Global 2012: 8 cool things you can do with your game console

The Xbox 360 Arcade with wireless controller. This is a Jasper chipset, with onboard memory. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
You obviously bought your game console to play games, but these days, you can do more with an Xbox 360 or PS3 than rampage through Modern Warfare 3 maps. A lot more.

Thanks to a number of awesome updates, both the 360 and PS3 are now viable all-in-one entertainment hubs, offering a wealth of features and services that make conventional cable boxes and media players seem ridiculously one-dimensional. Here are a handful of non-gaming uses for your game console:

Watch TV shows and films
Be a sports nut
Run your home's media
Auto-blog
Network socially
Fight disease
Use it as a stereo
Video chat

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/8-cool-things-game-console-232954117.html

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Global 2011: 5 things you never knew about Pac-Man

Image via Wikipedia
Having been a part of the pop-culture landscape for over 30 years now, Pac-Man is a pretty familiar character.

He has adorned cereal boxes, been the star of a Saturday morning cartoon program and appeared on virtually every gaming platform to have ever been released.

That's not just systems from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It also includes essentially every cell phone that has a screen, long-dead portable systems and plug-and-play devices for your TV. Along the way, the little pellet-muncher has built an empire that has allowed publisher Namco-Bandai to survive the worst the economy could throw at it.

But even the most well known icons have their secrets. This week, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Toru Iwatani, creator of the game, offered a postmortem on the industry's biggest franchise-and told a few tales most fans have probably never heard.

Here are the five most surprising:

1. The point of the game was to attract girls
2. Each ghost had specific orders
3. What, exactly, does Pac-Man mean?
4. The missing puzzle piece
5. The ghosts were almost just one color

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Global 2011: Sony announces 'Next Generation Portable' handheld

Image by @kevinv033 via Flickr
In a move that shocked precisely no one, Sony confirmed months of speculation by officially unveiling their next handheld video game system at a press event in Tokyo on Thursday.

Codenamed "NGP" for Next Generation Portable, the system packs a load of impressive technology, including two analog sticks, a 5-inch OLED touchscreen (for reference, an iPhone's screen is 3.5 inches), a second touch pad on the back of the device, and a new flash-card media format.

Sony announced that the system will be released before the end of 2011, though no word on whether that's a worldwide date or just for Japan. No pricing details were released.

To better compete with longtime rival Nintendo's soon-to-be-released 3DS system and Apple's formidable iOS devices, the NGP will also feature 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, front and rear cameras, an electronic compass, and six-axis motion-sensing capability. Yikes. Five to one it will also cut through this tin can!

Sony revealed a few other NGP functions, such as a location-based application that lets users find nearby players and a user-interface that ties social-networking features to every game.  The system has a new rounded form factor as well (Sony calls it the 'Super Oval Design') and is physically a bit larger than the current PSP-3000 model.

http://blog.games.yahoo.com/blog/346-sony-announces-next-generation-portable-handheld/

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