Creative offers quick audio upgrade with Sound Blaster Play!

Adding a Sound Blaster sound card to your PC really doesn't get any easier than this. The Creative Sound Blaster Play! plugs straight into the USB port and comes with onboard stereo headphone out and microphone in jacks. Its compact thumbdrive-like size also makes it a simple audio solution, particularly for notebook users.

But while Creative's Sound Blaster Play! may look similar to some of the other USB audio solutions out there, it has some neat tricks up its sleeves. For one, it has Creative's Multimedia Surround Sound (CMSS) function which upconverts stereo content into surround audio. It also promises enhanced audio quality and surround sound in games with its built-in support for EAX Advanced HD 4.0 and Creative ALchemy software.

The Creative Sound Blaster Play! is expected to launch in Singapore from mid August at S$29 (US$20.76). It can only be used with Windows XP and Vista systems and requires a USB 1.1 port. We are still waiting for Creative to confirm the other Asian markets where the device will be launched.

Update: The Sound Blaster Play! will be available in most Asian countries before the end of July, with the exception of Japan where it has been launched since the first week of July.

Microsoft SideWinder keyboard (may) have arrived

Whether this gaming keyboard is real or not is, in our opinion, irrelevant. The really interesting thing about the SideWinder X6 is that, perhaps for the first time, it sports a detachable numeric pad.



Frankly, we wondered what took the peripheral world so long to figure out the usefulness of this feature. With a simple flick, the keyboard's profile can be significantly reduced when real estate is scarce. Moreover, gamers who love to map numeric keys will now be able to hit those buttons without having to release the mouse. For fast-paced shooters and even real-time strategy games, this could be the difference between roaring in victory, or whimpering in defeat.

According to Engadget, the SideWinder X6 will retail for US$80 in September assuming, of course, this is not just another rumor.

SanDisk's write once-only SD WORM card

Don't mess with this particular SD media. Though SanDisk's so-named WORM card has nothing to do with those annoying self-replicating programs that can plague your PC system and disrupt networks, this one stands for Write Once Read Many and has an equally unsavory agenda. It's targeted for critical use in police investigations, court testimonies, electronic voting and other applications where the files must be protected from alteration or deletion at all costs.

So be careful what you write to the card, since any digital text once recorded onto the media is locked at the point of input. Short of incinerating this, you'll not be able to change or remove one iota of data onboard. With such a challenge being dangled, it's a huge red flag to hackers out there to do their darnest with this. Though at a pithy 128MB offering--at least for now--it may not be worth anyone's time. SanDisk claims this keeps for 100 years under proper storage conditions. More on the card here.

Via Webwire

E3 2008: Spore

There are a very small handful of brand name personalities in the video game industry that deserve Hollywood-style, above-the-title billing on the games they design, such as Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Arguably, one of the the only other figures who come close to that is Will Wright, the creator of the best-selling Sims series of games (and Sim City before that).

With his latest project, which shares many of the sandbox elements of the Sims and Sim City games, EA is betting big on another hit from Wright. Spore is easily the most anticipated PC game this year, not that there's all that much competition. Spore is best described as The Sims on a cosmic level, where you create an organism from the single-cell stage, watch it evolve, and after millions of years, develop the technology to leave its home world and colonize other planets.
Read more »

E3 2008: Fallout 3

Every year, E3 has one game on display that's almost universally tagged as the critical favorite, despite not having the big-name pedigree of a Halo or Grand Theft Auto. Last year, it was the underwater adventure BioShock, which--thanks to a steady drumbeat of positive press coverage--went on to sell a few million copies and become a true sleeper hit.

This year, it's Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic RPG set in the ruins of Washington DC. The original Fallout games were PC titles from the early 1990s, so the franchise can't rely on the faded memories of aging fans to sell big holiday numbers when it's released this fall. Instead, developer Bethesda has modeled the game on its previous big hit, the popular 2006 sword-and-sorcery RPG Oblivion.
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