The last [i]Need for Speed[/i] game that I enjoyed was [i]Hot Pursuit[/i]; God knows when that came out on the PC. Ever since, I barely touched the following games in the series ([i]Undergrounds[/i] and so on). I tried them, and they just reaffirmed my lack of interest in racers. Then [i]Burnout[/i] showed up, and I absolutely loved it. As I was getting back into the racing genre, I became more and more interested in the upcoming [i]Need for Speed[/i] game, so I decided to pick it up once again.
[i]Need for Speed: Most Wanted[/i] takes us back to the days of [i]Hot Pursuit[/i], leaves a bit from [i]Undergrounds[/i] and mixes in something new. What does this recipe equal? Why of course, success and awesomeness. How does it work?
The story isn’t (well, obviously) [i]Metal Gear[/i]. You are racing against a A
[i]Metal Gear Acid[/i], as you may all know, is not like the [i]Metal Gear[/i] games for other systemsA
OK, so we all sort of knew this, and it’s not like PS2 was famous for ease of programming, but it looks like it may take a lot of work to properly tap that cell chip. What’s news is that IBM is writing a special compiler called the Octopiler to break down single threaded code so it can feed all eight cores on the cell processor. What this means in layman’s terms is that a developer can take a simple program without many special optimizations for the newer multi-core processors and the new compiler will split it into threads to most efficiently use all those cores.
The bad news is that this new compiler is a long way off. It won’t be fully ready or functional anytime soon. Also not a whole lot of game code has been designed for multiprocessing in the past, so switching to three cores (on the Xbox) is going to take some ramp up time, and eight (on the PS3) is going to take even more. Honestly, I think Sony has a lot more on the line here, and Microsoft’s easy programming library (XNA) is pretty much ready to go.
Sony’s PS1 beat the Saturn for a number of reasons, but one you hear a lot is that it was easy to program for. It seems they’ve some a long way from that. Is Sony at risk here? Only time will tell.
Source: [url=http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060225-6265.html]Arstechnica[/url]
I’ve seen this rumor a few places, but Joystiq is reporting that there is a rumor of a new PSP on the works with 4 gigs of internal memory and a camera. This way it can be a better iPod killer, I suppose.
Personally I don’t want any of that stuff. I just want it to be cheaper so I can check out those Megaman remakes. I also don’t want to pay for a huge bundle of stuff I don’t need. Let’s hope they make those changes, too.
Remember folks, this is still just a rumor, even if it is widely reported.
Source: [url=http://www.joystiq.com/2006/02/24/rumor-new-psp-to-get-a-built-in-camera-and-4gb-of-flash/]Joystiq[/url]
[i]From Russia with Love[/i] takes us back to the beginning of the James Bond franchiseA
