Microsoft’s Eric Rudder showcased his company’s “Live Anywhere” concept at TechEd Middle East, with a quick demo of a game that can be played across Microsoft platforms with different input devices, from a Windows Phone 7 series prototype device (using an accelerometer and touch screen), to a Windows PC (using a keyboard), and an Xbox 360 (using a controller). Microsoft claims the game’s Visual Studio coding, no matter which platform it is for, is essentially the same – 90% of it is identical, and just 10% is platform specific. The synchronicity possible between the platforms is what makes the entire concept immensely more appealing – allowing you to play on any platform, and to resume exactly where you left off even if you switch to another,...

Nvidia released a video yesterday showing a benchmarking test between the GeForce GTX 480 (the new DX11 GPU based on the revolutionary Fermi architecture) and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 (ATI's flagship single GPU DX 11 card). While you would expect the GTX 480's almost 1 billion more transistors (3 billion compared to 2.15 billion) to give it a distinct advantage over the HD 5870, the Fermi flagship is not as spectacularly ahead as we thought it would be. However, the Unigine Heaven benchmark is probably not the best grounds for comparison, and stresses the 480's tesselation performance over the...

Steam is a game distribution service by Valve that is something of a hybrid between a cloud based service and a desktop client. The software connects to Valve's servers over an Internet connection, and provides updates, fixes and downloads for games. Games can be purchased and downloaded through Steam. Even if the games are purchased over traditional distribution channels, such as the Orange Box set (Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal), the games can still be maintained using Steam. Steam also provides the framework for multi-player gameplay and to make sure that there is no cheating or "H4X" software or scripts, commonly used and abused in multi-player environments such as Counter Strike. Steam was primarily played on Windows based machines so far....