Hasta La Gadget!

Nintendo 3DS gets new friend code system, finds beauty in unification originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember those all-night Mario Kart DS and Advance Wars marathons? Looking to recreate the magic with the 3DS? Bring a wall charger. Nintendo’s just unveiled its best-case scenario figures for the 3DS’ battery life, and compared with its predecessors, it ain’t pretty. The official numbers are three to five hours playing per game, or five to eight if playing an older DS title (and up to three hours 30 minutes to fully recharge). So… three to eight hours under the most ideal circumstances. Let’s look at the family album: the DS is 10 to 14 hours, DS Lite 15 to 19 hours, DSi 9 to 14 hours, and DSi XL 13 to 17 hours (all figures also from Nintendo). Can’t say we’re entirely surprised; Haus of Mario Chief Satoru Iwata’s own words back in October were “it is inevitable that Nintendo 3DS will be a device which requires more frequent recharging than Nintendo DS.” Think of it as an extension of the warning label. You can never be too careful, you know.

Nintendo 3DS good for only 3 to 8 hours of play time per charge originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 00:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rage HD for iOS is a seriously gorgeous game — well worth the $2, if you ask us. Now that he can look up from his monitor, id Software’s technical wizard John Carmack is making the interview rounds — let’s see what we can glean, shall we? On the subject of Rage itself, expect the first patch to add Game Center support as well as some bug fixes / minor tweaks to prettify the game further. And if you picked up the SD version, consider yourself among a more exclusive crowd: sales have been majorly lop-sided in favor of HD. “If it’s that big of a difference,” he told TUAW, “we probably won’t offer the low-end, standard def version [in future games].”

We already know Carmack’s thoughts on the iPhone vs. Nintendo DS / PSP, as they’ve been echoed before once or twice, but here’s one new to us: “You should be able to do something that’s better on an iPad than anything that’s done on the Wii,” according to the John that spoke with Kotaku. That’s all purely theoretical, as it’s really up to the developer as to how much power it takes advantage of, and even with the tablet in question, “we’re nowhere close to maxing out what could be done on an iPad.” Oh, and Android? There’s work being done for the Little Green Platform as well, but via TUAW John, “there’s a lot of things with how the distribution platform works and the diversity of the platforms that you have to target, where things are still much, much nicer on the iOS world.”

As for id’s next foray in the “iOS world,” Joystiq learned that a driving game based in the Rage universe is in the cards, and perhaps something inspired by Quake Arena: “maybe focusing on the lightning gun, and call it ‘Lightning Arena’ or something, that would be a full roam-around FPS game.” When asked about his resemblance to one Kevin Bacon, all reports indicate Carmack vanished behind a green-tinted smoke cloud of 1s and 0s, leaving in his wake a three-foot tall statue of Commander Keen made from old shareware discs.

id’s Carmack talks Rage HD, iPad’s power, and future iOS games originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 21:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rather like Nokia and its market share obsession, Nintendo just can’t seem to stop talking about its hardware sales lead. The company’s US chief, Reggie Fils-Aime, recently dished some NPD data detailing the specific advantage that the Wii has over its competitors in the US since the current console generation launched: Mario’s team has managed to sell 30.4 million units of its hardware, followed by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 at 21.9 million and Sony’s PS3, which lags somewhere far behind with 13.5 million total sales. On the more mobile front, DS sales have ratcheted up to 43.1 million, more than doubling the PSP’s 17.7 million shipments to the US of A. Nothing we haven’t heard before, really, but it’s always good to get a statistical update for the sake of keeping flamewars as informed as possible.

Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime dishes cumulative sales numbers for current console generation originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 08:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The mystery of what’s actually under the hood of the Nintendo 3DS is likely to elude us until launch date, when the inevitable teardown commences. That isn’t stopping IGN, however, from pooling together its rolodex of sources to report what it believes the specs are: two 266MHz ARM11 CPUs, a 133MHz GPU, 4MB dedicated VRAM, 64MB RAM, and 1.5GB flash storage (in addition to the previously-known SD card expansion). If based on ARM11 architecture, it’d certainly be in good (if not wildly disparate) company: iPhone (original and 3G), the first two generations of iPod touch, all Amazon Kindles, Palm Pixi, a plethora of Nokia handsets, and… the Kin One and Zune HD. Two separate processors isn’t too far fetched, either, as the original DS had both a 67MHz ARM9 and a 33.5MHz ARM7 (quite an uptick, eh?). Digital Media Productions took credit for the GPU back in June, claiming its Pica200 would be the chip of choice. That’s got a maximum speed of 200MHz, which according to this rumor is being underclocked.

So, nothing that runs counter to the admittedly little we got via the 3DS’ FCC leak, and still nothing to keep the Tegra 2 hopeful in check (poor souls). Those with a need to know so passionate it runs through their very being will, as we said before, probably have to wait until it hits retail. And we should find out when that is next week.

Rumored Nintendo 3DS specs include two separate 266MHz ARM11 processors, 1.5GB storage originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Sep 2010 21:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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