Ben Gilbert
Articles by Ben Gilbert
Canon's latest Selphy printer adds Instagram-sized square stickers
We'll forgive you if you've never heard of Canon's Selphy printer. It's an adorable little $100 printer that, in its latest iteration, has an especially zietgeist-y new feature: square sticker printing. "For the Instagram crowd," a Canon rep laughingly explained as we checked out the Selphy CP910 at CES 2014. Beyond the new square printing, little has changed from the previous Selphy. It still features ink cartridges bundled with paper, ensuring you'll never run out of hot dogs before you run out of buns. Moreover, with WiFi built-in, your latest Instagram selfie can be printed on the Selphy without having to move images. Pretty neat! Should that new feature be enough to spark your interest, Canon's Sephy CP910 ships to retailers "mid-month" for $100. Canon's also got a new Pixma photo printer here, and it's just $300 -- pretty great for an entry level photo printer. It's that big guy above! Head into the gallery below for a deeper look at both the Selphy and Pixma straight from CES 2014. Richard Lai contributed to this report.
Are you good enough for 'Bloodborne'?
Am I "good" at games? I don't know. I'm 30 years old: I've been playing video games for 25 of those years, give or take, and covering games professionally for just over six years. I spent two weeks this year completing Mega Man 1 through 4. I've sunk hundreds of hours into Spelunky. Whether I'm "good" at games is up for debate; I love challenging games. Despite this, I've never loved the divisive, feverishly adored/hated Souls games (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1 and 2). Their challenges felt too great to overcome, their systems too inscrutable, their technical issues too great in number. They felt frustrating instead of challenging. Bloodborne -- the latest entry in the series and the first without a "Souls" moniker attached -- changes that. This is a game I love to hate. But I mostly just love it.
This is Sony's streaming TV service, PlayStation Vue
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-366276{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-366276, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-366276{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-366276").style.display="none";}catch(e){} Wondering what Sony's new live streaming TV service, PlayStation Vue, looks like in action? Well, if you live in Chicago or New York City or Philadelphia, you can go try for yourself on PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4. There's a seven-day free trial! But if you're one of the billions of people outside of the trio of introductory markets, we've got a video walkthrough for you above.
The history behind Nintendo's flip-flop on mobile gaming
Did you hear the one about Nintendo "never" putting its content on mobile platforms? About how Nintendo makes its own hardware specifically intended to cater to its software? About how it would dilute those "brands" (think: Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong) to put them on hardware other than Nintendo's? Clearly Nintendo isn't so worried about that, as it announced plans last evening to work with Japan mobile game giant DeNA on moving its many brands over to mobile. Or, as Nintendo describes the relationship: a "business and capital alliance to develop and operate new game apps for smart devices and build a new multi-device membership service for consumers worldwide." Sounds like a blast!
Everything Valve does is because of Steam
Why is Valve getting into virtual reality? Why is Valve making Steam Machines and the Steam Controller? Why did Valve make its own Linux-based operating system? Why did Valve make the Steam Controller? Why is Valve releasing its game engine, Source, for free? It's the Steam economy, stupid! Valve's game store boasts "over 125 million active accounts worldwide." How does Valve keep growing that store? By literally everything else it does. Here's Valve president Gabe Newell explaining it to us last week at GDC 2015: "We're trying to build standard interfaces and standard implementations that other people can use. Because, to be honest, we're going to make our money on the back end, when people buy games from Steam. Right? So we're trying to be forward-thinking and make those longer-term investments for PC gaming that are going to come back a couple years down the road."
Sony's PlayStation Vue TV service to launch in the next two weeks
Sony's PlayStation-based streaming live TV service won't go live nationwide until sometime later in 2015. If you live in Chicago, Philadelphia or New York City, however, the service lights up "in the next two weeks." That's according to Sony Computer Entertainment head Andrew House -- he's the top PlayStation exec at Sony. House told the Wall Street Journal as much in an interview today, though he stopped short of providing details on pricing or launches in other parts of the US.
