Written by Brett Reistroffer
After recently announcing the launch price point for their first foray into the handheld gaming market, video chip maker Nvidia’s Shield was made available for initial pre-orders this week. Here’s a rundown on the mobile device and what it will bring to the gaming table.
-The device will launch for $350, no bundles or deals have been announced.
-The release date for the Shield has been set for June 30th, according to the pre-order pages on both Newegg and Gamestop, but has not been officially confirmed by Nvidia.
-For games, the system will play any Android based software, as it runs on the newest version, 4.2.1 Jelly Bean, along with the ability to stream Steam games from your PC wirelessly to the handheld unit. Although, you are going to need a beefed up gaming computer capable of playing games like Skyrim, Arkham City, and Dishonored in order to take full advantage of the feature.
-Games played on the handheld can be streamed directly to a TV using a mini-HDMI connection. This includes games streamed from your PC, although it would be often easier to stream your PC gaming directly to your high-def television set without a ‘middleman’ component, but this at least offers a new way to go about it.
-Users can connect their Google Play account to the device, allowing access to the service’s full complement of music, movies, shows, books, magazines, and games.
-The unit will sport a fairly impressive body of hardware, which includes:
- -A Tegra 4 GPU that uses a quad-core ARM architecture with 2gb of dedicated RAM
- -A 5 inch 720p retinal quality touch-screen display
- -Full motion sensing
- -Wireless N, Bluetooth, and GPS
- -For storage, 16gb flash memory and a MicroSD card slot
- -Input/Outputs for: Micro USB 2.0, Mini-HDMI, Stereo Headphone jack with microphone support
- -And of course, a full controller built into the device itself
At the initial price point, the handheld won’t be a fast moving product and will mostly likely market itself best to gamers on the more hardcore spectrum. However, it would be easy to see the device’s simplicity and ease of integration into the all-important living room area as a platform on which it can eventually break into the mainstream gaming market.
OfficialWebsitefortheNvidiaShield
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This week’s episode, A Nightmare in Silver, featured a redesigning of the Doctor’s old enemies, the Cybermen. Show runner Steven Moffat’s goal was to make the Cybermen “scary again”. Did he succeed? Well, my answer would be a resounding: Meh. The redesign was sleek and mimics the current trend with technology, but was missing a core of mechanic of what made the Cybermen scary. The episode in total was also fairly okay. I didn’t love it.
deus ex, but what do you expect when the enemy you are facing has been built up to such a degree that the only answer is something of that magnitude. This reveal was, at least, sort of established and hinted at throughout the episode. When meeting with the soldiers on the planet, Davis does act pretty regal and it came off really well. The way he held himself and spoke was phenomenal and certainly intimated experience with this sort of thing.
I admit I was afraid to revisit 
As I’ve said in the past, I am less than enthusiastic about Dark Horse’s currently-ongoing revival of their Comics’ Greatest World imprint. Representing an attempt by The House Richardson Built to create their own superhero-comic universe, a la the MU and DCU, the line proved short-lived for several good reasons. Chief among these, I think, is that the time for this sort of thing is pretty much passed. Both when DC (then National) adopted the idea in the early Thirties, and when Marvel put their own spin on it in the mid-Sixties, the idea was one whose time had come. While both those continuities are still around, with varying degrees of success, they’re sort of coasting along on inertia at this point, which is not to denigrate the efforts of the many talented creators who contribute to them. Hoping for lightning to strike again is anything but the way forward for American comics; rather, its salvation lies within the constant striving for new ideas and innovation, and to their credit Dark Horse does plenty of that.
The other main reason I oppose the CGW reboot is that, while I haven’t read anything close to all of the original comics, what I have seen of them has proved unimpressive to say the least. While few were outright irritating–with the exception of Barb Wire, which somehow managed to be even worse than the movie–they were mostly just dull, consisting as they did of somewhat more literate and artistically-inclined iterations of the standard Nineties trash.
MILWAUKIE, OR, MAY 9
05-08-13
Grimm #1 (Dynamite)
