Summary [7.5 out of 10]

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is an amazingly detailed translation of the Dragon Ball Z universe into a fighting video game. The graphics, sound effects, voice acting, animated styling and most important, myriad of fighting moves make this a must-get for any Dragon Ball Z fans out there.

General fans of fighting games will find a very entertaining game in here, but may be better served by the upcoming Street Fighter IV title instead due to more universal recognition/appeal.

Outline

• Story
• Graphics & Effects
• Sounds & Voice Acting
• Gameplay
  • Controls
  • Drama Pieces
  • Unlockables
• Online Multiplayer
• Training & Practice
• Conclusion
• Areas of Improvement

Story

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit retells the story of DBZ (using fight sequences and cutscenes) from the first three DBZ Sagas:

• Vegeta Saga
• Captain Ginyu Saga
• Frieza Saga

One thing I really liked about how the story was told from this perspective is that during a Saga, you might start off as say Goku, but then after a fight and another set of cutscenes, you might have to play as the person you just beat, say Vegeta, because of the introduction of another Saiyan like Recoome.

I thought this gave a nice natural feel to progressing through the story but also let you participate in more of it without just sticking you to playing as a single character and fighting through his life only during the Saga.

Graphics & Effects

Generally very good. The team did an excellent job giving the game the cell-shaded/anime look, but not quite as polished as say the PS3-exclusive upcoming title, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja. The cloth animation of clothing is a bit static feeling, not very fluid and you will see repeated skeletal animations applied to different characters models… like the “just got punched in the face, but am going to look back at you slowly” animation, and the “surprise-super-punch-in-the-gut” animations… you’ll see those more than a fair share.

The character models and skins were again excellent. Some of the cell-shaded-esque outlines on the characters that give it the drawn look are sometimes a hair rough, but unless you are being ultra critical and looking for it, the transition of 2D anime characters to this 3D fighter was done really well. The art team nailed the proportions of all the fighters, so for example, you never feel like Kid Goku is too short or not big enough or that Recoome was too tall or anything like that.

The visual effects of the game for special attacks like the Kamehameha are beautiful and exactly what you’d want to see. Big, bright explosive visuals with touches of bluring and powerful energy lines. Also smashing two energy beams into eachother and battling out who’s will win is just awesome that they even got that into the game.

Super-move scene-cuts are brilliantly done and perfectly timed. For example, kicking someone up into the air and issuing a “chase” attack as well will do a 3-scene cut of you first kicking them, then a cut, then you zooming in from the side, kicking them again, then a cut, then you zooming in from under neath and finally punching them down. All animated and sounded out just like the show would be done. I was really impressed with all of these sequences ever time either I or my opponent pulled of a super move of some kind.

Sounds & Voice Acting

The sounds and voice acting in the game were excellent. From what I heard the voice acting sounded like all the original cast from the show so as far as I could see there: “spot on”.

This also includes super-bad lines like “DARN YOUUUU!” that I’m guessing you love by this point. This is definitely a PG title (don’t expect any F-bombs or blood).

NOTE: This game does contain dubbed English voice acting, so if you were hoping for subtitled voice acting you might not like what you get.

The sound effects were solid, clear and had plenty of pop to them. Smashing someone in the face or breaking their spleen with a super-punch had that beautiful mechanical/powerful/sheen sound that is straight out of the anime.

Across the board the fidelity with which the team brought the Dragon Ball Z world into the video game was excellent. I really can’t complain about anything in this category.

Gameplay - Controls

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is not a button masher.

That’s the first thing I’d have to say about this game. If you are not the type of fighter-player that wants to learn combos and just wants to hop into a fight and start mashing buttons and pulling off sweet moves, you won’t enjoy Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit. This game is intended for people that are patient and will take the time to learn the moves.

If you hop into this game and try and button mash, you will likely make it through the first 4-8 fights and then hit a brick wall and just be unable to continue unless you bump the game down to Very Easy. You just cannot hang in a fight with a player that is executing sequences and taking off 1000hp per attack while you are dolling out 75-150hp of damage yourself each time you try.

There is also a strong dependency on chaining moves. In Street Fighters for example, it’s usually pretty easy to combine any number of punches and kicks and make up some long-running combo. In Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit, if you just try and button mash, you will find yourself firing off the exact same 2 or 3 move sequences over and over and over; even if you don’t intend to.

