Hasta La Gadget!

Sony’s “it only does everything” claim for the PS3 seems to be growing stronger with every day that passes. After getting Hulu Plus in the US recently, the versatile console has just seen the green light to start some movie streaming action in the UK, courtesy of a hookup with Lovefilm. To get this free extra, you have to have a £5.99 or above monthly Lovefilm subscription (that’s excluding its Games offering), though there’s a limit on how much streaming you can do at that price point. Such stipulations fall by the wayside on the £9.99 top tier, leaving you and your console to enjoy as many movies as you can handle.

Lovefilm movie streaming now live on UK PlayStation 3 consoles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 07:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What do you know, someone’s been busy working in Microsoft’s labs while we’ve been waiting for the company’s Kinect motion control peripheral to launch itself into our living rooms. The highly sophisticated webcam has undergone some algorithmic optimizations and now Alex Kipman, lead software developer for what used to be known as Natal, tells us that its processing overhead for the Xbox 360 console will be no greater than a “single-digit” percentage. That contrasts very nicely with the last number Alex gave us, which indicated there’d be a 10 to 15 percent penalty for using Microsoft’s new motion controller, and should mean your petting sessions with Kinectimals will be running smooth as butter when Kinect hits stores tomorrow. Great news, eh?

Kinect will use only a ‘single-digit’ percentage of Xbox 360 CPU power originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not just the PS3 that will be doing its Netflix streaming disc-free from today: the Wii is joining in the fun as well! Americans and Canadians alike will be able to download and install Netflix from the Wii Shop Channel, provided they’ve signed up for a subscription of $8.99 (C$7.99 in Canada) or above. Notably, over three million Wii consoles are said to have been hooked up with Netflix since the service launched back in April, and this step should make that number grow even larger. Only question is what we’re all going to do with those three million redundant discs now. We can’t turn them all into coasters, any ideas?

Continue reading Netflix on Wii drops the clunky disc requirement, starts streaming through Wii Menu

Netflix on Wii drops the clunky disc requirement, starts streaming through Wii Menu originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Careful, gamers on the go: your next handheld might be a hotspot hunter. Along with the “tag mode” Nintendo revealed earlier this week, where the 3DS can seek out other similarly depth-endowed handhelds and exchange information automatically, comes a system called SpotPass, which enables connecting to any open hotspots — even while sleeping like a baby. The purpose was ostensibly for passive downloading of game content and the like but, according to Nintendo prez Satoru Iwata, the company is pondering lumping automatic firmware updates into the mix. This would mean the 3DS would re-flash itself even while in suspended animation, in theory keeping software pirates and firmware buccaneers on their toes. As serious gamers who only purchase legal software (twice, just to be safe) this seems like a reasonable enough thing to do — assuming we don’t get any bogus firmware sneaking onto our $300 handhelds.

Nintendo 3DS might update itself over WiFi, still won’t cook you breakfast originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Halo series has always been about addictive multiplayer experiences, so it’s most disturbing to find out that campaign co-op gaming on the latest title is a non-starter for people without a hard drive attached to their 360. An issue has been identified by users of the 4GB Xbox 360, whereby attempts to team up on the baddies with your buddies — whether locally or via Xbox Live — is met with an error message saying that a HDD is “required for this game type.” This affects both Halo: Reach and the earlier Halo: ODST. Adding extra memory via USB has been found to be ineffective, but at least Microsoft has stated that it’s aware of the limitation and is “quickly working to resolve it.” Standard multiplayer is predictably unaffected, so we suggest taking your rage out on some newbies while the MS techs figure out their caching algorithms.

Halo Reach requires hard drive to play in co-op mode, Microsoft working on this ‘temporary issue’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Sep 2010 02:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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