Hasta La Gadget!

Hot on the heels of the revelation that the Xbox One was in full production, and would be getting a CPU bump, Microsoft today announced the release date for their next-gen console: November 22, 2013.

The Xbox One will hit retailers in all 13 of its launch markets on this date, including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, UK, and of course, the good old US of A. Microsoft expects to ship the Xbox One to more countries in 2014.

This puts the release date one week after the launch of the Sony PS4, which may give Microsoft a slight disadvantage in their holiday sales numbers, but I’m thinking that as long as they’re out prior to Black Friday, they should be on equal footing.

Not coincidentally, November 22nd is the same date the Xbox 360 was released in the U.S. and Canada – eight years ago if you can believe it.

Despite its initial sell-out of pre-orders, Microsoft is accepting a limited number of additional pre-orders for the Day One Edition of the Xbox One over the Microsoft Store.

[via Xbox Wire]

Bigben is one of the more obscure companies that I have heard of, as I would have associated it with the famous landmark over in London instead. Regardless, Bigben of France must have taken a good and close look over at the Wikipad, where that particular gaming tablet actually shaped this device that was specially designed for gaming. What makes Bigben’s offerings different from most of the crowd would be the fact that it comes with a detachable game controller, and this particular detachable game controller would deliver to you D-pads and other necessary buttons required for controlling games on the tablet – all without having to dirty your tablet’s display through finger taps, or to lose out on some graphical detail because your fingers were blocking the display.

Bigben has called this portable gaming device the GameTab-One (and no, it is not the official portable gaming console of the President of the United States of America), where it will be powered by a Rockchip RK3188 quad-core processor and carries a 7” 1024 x 600 pixel TFT display. Other hardware specifications of the Bigben GameTab-One include a 1W speaker, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, 2GB RAM, and 16GB of internal memory, running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean as the mobile operating system of choice.

Bigben Is No Tourist Attraction, But An Android-Powered Portable Gaming Console original content from Ubergizmo.

These days you can run dozens of classic games on a PC using emulators. If you’re good with modding hardware, you may be able to connect the right controller for the console you’re emulating. But if you’re Patrice Daubaire, you take it one step further. Patrice hacked 75 controllers to make them compatible with over 110 gaming systems.

Patrice calls his ingenious mod the Multi Video Game System 2 or MVGS 2. He managed to universalize 75 controllers – from an Atari 2600 joystick to aPlayStation controller – so that they’ll work with different gaming systems via a custom VGA adapter. Patrice claims his system has zero input lag and that the controllers weigh more or less the same as unmodified ones. Patrice was also able to add additional functions like a quick save button on some of the controllers.

To present his invention, Patrice built the MVGS 2 Dream Station, a PC with over 30 gaming system emulators. It has a nice cabinet with a built-in monitor and lets up to two players geek out. He also setup a rotating display stand for the controllers.

Pick your jaw up from the floor and head to the MVGS 2 website for more information.

[via Hack A Day]

Welcome to Engadget’s back to school guide! Today we’re talking gaming gear. Head to the back to school hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the month. Be sure to keep checking back; in early September, we’ll be giving away a ton of gear, including some of the picks in our guides.

You probably shouldn’t be playing video games in school, y’all. A certain back to school guide writer had his Game Boy and copy of Pokémon confiscated by a certain English professor in high school and, needless to say, it was a rough year. Thankfully, today your tablets and smartphones are often part of the educational experience — all we had was Oregon Trail and Karateka. Oh man, Karateka! But back to the goods: head below for our back to school gaming suggestions — if you convince your parents to pick this stuff up ahead of the first bell, perhaps seek out a career in law?

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In September of last year, Sony threw in an interesting nugget when it shipped the third-generation PS3: there’d be a unique, more affordable 12GB flash-based unit exclusively for Europe and Hong Kong. Sure, it doesn’t do much good for those who boast huge game libraries or prefer to store odds and ends locally, but Sony clearly determined that there’d be a real market for such a product. Sony Computer Entertainment America VP of marketing, handhelds and home consoles John Koller sat down with us following the launches, and made a point to tell us the following:

“The smaller Flash drive isn’t coming to North America, and a lot of that reason is the digital consumer. We really want to make sure, out of the box, that there is an option for them to be able to download that content. That is really critical for us, very very important.”

180s happen quite frequently in the technology world, and it seems that we’re peering at another here. Canada’s own Future Shop has the 12GB PS3 listed right now as “In Stock” for $199.99, and a number of stock trackers are confirming that units are trickling into brick and mortar locations across various provinces. This all jibes nicely with a recent PlayStation Lifestyle rumor that suggests the system is coming to both Canada and the United States on August 18th, leaving us to assume that this particular store simply managed to get a jump on the competition. All that said, you can get a new 500GB PS3 with Grand Theft Auto V for just $70 more (or another, more sizable unit for even less on the secondhand market) — but hey, options!

Update: We’ve received an image (shown after the break) of the 12GB PlayStation 3 in a Kmart stockroom here in the United States. The “do not sell until” date is predictably labeled as August 18th, which means that Yanks should be able to get their hands on one of these without an impromptu road trip up north in just a few days.

[Thanks, Jean-Philippe]

Filed under: Gaming, Sony

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Source: Future Shop