You really need to take the time to learn the combos in this game and if you do, you will be rewarded with not only a deep and satisfying fighting system where fraction-of-a-second combos are easy to pull of but you will be constantly rewarded with awesome-looking moves as you beat your opponent to death.

I would point out that it can be daunting to learn these combos as almost every single button on the controller can be used and some used in certain contexts with each other, but it’s still surprisingly easy to pull off some badass looking moves if you just take the time to learn say 2 or 3 special moves and then try and add 1 move to your repertoire per day even.

I’m basically saying “yes it can be really deep and look daunting, but it can also be pretty dang easy to look like a badass with about 10mins of practice”.

Gameplay - Drama Pieces

I’m adding this section because these things confused me until I learned what they are. They are basically special events that can occur during a fight if certain criteria are met.

As an example, if you select a protection drama piece, and you start a fight and your enemy unleashed some big attack on you, if that triggers that drama piece, a quick cutscene will trigger where your partner will come flying out of no where and kick your enemy across the face, breaking his attack and issuing some damage against him. There is a certain limit to how many drama pieces will trigger during a fight.

There is a whole slew of drama pieces and some of them are pretty cool. One that Recoome has is if an especially powerful attack is executed against him, he has a drama piece that will cause him to instantly dodge it and during that cutscene that is trigger he just laughs and says something like “Is that all?” or “I’ll just dodge that”.

They are kind of clever anime-esque touches to a typical 1 on 1 fighting game I thought that introduced some interesting twists to a fight.

Gameplay - Unlockables

As is getting popular with fighters and racing games, Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit features unlockables in the forms of new characters, new levels, new special attacks (drama pieces) and even moves.

The way unlocks work is at the end of each fight you are giving a quick breakdown of everything awesome you did during the fight, a star-score and finally a letter score for your battle. Then you are giving a list of notifications of things that you have unlocked as a result of that fight.

I found the presentation to be really satisfying, giving you some compensation for making it through a stage and making you want to keep playing through more or replaying the same stage to get a higher score and unlock more.

Online Multiplayer

This was one portion of Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit that disappointed me.

While the menus, features and matching function/flow of multiplayer was fairly good, the seeming razor-strict synchronization code made multiplayer matches on anything less than perfect 3-bar/Green connections unplayably frustrating. And there also didn’t seem to be a way to search for another low-ping game to join, you could only match against game settings and it was a crap-shoot to see what speed the person you were playing with was.

When you connect to another person to play an online match, you are shown the person’s PSN ID along with a 3-bar, Red/Yellow/Green latency (ping) indicator. I played multiple matches online and this was the summary of my experience:

• Red: Completely unplayable. The actual frames of animation seem to be synchronized. Meaning the game plays “choppy” and jerky trying to keep you and the host in sync.
• Yellow: The animation was smooth, but fight movements were dropped from time to time. For example trying to pull off a triple-punch and then a kick would result in maybe a punch and a kick, or more likely just the kick. It wasn’t a lag issue, it’s just that the commands were simply dropped and never played out. At one point I actually went 10 seconds without successfully firing off a single attack because each time I tried they were dropped.
• Green: Plays fine

I was really surprised by seeing such poor multiplayer net code, either by not implementing some sort of prediction algorithms or attempting so strictly to synchronize both the host and the remote player without any consideration for lag that will exist between the two.

Unless you can bag a 3-bar/Green connection, I’d say online multiplayer is a no-go.

One thing I did really like about the online presentation is that at any point you can make a choice (like a character, or to replay the person or quite) you are shown both your menu and your opponents menu and you can see their choice in real-time which made the online experience more personal and made coordinating with someone you liked playing with a bit easier after a fight was over (as opposed to blindly saying Continue or Quit and waiting to see what happens based on what they agreed to, you can watch them pick one or the other).

Training & Practice

I had to add a section for this because the game is brilliant in this regard.

Out of the box Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit provides a 3-tiered, unlockable training regiment that is meant to train you in all ways Dragon Ball. As you pass each class you unlock the next; with any class you have passed easily returnable to individually if you just want to practice 1 aspect at a later date.

The training was not 1-dimensional as I expected, is was actually laid out in an extremely intuitive way (the progression is very natural), instructions are completely voiced-over by the DBZ characters and instruction screens before each training excercise clearly spell out exactly what you have to do to clear that stage.

