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Darren Waters

More Gears for the Xbox 360

  • Darren Waters
  • 20 Feb 08, 20:24 GMT

Microsoft has faced some criticism in the last few months that its 2008 line-up was looking thin and that a resurgent Sony PlayStation 3 would trample on the console.

People pointed out that in 2007, despite a line-up which included Halo 3, Mass Effect and Bioshock, the console was only truly dominant (ie heavily outsold the PS3) in the US and UK.

The Nintendo Wii of course outsold both the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

At the Game Developers Conference Microsoft decided to pull out one of its big guns and try and stave off the growing chatter that the console was in for a difficult 12 months.

At the end of a keynote speech delivered by the firm's head of Live services, John Schappert, Microsoft announced a follow-up to the multi-award winning Gears of War.

A teaser trailer was shown to delegates, which really gave nothing away, and the game's lead designer Cliffy B said it would be out in November and would be "bigger, better and more badass".

Crucially the game's developer Epic had been on stage earlier in the keynote showing off the latest features of its Unreal engine and used Gears of War characters and locations to show what it was now capable of.

It's no leap of logic to assume that those features will appear in Gears 2.

They include: more dynamic lighting, destructible environments, new water effects and flocking attributes for large numbers of characters on a screen at one time.

For Epic Gears of War 2 will be the ultimate poster boy for what its engine is capable of.

For Microsoft Gears of War 2 will be the ultimate rebuke to those who feel the console will suffer in the months ahead.

The game comes as no surprise - the first title was such a success Microsoft would have paid anything to get a sequel.

The criticism that Microsoft faces is that a blockbuster title like Gears of War 2 does nothing to bring new audiences to gamers; it just keeps the fan boys happy.

Rory Cellan-Jones

Zennstrom and the TV Revolution

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 20 Feb 08, 08:53 GMT

must be the most important digital entrepreneur to have emerged in Europe over the last five years. He has given us free music with the file-sharing service, free phone calls through , and is now touting free television through his service. He has pioneered technologies which threaten to disrupt the music, telecoms and television industries - his only problem has been how to prove they can be profitable.

Last year Joost raised $45 million from investors - after initial funding from Zennstrom and his Skype co-founder - to launch a platform enabling TV firms to put their content in front of a global audience. There was a lot of hype and hope about this advertising-supported platform which was going to be the big winner from the internet television revolution, just as Skype had made internet telephony take off.

But when I interviewed Niklas Zennstrom at a networking event in London this week, he conceded that Joost was going to take a lot longer to reach a big audience than Skype, partly because of the need to reach complex deals with media owners. And when I asked when he expected to turn a profit, he made it clear that was so far off it wasn't worth talking about now.

Once you download the Joost software, you do get access to an awful lot of television for nothing. But it's difficult to get very excited about what is on offer - whether it's old movies or the "Motors & Babes" channel - and indeed there are complaints on the discussion forum about the poor content.

Zennstrom insists that Joost does not need blockbuster programming, like the Premier League football on which BskyB built its business. He believes this global platform can prosper by serving viewers with all sorts of special interests, from fly-fishing enthusiasts to gadget fans. What's not clear to me is why a large audience will go to the bother of installing software without the lure of something they can't get anywhere else.

2007 was supposed to be the year that internet television took off, with the launch of a whole clutch of services with wacky names and big ambitions. But two things have happened - the viewers have been slower to take to online TV than expected, and the big established broadcasters have launched their own platforms, keen to avoid the mistakes of the music industry which handed the digital initiative to Apple's iTunes service.

Still, the Swedish serial entrepreneur has a track record of producing services that people want to use and tell their friends about, so maybe Joost will take off. Niklas Zennstrom is sensitive about suggestions that he is better at innovation than commercialisation - he insists that Skype is now profitable, despite Ebay's $1.4 billion write-down of the business it bought in 2005. But he may have to prove that his internet television operation can make money before moving on to his next world-changing venture.

Darren Waters

Gaming with the power of your mind

  • Darren Waters
  • 20 Feb 08, 01:39 GMT

The humble controller has long been a blessing and a curse of gaming. For many people it is a barrier, which is partly why Nintendo's Wii has been so successful.

The Wiimote makes gaming more intuitive and natural. But what about going several steps further and removing the controller altogether?

US/Australian firm Emotiv believe they have done just that with their - a neuroheadset which interprets the neural activity in the brain.

With it you can control action in a game with your thoughts and emotions; attacking creatures with an angry face or lifting objects by just thinking of the movement.

I was shown a demo this afternoon and the technology shows great promise. But to be clear - the headset doesn't mean you can strap on and run around Halo 3 blasting away at enemies just by thinking.

All of the actions I saw demonstrated were quite considered and slow paced. There was little sense that the device can translate thought to action in milliseconds - the kind of time frame needed for FPS games.

The Epoc will need the support of developers if it is to succeed and to that end Emotiv has released an SDK (software development kit).

Hopefully developers will rise to the challenge because this area of immersion and control could prove to be the breakthrough gaming has longed for.

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