Hasta La Gadget!

For many, the end of the year means spending time with family and friends while stuffing yourself full of delicious food, but for gamers, there’s always an added perk to the holiday season: cheap games. Black Friday deals might be the source of these cheap games for some, but when it comes to PC gaming, it’s all about the Steam sales. Get ready to empty your wallets, because the dates for Steam’s autumn and winter sales have been leaked out and the festivities kick off tomorrow.

Tamás Bakó, CEO of Secret of the Magic Crystals developer Artery Studios, outed the dates for both sales in a post to the game’s Developer Diary. According to him, the autumn sale will run from November 21 to November 27, while the winter sale will follow shortly behind, launching on December 20 and running until January 4. How does he know this? Because Valve contacted him to ask if wanted to include Secret of the Magic Crystals in the sales.

Joystiq has also spoken to an unnamed indie developer who confirmed the dates Bakó listed, so it looks like the Steam sales season will be kicking off soon. This, as many gamers know, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there are always a ton of games that are given deep discounts, meaning that you can pad out your game library on the cheap. On the other, the games may be cheap but they still cost money, which can lead to some overindulgence on those sweet, sweet deals.

In other words, hopefully you saved up some money in anticipation of Steam’s end-of-the-year sales, because there will unquestionably be plenty of deals to take advantage of. As always, we can expect to see major retail releases and smaller indie games alike discounted in these sales, so there should be something for everyone. Is your bank account ready?

Steam autumn and winter sale dates leak out is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As a vital component of every desktop and notebook computer ever produced, the mild-mannered keyboard rarely stands out. Most keyboards are simple — if they input text, they’re at least doing something right. Gaming keyboards tend to be a little more complex, touting extra features designed to give the player a leg up in-game. Mad Catz’s S.T.R.I.K.E. 7 keyboard hopes to do just that, packing in a touchscreen, a handful of detachable components, alternate key caps and a software suite to help leverage the whole package. With far more bells and whistles than the average input device, it certainly caught our eye. Is it unique enough to warrant its $300 price tag? Read on to find out.

Continue reading Mad Catz S.T.R.I.K.E. 7 review: a more modular keyboard for the gaming crowd

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Mad Catz S.T.R.I.K.E. 7 review: a more modular keyboard for the gaming crowd originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Nov 2012 15:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Most of us who remember Myst are content to relive the halcyon days of click-and-watch puzzle games by loading up the iPhone port. Mike Ando is slightly more… dedicated. He just spent the past six years building a replica of the Cyan game’s signature, Age-traveling link books that includes a full Windows XP PC with a 1.6GHz Atom, a 2-hour battery, a 5-inch touchscreen and every playable game from the Myst series stored on a CF card. And while we’ve seen books hiding devices before, Ando’s attention to detail might just raise the eyebrows of hardcore custom PC and gaming fans alike: he went so far as to gut and emboss a 135-year-old copy of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine to match Cyan’s reference tome as closely as possible. It’s tempting for anyone who cut their teeth on CD-based gameplay through Myst, but perfect devotion to one of the better-known fictional worlds will cost an accordingly steep $15,625. We wouldn’t have minded seeing some real intra-world travel for the cash outlay.

Continue reading Myst linking book replica goes on sale with full PC inside, won’t quite take us to other worlds (video)

Filed under: Gaming, Alt

Myst linking book replica goes on sale with full PC inside, won’t quite take us to other worlds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 31 Oct 2012 02:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve been a gamer all my life going all the way back to the original Atari console when I was a kid. I go through spurts where I play mostly driving games, but recently I’ve been walking around the game sections of my local stores looking for a decent shooter. Sadly, I haven’t been able find a decent one but I may go back now and pick up Medal of Honor: Warfighter because it’s now available.

The gritty FPS uses the awesome-looking Frostbite 2 Game Engine and has both multiplayer and a single player campaign mode. The game allows players to choose from 12 different Tier 1 units that hail from 10 different nations. The multiple player aspect of the game allows players to represent their nation of choice head-to-head an online competition.

The game also has a new feature called Fireteams, the game’s new, tight-knit online co-op mode. Fireteams are supported on eight real-world maps around the globe. The game is available in North America right now and will be available in Europe on October 26. You can pick the game up now for the Xbox 360, PS3, or PC.

Attempts to create truly small gaming desktops usually involve at least some kind of performance hit. Even HP’s category-bending Firebird, one of the few stand-out examples, had to use toned-down graphics to succeed in a tiny enclosure. Digital Storm might have broken the trend towards sacrifice with its new Bolt desktop: although it’s just 3.6 inches wide and 14 inches tall, the Bolt can cram in as much as a GeForce GTX 680 and will even let gamers upgrade the graphics like they would in a full-size PC. The seemingly logic-defying (if also finger-defying) case still allows room for as much as an overclocked 4.6GHz Core i7, 16GB of RAM and storage options that meld a spinning hard drive with up to two SSDs and a DVD burner. Digital Storm isn’t even setting an absurd base price, but it’s in the cost that we finally see the catch to the miniaturization tricks. The $999 entry-level Bolt carries a modest 3.1GHz Core i3, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive and GeForce GTX 650 Ti, while it takes a staggering $1,949 to get a fully decked-out Core i7 system with a GTX 680. Those prices might be worthwhile for anyone who has ever strained while lugging a traditional tower to a game tourney.

Continue reading Digital Storm Bolt stuffs full-power graphics into a mini gaming desktop, stretches laws of physics

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, NVIDIA

Digital Storm Bolt stuffs full-power graphics into a mini gaming desktop, stretches laws of physics originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Oct 2012 05:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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