Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > April > 30
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Video: Big robots power NCsoft’s ‘Exteel’
In honor of this week’s release of, “Iron Man,” I thought I’d share with you a video of some other awesome robot-style action.
Austin’s NCsoft released this video today related to their new giant mech game “Exteel,” which is free-to-play.
Enjoy!
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Digital review: ‘Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds’
At first glance, the PlayStation 3 game “Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds” looks like an overly cartoonish representation of video game golf. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog appear in golf pants.
But the cutesy touches — anime-style Bobbleheaded characters and chirpy voice acting — are just window dressing for a challenging and satisfying golf simulation. Taking advantage of the PlayStation 3’s beefy hardware, the game offers gorgeously rendered courses, smooth game play and good online play options.
Even if you’re not a golf fan, there’s still plenty to like. The game’s graphics are impressive, and the controls have been improved over previous “Hot Shots” games to make them even more intuitive. Starting with the single-player Challenge Mode, the game progresses at an easy pace, opening up new options and opponents gradually. A few hours in, the tournaments increase in difficulty, and you’ll need to balance out your character’s strengths with new equipment and power-ups.
Those skills all come into play in multiplayer and online modes. Matches I played online were tough but friendly. Opponents offered encouragement via text messages, but they were also regularly scoring birdies and eagles. You start off in a game lobby, walking around different rooms and striking up conversations with other players with an even more cartoony avatar of yourself. From here, you can find games. One nice touch is that holes are played concurrently. You don’t have to wait around for each opponent to take their turn. Instead, you see ghostly, nearly transparent images of other players tackling the same hole as you play. That structure speeds things up considerably — you can get through a quick nine holes in about 15 minutes.
The most recent “Tiger Woods PGA Tour” games have disappointed some players and critics. For those with a PS3, “Hot Shots” is a surprisingly good alternative. It has enough depth to satisfy golf enthusiasts and casual players alike.
“Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds”
$60, PlayStation 3
Rated E for Everyone
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A (wireless) bridge to tomorrow: Airport Express
When we built our house, we spent some extra money having a home theater specialist run audio wire, coaxial cable and Ethernet lines throughout.
Some of it was money well spent: Having our rear speakers in the living room mounted overhead with no wires showing was great. Some of the other expense was a waste: We’ve never installed speakers on the back patio or upstairs because the A/V receiver in the living room cranks up music loud enough to be heard everywhere.
And in the era of cheap Wi-Fi, creating wired network connections in several rooms doesn’t seem like such a good use of money, either. In one way it’s helpful: Our cable modem is housed in a master bedroom closet and connects through the hard wiring to an Airport Extreme wireless router that’s far away upstairs.
But our installer accidentally installed a phone line connection in our living room instead of Ethernet and I never bothered to have him come back and correct that. So for the past four years, the only way my Xbox 360 or satellite TV set-top box could connect to the Internet was through a wireless bridge.
A wireless bridge connects to an installed Wi-Fi network, but has an Ethernet port that allows you to connect wired Internet devices. In the case of our satellite box, you can only access On Demand features through a high-speed Ethernet connection. Since there’s no Ethernet wall outlet nearby, a wireless bridge allows us to convert Wi-Fi to a wired connection without running more wires through the house.
I’d been using a very old wireless bridge, a D-Link Wireless-B bridge, circa 2002. The device was small, but ugly. It was slow and had annoyingly bright lights, but it got the job done. I could connect to Xbox Live and download TV shows via On Demand, even if the speeds weren’t spectacular.
Recently, the bridge stopped working. It had trouble connecting to the XBox network and wasn’t playing nice with our router. I got tired of disconnecting everything to diagnose weird network settings.
So the hunt was on for a faster bridge. Wireless-G bridges, especially for gaming, are plentiful. But I was holding out for something that could run at the newer Wireless-N standard because my router already broadcasts at that speed. Wireless-N bridges are just starting to appear in the marketplace and some cost as much as $100 or more.
The Express also recently was revamped to run at Wireless-N speeds. For $99 on Amazon, I had my device.
The setup wasn’t Apple-intuitive, but it did take less than an hour. I had to tell both the Extreme router and the Express bridge how to communicate with each other (it involved configuring an obscure protocol called “WDS” in the setup software). But once I got the green light from the Express, I was able to go online with the Xbox and the DirecTV box. Connections were speedier and both my laptop and desktop recognized the new iTunes speaker.
Combining iTunes streaming with the iPhone software “Signal,” I had an iTunes remote control that could change tracks from anywhere in the house (or outside of it).
For some people, this kind of setup might be overkill. It might be cheaper and less time-consuming to run a cable to the living room or have an installer come do it for you.
But I’ve found the Express to be a nice little Wi-Fi marvel, and streaming iTunes music (including copy-protected songs purchased from the iTunes store) is a welcome bonus.
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