Tancap Blog

New Review Posted

Tim — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:31:07 +0000

I’ve posted a short review of “10 Minute Solution” for the Wii. While it is value priced, I didn’t find enough content to recommend it. Things should be much more interesting this winter with a number of exercise games coming for Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move.

Consumer Reports Posts First Look at Volt

Tim — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 12:29:25 +0000

Consumer Reports Cars Blog has posted a video first look at the first (preproduction) Volt off of the assembly line. Except for the center console, it sounds like they are generally impressed with the vehicle.

My Fitness Coach 2 Review Posted

Tim — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:43:37 +0000

I’ve posted my review of My Fitness Coach 2. It another in a growing line of disappointing exercise games from Ubisoft. With new exercise titles coming out at the end of this year for the XBox 360 and PS3, hopefully we’ll start seeing more exercise games that take the quality of their presentation and accuracy of their controls seriously.

Sony and Nintendo at E3

Tim — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 03:12:31 +0000

Sony took their turn at E3. While Microsoft focused on Kinect, Sony focused more on promoting their game line up. They showed a number of games with Move support including Heavy Rain. It looks like Sony will be able to launch their motion controller with a more varied lineup than Microsoft. Other announcements by Sony include a premium online version of their online service and titles with 3DTV support. More information is also available via Playstation Home.

Nintendo showed off a few expected new titles based on its core franchise such as Legend of Zelda: Skyward Word, Metroid: Other M, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Mario Sports Mix. Also featured were reboots of some old classics such as NBA Jam, and Golden Eye 007. While it was nice to see a fairly solid lineup for some classic IP, it would have been nice to see something new for the console market. With motion control looking to be on track for both Microsoft and Sony and 3rd party support lacking, Nintendo will have to depend much more heavily on its 1st party titles to do well than in the past. Most of the interesting information at E3 from Nintendo came from the official reveal of the Nintendo 3DS. Once again it looks like Nintendo is going to show everyone else how a portable gaming system should be designed. More information is available on the web and via the Nintendo Channel on the Wii.

Microsoft at E3

Tim — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:00:20 +0000

Today Microsoft was center stage at E3. Microsoft announced a new slim version of the XBox 360 elite. The official product name for Natal will be Kinect. A whole slew of games using Kinect were featured including Dance Central, Kinectimals, Kinect Sports, Kinect Joy Ride, Kinect Adventures, Kinect: Star Wars, Your Shape Fitness Evolved, Deca Sports Freedom, Zumba Fitness and EA Sports Active 2. There will be an ESPN 3 app for the 360 as well as video chat (VideoKinect), and Kinect integration for Zune. Other games featured included Halo: Reach, Call of Duty Black Ops, Fable III, Kingdoms, Madden NFL 11, and Rock Band 3. If you own a 360 you can get more details by checking out “XBOX @ E3″ in the Spotlight section. You can see some of the Kinect games in action at the xbox.com website.

Seagate Reveals Hybrid SSD / HDD

Tim — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:12:55 +0000

AnandTech has a post about Seagate’s new Momentus XT hybrid drive. It is a notebook hard drive combined with a small 4 GB SSD used for read caching. The results overall are pretty good especially for notebooks that often don’t have more than one drive bay available to do a separate SSD and HDD combination. It won’t beat a decent pure SSD, but for normal day to day use it will still be generally faster than any single hard disk drive.

For more information, see AnandTech’s article here.

Seagate Confirms 3 TB Hard Drives at the End of the Year

Tim — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:17:28 +0000

Seagate has confirmed that it is planning on releasing a 3 TB hard drive at the end of the year.

A THINKQ post goes into some of the details (and potential problems) of the drive.

Steam Client for Mac OS X Released

Tim — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:22:59 +0000

The Steam Client for Mac OS X is now available here. When you are done installing be sure to pickup a free copy of Portal.

Thanks DailyTech

AnandTech Reviews OCZ’s Vertex 2

Tim — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:07:08 +0000

AnandTech has reviewed the OCZ Vertex 2. As expected, it performs better at small writes with the uncapped firmware it runs when compared to the Agility 2, but if you don’t need the best possible small file random write performance the Agility 2 is probably the better deal. In either case, SandForce based drives appear to be the SSDs of choice for now assuming you aren’t planning on using some kind of whole disk encryption software or planning on using it to store compressed video.

For the full article, click here.

Phenom II X6 Reviews Posted

Tim — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:05:21 +0000

AMDZone has posted a list of links to a number of Phenom II X6 reviews. It looks like a pretty good CPU if you have something that can use all 6 cores.

For the list of reviews click here.

Also, AnandTech has posted a review here.