I’ve played a lot of fighters in the past that give you a practice mode and let you lookup combos yourself, but not one with as much detail and purposefully-designed training before.

Continuing from the previous section, I think the Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit designers knew that the fighting system was deep and required a good understanding of the combos so they developed this training mode directly into the game.

Lastly, as mentioned, you of course have a Practice Mode where you can get into the ring with a CPU character and wail on them indefinitly, looking up combos as you go and either turning their AI on or off (so they either fight back, or stand there like a sack of bricks).

The combination of the two modes makes for an excellent ramp-up experience for first time players and folks that just want to brush up on their fighting if they find themselves in a rut.

Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is a great game that is a must-buy for Dragon Ball Z fans, a safe-buy for avid fighting-game fans and a great rental for fighting game fans. While it won’t be converting any gamers that generally avoid fighting games, watching some of the more over-the-top attacks and anime-style presentation can be pretty entertaining.

If you like fighting games but sometimes find yourself on the fence, we might suggest waiting to see the reviews on Naruto: Ultimate Ninja or Street Fighter IV before making a final decision on which fighting game to get.

Areas of Improvement

As with all our reviews, we try not to criticize unless we can provide feedback on how to improve something. So we’ll outline those below:

• Better online multiplayer gameplay experience. Less jerky, more fluid.
• A bit more button-masher friendly. I felt the barrier to executing cool moves was a hair to high to make this a blind-pick-and-play title, which I believe most fighters should be.
• A bit longer or clearer presentation of the portion of the DBZ universe that is being covered in the game’s story mode. Maybe a lead-in, lead-out to the place in the story where the game takes place to give non-DBZ fans some more context.
• Less repetitive character animations and more fluid story presentation. A few times we saw cutscenes play that didn’t really make sense given the outcome of a fight or a cutscene would cut to a character that wasn’t even involved in the scene saying something, then cut back to the real scene… that was odd.
• An option for sub-titled, original-voiced material for folks that don’t like the cheesy English voice overs.

With gas prices around $4/gallon and budgets everywhere getting crunched with higher costs of… everything, states are struggling to figure out how to lower costs and try and accomodate greener practices.

After a year-long study, Utah has announced this week that it will be moving to a 4-day (Monday through Thursday), 10hr/day work week.

The announcement will effect 17,000 of the 24,000 government workers in Utah and save the government a ballpark of around $4 million/year in lessened energy expenditures (electricity for lighting and AC as well as reimbursed fuel expenses).

The hidden benefits here are the boost in moral due to the 3-day weekends ever week, a boost in the local economy as locals go out on Friday to enjoy the city, hang out or golf and another potential side-benefit is the attraction of younger workers to the government workforce for the promise of a 3-day weekend.

There are a few challenges to get around, first being adjustments in the bus and child-care schedules that will need to move around to accomodate the new working schedules but spirits seem to be high around the change.

Good luck to you guys in Utah, this sounds really cool!

If you ever got a chance to play the original Operation Flashpoint, then you are familiar with the feel that Bohemia Interactive was able to create that has never been re-created in another FPS or army shooter since… not even America’s Army (the US army simulation game).

Kotaku describes that feeling as:

The feeling of being a real person, alone, in a dangerous place, and each step you take across the game’s huge landscape could well be your last.

and I think they nailed it right on the head. The trick with the Op Flash games was that there was already the map you were on, and it didn’t seem to end. You had vehicles, which included cars, jeeps, tanks, farm equipment, helicopters (attack and troop), crop dusters… and this was back in 2001. While each map had an objective, like “Attack this squad at these coordinates”, you could happily fly for 10 mins in the wrong direction and parachute out of the helicopter and land in a small farm town in the middle of no where with nothing but dirt roads.

It was nuts that you could even do this back then.

There were other things that made the game feel desolate, you didn’t know where gunfire would be coming from sometimes as there might be a sniper a quarter of a mile away, in a ghili suit tucked under some tree bush on a mountain side. Yea, it got that crazy.

You could of course snipe drivers out of vehicles, breaking the front windshield and making the vehicle come to a slow crawling stop… this included helicopters and the “slow crawling stop” was more like “falling like a rock out of the sky”.

Did I also mention that the entire game was multiplayer-enabled as well? Again, all of this that has been popularized by games like Battlefield 2, but back in 2001.