Apple wants your iPhone to double as a medical device
Apple's taking another step in its ongoing effort to make its iDevices more friendly to medical professionals. "ResearchKit" was introduced this morning in a San Francisco event by Senior VP of operations Jeff Williams; he calls it, "a software framework made specifically for medical research." More specifically, ResearchKit is a solution for making iOS devices with HealthKit into "powerful tools for diagnosis." The long and short is ResearchKit is intended to make medical diagnosis apps easier to create by medical professionals. A handful of apps were shown off that help with diagnosis of a range of conditions, from Parkinson's to breast cancer. The data collected by these apps, which Apple says it won't see and you can opt out of sharing, can be used for enormous research projects.
How serious are you about virtual reality?
The absolute best/worst virtual reality stock photo we could find Are you prepared to dedicate a room in your house to virtual reality? Perhaps you're a little less crazy than me, but you're okay with a wire running across your living room to a headset? Or maybe both of those sound crazy to you, but a headset that can plug into your phone is okay? These are the emerging options for virtual reality: a medium finally coming into its own, that's poised to disrupt industries and hairdos the world over.
'Rock Band' is back with 'Rock Band 4': headed to Xbox One and PS4 in 2015
Remember way back in 2009? Times were simpler then: Pittsburgh's Steelers were Super Bowl champions; Tiger Woods was caught having an affair; and I was playing a lot of Rock Band. You probably were too. Many millions of you were, anyway, and the plastic peripheral market was booming. In a few short years, the world went from zero to dozens of plastic guitars, keyboards, mics and drums per household, all in the name of games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. House parties quickly turned into Rock Band parties with surprising frequency. It was only another few short years before those games, and the peripherals they required, fell off a cliff. That was 2010, when Rock Band 3 launched. It's been five years, and the world is apparently ready for more Rock Band. The folks behind the original Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises are back in the development seat and bringing Rock Band 4 to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this year.
Valve's push into VR will span many headsets from many companies
Currently, the HTC Vive is the only virtual reality headset that's part of Valve's Steam VR push. That's not because it's the only one, but because it's the only one we know about thus far. "You should think of the Vive as the first in the same way there are multiple Steam Machines," Valve president Gabe Newell told me this morning. In other words, Steam VR is an open platform supported by Valve. "We're building tools and hopefully they're valuable to hardware partners who want to do it. In some cases, we'll take the leadership role in shipping stuff. But we're really just building tools for other people to continue. So you'll see more headsets."
Valve is solving virtual reality's input problem
Among the handful of announcements Valve made at this year's Game Developers Conference was a subtle and hugely important one: Lighthouse. What in the world is Lighthouse? It's the "base stations" referenced in Valve's VR headset announcement, and it's even more important than the incredibly impressive headset. Valve president Gabe Newell compares it to USB and expects it to fundamentally change how people interact with virtual reality. "Now that we've got tracking, then you can do input," Newell said in an interview with Engadget this morning. "It's a tracking technology that allows you to track an arbitrary number of points, room-scale, at sub-millimeter accuracy 100 times a second." What that means for me and you is that Lighthouse puts your body into the virtual world with stunning precision. I tested it and can confirm: holy shit, yes, this really works. Want to reach out and touch something in VR? Lighthouse is how you'll do it.
Using NVIDIA's streaming, Android TV set-top box: the Shield
You already know what NVIDIA's latest Shield hardware is: an Android TV-powered set-top box that uses the latest chip from NVIDIA. It streams games over the company's "Netflix for gaming" platform known as GRID; it streams games from your local PC; it powers Twitch streaming at the same time of said streamed content; heck, it powers games like Crysis 3 locally, running on Android. But is it any good? The only answer I've got is maybe.
Crysis 3, Doom 3 and more ported to Android, powered by NVIDIA
"Can it play Crysis?" is the question people are still asking after all these years, despite the vast majority of game hardware now being more than capable of running Crytek's gorgeous first-person shooter. It's how NVIDIA introduced Crysis 3 this week, running on its new Android TV-powered NVIDIA Shield set-top box. Which is to say yes, it can play Crysis. The game is outright running on Android, albeit only Android devices powered by NVIDIA's bleeding edge X1 processor.
