Dawn of War 2 standalone expansion 'Retribution' announced for early 2011

Relic and THQ have announced the second standalone expansion to the Warhammer 40k-themed RTS Dawn of War 2. The expansion will be called Retribution, and will introduce the series' first multi-race single-player campaign. The first race announced is the Orks, but players will be able to choose other races to play through the campaign as well, meaning you can finally play as something other than Space Marines in the single-player game.

Multiplayer also gets extras in the form of new units, some new maps and a whole new playable race to fight with. There's no word out of Gamescom yet as to exactly which race that is, but given that we've played as Orks, Space Marines and Eldar in the series before, playing as the Tyranids is a pretty good guess (edited) already in the game. Commenters are guessing Dark Eldar. We'll find out for sure when the expansion is released -- it's scheduled for Q1 2011.

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Pac-Man creator reminisces about classic game design, calls for creativity

Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani wants the next Pac-Man game to be about "a singing Pac-Man." Not a musical, "not Chicago," but more of a Blues Brothers type thing, he told a packed house at his GDC postmortem. Nobody there knew what that meant either.

In the hourlong presentation, Iwatani shared concept art from the thirty-year-old arcade classic, including the hand-drawn concept for the famous Pac-Man death animation, and even a chart of ghost speeds. He identified the design of Pac-Man as female-focused, with an emphasis on "eating" as a verb ("Girls love to eat desserts," Iwatani explained. "My wife often eats desserts.") and cute characters, including cute enemies.
An executive at Namco suggested that those ghosts all be red, to avoid confusion about some perhaps not being enemies, but Iwatani countermanded that with a survey. When she saw the survey, which unanimously supported multicolored ghosts, the executive agreed with Iwatani. "She was a wonderful manager." Iwatani also shared the clockwork-like algorithms behind the ghosts -- one follows Pac-Man, one aims for a space 32 pixels in front of Pac-Man, one mirrors Pac-Man's position on the opposite side, and one just runs around randomly. An audience member asking a question described it as "like clockwork."

The talk continued with a discussion of Pac-Man Championship Edition and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. According to Iwatani, Pac-Man CE director Tadashi Iguchi spent a year studying Pac-Man to determine what was fun about it before distilling that into CE.

Also on the subject of study: Iwatani's new job post-Namco is at Tokyo Polytechnic University, where he teaches game design. His students make their own games (like the TGS amateur division award-winning Sand Crush) and perform research about games, like measuring bloodflow to the brain during various gameplay activities. Then, using his students' work as an example, Iwatani called for more creativity from the game design community. And perhaps from the audience as well: when asked about the Western name change from "Puckman" to "Pac-Man," Iwatani told the inquiring audience member "Don't you have the answer? You know why!"

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PS3 stats: Over 41 million consoles sold, PSN revenue up 70 percent in 2010

During the PlayStation Network Analysis panel at GDC, SCEA digital distribution manager Pierre Gravereau provided some platform stats to attendees, revealing worldwide sales of over 41.6 million PS3 consoles. More than 80 percent of consoles are connected to the internet and have spawned 70 million PSN accounts.

Gravereau boasted about the success of PSN in 2010, saying traffic to the PlayStation Store increased by 60 percent compared to the previous year and Sony subsequently saw a 70 percent spike in revenue. Even without exact hard figures, it's quite a dramatic uptick.

Now, we're no bussinessologists, but if you ask us (you asked, right?), we'd have to attribute Sony's success in 2010 to one thing: KB.

