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Even before “The Wizard” enchanted and inspired the gaming generation, gamers have sought that final prize: making a living playing video games. Unfortunately, dreams of professional-gamerism have been shown to be as elusive as dreams of being a professional gambler. Luckily, startup BringIt is attempting to make both those dreams a little more attainable. BringIt made the connection between the huge online gambling market and the exploding online gaming community, and has created a site where gamers can challenge one another with cash on the barrelhead.

Source: Devin Coldewey

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Filed under: Gaming

Putting it simply, Lucid’s goal with its HYDRA technology is to “build a completely GPU-independent graphics scaling technology” which enables two completely different cards to work together in harmony with “little to no software overhead.” Let that sink in a minute. Now that a puzzled look has surely overtaken your face, we’d strongly recommend hitting the read link for a (very) detailed look at the technology, an explanation of how it works and even a few hard hitting questions addressed to the company. We’re trying to stifle our excitement here, but are hopes are escalating quickly.

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Source: Darren Murph

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Filed under: Gaming, HDTV, Home Entertainment

We’re beginning to lose count of how many times we’ve been around this carousel, but just in case you thought yet another rumor would bring the Blu-ray-infused Xbox 360 any closer to reality, Microsoft’s out to put the kibosh on your wildest hopes and dreams. Following up on the latest round of whispers that surfaced last Friday, Redmond proclaimed to GamePro: “As we have stated, we have no plans to introduce a Blu-ray drive for Xbox 360.” The statement also noted that “games are what drive consumers to purchase game consoles, and we remain focused on providing the largest library of blockbuster games available.” Right — which totally explains your prior relationship with HD DVD.

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Source: Darren Murph

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Filed under: Desktops

Vigor, a PC-maker not known for its subtlety or underpowered systems, has just launched two new desktop powerhouses destined to shake you to your very core. The Force Recon SP and Force Recon BT will undoubtedly leave you in existence-questioning bafflement as you experience the sheer neck-breaking speed of their CPUs and accompanying graphics chipsets. The former tears enemies asunder with AMD’s Phenom quad-core processors coupled with dual ATI Radeon HD3870 graphics — capable of driving XHD displays at 2560 x 1600. The latter sports Intel’s quad-core mind-destroyer, the QX9650 Core 2 Extreme (which trots along at 3.0GHz), utilizes the new SSE4 instructions, and supports a slew of options which blend into what Vigor refers to as the “juiced” configuration. Both models are available now, with the SP starting at $2,319, and the BT clocking in at $2,869 — though both of those numbers can escalate quickly.

[Via Yahoo!]

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Source: Joshua Topolsky

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Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming

The delayed, revamped N-Gage client still isn’t ready for prime time, but the First Access preview service — which is just a little bit more functional than the preview shipping on some Nseries devices already — has finally launched. The service introduces a full suite of social gaming tools (though with compatibility officially limited to N81s for the moment, that’s a very small social circle indeed) and lets users download several game demos; Nokia promises that the service will evolve and expand as it ramps up for a full-scale release, so don’t get too down on the lack of content and community just yet. Oh, and just a word of warning, downloaders: your data will get reset prior to the full-scale launch, so don’t get too attached to your high scores, k?

[Via All About Symbian]

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Source: Chris Ziegler

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Filed under: CES, Gaming, Home Entertainment, Transportation

Let’s be honest, gaming chairs in all flavors of “enhancement” from vibration to sound to cup holders and beyond are quickly becoming a dime a dozen — but the ButtKicker not only takes a different approach to vibration enhancement than other options but also wins the “most notable name” award in the arena. For one thing, it’s not a chair — it’s a device you can install on any office chair to add vibration experience to not just gaming but anything producing sound on your computer including music and other media players. There are also two other versions of the device for use in home theater and auto installations (you can retrofit pretty much any old Lazy-boy in your living room). At $99 the gaming-focused version of the ButtKicker is cheaper than a lot of all-in-one gaming chair solutions as well. Oh, and how does the thing feel? Let’s just say it tickled us in many nuanced ways.

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Source: Barb Dybwad

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Filed under: CES, Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

You’ve already had a chance to see the DLP DualView technology in action, but just in case you needed an official word that it was here to stay (for now, at least), Texas Instruments has doled out just that. Essentially, the system enables two viewers to see two completely different images on the same screen so long as they’re both rockin’ a set of specialized glasses. Reportedly, TI hopes to make multiplayer gaming a whole lot more fun (and fair, we suppose), but you will need “a compatible source,” a 3D-ready DLP TV and a pair of DualView glasses to get things up and running. ‘Course, we’ve no idea how soon this stuff will hit the mainstream, but hey, there’s nothing like fraggin’ it up with a set of specs that just reek of 1980, right?

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Source: Darren Murph

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Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Handhelds, Portable Audio

In case you haven’t heard, Nokia’s blowing it out tomorrow, London style. We can’t be certain what exactly is going to get announced until the curtain drops, but as the date and time draw near, we’re hearing whispers from across the ‘nets about what we can expect. Latest across our desks is this itinerary from The Nokia Blog, detailing the day’s events; from it, we can see that the N81 and 8GB N95 are both on the docket, ensuring that the high end will be well represented. Also up are the rumored music store and the revamped N-Gage platform we’ve been hearing a solid buzz about recently. Stay tuned, we’re just a few hours away now!

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Source: Chris Ziegler

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