Hasta La Gadget!

The Classic White PlayStation 3 was originally released in Japan and a little later in Canada, but eager PlayStation fans in the US can now get in on the action because Sony has launched a new bundle that comes with a Classic White PlayStation 3, a 500GB hard drive, and one year of PlayStation Plus, specifically for US gamers.

The bundle will be priced at $299 and will become available starting on January 27. The new console is Sony’s third redesign of the PlayStation 3, and the second redesign of the slim model. While it unfortunately comes with the old-school top-mounted disc drive, the console sports the largest HDD capacity on any PS3.

Sadly, the bundle doesn’t include any games — just the big hard drive and the PlayStation Plus subscription, which will allow you to get a whole bunch of free content anyway. PlayStation Plus provides subscribers with all sorts of discounts, demos, cloud storage, and games, including LittleBigPlanet 2, inFAMOUS 2, and Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One.

Sony also says the 500GB hard drive is large enough to store quite a bit of data, including either 3,750 games, 297 movies, 198,437 songs, or 80,000 photos. And of course, the bundle wouldn’t be complete without a matching white DualShock 3 wireless controller. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled come January 27 in order to get your hands on the new bundle.

Classic White PlayStation 3 bundle hits the US on January 27 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Remember the Oculus Rift at CES last week? Of course you do — it was only one of the top stories of the entire show, and we want one pretty badly. Now, Valve is preparing a version of Team Fortress 2 that will utilize virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift, and the company is planning to show it off at the Game Developers Conference in March.

Organizers from the annual conference have announced that Valve has scheduled two talks during the week, both of which will focus on porting Team Fortress 2 to virtual reality goggles, as well as overall research and development challenges dealing with head-mounted displays and tracking systems.

These two presentations will give developers a rare look into Valve’s game development process, and will provide a better idea of all the successes and failures that the Valve team met along the way. These talks could also provide further insight into the progress that game developers are making with virtual reality games.

Overall, it’ll be interesting to see what Valve dumps on us come late March, and hopefully the ability to play Team Fortress 2 using virtual reality will be available in the near future. With the popularity of the Oculus Rift already at full steam, it should only be a matter of time before we see some awesome games come to the new platform.

Valve to unveil Team Fortress 2 virtual reality port at GDC 2013 is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Gun control and violent video games have been a hot topic recently. Ever since the shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut, critics have put blame on violent video games as the source of violent behavior by teenagers and young adults. And now, a Missouri lawmaker is proposing a new bill that would levy a 1% tax on the sale of violent video games.

Missouri House Representative Diane Franklin is sponsoring a state bill that would see the tax applied to video games based on their ESRB ratings, and the revenues from the tax would go towards “the treatment of mental health conditions associated with exposure to violent video games.” The tax would be applied to video games with at least a “T” rating (Teen).

The Associated Press mentions that both Missouri’s Democratic governor, and the Republican majority controlling the general assembly oppose any new taxes, so it’ll be interesting to see exactly how far this bill goes, but the rise of concern among violent video games may change some lawmakers’ minds about the subject.

If the bill ends up passing, games such as Starcraft 2, EVE Online, Tropico 4, and even The Sims 3 would all be taxed in Missouri because of the amount of supposed violence in them. Other proposals for a tax levy on violent video games were brought up in Oklahoma last year, and in New Mexico in 2008, both of which failed to pass.

Missouri lawmaker wants to levy tax on violent video games is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This morning Google blessed bored office drones around the world with another playable doodle that celebrates Frank Zamboni’s 112th birthday. The game has players guiding the iconic ice resurfacing machine he invented back in 1949 across a rink, as more and more skaters mar its surface between rounds. It’s no Grand Theft Auto, but certainly a nice break from Solitaire. [Google] More »

The officially release of the third installment in the BioShock series is slowly creeping in on us. While it’s still a couple months away, it’ll be here before we know it, and Irrational Games has released PC specification requirements for the new game, BioShock Infinite. This will give you a little bit of time to save up some cash and buy a new graphics card, because you may need it.

Minimum requirements are actually quite respectable, and we can’t imagine most PC gamers will have a hard time running the upcoming game. BioShock Infinite requires at least an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHz, with 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of hard drive space available. As far as a video card goes, at least an ATI Radeon HD 3870, NVIDIA 8800 GT, or Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics will be good enough.

Recommended requirements call for a bit more prowess. You’ll need a “quad-core processer”, 4GB of RAM, 30GB of hard drive space available, and at least an AMD Radeon HD 6950 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560. Even the recommended requirements aren’t too bad, and we’re guessing that any hardcore PC gamers already have a tricked-out PC that can run this.

As far as PC controls and other options, Irrational Games says that you’ll have all of the traditional options to choose from in the settings, like changing key combinations and adjusting levels for mouse sensitivity. The game will also support AMD Eyefinity, NVIDIA Surround, and Matrox TripleHead2Go, and gamers will have separate controls available for aspect ratio, resolution, and display mode.

BioShock Infinite PC requirements announced is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.