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European Researchers Develop World’s First Flexible Organic Microprocessor

European researchers recently announced the development of the world’s first flexible organic microprocessor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco CA. The novel technology harnesses organic semiconductors and has applications ranging from cheaper flexible displays and sensors to high-tech fashion and advanced e-readers.
The flexible microprocessor was developed by polymer and molecular electronics researchers at Imec (a Belgian nanotech research center). Jan Genoe, who led the research with colleague Kris Myny, explained that the largest hurdle in the development of this new technology was figuring out a way to control organic transistors. When it comes to structure, silicon often beats out organic alternatives because the monocrystalline structure allows for more consistent behavior.
In order to turn the current on for one of these transistors, you need to turn up the gate’s voltage to a known threshold. By adding an extra gate to the back of each organic transistor Genoe’s team was able to better control the electric field in the semiconductor, therefore eliminating the unpredictable performance.
Imec’s new flexible microprocessor could lead to an exciting range of applications – if wrapped around pipes it could record water pressure, or it may be used to package food and pharmaceuticals and could indicate whether your meat is rancid or if you forgot to take your meds.

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Acer’s NVIDIA Ion LE powered AspireRevo nettop now available

Acer’s NVIDIA Ion LE Powered AspireRevo nettop was recently spotted on Newegg for just $200. You may or may not be familiar with this nettop as it’s been around for a while minus the NVIDIA Ion LE graphics card.

This Ion LE card coupled with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive make for one of the most affordable ways to view 1080p video content. However, Gizmodo makes note that Adobe Flash isn’t completely optimized for the Ion LE, you may run into problems streaming flash video from sites such as Hulu and YouTube.

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Hacking an iButton

posted by Zach Banks
filed under: peripherals hacks, security hacks, tool hacks

Maxim’s iButtons, which are small ICs in button-sized disks, are starting to show up in more and more places. They have a range of uses, from temperature loggers to identification, and all use the 1-wire protocol to communicate. Over a furrtek, they hacked an iButton used for buying things from vending machines and created an infinite money cheat. They built a small rig based on the ATmega8 to read and write data to the chip. The data was encrypted, so it wasn’t feasible to put an arbitrary amount on the card. Instead, they used a similar technique to the Boston subway hack and restored a previous state to the iButton after something was bought. They also created a hand-held device to backup and restore the contents of a button for portable hacking.

[Thanks furrtek]

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Chalkbot vs Graffitiwriter

posted by Caleb Kraft
filed under: digital cameras hacks, news, robots hacks

For those who watched the Tour de France, you may have been pleasantly surprised to see some cool tech. Nike was using a robot to paint pictures on the street in chalk dot matrix style. It was accepted by the general public as new and innovative, as well as generally cool. In the hacker community though, a bit of trouble began to brew. The Chalkbot bears more than a passing resemblance to a project called GraffitiWriter. GraffitiWriter was a bot initially designed to protest the militarization of robotics. As it turns out, one of the early developers of the GraffitiWriter is behind the Chalkbot in a legitimate contract. The trouble doesn’t seem to be one of intellectual property legalities. People are mad at the corporatization of public work. They want kids watching to know that this system was designed by regular people in their spare time at their homes, not by a team of researches in a secret underground Nike laboratory.

The article takes a bit of a turn and talks some about the possibility of projects being taken and used for corporate advertisement. The specific item they are talking about is the Image Fulgurator which secretly projects images on objects in your photographs. You’ll have to go check that one out to see how it works.

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Inside the Asus EEE Keyboard

posted by Nick Caiello
filed under: news, pcs hacks

It seems that our french friends over at BlogEEE.net have gotten their hands on a prototype of the Asus EEE Keyboard all-in-one keyboard computer. After plugging it in and messing around it a little bit, they decided to take it apart. Although BlogEEE.net is in French, we were able to learn several things about this prototype. According to the site, the PCB in their EEE keyboard is marked as Revision 1, meaning that it is very possible that this could be the finalized version of the PCB that will be seen in retail units. Also, they mention the presence of a Silicon Image sil1392cnu, a chip responsible for sending HD graphics via the EEE’s onboard HDMI port, supporting resolutions anywhere from 480i to 1080p. Perhaps one of the most impressing details uncovered was that when weighed the EEE keyboard clocked in at an impressive 2.1 pounds, lighter than most keyboards that don’t have an onboard CPU or display. While we’ve learned a lot about the Asus EEE Keyboard so far, there is still no information available regarding its release date.

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