Hasta La Gadget!

Microsoft employees may eat their own dog food, but they won’t have to code cross-platform Windows Phone 7 games in their spare time — Redmond job postings recently revealed that there’s a studio for that, which will develop and publish first- and second-party titles on the company’s dime. According to job descriptions, the newly-christened “MGS Mobile” will develop “showcase” Windows Phone 7 titles with an emphasis on connected play, and also incubate titles from indie devs and partners like the original Microsoft Game Studios, its older Xbox-based sibling. Interestingly enough, games won’t necessarily be limited to Windows Phone 7 devices, but may appear on “emerging mobile platforms” as well — the idea being to advance Microsoft’s position in the mobile gaming space rather than just pimp the WP7 platform. Is the world ready for Halo on MeeGo? Oh, you bet your britches it is. Just don’t expect to see Xbox games on Android, yo.

Update: Looks like Microsoft’s actually been on the job hunt since June. It’s just so hard to find good employees these days.

Microsoft to open mobile games studio, develop and incubate Windows Phone 7 titles originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Aug 2010 20:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, Jeff Bezos may be keen on keeping Kindle a “purpose-built reading device” (for now, at any rate), but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a little multimedia fun, right? Amazon has published two diction-centric games, Shuffled Row and Every Word, free of charge and available now for delivery via Whispernet. Both involve word creation — the former with 60 disposable letters and the latter with six or seven reusable tiles à la Scramble — and neither seem to be available for the Kindle 1. Second-generation and DX owners seem to be playing without issue, but the most faithful of early adopters? You just got another reason to upgrade — a minor one, yes, but it very well could be a sign of Things to Come.

Kindle 2 gets more game, Kindle 1 gets more wrinkles originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s just a tablecloth and a piece of paper, until you pull out a Nexus One, at which point it magically becomes an arena where toy robots fire off punches. Augmented reality isn’t anything new, of course, but Qualcomm seems determined to bring it to cell phones in a big way — launching an AR game studio, sponsoring a $200,000 developer challenge, and announcing a free software development kit (which will see open beta this fall) all on the same day. The company partnered with Mattel to build the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots proof-of-concept you see above using that very SDK, and you’ll find a hilarious video of grown men pretending to have the time of their lives with it right after the break.

However, augmented reality is only half of Qualcomm’s mobile gaming plan — a rep told Pocket-lint games like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots are only financially viable if they can work across platforms. To that end, the company also demonstrated a simple three-player peer-to-peer title, but with — get this — a Nexus One (over Bluetooth), a Nokia N900 (over WiFi) and a Dell Latitude laptop all playing the same synchronous game. To commemorate this mishmash of awesome, the company funded another video; listen to an individual with a ludicrously bad accent give you the play-by-play after the break. Oh, and find some press releases, too.

Continue reading Qualcomm demos augmented reality and peer-to-peer tech, tries to punch cellular gaming’s block off (video)

Qualcomm demos augmented reality and peer-to-peer tech, tries to punch cellular gaming’s block off (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’d heard earlier that ngmoco’s new game Eliminate: Gun Range was one of the first apps to really take advantage of the iPhone 4‘s gyroscope, and now that we’ve had a chance to play with it, we’ve got say there’s a ton of potential here. E:GR is itself just a simple shooter, but the gyroscope adds what seems like nearly 1:1 motion control to the proceedings — and since you’re moving the display itself, it almost feels like augmented reality. It’s hard to explain, since it’s so unlike any mobile UI experience we’ve encountered before, but as soon as we tried it our brains pretty much exploded with possibilities — we’re thinking drastic improvements to actual augmented reality apps like Layar, all kinds of crazy flight simulator games, much more refined GPS apps, you name it. Video after the break.

Continue reading Gyroscope gunning on the iPhone 4 with Eliminate: Gun Range (video)

Gyroscope gunning on the iPhone 4 with Eliminate: Gun Range (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Jun 2010 05:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Xbox Live and Windows Live Messenger are about to meet up in a very personal way — Microsoft has just announced a new video chat service called Video Kinect, which serves as a logical extension of its brand new Kinect voice- and motion-sensing control system. But it’s not just video calling, no sir, you’ll be able to watch movies, news, sports, and the like together with whoever you’re chatting with. Additionally, thanks to a motorized base and a new skeleton-tracking feature, the Kinect unit will also follow users as they move around the room. Yup, not creepy at all.

Video Kinect: video chat and stream sharing over Xbox Live and Live Messenger originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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