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Carmack and Megatexture

Next game from Id Software will be released this year: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I’m writing about this because John Carmack seems to have implemented an interesting technology for terrain rendering. What I can deduce reading this interview and lot of forums in internet is that it is a similar algorithm as the one described by Arul Prakash and Hugues Hoppe in the last GDC: Geometry Clipmaps, an unique and huge texture that is smoothly interpolated (and may be proceduraly generated) in the GPU. The name given by ID Software is Megatexture (contributing to the MegaHype surrounding John Carmack, of course, a deserved one)

Geometry Wars

Xbox Live Arcade is one of the best things that Xbox360 has brought to us. Most of the games are incredibly addictive. Geometry Wars is one of the best games of Xbox360. Yes, a 5€ game competing with 60€ games. If you are addict to this game, you will enjoy this video: 4.191 million points!

XBOX360 arrives to Europe. First impressions

Finally, the last friday I got my xbox360. I decided to apply my 50% discount to PGR3. I loved PGR2 and now I loving this latest version. It is the same game concept but with better graphics and better online integration. The new live system is fascinating, you can compete with other players with your same skill (TrueSkill), you can see your friends in the GothamTV event and you can continue talking with people even when changing to other game. Technically I think this is the best game for xbox360 now. The implementation of HDRI (10bits per component) and MotionBlur (though I missed the motion blur used in the replays of the previous version) is a must see for everybody. Obviously I expect more from this generation of games.

I specially like how all your xbox activities are recorded and kept visibile to other people (you can disable this if you want). People can watch the games you have played and the achievements you have got. This facts, that seem to be irritating some people are one of the things that made me buy this console.

On the wrong side, the distribution of the console in Europe have been a disaster. I can’t understand why VGACables won’t arrive until next week. And the console is pretty noisy. Add to this that it hung up three times this weekend. It’s winter here in Spain, what will happen when the summer comes?

MarioKartDS

Yesterday, Nintendo started to sell Mario Kart DS here in Spain. Undoubtly, this is a game that sells consoles, NintendoDS in this case. I was tempted to buy it when Nintendogs was released, and now I have decided to buy it (the pack with console + mariokart). The game is absolutely addictive and reminds me the feeling from SNES. To this, you add the Wi-Fi support. This is the first NintendoDS game to support Wi-Fi. Here in Spain, Nintendo is getting some interesting agreements to get the maximun hotspot coverage. I am suspicious of this idea to work in Spain. Nevertheless you can always use yor home connection to play in internet.

In the topic of games, Nokia assume that N-Gage gaming phone is not working properly and they retire temporally from the videogame market until 2007.

XBOX360 is out [USA]

We will have to wait until December 2nd to buy it in Europe, but US gamers can buy it since yesterday. Being a hardware fanatic I will buy it only by the hardware you get (Main Processor, Graphic Processor, Motherboard) . The 299€ (399€ the full version) is worth the money.

The most wanted games for me are Perfect Dark Zero and Project Gotham Racing 3. They are getting good reviews to be the first games for this generation. We will have to wait some months until we get the first games using the full potential of the console. Most of the first games are not fully optimized and are only using one of the three cores.

By the way, not everybody is buying this console to play. What would the people betting in ebay say about this?