After seeing screenshots or video of the Xbox Live Arcade version of Perfect Dark, you may not have been blown away. Coming just weeks after the release of the gorgeous Battlefield: Bad Company 2, not to mention the myriad of other great-looking FPS games that have been released in recent years, it's easy to be underwhelmed. You might even think that it hasn't been updated much from the N64 version -- but if that's what you've been thinking, you clearly haven't taken a look at N64 game in a while.
The video above shows some footage of the opening cinematic and part of the first level in both the N64 and XBLA versions of Perfect Dark. It doesn't take long to see that Rare has clearly polished up the graphics quite a bit since the game's release back in 2000,

The folks at Asus seem to have finally got it, as the top management decided to stop manufacturing as well as shipping the recovery DVD which comes with each package of the Eee PC. Why, you ask? Just in case your memory eludes you, there is no optical drive with the Eee PC, so you will need to fork out more money to get an external DVD drive instead, and it would be interesting to do a simple survey and find out just how many Eee PC users actually own a DVD drive. Good call, Asus, better late than never and at least you will do your bit in saving the environment.

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Game Faces: Meet the 1UP Community
1UP users speak up about themselves and their love of games. By Mike Cruz




Who is 1UP? Our staff page is part of the answer to that question, but 1UP is also made up of thousands of gamers who contribute blogs, comments, videos, cheats, and countless other precious bits of gaming knowledge to the site. Now, it's time to turn the spotlight toward a few members of the 1UP family to learn about their backgrounds and get some insight on their attitudes towards gaming.

Meet: NintendoTheory |

<span class="articleText">Legend has it that the term "yakuza" derives from the classic Japanese card game hanafuda. Of the many combinations of cards you can draw as a hand, the worst is eight-nine-three -- pronounced, in an old dialect of Japanese, "ya-ku-za." In order to win the game with such a hand, you would need a combination of trickery, luck, and courage -- qualities that the gangsters who took the name as their own held in high esteem. Despite being the worst of society, they would use those strengths to attain power, wealth, and respect.
Centuries later, the U.S. version of Sega's Yakuza 3 has been dealt an equally bad hand. Released without several of the features of its Japanese counterpart, Yakuza 3's Western release has generated enough nerd

Picture: the Alcatel-Lucent Dashboard launched at MWC, picture with new features coming soon

[SXSW] Alcatel-Lucent today announced the packaged API (Application Programming Interfaces) bundles, and an associated revenue sharing model that eliminates upfront costs for developers and offers new revenue streams for service providers. Additionally, a new business and application modeling tool has been released; it allows developers to get the most out of their applications, according to the company. I am not a developer and I have not seen the bundles or the tool, if you are a developer attending SXSW, go to the &ldquo;Eleven API

<span class="articleText">One of the featured games during Sony's PlayStation Move press conference was the nifty looking fighting simulator called, for now, Motion Fighter (Sony is quick to use the phrase "working title" in all the official paperwork). The premise is simple: beat the crap out your opponent (in my case a burly street-tough biker type) while acting out the movements you want to happen on screen -- basically, boxing. The fighting system, which consists of just blocks, punches, and the occasional "dirty move," are exactly what I would want out of a boxing game where I'm actually doing the punching.
Maneuvering your fighter is done completely via two Move controllers -- no Sub Controller here. Punches are thrown by physically swinging the

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Following this year's Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony, we were able to grab Valve's Gabe Newell for a brief chat about Portal 2, wherein he mentioned that he thinks it is the best game Valve has ever created. Here's the transcript of our interview:
1UP: Was Portal 2 from the beginning always going to be a full price game?
Gabe Newell: "One of the nice things about The Orange Box was

Solar gadgets never seem to get old, and next up is Landport&rsquo;s Solar Sound speakers, laying claims to be Japan&rsquo;s first set of solar powered speakers. The solar panel is rather obvious at the top of the speaker, but in case you want some music to serenade your partner at night, you don&rsquo;t have to worry, as the device can offer between five to eight hours of playback time, thanks to its built-in lithium-ion battery, which can be charged via USB. The Lanport Solar Sound speakers are currently going for 5,250 yen (US$60).

