Hasta La Gadget!

Alienware’s hot (literally) new gaming laptop,the M11X, is finally on Dell’s site for your personal configuration pleasure. When Dell announced the tiny, power-packed gaming rig last month at CES, the machine was promised to sell for “under $,1000″. Dell kept its promise, and then some: The base model can be had for just $800.

The M11X uses a low-power processor (1.3GHz Pentium SU4100) coupled with a 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT335M graphics card, 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard drive. You can also pick which color the glowing, internal lights will be when you first switch it on (changeable at any time) and have a name-plate custom engraved (Dell tries to get hip by allowing you to pick your “full name, nickname or handle“).

If you want to spend a little more, you can pimp the rig with an Intel Core2 Duo SU7300 running at 1.3GHz ($100), 8GB RAM ($350) and a 256GB SSD ($570). You can also opt for a 3G data slot and antenna for $125. We like that upgrading the CPU still keeps it under a grand. Also, please excuse the hair in the video above: I’m no Danny Dumas.

Alienware M11X [Dell]

Remember the classic Atari joystick, a sure candidate for the least ergonomic game controller in history? Now you can buy a new one.

In case you have successfully blotted the memory from your brain, let me remind you how things were. The joystick, curiously named as it brought he very opposite of joy to your poor wrists, was a short, stiff stick wedged into a thick, hard to grip base. Moving the stick away from its center was akin to crushing a ball-bearing between your fingers: impossible, painful, and it resulted in bruising.

Now the folks at Retro Thing, a blog dedicated to the wonders of yesteryear, have re-fashioned this wrist-twisting classic, and brought it into the modern age. First, it uses USB, so you can hook it up to a new machine. Second, it is clear. Why make it clear, instead of classic black? Because today, every gadget has to have a blue, glowing blinkenlight inside. The Clear Classic USB Joystick has not been made exempt from this awful custom, and lights up as blue as a comedian in a working men’s club.

The stick will cost you $30, and once your hands have recovered from the mauling they’ll likely receive on first use, you can pop open the case and make a new housing for the fully removable controller board inside. Don’t have any old-school games to play? Fear not! The joystick ships with a CD full of old games and the Stella Atari 2600 Emulator for Mac or PC.

Clear Classic USB Joystick [Reflex Audio]

50 seems to be a pretty trendy number right now, what with Palm’s Pre Plus and Samsung’s i8910 HD both showing off the ability to run more than 49 concurrent processes. Joining that number party, albeit in a different fashion, is this video demonstrating 50 games running smooth as butter on a Motorola Droid handset. If you thought you had to have a Zune HD, iPod touch or one of them webOS thingies to get your mobile gaming on, maybe this will serve as a competent dissuader. See it after the break.

Continue reading 50 Android games demonstrated in one video — who says Android can’t game?

50 Android games demonstrated in one video — who says Android can’t game? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve now pretty much reached saturation point with OnLive demos, so it’s good to finally see an independent set of eyes poring over the service and giving us the lowdown on the actual user experience. Whether you call it on demand, streamed, or cloud gaming, the concept is remarkably simple — OnLive pumps games via a web browser onto your machine and gives you the full gaming experience without the need for all that pretty, but expensive hardware. PC Perspective‘s Ryan Shrout “found” a login to the Beta program and has put together a very thorough comparison between OnLive and playing the games locally on the same computer. His conclusion is that latency issues at present make an FPS like Unreal Tournament unplayable, but slower input games like Burnout Paradise or Mass Effect give pleasingly close renditions of the real thing. We encourage you to hit the source link to see side-by-side video comparisons and more in-depth analysis.

OnLive Beta gets a preview, lukewarm approval originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Grand Theft Auto, the pedestrian-punching, car-stealing, ho-beating video game, has arrived – cursing and swearing like a dock-worker with Tourette’s – on the iPhone.

The GTA franchise is best known, perhaps, for scandal and controversy. The infamous “Hot Coffee Mod”, for instance, saw the game enter a rather adult realm. But behind the whines of the do-gooder public moralists hides an excellent set of games, and at first look, GTA Chinatown Wars lives up to the reputation.

Chinatown Wars is pretty much a straight port of the Nintendo DS Lite version and, despite having had to pass the prudish App Store censors, survives with all of its gameplay (and f-bombs) intact. I had a quick play with it in bed this morning and I love it (and I’m no gamer). The controls consist of an on-screen virtual joystick, which works by moving a thumb around in the bottom left corner. The buttons for kick, punch and so on are also virtual, and while the joystick works great, the “buttons” are easier to miss in a panic. The DS’ mini-games also make it in, as the consoles share a touch-screen. You can break into a car by hitting the screen and start it by twisting a screwdriver in the ignition. Neat.

The animation is incredible, especially considering it is happening on an iPod. For those who haven’t seen the DS version, Chinatown Wars is a hybrid of the original top-down GTA and the full 3D environments of the console games: a camera flies above you and swoops around to follow the action. Ignore the jagged lines on the screenshot – you don’t see those in the game.

Chinatown Wars is $10. That’s a lot by App Store standards, but half the price of the DS cart. Watch out Nintendo.

GTA Chinatown Wars [iTunes]