The important take-away from this post is that according to CVG, their time spent with Operation Flashpoint 2 shows that it has still somehow maintained the same gritty realism and mind-bogglingly large battle theaters that make you feel alone and under pressure when in the battle field.

We’ll keep you posted on any new developments as they trickle out.

NOTE: I declare semi-shenanigans on these “exclusive screenshots” below, the fire and smoke in the last one is ridiculously natural looking, so take these with a grain of salt and assume they were doctored by Codemaster’s marketing team before having a stroke at how good they look.

Thanks CVG!

Actually I am hinting at a movie… but I think it’s implied… or maybe it’s not… maybe I’m just really smart. Yea let’s go with that.

Anyway, seems like the viral marketing surrounding Resistance 2 has started to spin up in the form of “Project Abraham“. A short flash movie that shows Katee Sackhoff (”Starbuck” from Battlestar Galactica and pictured on the left) talking down to a hospital gurney as it’s rushed into the operating room telling her husband/friend/whatever that “Everything will be OK”.

The movie ends with Sackhoff freaking out to get the doctors to help him but to only have the MPs remove her from the room and then you hear the sound of the heart monitor flatline… which then turns into a series of Morse Code beeps.

The beeps apparently spell out “blackout“, which when appended to the original site’s URL, you end up with this interactive, old-school looking picture, and I have no idea what you are suppose to do with it.

Thanks Kotaku!

The badasses over at Unwired View have figured out how to install the Android OS dev image on the Nokia N810 running the Diablo (latest) firmware; effectively replacing the operating system with Android and allowing you to play around with it long before real Android phones and devices will hit the street.

The best part, it’s a 2-step process to be done from the 810N directly that will probably take no more than a few minutes, more specifically:

1. Download android.img.bz2
2. Install android-installer.deb
3. Reboot the Nokia 810N

Now you’ll have a new entry under the Extras Menu that you can fire up to do the install. If you get stuck, have questions or want more information about the process, check out the Internet Table Talk Forums here for a slew of folks that have done this and can help.

Thanks Laurence Hartje and Unwired View!

During G4 TV’s preview run of Rock Band 2, some forum goers over at ScoreHero Forums snagged a screenshot of part of the song-list screen. Kotaku further broke it down with a best-guess of artists backing the song list, and we have:

• “Panic Attack” by Dream Theater or Finger Eleven
• “Chop Suey” by System of a Down
• “Give It Away” by Red Hot Chili Peppers
• “Everlong” by Foo Fighters
• “Kids In America” by Kim Wilde
• “Ace of Spades” by Motörhead
• “Hello There” by Cheap Trick
• “Anyway You Want It” by Journey
• “Pinball Wizard” by The Who

Looking pretty good. I’m loving Journey, Dream Theater, Foo Fighters and Chili Peppers.

Thanks Kotaku!

Was browsing through Slashdot today and saw two interesting articles. It looks like nations, naturally under the guidence of the RIAA/MPAA and similar groups, are beginning to move ‘anti-piracy’ legislation forward.

The first part of the problem is to give ISPs complete amnesty from pirated material, which will protect them from litigation and give them an “all clear” to begin monitoring their traffic like crazy as compensation for the amnesty.

This is going to get discussed at the G8 Summit as nations and nation-wide ISPs begin to collaborate on filtering, monitoring and data mining of user’s traffic.

Then we have a story that ISPs will be tasked up with the responsibility of copyright enforcement as they monitor traffic travelling over their wires. The days of ISPs simply providing a service and nothing more are eroding away to some singular global monitoring entity. The writing is on the wall that at some point the unification of corporate giants and monitoring tools integrated with government programs will give us one giant, unified and completely monitored network that is mined every nano-second of every moment.

If it hasn’t happened already, I’m sure some AI-driven intelligence databases know more about your profile, likes/dislikes and habits than you are actually aware of yourself. Might be interesting to get a peek at this information and see if I have a chronically bad habit of looking up funny cat pictures or not

BONUS: As the bullshit-bonus story of the day a lawsuit filed against YouTube by Viacom and enforced by a judge’s ruling will force YouTube to give Viacom a complete log of every video, every user has ever watched. Besides the absolutely rediculous volume of that data, what in God’s name does Viacom even plan on doing with it?

