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Microsoft Entertainment Games

Microsoft Tablet PC Games 28

Posted by Zonk from the games-for-long-meetings? dept.
sushant_bhatia_progr writes "eWeek has an article on how Microsoft Corp. is readying a Tablet PC game software development kit and a new Tablet-PC-specific game, both meant to attract new developers and users for Tablet PCs." From the article: "The Redmond, Wash., software maker is co-developing both the SDK and the new game, called Arcs of Fire, in conjunction with software partner 3 Leaf Development. 3 Leaf officials did not respond to a request for comment. Microsoft expects to release a first beta of both the new game and the SDK in early January."
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Microsoft Tablet PC Games More

Microsoft Tablet PC Games

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  • Just a short question: Is there actually anyone using a tablet-pc??
    • Yeah we use one in our lab. We run a face recognition program on there for the demo's we give. We even got nifty glasses with cameras on them too :-)

    • I was seriously considering one last year, right after christmas. The problem? the crappiest, under 1 ghz tablet was about $2000. Are the tablet features worth 3z the cost of a quality desktop, or 2x of a decent laptop? Not for me.

      Fortunately it seems that the average price for a tablet is going down, so the technology might end up reaching enough people to make the platform viable. I really wish it does, if just for the superior interface for many forms of gaming. SCUMM based games and MOO clones are begg

    • Yes, I just picked up a Fujitsu Stylistic ST5020D a couple of weeks ago to use with Corel Painter IX as a portable digital drawing/painting device.

      It's rather nifty. While the handwriting recognition and writing by hand is slower than typing, typing requires both hands and place to put the keyboard whereas with the tablet one can hold the tablet with one hand and write with the other.

    • Ubergizmo has a report about an electronic paper product [ubergizmo.com] coming out in 2006. It has a thickness of 3mm and delivers full color images. Competition for the Tablet PC?
    • Yes, I have an M200 Toshiba Tablet PC (along with a sea of IBM Thinkpads). The Toshiba is my main laptop at the moment, I would highly recommend it to anyone who's seriously looking at Tablet PCs. I like the convertable format much better than the plain "slate" tablets, because you can use your full keyboard when appropriate- I code with the keyboard, and read/draw in tablet mode.
  • How about a Tablet XBox?
  • This is reminisicent of the same philosophy m$ used to push win 3.x out on the business marketplace. The only reason a user would even open the windows shell was for minesweeper or solitaire. After all, most business apps up to that point were still programmed for DOS.

    Tablet PCs are being pushed to the business world, but it'll take some play-time to get them broadly accepted.

  • Screen wear (Score:3, Interesting)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @10:12AM (#11081383) Journal
    In other news - tablet PC screen protector sales expected to surge.
    • Funny you should mention that. I downloaded a curling game for my Handspring Visor. It requires you to scratch up and down, your stylus being the broom thing. I played it once and not going to touch it again until I get a protector for it.
  • Are they going after that niche market of manager types who are just not satisfied playing with their Crackberries, err, Blackberries during those long and boring meetings? Are they really selling enough Tablet PC's for this to matter a hill of beans in the first place, or just another paper tiger for Microsoft to say "we dominate this market too..."
  • They're underpowered and the screens are too small.

    I want one with a 15.4" widescreen, that I can reorient to portrait mode. I want a really fast and reasonably cheap processor, like an AMD64. I can understand why the screens haven't ramped up yet, but why haven't they moved to faster processors and better memory, yet?

  • first up... (Score:3, Funny)

    by justforaday ( 560408 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @10:28AM (#11081527)
    First up, a Nintendo DS emulator!

  • As a tablet pc owner and user... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JackAsh ( 80274 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2004 @10:30AM (#11081544)
    ... I welcome our new game overlords.

    But seriously, I do own a Tablet PC, the Toshiba M200 (a damn fine machine BTW). Tablet PCs are really not that good for gaming. There's no controls on board, the screen is not touch sensitive but eletroresistive (which is good for writing, bad for turning the machine into a Nintendo DS) and the battery life is already short enough without eating up massive CPU cycles into games.

    With that said, I see absolutely no reason why a machine like the M200 (convertible) or slate models that can be "docked" into a keyboard and mouse location can't be used as a regular machine with regular gaming.

    Other than, of course, the insane obsession laptop manufacturers have with including crappy video cards, like the Intel Extreme Graphics 2!!! Now with extra ram-shared crappyness! Because at intel, "w3 @re teh suxx0rz".

    At least the M200 has a Geforce 5200 (although one with only 32MB of VRAM). If you ask me Microsoft pushing for decent video cards would do a million times more good than any pen input game SDK will ever do. But then again, I'm probably being as visionary as I was back in the Doom days ("Mouse?! Why would I ever need a mouse for an FPS game? My keyboard does everything I need, thank you very much").

    -Jack Ash

    • I was absolutely blown away by ArtRage, designed for Tablet PC. If you haven't seen it, grab it. Every Tablet PC user should have it even if it's just to show off to your friends when they ask, oh, so what's so cool about Tablet PC?

      Anyway, recognition of my asian handwriting kicks butt too.
  • Finally, a reason to buy a tablet PC!
  • It would make sense, as the purpose of the game is to get people to use their SDK, and what better way to show off how to use it than to open the source to the game, but TFA says nothing about source being opened. I'll guess we will just have to wait and see.
  • Microsoft has tried several times to make the tablet PC a viable product. (Among other things, like interactive TV.) If they really wanted it to take off, they'd release version 3.0 (or 3.1). Everyone knows that's when Microsoft products become useable.
  • IMHO the reason TabletPCs fail is that people see them as laptops without keyboards. As long as people think this way, they will fail. Repeat after me, TabletPCs suck as laptop replacements.

    That said, they are great for reading books, taking notes, browsing webpages for information (after you set up the sites you visit most), watching movies, and playing "non-twitch" games (chess, cards, etc.).

    Anybody trying to make games like Doom3 for the TabletPC will not make money. If you spend some time with a Tabl

  • MS has announced that, due to their innovative inclusion of a touch screen to control games, their advertising slogan is simply "Touch." They are apparently seeking a popular female Japanese vocalist to appear in their ad campaign.

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