Hasta La Gadget!

The biggest entertainment launch of the year so far isn’t Iron Man 2, Toy Story 3, or any other film from a major Hollywood studio. Nope. The big winner is Microsoft with Halo: Reach. The Bungie-helmed FPS pulled in $200 million in its first 24 hours, becoming “the biggest entertainment launch of 2010 in the U.S.,” according to Microsoft’s numbers.

Microsoft VP Phil Spencer had this to say about the admittedly impressive numbers, “Halo: Reach is the biggest game Microsoft has ever released, and its launch has already surpassed every game, movie and entertainment launch this year.”

The huge numbers were helped along by midnight launch events held on Monday across the globe in cities like London, New York City, and Microsoft’s own home base of Seattle. The event in New York featured a surprise appearance by Kanye West protégé Kid Cudi.

The good news first: the Sony Move, Xbox 360 Kinect, Amazon Kindle, and Apple iPad are all about to get more prominent placement in your local Best Buy, ahead of the holiday season.

And the bad news? Well, that space has got to come from somewhere. The big box retailer will be scaling back its CD and DVD shelf space in order to make room for the season’s latest entertainment gadgets.

Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn addressed the issue on a recent conference call, telling industry analysts,

We’ll have another store reset before the holidays, which will include an increase in the space for higher-growth and, in the aggregate, higher-margin categories, like Best Buy Mobile, e-readers and gaming, with a heavy emphasis on new gaming platforms and pre-owned game titles. This will be enabled by our reorganization of the DVD and CD sections. The CD section in particular will shrink in space allotment.

It’s the latest blow for industries that have already seen a major decline in retail shelf space, thanks in no small part to the rapid shuttering of music and video specialty stores.

You might have hoped that NVIDIA’s introduction of the 400M series of mobile GPUs would bring about a slew of hot new laptops to drop into our gaming boudoirs, but we are in fact left facing more of the same. Externally, anyhow. The chipmaker rolled out the green carpet for a set of upcoming machines in London today, but they were refreshes, rather than overhauls, of current hardware. The big news is to be found within, as the new GTX 460M has made a home inside the updated ASUS G53, Toshiba Qosmio X505, and MSI GT663. The common thread among these three is that they’re all big and hefty, and all emit a subtle vroom sound every time you touch them. What we learned from NVIDIA today is that the GTX 480M will remain an exotic (you might even call it quixotic) GPU reserved for large-screen gaming stations, the GTX 470M will similarly be an enthusiast part, and the GTX 460M will be the company’s big play for the mainstream performance market. It also became clear that even the third GPU in the company’s mobile hierarchy will need quite a bulky cooling setup (and a proportionately huge charger) to do its job, but NVIDIA’s promises of much-improved performance might just make it worthwhile.

As to the more sane among us, there was a selection of pleasingly thinner machines, like the ASUS N53 and Acer Aspire 5745, which make do with the lower-specced GT 420M and GT 425M graphics chips. Those are expected to be NVIDIA’s biggest sellers, and the video demo after the break of the 425M churning through StarCraft II is certainly appealing. We should note, however, that the latest (though definitely not greatest) Prince of Persia game was also on tap on one of these machines and its frame rate gave us a delightful old-timey feeling any time we entered combat with its emulation of stop-motion animation. So, as ever, it’s looking like great graphics will require great rigs, but we can probably expect a decent — not game-changing (get it?) — leap in performance among the lighter options as well.

Continue reading NVIDIA trots out GeForce 400M series laptops, shows off StarCraft II gameplay (video)

NVIDIA trots out GeForce 400M series laptops, shows off StarCraft II gameplay (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft this week took the wraps off another Kinect/Xbox 360 bundle. The new package features the slimmed down 250GB Xbox 360 console (priced at $300), the Kinect sensor ($150), and the Kinect Adventures title ($50) together for $400.

This is the second Kinect bundle introduced by Microsoft. The first, introduced in July, featured the Kinect, Kinect Adventures, and the 4GB Xbox 360 console ($199). It will be price at $299.

The new slimmed down Xbox 360 console was first unveiled at this year’s E3 in Los Angeles. The Kinect name and availability was also announced at that show. The motion-controlled, controller-free peripheral will be available in the states on November 4th.

Microsoft also used the opportunity to announce that the Kinect will go on sale in Japan on November 20th. The device will debut in that country next week at the Tokyo Game Show.

If you’re not careful, it’s pretty easy to let your entire living room become slowly dominated by gaming gear. Your Rock Band drum set establishes a base of operations, and slowly but surely the pile of games encroaches on your couch’s territory. Then the guitars make a play for the easy chair, and the wireless controllers take over the coffee table. With Level Up’s new gaming towers, it doesn’t matter which game system you have (or if you have multiple,) you can get a tower that will store the system itself, your favorite games, your controllers, and even a few other peripherals like those Rock Band instruments you just don’t know where to keep.

Level Up has four towers for the three major consoles: the Aperture and Trideca that match the Nintendo Wii, the Allow for the PlayStation 3, and the Zig-Zag for the XBox 360. Each tower has a controller deck that the top with molded slots for your game controllers, shelves for your games and other discs, and soft plastic hooks on the side for cables, Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitars. This way you can keep all of your gaming gear in check without necessarily hiding it all away. The shelves are available at brick-and-mortar stores like Toys ‘R Us and Bed Bath and Beyond now for $69.99 retail.