Pure Digital Technologies Inc. isn’t the most well known of brands. Ask people what they make and most wouldn’t know but show them a Flip Video camera and they’re instantly interested. Its quite a nice lineup of products they’ve got with a very focused direction; simplicity in photography. The Flip Video series has been tremendously well received by bloggers and social media aficionados but yet the brand, in Canada at least, is relatively unknown.With a value price point and a solid product you would think the original Flip Video cameras would be tremendously popular but soon after their release in Canada they started to show their age in as much as they did not support high definition. By that point it was fast becoming a necessity. The cameras promoted their Easy-To-YouTube abilities so then once YouTube began to support HD footage, the lack of HD in the Flip cameras became the elephant in the room. continue…

Today sees the retail release of Forza Motrsport 3 for the Xbox 360. Its first and foremost a car racing simulator but theres so much to it. Its simultaneously a complex and simple game from Turn 10 Studios which really shows the evolution of the genre and tries to push it further. A lot of eyes are on this one. Some are worried they simplified it too much, making things too easy. Others worry that its too hardcore and inaccessible to all but the extreme car enthusiast. continue…

This week sees the release of Shadow Complex for the Xbox Live Arcade developed by Chair Entertainment with help from Epic Games (since it uses the Unreal Engine 3 after all.) It’s been highly anticipated for a while now and is part of the much-promoted Xbox Live “Summer of Arcade” avalanche of top tier releases. Its been a relatively dry year for game releases, with downloadable games generally being the most interesting things out there as most retail titles have been waiting for Q4 or have been delayed until 2010. With such a lack of fresh meat, theres lots of room for a game like Shadow Complex to strut it’s stuff. We’ve already seen the multi-player-only Battlefield 1943 gain huge sales in this industry climate. Now its Shadow Complex’s turn to attempt the same with a purely single player experience. continue…

Who doesn’t love Wallace & Gromit? Nobody worth knowing, thats who. Their claymation adventures are charming fun and they are back with more, this time as episodic games in the spirit of the classic point-and-click adventure games equally beloved by all. It seems like a winning combination and now they’re inaugural escapade, Fright of the Bumblebees, has landed on Xbox Live Arcade by Telltale games. continue…

We have finally had some respite after the holiday game release rush of 2008. There were just so many games to check out in such a little timeframe. It was quite an unfortunate situation for many publishers. There is only a finite amount of consumer attention to go around after all. We still don’t know too much about games slated for 2009 though there are a few slated for first quarter release that we had been looking forward to. Halo Wars is high up on that list and we’re quite pleased that the publishers decided to delay the release until after that rush so we could take the time to give it the attention it deserves.

Its a real-time strategy game (or RTS) set in the fiction of Bungie Studios’ Halo series. Executive Producer Steve Schreck has crafted this title specifically for the Xbox 360 at Ensemble Studios, allowing them to forgo concessions of multiplatform design and focus on what was best for that environment. The video game console is argued by many to be an atypical environment for an RTS game (these people favor the PC for such games) though it is easy to draw up a list of strategy games on platforms other than the PC comparable to any list of those on it, suggesting this argument is a fallacy and deserving of dismissal. continue…