I think it will be a year before they have the capacity to even process it correctly and from there then what… more RIAA-lawsuit mining? They just hunt though the trillions of access records looking for every person that ever watched a Viacom-copywritten piece of material, find their IP, and issue a lawsuit against them?

Brilliant… I guess if it’s failing for the RIAA, why not try it again… and see if it works that time.

I do like that these actions are making most people hate media and take a more appropriate approach to it than an addictive “must have” attitude that these entities want us to have. I can hum pretty damn good… I don’t need music on my iPod!

While we covered Resistance 2 screenshots quite a few months ago, this PS3-exclusive is starting to shape up and take shape with two new screenshots that have dropped today.

NOTE: These full screen images are huge, could take a while to download.

If you were a fan of the original game, Resistance 2 picks up right where Resistance 1 left off. There was a good gameplay movie that dropped in April that showed off some gameplay sequences from their “Chicago” level, check it out:

QUESTION: Does anyone else think this game styling/design is heavily influenced by the Half-Life 2 franchise?

Ummm…. this?

If you were waiting for the 2.4 Firmware update for the PS3 to cure your in-game communication woes with the “in game XMB support”, then you are probably pissed off right now.

Either apply the 2.4 update bricked your PS3 as a good handful of people are reporting online or you noticed that trying to do anything other than text-message from inside a game requires you to exit the game.

Awesome

So this feature that has been in PC gaming for more than 10 years now, Sony still can’t figure out how to do.

To clarify, voice chat has always been supported in multiplayer-games that provide it, but on the Xbox 360 you can invite individual friends to private chat channels regardless of what either of you is doing. This is sort of like being on the phone with a friend while you both do something else. This also helps when you just want to talk with a close friend and play a multiplayer game together, but don’t want to sit in the game’s chat channel and listen to all the other multi-tards and angry 9-year-olds scream at each other.

Sony maybe have the tech lead over Microsoft, but their complete inability to understand their market is really surprising to me. It’s like Sony Japan (folks that develop the firmware) don’t listen to any of the screaming feedback coming out of Sony America.

Ahh well… it’s still an awesome Blu-ray player and Media Device… and the games sure look pretty, so I’ll forgive it.

News is trickling out that while Guitar Hero: World Tour will pioneer the custom-music-creation tooling for “band gaming”, Rock Band 2 won’t have the feature out of the gate but may add something “radically different” down the road to the game.

So as we get closer to these September and October release dates for the two biggest video game music franchises, the details are starting to emerge to help us try and make an educated decision on which one to go with.

Because of the backward-compatibility with DLC, the order of deciding between the two franchises will look something like this for most people:

1. Do I have a significant number of DLC from a previous release? If YES, stick with this franchise.
2. Do I have a strong preference for the artist or song lineup for Guitar Hero: World Tour or Rock Band 2? If YES, buy the preferred franchise.
3. Am I the type to put in time creating custom songs OR downloading and playing custom songs from other people? If YES, buy Guitar Hero: World Tour.
   1. … or possibly Rock Band 2 assuming at a later date they announce the details of their own creation feature.
4. Have I played Guitar Hero or Rock Band enough in the past to prefer the feel or style of one game over the other? If YES, buy the associated franchise.

Thanks CNN!

For those that don’t know the back-story behind Crysis Warhead, originally Crytek, the creators of Crysis, intended to have a much longer post-game support cycle behind Crysis after it’s launch with a planned expansion pack and the long-hyped “1.3″ update that was going to boost game performance across the board.

NOTE: Even though Crysis is known for being one of the best looking games ever, the engine did have a tendency to bring every computer, big and small, to it’s knees regardless of horse power.

As it turned out what would have been the 1.3 update got rolled into what was going to be an expansion pack and the whole thing got turned into a new ($60) game instead of a free upgrade and a $30 expansion pack, known as Warhead.

As the hype machine starts for Warhead, rumors has it that the game engine performs on average 15% better than the version of the Crytek engine in Crysis but with the same gorgeous graphics.

So if you were a fan of the original Crysis (I wasn’t, it was beautiful but so boring), you have some more Crysis-ing to knash your teeth on:

Thanks VE3D!

Well this is just awesome. If you’ve never heard this song, it’s just this band singing the F word and S word… but it’s catchy:

To boot, apparently you can play it on Guitar Hero 2 as well, ha!

Thanks Brian Fernandes!

