fear

This week's game demos are intended for mature audiences only. Viewer discretion is advised.

With Mark back in the preGame lineup, we're set to demo two very dark and creepy titles on today's show. First up is Shadows of the Damned, the collective offspring of an all-star Japanese development team. Talent from such series as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and No More Heroes have collaborated to form a truly unique and remarkably odd tale of a man who must travel through hell to save his girlfriend.

Next up is the third title in the F.E.A.R. series. The tone in F.E.A.R. 3 is creepier than ever, but the game's iconic mechanics--like distinctive slow-motion effects--are still well in tact. Players will be greeted (or terrified) by Alma over and over again as her dark presence still runs rampant through the universe.… Read more

Wilson might be the only host on The 404 who watched the entire big game Sunday, so we don't spend too much time talking about the actual game and instead stick to the commercials. Ads this year included Google's first Super Bowl ad. Also, HomeAway revitalized the Griswold family from National Lampoon's "Vacation", and Motorola aired a commercial with Megan Fox selling something...we just don't remember what it is.

We also have a story about Comcast changing its name to Xfinity. Starting next week, its cable television, telephone, and Internet services will feature the rebranded name in 11 markets. In what seems like an effort to give a sharper edge to the brand name, the change is taking heavy fire from sites like The Consumerist, which claim that the new Xfinity name has an X-rated/pornographic/stupid/energy drink connotation.

Finally, we run down a list of the 10 most needlessly perverted mainstream games. Follow along as we chat about some of the most revealing games in console history with titles like Dead or Alive, The Sims, and Bayonetta leading the scandal. Oh my. Speaking of which, we hate to be the ones to report it, but Microsoft is no longer offering online support for original Xbox games like Halo 2 and Counterstrike. Bummer!

Hello, Slashdot.

In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that… Read more

MySQL has placed itself in the middle of a rising furor over its allegedly diminished commitment to open source. To be fair, it has only itself to blame.

It all started with a disgruntled ex-MySQL employee, Jeremy Cole. Cole declared that MySQL's sky was falling because it was to be releasing certain parts of the next version of its database as closed-source software. Marten Mickos responded that he had misunderstood (when, in fact, he had understood very well), it went to Slashdot (where it was of course misconstrued even further), and we're left with a somewhat tepid defense by Marten in the comments section of Slashdot to the self-addressed question, "Why is MySQL now producing some proprietary software?":

The reason is that we have an ambition not only to produce FOSS [free and open-source] code, but also to be a profitable business that can exist for a long time. Each time we make more money, we hire more developers to develop GPL code.… Read more

I don't know if it's silly that this surprises me, but apparently London's police aren't the only ones who have a problem with photography. According to a report on wusa9.com, the Web site of a local news station in Washington, the United States Secret Service asked a man outside the stadium of the Washington National's baseball team to delete a photo he took that included one of the stadium's security checkpoints. President George W. Bush was in the stadium to throw the first pitch for the team's opening day.

I know that … Read more

People fear public speaking more than anything else. Anxiety over a simple presentation can be debilitating. Moreover, sufferers are typically embarrassed and reluctant to admit they have a problem. They hide a deep concern about the phobia's affect on their careers in an industry that values presentation skills so highly.

I know quite a bit about this subject. As a senior high-tech executive for many years, I've given hundreds, maybe thousands of presentations and speeches. I even have a reputation for being quite good at it. That's why it will surprise a lot of people to know that I have a fear of public speaking.

Sure, I've come a long way. At this point, the residual anxiety I feel is certainly manageable and may even help my performance. Since I've put so much into conquering this beast, I thought I'd share what I learned along the way.… Read more

Resident robot expert Tim Moynihan is too busy pitting robots against each other in the ultimate head-to-head battle, so it falls upon me to warn tell you about Robot Land, a proposed industrial park in South Korea. Intended to be the locus of the country's robotics industry, Robot Land will house robotics manufacturers, suppliers, and research centers, plus exhibition halls and a stadium for robotic competitions. On the one hand, that sounds awesome--all kinds of robotic goodness in one place for our edification and (more important) entertainment. On the other hand, Delos.

South Korean officials are expected to announce … Read more