Consoles, Games and Emulators.

EA’s long-running Need for Speed series took a trip underground a couple of years back when the developer refocused the game solely on illegal street racing. While the nighttime racing series was certainly successful, the lawless world was always missing one key factor: cops. This year’s installment crawls back into the daylight. The actual racing hasn’t changed too much, but the ever-present police make this game a whole lot more interesting.

The game’s career mode starts out with a hilarious bang. You take on the role of a nameless, faceless new racer attempting to hit the scene in the city of Rockport. An underground ranking known as the Blacklist governs who can race who, and when. You almost immediately run into a punk named Razor, who’s definitely the sort of dude that lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. He’s at the bottom of the list, but a few races later, he’s sabotaged your ride and has won it from you in a race. Meanwhile, you’re carted off to jail. Left with nothing but some mysterious help from a stranger named Mia, your task is to get back in the race game to work your way to the top of the Blacklist, which is now topped by Razor, who’s using your old car to wipe out the competition.

The game actually has a great story hook at the beginning that makes you want to see the career mode through to completion. The early story segments are told through some sort of unholy mixture of computer-generated cars and full-motion video actors. The acting in these early segments is awful…awful good, that is. You’ll scratch your head and wonder if these segments are intentionally bad and meant to be played for laughs or if they’re just unintentionally funny. Either way, they’re great. Unfortunately, after a brief prologue, you stop seeing video sequences, and the story is conveyed via voicemails from various characters. Are you a cop? Will you get to utter the magic street racing words, “Mia, I am a cop”? is the plot twist even more painfully obvious than that? You’ll have to see the story through to find out where everyone’s allegiances lie.

Working your way up the Blacklist is a multistep progress. Before you can challenge the next Blacklist racer, you have to satisfy a list of requirements. You’ll have to win a set number of race events. And you’ll have to reach a set number of pursuit milestones and earn enough bounty by riling up the police. The cops hate street racers and will give chase when they see you rolling around the open city. You can also just jump right into a pursuit from a menu, too.

Running from the cops is the best action the game has to offer. Chases usually start with just one car on your tail. But as you resist, you might find 20 cars giving chase, in addition to a chopper flying overhead. Losing the cops gets tougher as your heat level rises. Level one heat results in the appearance of just your standard squad cars. But by the time you get up to level five, you’ll be dealing with roadblocks, spike strips, helicopters, and federal-driven Corvettes. A meter at the bottom of the screen indicates how close you are to losing the cops or getting busted. Stopping your car–or having it stopped for you by spike strips or getting completely boxed in by cops–is how you’ll get busted. To actually get away, you’ll need to get out of visual range…and stay there. The initial evasion changes the meter over to a cooldown meter. You’ll have to lie low and wait for that meter to fill up to end the chase. This is probably the tensest part of the entire chase, since you never know when two cops might blow around the corner and spot you, starting the whole process over again. It all sort of works like some sort of strange, wonderful cross between Grand Theft Auto’s open city and Metal Gear Solid’s stealth mechanic. All the while, you’ll be acquiring heat on your car. This means that you’ll have to keep a couple of cars around, because acquiring heat on one car lowers the heat on your other ones. Also, getting busted too many times can result in your car getting impounded, though you can avoid that by resetting the system whenever you get caught (if that’s more your speed).

There’s also a lot of racing in Most Wanted’s career mode–almost too much, in fact. You’ll engage in multilap circuit races, point-A-to-point-B sprint races, drag racing, checkpoint-driven tollbooth races, and speed trap, where the winner is the player that accumulates the most speed while passing by a handful of radar cameras spread throughout the track. The races are solid but not spectacular. The artificial intelligence doesn’t really help things along, because most of the game is rubber-banded like crazy. We actually set our controller down for 20 seconds–then picked it back up and caught our opponents on the final lap. And though the AI will occasionally crash and come to a complete halt, it’ll catch up very, very quickly. Later on in the game, you get a voicemail message informing you that things are going to get tougher. At this point, the computer drivers magically start taking every single shortcut, and the rubber banding only seems to work against you. As a result, catching up after a mistake is much tougher. If this difficulty had gradually sloped up, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But flipping the switch from “drive like crap” to “drive like a genius” is really annoying. Fortunately, the racing action itself is entertaining enough to keep you going, and of course, you’ll be dying to find out what happens next in the story.

Gran Turismo 4 features more than 700 cars from more than 80 manufacturers. As you might expect, the lineup leans heavily toward American, Japanese, British, and German makes, though you’ll also have access to cars from Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Korea, among other countries. This variety is not simply limited to country of origin, however. The cars found in GT 4 range not only in their power and prestige, but also in their ages. The game features cars from every major era of auto manufacturing: from 1960s muscle cars, to powerful Japanese turbo machines of the mid ’90s, to one-off concept cars that won’t see city asphalt for 10 years or more, to examples from the very dawn of the auto era (such as the Ford Model T and the Daimler Motor Carriage from 1886).