Badass! The remake of Clash of the Titans, an awesome movie from the 80s covering Greek lore, has gotten the director of the newly successful The Incredible Hulk remake, Louis Leterrier.

It also looks like the movie is going to be getting the fast-track treatment to get this puppy done and out by Summer 2010. Hope they don’t skimp on the story… word on the street is that IESB, folks who did the script review, loved it and said it rocked some socks off.

NOTE: IMDB seems to be still listing the original director for the remake and hasn’t updated it with Leterrier’s name yet.

Thanks Latino Review!

As a fan of Top Spin 2 I was happy to see that Top Spin 3 is out and ripe for the picking. From what we’ve seen so far it looks like most of the tried-and-true gameplay mechanics (like power shots) are back but along with some of the trickier shots like drop-shots that we couldn’t quite ever pull off well.

For those that haven’t played, the Top Spin series is the ultra-realistic tennis simulator series from 2K Sports. If you play tennis and enjoy the sport I would highly suggest the series to you, as little things like a nice slice, powerful cross-court backhand, or crushing Roddick-esque serve are all accurately animated and portrayed in the game.

The one downside I had with Top Spin 2, is that as you approach the end of the game and get to the level of playing at center court and in the top 5-10 rankings, the game ramps up to almost impossible-to-progress levels, not cutting you slack with the training and your opponents playing so fast and varied that it’s all you can do to even hang in on each point let alone smashing winners down the baseline.

Either way we’ll keep the tennis fans out there posted on Top Spin 3 as we get a chance to take a closer look at it.

Get ready to take it up the yoo-hoo… AT&T has finally released pricing for the 3G iPhone.

The Basics (Prices for 8GB and 16GB)

• For Plan Renewal: $199 or $299
• For Early Upgraders: $399 or $499
• For No Plan: $599 and $699 (Launched Later)

For full plan in formation, check out the following tables:

Thanks Engadget!

We’ve been covering the up-coming war between Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2 as the details unfold… this is mostly because I finally played one of these games and see why people like them so much; they are pretty fun.

Since Guitar Hero: World Tour got the announcement-drop on Rock Band 2, Rock Band is playing a bit of “catch up and dazzle” of it’s own, dropping news about it’s lineup as well as instrument information.

One of the biggest items is that Rock Band promises “improved instrument quality” after the fiasco that was Rock Band 1 with Drums and Guitars breaking like crazy.

Today the Rock Band team dropped a picture of the upcoming Fender-inspired, faux-wood style guitar that will be part of Rock Band 2.

(Click the image on the left for a giant version of it)

One thing to notice up-front is that the commonly-complained about “same color frets” issue that some people had with Rock Band 1 is still there. It looks like the RB team has decided to keep the instruments looking as real as possible forsaking, possibly, the gameplay-ability. More specifically it could be harder for some players to differentiate or remember the colors of each button with just the little strip of color to the side.

While this looks cooler, I don’t know how many people picked up Rock Band and thought “I want to kinda-sorta ACTUALLY playing an instrument”… most probably thought “I want to play a GAME”. In which case making that game easier to play would give a lower barrier to entry and be a bit more fun.

Notice that the Guitar Hero guitar not only stayed with the more classic design (although they did make it a bit more subtle) but also added the touch-sensitive bar.

News has already come out that Rock Band 2 will include revised drums as well, not sure how similar they will be to Guitar Hero: World Tour drums or if they will include cymbals, but we’ll keep you posted!

We normally don’t cover a lot of product announcements here but from time to time there will be something interesting that pops across our desks that we want to share.

Uniross, rechargable technology company, issued a press release for a few new products 1 of which is a solar-powered battery recharger… how cool is that? So you are at the beach and burn through your batteries, don’t worry about pitching them, grab your solar recharger and pop them in there, go swimming and bam, they are charged back up… and you didn’t have to throw out any batteries into any land fills.

I really like the new green technologies that I’m seeing trickle out now as well as the general interest levels in them by folks, I have high hopes for this tech cleaning things up a bit.

Full announcement after the jump:

Ditch The Disposable Lifestyle With Uniross

New Product Range Includes Solar and Wind Chargers

Uniross has just announced the launch of a new range of eco-friendly battery chargers. With gadgets an everyday part of people’s lives, an unfortunate side effect is that 660 million batteries end up in landfill sites every year. Our increasing reliance on portable power means the last thing you want to worry about is carrying spare batteries, so Uniross is making battery charging a way of life with a new range that allows you to recharge your batteries anytime, anywhere.

