The Verge - The gaming gear of CES 2012

Mad Catz at CES 2012: headsets, arcade sticks, and a mouse (hands-on)

2012-01-20T07:40:02Z

To say that Mad Catz brought a slew of fresh gaming peripherals to CES would be putting it lightly. In addition to its MLG Pro Circuit modular controller we told you about last week, the company also had a pair of headsets on display: the Cyborg Freq 5 for PC gamers and a Tritton Primer wireless Xbox 360 headset, an MMO 7 mouse and a two-player FightStick arcade controller. We had hands-on time with the latest gear, and now have some photos and initial impressions to share.

First, we'll tackle the headsets. While it may lack simulated 7.1 surround sound as found in products from Turtle Beach and Astro, the stereo output from the Freq 5 seemed to provide adequate lows and a relatively crisp high-end in Mad Catz's crowded hotel suite. We...

AMD's top-tier Radeon HD 7970 plays 'Battlefield 3' on three screens, two more for video conferencing (hands-on video)

2012-01-16T00:55:01Z

AMD's Trinity-based laptop was the most impressive demo at the company's CES 2012 booth, but we couldn't pass up the chance to play Battlefield 3 across three nearly bezel-free screens on a pair of Radeon HD 7970s — especially when flanked by an additional pair of screens doing multipoint video conferencing. One of the little-known features that AMD added in the new Radeon HD 7000 series is Digital Discrete Multipoint Audio, or DDMA for short, which basically means you can assign audio, not just video, to a particular monitor, and always hear audio from the direction of the program it belongs to. In this case, the booms and bangs of Battlefield came from ahead, while the friendly AMD reps spoke to us on either side, though you could...

SoftKinetic's ten-finger virtual puppet show demo video walkthrough

2012-01-15T21:55:04Z

Microsoft's Kinect for Windows wasn't the only gesture control system to tout "near mode" this CES. SoftKinetic offers an alternate solution with an eye towards OEMs, and this week it released a public alpha of new firmware for its DepthSense 311 that it claims will detect finger movement from as close as 15cm (vs. Kinect's 50cm) and as far away as about three feet. Those numbers seems about right; SoftKinetic let us try out the firmware first-hand in two applications — a barebones tech demo that showed exactly what the software was detecting, and a "puppet show" app that let you control two cartoon puppets with ragdoll arms — and detection seemed to work fine within the stated range. The puppets could to and fro, nod their head,...

ePawn Arena: the 26-inch, $400 tabletop gaming screen with interactive game pieces (hands-on)

2012-01-15T00:37:04Z

ePawn's seeking to shake up the tabletop gaming space, and we have to say, we're almost convinced it can: the startup's 26-inch Arena screen, which lies flat on a surface, sounds like the perfect tool for an aspiring Dungeon Master. The display uses a custom magnetic system to track the position, rotation and identity of physical game pieces in real time, and it's pretty fast: quick enough to play a casual game of air hockey, let alone track a few miniatures. More importantly, the software is platform agnostic, and doesn't reside on the screen itself. Your smartphone is the computer, and it connects to the ePawn Arena over Bluetooth.

The idea is that you'll buy the screen and a variety of pieces from ePawn, then build software yourself...

AMD Trinity demo: full HD gaming, video playback, and transcoding

2012-01-13T23:06:54Z

AMD's next generation of Accelerated Processing Units, Trinity, was shown off to us at CES this year with an impressive multithreaded workload. One display was running Dirt 3 in DirectX 11 mode, another was on the Windows desktop with a video transcoding app in full flow, and the third — part of the laptop running the entire operation — was playing back a full HD movie. The upcoming Trinity chip was handling all three tasks simultaneously, offering compelling evidence for AMD's bold claim that Trinity will offer Llano-like performance but at half the energy consumption. The Dirt 3 instance played with perfect smoothness throughout and we saw no stutter in the HD video being played back on the laptop. We were shown a Trinity APU with...

Shogun Bros. Ballista MK-1 gaming mouse adjusts DPI like an abacus (hands-on)

2012-01-13T04:03:02Z

Last year, Shogun Bros introduced a crazy mouse with a gamepad on the bottom. What could be crazier? How about a partnership with Ubisoft for an Assassin's Creed version with leather buttons? When we got to Shogun Bros' booth at CES 2012, though, it wasn't the new Chameleon that impressed: you're looking at the Ballista MK-1, a 5700dpi wired laser mouse that can independently adjust sensitivity on both the X and Y axes, on the fly, as well as dial down the 1000Hz polling rate to save power.

You hold down the config button for five seconds to edit settings, then spin the mouse wheel to adjust the sensitivity in 100dpi increments, while a tiny abacus of red and green LEDs keeps track of your chosen resolution. You can save four different...

BlackBerry PlayBook gets 'Cut The Rope' at CES 2012 (hands-on)

2012-01-13T00:25:48Z

Cut The Rope is the latest big title game to gain compatibility with the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Microsoft launched an HTML5 version of the fun puzzle game during its CES 2012 press conference just a few days ago, but Om Nom the little green gobbler is also making its way to QNX. RIM is displaying the game quite prominently in its own booth on the show floor, and it's still the same challenging but delightful experience. Performance seemed fine on the PlayBook hardware — but then again that's never really been the device's problem. Still, if you're a PlayBook owner and you've already beaten Angry Birds, you can head over to BlackBerry App World and download the game for $2.99.

Hyperkin's $19.99 Game Genie for Nintendo 3DS (hands-on video)

2012-01-12T05:43:07Z

We stopped by Hyperkin's booth at CES to take a look at their Game Genie cheat device for Nintendo's DSes — the same device works with the original DS, DS Lite, DSi, DSi XL, and even the 3DS. In case you don't remember the original Game Genie, game cards plug in to one end, the other end goes into the console, and when you turn on to play you can choose from a list of cheats like unlimited lives or never-ending tanooki suit. The DS Game Genie is available now, and a PSP version is coming at the end of the month. A Vita version is in the works too, and should be out around the same time that the new console lands in the States.