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<span class="articleText">The Shoot is a fairly standard arcade rail shooter, adopting the theme of a series of B-grade movie sets (hence the double meaning in the title). Its look is certainly different: the presentation features comic book-style harsh lines and dank colors, but with characters presented as cardboard cutouts -- and often on strings.
Again, The Shoot is a "light gun" shooter at its core, so most gamers should know what to expect: move the cursor and push the trigger. The Move controller does serve a slightly greater purpose, as you can physically lean to the left or right to dodge enemy missiles and such; plus more moves like a slow-mo mode activated by turning yourself in a complete 360-degree spin (light gun meets figure skating?), or drawing

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Nexon America is preparing to launch their next batch of free MMORPGs in North America, and they showed off two of them during a recent GDC event. Already available in Korea, Dragon Nest and the recently-renamed Vindictus aim to kick subgenre's visual quality up a notch while offering different gameplay styles.
Nexon America vice president Min Kim presented Vindictus -- known as Mabinogi Heroes in Korea -- first, offering a quick tour of features such as the Source engine and the more action-oriented combat. Nexon is currently distributing

Mark June 17 on your calendars as that would be when the OnLive 'Games-on-Demand' service powered by cloud-servers arrives. Steve Perlman and Mike McGarvey, founders of OnLive, has taken the opportunity to announce the subscription plans for the service for both PCs and Macs, albeit only for folks living in the US, with no word on availability and their respective subscription plans for the European region at the moment. What is OnLive? It is a 'Games on Demand' service powered by Cloud-servers and based on subscription model. The moment you access the huge library of games, you can play them instantly over the Internet without having to worry about system compatibility and going through the

<span class="articleText">Many of us here in the office got our first hands-on with the new PlayStation Move today and its (somewhat necessary) add-on, the Sub Controller. There were a number of tech demos on display at the event (look for our video recap for more impressions), whereas the only "real" game on display working with the new Move was the recently announced SOCOM 4. And while I personally won't be hanging up my DualShock3 and trading it in for a Move after my first impressions with the product, it's still an impressive display on what can be done with this new device: decent motion control for a hardcore game.
The PlayStation Move controllers themselves are very similar to the current set-up of the Wii Remote and its Nunchuk: The right-hand controller

<span class="articleText">My memories of Medal of Honor traditionally involve the Saving Private Ryan-esque level depicting D-Day, or highly scripted (and action-filled) gunfights-as-rollercoaster moments. So it's pretty darn weird to see the new Medal of Honor take place in a period other than World War II, and on top of that, to see a pretty low-key (and downright stealthy) mission as opposed to a blazing shootout.
Executive producer Greg Goodrich recently stopped by to show off a mission, and briefly talk about the new direction for Medal of Honor. Sure, this install maintains MOH's core ethos of being a serious and realistic depiction of military combat -- it just happens to

While the shipping delay for the JooJoo tablet isn&rsquo;t ideal, some additional information has surfaced in the meantime, which should keep you going until March 25th. The most interesting deal is that the interface of the device has been updated, and you have to admit, it currently looks a lot nicer than the original interface. Aside from the user interface, another notable difference is color of the casing,

Nokia has made it clear that it will revamp the user interface (UI) of its Symbian phones, and you might have seen the video above during Mobile World Congress. However, what's more interesting is that Nokia has removed a ton of legacy code and APIs, to make the clean break that was long overdue. We're getting closer to what was available on the N900 and some of the qualities are the same (the app switching UI is excellent), but the new UI is seemingly much faster and more fluid. With the new software architecture, comes new code that is not built to deal with last decade's problems such as lack of graphics hardware or horrible memory constraints.

The net result should be much more responsive Nokia phones and interfaces. I'm glad that Nokia (and others) are seeing the light, because Apple and Microsoft sure did too. Now, we're waiting for the actual hardware that we suspect might come out this summer at Nokia World.