Wallpapers on the spotlight: Trine 2
Along with the official announcement of Trine 2 release, during the E2 2010 Atlus unveiled screenshots, a teaser trailer and some artworks of the game. All the stuff regarding the sequel to the marvellous puzzle-platformer developed by the Finnish company Frozenbyte has been collected for the latest post in the Videogames highlights series, while the topic of today’s post will be one of the aforementioned artworks which in my humble opinion is worth the evaluation by any fan of games and fantasy in search for a new wallpaper to decorate one’s own virtual desktop with.
CPU upgrade, from T6400 to X9100. Because 3 GHz are way better than 2 GHz…
UPDATE: After a few months the CPU upgrade turned to be a remarkable failure. I advise anyone against this kind of practice and I invite you to read the post regarding my useless troubleshooting efforts.
I purchased my latest computer in absolute emergency conditions, and except for an annoying, sound-related issue when I extensively use the network (a fact for which I would be inclined to blame and damn Vista SP1) I’m satisfied with it until now. But being obliged to spend a limited budget obviously didn’t hinder me to upgrade the system main component, the CPU, overlapping to satisfaction the pleasure of having a fairly recent setup to let me use it in scenarios that are a little less retrograde than the ones I’m usually accustomed to.
Snapshots #3: high definition, high emulation
While I’m still in the throes of digesting a four days Christmas food stuffing, waiting for the will to (re)start to write something meaningful on these pages I yield to the last dessert made up by variously assorted snapshots. In particular they cover PlayStation 2 emulation with PCSX2 and high definitions rips, two of the many things that where forcedly precluded to me before my new laptop fortuitous purchase due to the lack of adequate hardware equipment.
Dolphin emulates New Super Mario Bros. Wii at 1080p
I had already talked about Dolphin’s remarkable qualities in a previous post, being it the only emulator currently capable of replicating a Nintendo Wii console on PC and running some commercial games. Another, impressive confirmation of the emulator capabilities comes from this YouTube video (via Joystick Division), that in a single shot shows off what the recently added Full HD video clips viewing (1080p, or 1920×1080 pixels) is really useful for while it demonstrates the growing Dolphin compatibility with the latest games published for the Nintendo console.
Sony’s firm faith in the Blu-ray format corpse
Replying to the speculations of analyst Mike Hickey, which forecasted the marketing of a cheaper PlayStation 3 edition without the costly embedded Blu-ray drive, Sony was resolute in specifying that the simple idea would be absurd and would kill “the backbone” of the console because games are built just upon the BD format. “Blu-ray will always be part of PS3“, Sony says, but the market environment and the slow, too much slow growth of high definition disks sales allow to easily predict the fact that within the years to come such model will be only valid for the videogames of the Japanese console and very little more.
New opening sequence for The Simpsons in high-definition
Well, actually if you leave out the evidently superior sharpness of the drawings (”as meant to be by the authors”, one says in these occasions) there isn’t much of new after all. Whatever it is, the most yellow America’s family updated its transmissions to the oddities of technology evolution, and on the past Sunday Fox aired the first high-definition episode (in 720p) provided with a complete rewrite of the notorious opening sequence of the show.
Will Blu-ray die at Christmas 2008?
The worldwide recession is getting worse, wasting economies and laying off employees that will find themselves with no salary hence without money to spend in home entertainment. In such a scenario what was a balance leaning between hope and pessimism turns in a sword of Damocles dangerously close to deadly hit Sony’s Blu-ray, that maybe will get through this Christmas but could not be able to see the dawn of the next one.
The uncertain fate of Blu-ray between hope and pessimism
Blu-ray, the optical format for high definition that won the commercial and technology war against Toshiba HD DVD, continues to be the great question mark of the multimedia market. If the inquiries highlight how consumers aren’t presently interested to the new technology, the disk “in blue” brings controversy also and foremost among the giants of consumer electronics, alternatingly foreseeing for Blu-ray the perspective of a bright future or a short run which soon will take it into oblivion, replaced by more advanced contents delivery channels.
Blu-ray? Nobody wants it, yet
Since the past 19th of February, when Toshiba announced the forsaking of HD DVD, the Sony Blu-ray format has became the only standard for the distribution of Hollywood blockbusters in high definition. But at the end of the commercial war between the hi-def formats, after almost three years of hits below the belt and arid controversy, what remains is a market unwilling to go conquered by the (presumed) marvels in 1080p and consumers not particularly interested. However the majors believe in it, and the tech companies continue to invest into the improvement of devices and disks based on the “blue” standard specifications.
Hi-def TV and faith truth…
I’m an atheistic, and I don’t complain. I feel disgust for the TV, and I don’t complain. The problem is that in the Italy of 2008 there are so many watching TV yet, and in my life I’ve never been able to have a decent talk with someone mantled of his own faith in some sort of religion or preternatural deity without the feeling of beein ragged or, worse, treated like a pariah by which feels like an holder of a superior truth.
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