Spore, it was interesting to see Google actually promote Spore by noting that games can now utilize Youtube by uploading a quick video:

Enter Spore, the much anticipated game from Electronic Arts and Maxis, which lets players create their own alien creatures, import their creations into the game world, and upload video of their creatures’ moves directly to YouTube from within the game. Additionally, all of the YouTube community can enjoy: Spore’s own YouTube Channel, which will showcase the most popular videos of creatures fans and gamers create.

I am certain this will help increase the visibility and popularity of the game, but I am surprised they didn’t expand on this and noting how this could be used for popular games like World of Warcraft where players commonly put up their own videos.

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Making some thematic changes that I feel fits better with the site and the topics I want to discuss. Unfortunately this theme was not properly set up for widgets, so the past day or two I have been fiddling with the theme code to get it to work (yeah, php). At this point I have the widgets working, just have to get the code to work properly at this point.

In the meantime, I go fiddle with my brand new gaming computer.

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EA, ahead of the pack of any other major game company, finally looks and sees how successful online gaming is over in Asia and decides to “experiment” with the concept of in-game transactions (a la QQ堂 or QQ itself) and in-game ads. Red Kemp notes:

The number of people playing video games online in China increased by 20% to 59 million[...]. Interestingly, a majority of these games are free-to-play.

I’m very surprised that these sites within Asia have still not tried to challenge the American market for online games to really dominate the US arena as most of the major players here are very far behind and afraid of trying different models.

Now, it may be said that the costs of creating the games and maintaining them there may be a lot cheaper than here in the US, but nonetheless if the games in China do not get on the ball in creating English versions, I can definitely see EA and later other major gaming companies establishing firm control in the US market for a long-time.

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我先去中国时候，一个朋友告诉我很多中国人用QQ，所以我觉得如果我想提高我写的中文水平，应该下载QQ。一年以前我不用QQ乐是因为大部分的朋友现在用MSN，但是最近跟老婆打QQ堂发现我QQ号码没有了。真讨厌！哎。。。反正我再注册新的QQ号码所以可以打QQ堂。真好玩。

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Beyond looking forward to any kind of Star Trek game, I have been waiting for about one to two years now for EA’s Spore game to come out. Turns out that the game will be out finally this year in Spring 2008 (exact date to be given at the end of January). My hope is that this will be a cutesy/fun game that my wife and I can both get involved in (similar to The Sims) without it being too complicated.

The game itself will begin all the way down from the cellular level all the way into the galactic level, providing various styles of play throughout the whole game. Below are some amazing pictures of what is in and what can be done with the game:

Admittedly, the graphics definitely are not up there (which may be a benefit to my laptop), but then again, it should mesh perfectly well with the Wii crowd.

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Gizmodo has a video and pictures (whereupon my poor computer received a lot of drool) of Alienware’s new curved monitor at 2280×990 that although has some seams (which will be fixed says Alienware) is just an amazing sight to behold!

You know that any computer geek will still need two of those as the screen just will not be big enough to do work on it.

*laughs*

Work? On that monitor? That goes straight to pure gaming (which is built perfectly for Crysis as well).

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As much as I love the libertarian streak, you have to admit how pointless some of this is (although I have to admit the hilarity):

Presidential hopeful Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX),[...] has rallied another group of die-hard backers to his ranks:

Gnomes. And dwarves. And possibly even night elves — because the world of political activism has hit the World of Warcraft.

And before any of you think about the fun that you could have with them, please note:

Although fighting is a big part of WoW action, would-be political rivals — and Paul-weary gamers in general — shouldn’t bother sharpening their broadswords to confront marchers. The event will take place on a server that forbids player vs. player combat.

You know that the writer (Jason Rhyne) has played WoW with a comment like that.

Oh and you Ron Paul WoW supporters? Total cowardly noobs marching on a non-PvP site, just take the whole fun out of that. I was *this* close to re-starting my character again just to pwn you guys, but oh well.  Oh, and someone has to joke about this: <snark> If you can’t handle PvP, how can you handle anything else in the real world? </snark>

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I love killing time with addictinggames.com and armorgames.com and wish for more simple games on a daily basis rather than once a week, but nonetheless there should be some simple game standards so that idiotic games like these don’t get shown over other better games, eg: Podz:
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