The Hong Kong International Airport has taken a fairly interesting approach to keeping waiting, angry passengers from staging mutiny in the terminals. It’s partnered with Sony to install 14 playable PS3 consoles, according to The Moodie Report. This is part of a long-lasting partnership between the airport and Sony Computer Entertainment. As it’s one of the most trafficked international airports in the world it makes sense that corporations like Sony would use it as a venue to show off their wares–in this case, the latest games. It’s good for the airport, too, as it distracts passengers from their desire to kill the ticketing-booth reps. Currently, the PS3 “poles” feature the PS3’s top games, including Final Fantasy XIII, James Cameron’s Avatar, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Assassin’s Creed 2.
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The new Apple iPad hopes to take gaming even further, but the hurdles are higher this time. Everyone doesn’t need a tablet, which is a significant challenge to iPad adoption. Millions of iPhone/touch game players proliferated because millions of people need portable media players or phones, and found that it was easy and cheap to game on the same device they had in their pocket already. On the other hand, at US$499, a 16GB iPad will have the same storage capacity as a PSP Go, which costs US$249. Though the iPad lacks a memory card slot, its screen and battery life look to be far superior. The good news is, the iPad looks set to run all App Store games, playing them in original resolution in a smaller window or doubling the pixels to full-screen mode on its 9.7-inch IPS screen. The iPad sports a custom A4 processor that should be much more robust than the iPhone/iPod touch processor, which opens up potential for even more impressive iPad-specific titles.
With a nearly 10-inch screen, however, it could be argued that the tablet is really trying to overtake the TV as a primary source of gaming rather than the Nintendo DS and PSP. We expected that the iPad keynote would focus more on social games such as Farmville, making gaming more an adjunct to communication than high-end graphics, but the iPad does look capable–with its Wi-Fi and optional 3G antenna–of offering more PC-like game experiences with larger screens and submenus than its smaller iPhone cousins. The sky could be the limit for iPad development once developers learn to use the device, with the exception of one category of gaming: Augmented reality. The iPad has no camera.
With a larger screen, however, comes a need for a different control scheme. A virtual control pad such as the ones that grace many, many iPhone games will be difficult to control on a larger-scale device in their current form, begging for a reoriented or redesigned virtual control pad. That might be a welcome development: Virtual buttons could lurk on the sides instead of taking up nearly a third of iPod/iPhone screen real estate as they currently do. Gameloft’s demo of its first-person shooter, NOVA, demonstrated its tap-to-aim system with ease, showing that faster games could find their way on the iPad with relative ease.
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A Switzerland-based company which is well-regarded for its cooling products among DIY PC enthusiasts. From a value standpoint, its US$57.90 Arctic GC Pro console is a bargain bundled with three controllers (two wireless and one motion), seven sporting attachments and 48 games. The latter includes bowling (remember Wii Sports?), racing, strategy and puzzles in “sharp and clear 3D images”, according to Arctic Cooling’s official press release. Although the console offers only legacy composite audio-video outputs. Another noteworthy feature is that the Arctic GC Pro will run on both AC power and batteries. Hence, it can go to uncharted territories such as the car and is an ideal companion for mobile displays ranging from Pico projectors to small portable TVs.
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