If you’re in a hurry, use the new 15 minute charger at home to save time and the environment. Or, if you’re lying on the beach, you can recharge your batteries with the new Uniross Solar Charger. Never again be caught short on a long train ride with no power and an MP3 player of songs; simply plug in the new Uniross Pod portable power pack…and why take a separate alarm clock on your travels when Uniross now has a charger that incorporates a travel clock?

“Our customers have told us they want to recharge batteries wherever they are - with convenience and simplicity the key,” said Mike Doole, Managing Director of Uniross. “Ultimately we want people to ditch their disposable lifestyles so we hope the new additions to our range inspire people to do exactly that.”

Uniross is the only battery brand endorsed by the WWF. “Throwing away batteries wastes precious resources and adds to environmental pollution,” said Colin Butfield, Head of Campaigns at WWF-UK. “Recharging is a simple way people can reduce their impact on the environment, which is a key aim of WWF’s One Planet Future campaign. Even better, a charger that uses the ultimate renewable energy source - the sun - means you can recharge whilst you’re on the move.”

With Uniross’ multiusage range, incorporating Hybrio technology you can now use the batteries straight out of the packet because they are pre charged. So they’re as convenient as a disposable battery, but when they run out you can just recharge them again and again … up to 1,000 times!

The new additions to the Uniross range are:

- Solar Charger
With USB adaptor
RRP £39.99

- 15 Minute Charger
For a faster charge: charges any battery in less than 15 minutes
RRP £34,99

- NOMAD Charger
Your portable power hub: with USB adaptor
RRP £19.99

- Wind Charger
Wind powered portable power with bike mount, integrated Li-Ion battery with
USB output and phone and game connectors
RRP £49.99

- Travel Clock Charger
Charges any battery in less than 3 hours, while you sleep
RRP £29.99

- Universal Chargers (2 models)
1.  Charges between 1 and 4 AA / AAA / C / D batteries
>From £10.99
2.  Premium: Charges any RECHARGEABLE battery in less than 3 hours
RRP £29.99

The new range of Uniross chargers is available from August from good electrical, department, supermarket and hardware stores and internet retailers.

The Antro Solo, pictured above, is a Solar-Gas-Electric and “Human” powered hybrid vehicles that came out of design shops in Hungary. The car is designed to go 150mpg and is planned to enter the market in 2012 at a $20,000 price point.

The entire car, chasis made out of carbon fiber, weighs less than 600lbs but can still reach a top speed of 90mph. The entire top of the car is covered in solar panels used to charge the car during short 10-15mile trips, but the car also offers stored battery-power for rainy days as well and as a last-ditch emergency effort, both driver and passenger seats come with pedals that can be used to charge the car’s battery if you are caught in a tight spot.

If you have gas though and don’t want to pedal to power the car (you know the American version will never have pedals… yay-fattest-nation-ever) the car does have a small combustion engine that can be run off of Ethanol or standard gas to power it as well.

What is pictured above is the running prototype that they hope to get into mass production by 2012.

Bring on the new tech!

Thanks TG Daily!

Quick “interesting news” post, scientists have found that the “wisdom of crowds” effect that is so commonly referenced with Web 2.0/social networking sites actually exists within each of us (assuming you are atleast of average intelligence).

More specifically, if you take a crowd of people and ask them a question, the average of the answers is typically correct (example given was “guessing jelly beans in a jar”). That sounds pretty cool, and as an individual you might feel defeated or dumber without the crowd… what researchers found though is that if a single person is given time to guess multiple times, the average of their multiple answers are typically just as accurate.

a) that is badass, cause now I’m not as dumb as I thought

b) I guess from now on I need to make decisions by giving multiple answers over the period of a few minutes… “Do you want to go to dinner?” “Yes… no… yes yes… no… yes…. ok let’s go”

c) I wonder what this means for Web 2.0/social networking sites?

Thanks The Economist!

PS3 users rejoice! VE3d is reporting that PS3 firmware 2.4 (trophies/in game XMB) will be released this Wednesday.

Additionally, the Playstation Blog has two video demonstrations - In Game XMB and The Trophy System.

The first game to support troph