While the game’s roster is impressive both in its size and scope, it must be said that a good portion of the cars, such as the aforementioned Daimler, won’t be of much use to you in terms of progressing in the game. Indeed, as you move through the career mode, known as Gran Turismo mode, you’ll quickly find your garage piling up with cars from race and series wins; their only value to you will be as resells. On the plus side, a dramatically improved garage interface will let you quickly and easily sort through your car collection, no matter how large that collection becomes. Sorting through criteria such as country of origin, drivetrain, manufacturer, or power-to-weight ratio is a huge improvement from scrolling down an ever-elongating list while hoping to spot your car of choice based on model alone, as was the case in previous GTs.

The available cars, of course, are only part of the attraction of GT4. The game also features more than 50 courses to drive, including a tantalizing mix of real-life racetracks such as Fuji Speedway, Suzuka, and Laguna Seca; a cosmopolitan array of city courses from metropolises such as Hong Kong, Seoul, and the Big Apple; rally courses on dirt and (new for this installment) snow and ice; and old fictional friends such as Grand Valley Speedway, Deep Forest Raceway, and Trial Mountain. Two particularly notable additions to the GT4 track roster are El Capitan, a three-mile behemoth designed around the imposing granite centerpiece of Yosemite National Park, and the Nürburgring Nordschliefe, which, at nearly 13 miles long, is imposing in its own right. The Circuit de la Sarthe, the annual site of the 24 Hour of LeMans race, makes an appearance in two flavors: the current track and the old configuration, which is thankfully free of the chicanes that currently mar the four-mile back straight.

Beyond these impressive stats, the first thing any casual fan of the GT series notices are the graphics. The earlier GT games defined the technical reach of the PlayStation across two consoles, and this reach extends here. Car models look fantastic, and though only six cars are on-track at any time, the game suffers zero slowdown, even when things pile up in the corners or during drastic elevation changes. Lighting effects that were impressive in Gran Turismo 3 are stunning in GT4, both in terms of technical achievement (such as in the real-time reflections on car doors) and artistic aesthetic (the luminous George Paris street track or the neon-drenched section of the Hong Kong city course). The game only features three points of view when driving–and there is no cockpit view–but a tangible sense of speed is conveyed by all three angles.

Small graphical touches this time around include 3D crowd models, which are most noticeable during the rally stages. Spectators will run out on the course to take pictures of your oncoming vehicle. Then they’ll scurry out of the way at the last moment. Meanwhile, throngs of spectators will back up en masse as you speed by them on the dirt tracks. Though you can’t hit these pedestrians, their collective presence on the courses adds a nice feeling of danger and claustrophobia to the rally stages. On the downside, an invisible barrier pervades the perimeter of many of the courses, which detracts from an overall feeling of immersion. As a result, it’s impossible to careen off a cliff at the Grand Canyon, for example. In the absence of a damage model, GT4 now incorporates a blur effect when smacking into opponents or stationary objects. It’s similar to the effect found in Colin McRae Rally 2005, but it doesn’t last as long. Also, while the game supports both 480p and even 1080i resolution, its implementation does not prevent a few jaggies or blurring effects from appearing during replays.

Every year tens of thousands of high school football players dream of continuing their careers at the collegiate level, but most of them will never know what it’s like to play in an enormous stadium in front of 60,000 rabid fans. EA Tiburon is doing its best to make sure that dream comes true for everybody in NCAA Football 08’s campus legend mode. We recently spent some time with the mode at EA’s Summer Preview event and tried to see if we had what it takes to take our game from high school to a Division 1 powerhouse. It wasn’t easy, but it sure was fun.

You can start your campus legend career in a number of ways: You can take over the career of any existing collegiate player, you can create a player and start him off in college, or you can create a high school player. Just be sure to pick a position you enjoy because you can’t change it once you’ve begun. Should you go the high school route, you’ll start the game as a senior who’s about to take part in a 16-team playoff featuring schools from real cities in whatever area you said your player is from. The first three games take place on what looks like a typical high school field with a small number of bleachers packed with fans. If you can make it to the championship game you’ll be rewarded with your first taste of what it’s like to play at the next level because your game will take place in the stadium of the nearest major university.

