Nvidia fans get icing on the Cake

It's not a lie.

Valve has entered an agreement with Nvidia to screw ATI over. All owners with Nvidia cards can now download an exclusive extended version of the Portal Demo, plus the full version of Peggle Extreme.

For those of you who didn't buy The Orange Box because you already owned half the games included in it, but wanted to get your hands on Peggle Extreme (which is only available if you buy The Orange Box), now is a great chance to pick it up.

Take the system test by following this link. Don't worry if you don't have Steam installed already, you'll be asked to download it. (if i'm wrong, just head directly to http://www.steampowered.com to install Steam. I highly recommend it anyway.)

List of games:

Portal: First Slice (extended demo)
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Peggle Extreme

Does your computer suck for gaming?

Some people don't believe the box when they buy a game. Minimum requirements don't necessarily mean you'll have an enjoyable gaming experience, yet people still buy the game. Then they complain that the game is unplayable.

Now if you, for some reason, don't know your computers specs or can't make the connection between what you have and what's written on the box, why don't you check your system requirements against every game?

A word to the macheads out there, don't bother with the site, you'll amusingly get "unknown" for every test.

Blu-ray to win format wars?

Yea, I'm a little late. Anyone who has been following the news knows that Warner Bros. Entertainment has decided to side with Blu-ray.

The impasse was broken Friday by Warner Bros. Entertainment, the last major studio to put out movies in both formats. It announced it was ditching HD DVD, and from May on, would only publish on Blu-ray and traditional DVD.
The decision puts a strong majority of the major studios, five versus two, in the Blu-ray camp.

That will probably boost PS3 sales, as the prices for PS3's are becoming reasonable. As much Sony bashing as I've done recently, even I'm starting to consider a PS3. I think the combination of Blu-ray and Sony's hardware specs could see itself out-pacing the Xbox 360's graphics in a couple years. It's going to be a tough fight though, because graphics itself won't be able to take down the Halo and Xbox Live community in general.

There's still one more deciding factor in the format wars and that's the Adult Film Industry. It's been said that porn helped decide VHS has the winning format. So far, the adult film industry has chosen HD-DVD, but that's really not saying much since we're talking about a handful of films. Things might change though, since PS3 owners are apparently all porn addicts and Digital Playground has released their most popular title Pirates out on Blu-ray.

However, Joone now tells CePro that PlayStation 3 owners have been demanding that the studio release movies in the Blu-ray format. (PlayStation 3, owned by more than two million people in North America, has a Blu-ray player inside.)

I still don't like Sony's attempt after attempt to dominate formats, but I guess if you keep trying, eventually you'll win one.

Your old TV is lame

TV broadcasters are about to stop using analog signals in favor of digital ones. For those of you who still have analog televisions, you can pick up coupons for digital converters here. They are going to cost about 60 bucks and the coupons are for 40.

Even if you have a digital TV, it might be work signing up for the coupons. I'm thinking that your analog TV tuner card for your computer might benefit from it. A bonus is that those TV tuner cards will probably be extremely cheap after the switch is made.