gaming

Look out, modders: federal customs agents have just announced a new crackdown on the smuggling of "illegal" devices that enable gamers to play pirated wares on Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox 360, Sony's Playstation 2 and other consoles.

As part of an ongoing investigation into the sale and distribution of such "circumvention devices," U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from 22 offices said they raided businesses, storefronts and residents in 16 states on Wednesday. They reported executing 32 search warrants, but there was no word on whether any arrests were … Read more

Unlike a lot of my colleagues here at CNET Networks, I'm not a gamer. My tactics in hand-to-hand combat games entail less adroit maneuvering using precise button combinations and more random mashing of various buttons in the faint hope that if I mash fast enough, I'll accidentally stumble across some winning combination that I can never hope to recreate. And my skills in driving games may leave you concerned about my actual, real-life driving skills. (Don't worry, I know not to mow down unsuspecting pedestrians. Usually.) So it's a little odd that I'm here writing … Read more

The iPhone is one of the most lusted-after gadgets, but if the size of their respective crane games is any indicator, the Nintendo Wii is still the most coveted tech--at least on the Point Pleasant Boardwalk at the Jersey Shore. When I saw the iPhone crane game images on JoeyGadget last week (via Gizmodo), I couldn't help but think of my own summer Jersey Shore trip a few weeks ago, where I saw this incredibly large Wii crane game. While the Wii game clearly dominates in size, the iPhone game costs more per play--$5 per try for an iPhone and only $2 per try for a Wii. I also spotted some Xbox 360 and PS3 crane games during my visit, but they were the same size as the iPhone game and didn't get front-of-the-arcade treatment like the Wii game. And as you'd probably guess, I didn't see anyone come close to actually winning a Wii.

More pics after the jump.… Read more

What came first, the chicken or the egg? For PC gamers, the answer is a no brainer...The advanced hardware comes first, and the game titles that can truly take advantage of that hardware come months, if not years, later. It comes as no surprise that Microsoft's own DirectX 10 page talks about the benefits of DX10 in the future tense: "Many of the newest Windows games will take full advantage of the next-generation graphics technology in Windows Vista called DirectX 10." (Italics added.)

Game developers have little incentive right now to produce games for DX10, as … Read more

Even those of us at Crave who aren't huge gamers discovered long ago that we would lust after just about any design to come out of Razer's equipment labs. And though it's difficult to get us worked up over a mouse these days, but the company has managed to accomplish that too, once again.

Razer just outfitted its ambidextrous "Diamondback" gaming mouse with a 3G infrared sensor, a technology that was first embedded in its "DeathAdder" model. Available next month for $60, the 1800-dpi Diamondback will be available in "Frost Blue," &… Read more

In a poker contest of man vs. machine, the results are in. Humans-2. Polaris-1. (And one draw.)

On Tuesday night, Phil Laak and Ali Esmali, two professional poker players, faced off against a computer program called Polaris, which was developed over 26 years at the University of Alberta. The contest, held at the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in Vancouver, Canada, was one of the first scientific poker contests involving real players.

In the end, Polaris beat Laak and Esmali in the first match of 500 hands; tied the second match; then lost the last … Read more

It's been a hectic week, but we didn't want that to deter us from recounting this cool event: Last Friday night Crave joined a standing-room-only crowd of geeks, artists, and filmmakers at Los Angeles' Machine Project art space for an overview and screening of machinima films. A compound of machine and cinema, machinima describes the art of making films out of video games. Bypassing both labor-intensive hand-drawn animation and computer-intensive digital animation, machinima artists instead use game engines as cheap animation tools, combining video sequences created within the game with original dialogue and soundtracks. The result is far … Read more

The premiere bunny and dog freelance police duo of the gaming world are coming back for another round. Last year, Telltale Games released Sam & Max Season One, a series of six episodic, downloadable adventure games starring Sam and Max, the comic book characters turned video game heroes. Nostalgic gamers, still full of happy memories of LucasArts' 1993 adventure Sam & Max Hit the Road, ate up these new Sam & Max games. The episodes were first available on GameTap but later were released on Steam and can now be physically purchased on a disc.

Fortunately, gamers don't have … Read more

A group of computer scientists from Canada said Thursday that they've managed to crack the "code" of the checkers board game so that a computer program can win or draw against any opponent, according to a story from the BBC.

Even though a computer program by the name of Chinook won the World's Checkers Championship in 1994, that software would lose the game occasionally.

The Canadian team, which was led by Jonathan Schaeffer, chair of the department of computer science at the University of Alberta, said that checkers has been the most challenging game to beat … Read more