Shield: NVIDIA's $200 gaming-focused Android TV set-top box
Another year, another new Shield device from NVIDIA. What's Shield? It's the hardware line from NVIDIA that spans a bizarre handheld game console, a powerful gaming tablet, and now a $200, Android TV-powered set-top box. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the Android TV-powered set-top box this evening during a GDC 2015 press conference, which the company referred to as a combination "revolutionary TV", "gaming console" and "supercomputer." Head below for all the specs as we learn them live from NVIDIA.
Using the PlayStation 4's new version of Project Morpheus
I just used Sony's newest version of the PlayStation 4 virtual reality headset, Project Morpheus. Rather, I should say that I just faced down a burly, British would-be-torturer before being whisked away to a first-person gunfight in a well-appointed London manor. That's "The London Heist," one of the new demos from Sony's London Studio being shown off this week at GDC 2015. It's intense, and demonstrative of the new prototype's upped specs.
Sony's PlayStation 4 VR headset launching in the 'first half of 2016'
Sony's PlayStation 4-powered virtual reality headset, Project Morpheus, has new specs and a slightly different look (seen above). Okay, it doesn't look that different. What's new? For one, the screen resolution is improved: it's now 1,920 x RGB x 1,080. The refresh rate is doubled from last year at 120Hz, and the new 5.7-inch screen also has a higher field of view (nearly 100 degrees). Oh right! It's got a new, bigger screen at 5.7 inches! But you already guessed that. Further upping the specs is lower latency, now under 18 milliseconds. Most importantly, the unit will launch at retail in "the first half of 2016." That's... kinda soon? Almost?
'Liquid VR' is AMD's push into virtual reality with software
The latest Silicon Valley company to hop on the virtual reality bandwagon is AMD, this morning unveiling what it's calling "Liquid VR": a software development kit aimed at making VR easier for everyone. The announcement comes from a presentation at GDC 2015 in San Francisco, where virtual reality is dominating the news. What does Liquid VR do for developers and users? It essentially makes everything much easier. As one AMD rep put it during this morning's presentation, "You can plug an Oculus Rift into a computer and start 3D rendering directly to the headset, even without Oculus' SDK." In so many words, Liquid VR is yet another solution for making various VR headsets work easily on various devices; it also optimizes the use of that headset for that particular computer (no doubt powered by AMD's chips).
We're live at the 2015 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco!
Every year, in late winter, covering the game industry gives me a chance to leave New York City at its most miserable. It's with great pleasure that I tell you, yes, we're here in San Francisco -- where it's 60 degrees and not 34 -- to bring you all the news, hands-ons, interviews, videos and combinations thereof, straight from the 2015 Game Developers Conference. From here on out, we're gonna make that name a bit simpler: GDC 2015. We've even got a page right here where you can keep up to date on all the aforementioned coverage. Head below for a brief rundown of the week to come.
One of gaming's most used engines is now free
Created in Unreal Engine 4 Game development is expensive. It's not a question of the tools costing too much; game engines like Unity and GameMaker Studio offer free versions, and paid versions aren't far out of reach. That's a recent development, though. When the last generation of game consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii) ruled the roost, the Unreal Engine was both ubiquitous and costly. Its latest iteration, Unreal Engine 4, is widely used, but has taken a sideline to free offerings from the likes of Unity. The engine's maker, Epic Games, isn't sitting idly by and letting the competition take over, though: as of this morning, Unreal Engine 4 is free for all to use.
Samsung's VR headset gets the first Oculus-powered paid app store
It's the day many, many virtual reality developers have been waiting for: Finally, a way to sell VR games to people with VR headsets. Namely, Oculus and Samsung's collaboration on the Gear VR headset is bearing digital fruit in the form of a digital store. In short: You can finally buy and sell games on Samsung's VR headset. That's a bigger deal than it sounds, as Gear VR's store has been riddled with little more than tech and game demos since its launch late last year. We've been anxious for deeper experiences, and many developers have been withholding those experiences for a time when they could actually make money on their work. Let the floodgates open!