• Casual gaming is a hardcore pursuit - Joystiq
  “Lending more credence to the idea that casual gaming deserves a lot more attention from the industry and the gaming press than it does currently, a survey carried out by Macromedia on its casual gaming site, Trygames, has found that just under a third of
  (tags: gametomorrow, gametomorrow.com, gaming, Joystiq, games)
• PlayStation.com
  Positive review (in Spanish) on Micro Machines for PlayStation: “Después de ocho largos años en el garaje, Codemasters nos trae por fin una continuación del que probablemente sea uno de los mejores juegos de PS One de todos los tiempos.”
  (tags: PS2, PlayStation, gaming, gametomorrow, gametomorrow.com)

Linden Labs put out version 1.10.5 of Second Life yesterday [release notes]. After the upgrade, the first time I logged in (actually the first 2 times I logged in, weirdly) I was prompted to accept a rather long new Terms of Service agreement.

VTOR has some commentary on the the ToS (along with some biting remarks on the scalability and stability of the platform), and NWN has commentary on another of the changes in the new version - the fact that you can now see whether a user is a paying customer in their profile.

It’s a long ToS and I’ve not analysed it in detail to work out whether the changes significantly impact my activities playing around with LSL and random objects I might choose to create. Comments?

There’s another new change, which is that LL have increased the number of categories of place types - see this forum post.

We’ve been quite excited about the positive response we have received on GameTomorrow. We also, however, acknowledge that activity here has not been what it should be and we’re going to be stepping things up in the weeks to come. Among changes you will notice are:

• Increased activity from our core members
• New members including our first members from outside IBM (look for intros/posts from them soon!)
• New members from within the IBM development community
• Our first ever game review section where we will see first hand reviewers’ opinions on game technology in real use

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the blog or if you would like to be a contributor, please send email to gametomorrow@gmail.com

• Game Console Energy Consumption - Xbox
  The guys over at DX Gaming Network put all current gen consoles and the Ghostbuster-trap-powered Xbox 360 to a power consumption test to find out how much power these consoles are sucking up and how the consumption will affect your electric bills.
  (tags: Xbox 360)
• GameSpot:Video Games PC Xbox 360 PS3 Revolution PSP DS PS2 PlayStation 2 GameCube GBA PlayStation 3
  Twenty years after the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the GameSpot editors took a look back at the console that shaped gaming, in our feature Flashback NES.
  (tags: NES, games)

Ray-tracing has always been the algorithm of choice for photorealistic rendering. Simple and mathematically elegant, ray-tracing has always generated lots of interest in the software community but its computationally intensive nature has limited its success in the interactive/real-time gaming world. However while the rendering time of traditional polygon rasterization techniques scales linearly with scene complexity, ray-tracing scales logarithmically. This is becoming increasing important as gamers demand larger more complex virtual worlds. Ray-tracing also scales very well on today’s multi-core “scale-out” processors like Cell. It falls into the category of “embarrassingly parallel” and therefore scales linearly with the number of compute elements. The graphics community has taken notice of these facts and is pulling together a conference to share ideas.

The 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray-tracing

We plan to participate as we feel this topic is very important to the future of gaming and graphics in general.

• Hidden J Allard Video On PGR 3 Site
  This is great….

  “No clue where this one came from but there is a J Allard video hidden at the Project Gotham Racing 3 site. Most of us have already seen this flash animation where it starts you off in a racing car and you begin to catch up to other c

  (tags: PGR3, xBox)
• Xbox 360 Jump In Ad Wins ADDY Best of Show Award - Xbox
  “The ADDY Best of Show National goes to McCann-Erickson of San Francisco, Calif. for its “Jump Rope” ad for Microsoft XBOX 360.”
  Click link to see video
  (tags: xBox)

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a great post in his blog this week about “life and business in the virtual world”.

“Finally, with IT all around us, it is very important that we leverage all that powerful and inexpensive computing power so that future applications will be much more human-like, realistic and “immersive.”  We see this future emerging most clearly with computer and video games, especially with the new generation of game consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation 3, as well as with massively multiplayer online environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft.   “

Tags: Second Life , WoW , mmog