Your focus isn’t just on winning playoff games; it’s also on playing well and garnering the attention of college recruiters. This means you’ll have to make every play count, especially since your coach can bench you if you’re stinking up the joint. But be aware that if you’re blowing out the other team, your coach might call off the dogs and pull you too. Because you’re a player and not a coach, you’ll have to run the plays that are sent in by the head coach. EA is toying with the possibility of letting you call audibles if you’re the QB, but no final decision has yet been made. You’ll have control over only the player you’ve created, and the game will quickly simulate any play you’re not involved in, though you can choose to watch any play you’d like. While it’s only natural to want the ball in your hands on every play, it’s surprisingly fun to throw a block that springs a player free for a big gain–especially if you’re a quarterback. QBs naturally get the most action and receivers the least, but you can call for the ball if (like any receiver worth his salt) you think you’re open on every play.

Once your high school career has wound down you’ll be presented with a list of the schools that want you to don their colors. While this is a small victory, your journey has just begun. Do you go to a small school where you’ll come in and challenge for the starting job right away, or do you swallow your pride and ride the pine at a major program? We chose the big school route and headed off to Nebraska to see if we could channel our inner Tommy Frazier. As expected, we were way down on the depth chart. Heck, we were lucky to just get into the stadium. But we didn’t come this far to be a glorified water boy; we came to play, and that meant working hard in practice.

When practice started we were shown how far behind the next player on the depth chart we were. Basically, you’ll need to earn about 21 practice points for every one overall rating point between you and the player above you. When your rating equals his, the job is yours. After practice we were awarded points that went toward improving our quarterback’s accuracy, throwing power, carrying ability, elusiveness, spine move, and juke. While a backup quarterback’s role is mostly limited to mop-up duty in blowouts, other nonstarters will need to be prepared to contribute to special teams, both on offense and defense. In addition to practicing, you’ll need to figure out how to best spend your free time. You can choose to study, go to the movies, or play pickup basketball, which may raise or lower certain attributes or even cause injury. Being all about our education we decided to stay in and hit the books. Hey, we said we wanted to be like Tommy Frazier, not Lawrence Phillips.

Even though it has been just a short time since our last hands-on time with the game, it’s already looking and playing even better. The new gang tackles look great, and while there are even more animations in this build, the frame rate was more consistent and smooth. EA was tight-lipped about other aspects of the game, but we were able to get a few tidbits on some things to look forward to. Not only will there be 115 stadiums, but UCS’s new stadium will be in the game, as will Vanderbilt’s new digs and Alabama’s upgraded stadium. We also got a closer look at the beautifully detailed trophies that will fill your trophy room…if you’re any good.

NCAA Football 08 is due out on July 17 for the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. We’ll continue to bring you the latest on the game as its release date approaches.

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Science Daily — The prototype for a revolutionary new general-purpose computer processor, which has the potential of reaching trillions of calculations per second, has been designed and built by a team of computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin. Floorplan of the TRIPS prototype chip. (Credit: The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer Sciences) Ads by Google Advertise on this site Distributed Computing Event stream processing (ESP) for distributed computing architectures www.progress.com/apama Banner Corporation Technology Marketing Agency Media, Advertising, Interactive www.b1.com Calculadora Para La PYME Calculadora de valor gratuita de SAP para empresas en crecimiento SAP.com All High Risk Merchants GFA - Professional Payment Experts US & Int’l - Adult/Gaming/Moto/Inet www.globalfundingalliance.co.uk UniRisX Insurance Service Innovative Insurance Technology Deliver any product via any channel www.unirisx.com The new processor, known as TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), could be used to accelerate industrial, consumer and scientific computing. Professors Stephen Keckler, Doug Burger and Kathryn McKinley have been working on underlying technology that culminated in the TRIPS prototype for the past seven years. Their research team designed and built the hardware prototype chips and the software that runs on the chips. “The TRIPS prototype is the first on a roadmap that will lead to ultra-powerful, flexible processors implemented in nanoscale technologies,” said Burger, associate professor of computer sciences. TRIPS is a demonstration of a new class of processing architectures called Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE). Unlike conventional architectures that process one instruction at a time, EDGE can process large blocks of information all at once and more efficiently. Current “multicore” processing technologies increase speed by adding more processors, which individually may not be any faster than previous processors. Adding processors shifts the burden of obtaining better performance to software programmers, who must assume the difficult task of rewriting their code to run well on a potentially large number of processors. “EDGE technology offers an alternative approach when the race to multicore runs out of steam,” said Keckler, associate professor of computer sciences. Each TRIPS chip contains two processing cores, each of which can issue 16 operations per cycle with up to 1,024 instructions in flight simultaneously. Current high-performance processors are typically designed to sustain a maximum execution rate of four operations per cycle. Though the prototype contains two 16-wide processors per chip, the research team aims to scale this up with further development.