Anandtech has gotten their hands on one of the new Xbox 360s, and has pried it open for us all too enjoy. And true enough, the CPU+GPU+RAM have been fused together into a single package with a single cooler. Furthermore, Anandtech finds that the new Xbox 360 consumes less than 50% of the power at load than the older Xbox 360s.

There’s a fine line between simulation and arcade racing, and most racing games try to hit a perfect balance, like Forza 3. Blur however, doesn’t do such thing, it purely belongs in the arcade section, and it does for a good reason: it’s fun, exciting and the furthest from simulation a racing game game be (besides Mario Kart, of course).

Blur not only features very high-paced driving where your nerves are on the edge, there’s a whole other dimension to the game with power-ups and a reward system which rewards you for destroying, slamming into and generally obstructing your opponents on the track. At best it can be described as a grown-ups version of Mario Kart. On steroids. You’ll be collecting power-ups which range from missiles you can shoot at your opponents, to land mines you can place.

As you might expect, there’s a campaign mode, which consists of 9 parts each with 7 races, so there’s plenty to do in the game (read: lots of racing). However, Blur suffers form what most campaigns in racing games suffer from: repetitive gameplay. The second half of the career mode in Blur is just like that, however, with the high-paced gameplay, the power-ups and rewards, it’s not as bad as in most other racers. One downside is that you’ll reach the max level in the game halfway into the campaign, leaving little to play for in the second half.

Other modes include checkpoint races, destruction mode where the sole objective is to destroy each other, and the modes are competent, especially the multiplayer, which featured the same frantic gameplay and modes as the single-player, and there’s ranks and awards as well.

Technically, the game manages to keep a great visual look and style, while still delivering a sense of great speed. Same with audio and the music selection, each contribute to give the game a great feeling of big production value. Overall, if you’re into arcade racing and not simulators like Forza and Gran Turismo, Blur is definitely worth checking out.

The good:
Fast paced racing
Lots of races
Power-ups are fun
Lots of cars to race

The Bad:
Campaign gets repetitive
Multiplayer can lag at times

Overalls score: 8/10

The Red Ring of Death is something that has followed the Xbox 360 since its launch, where almost a third of all consoles are/were defective. However, it has since gotten better, and with the new Xbox 360, RRoD is a thing of the past. At least physically, as there are no red lights on the ring on the console — only green. So from now on. it’s the Green Ring of Death, or GRoD.

A few years ago (or 4) there was a famous pic of Spielberg and Miyamoto playing the Wii. This year, the filmmaker was spotted playing with the Nintendo 3DS, wearing his trademark cap.

Steam on OS X isn’t particularly running as smoothly as on the PC. On the same computer, Steam games will generally run 30-50% slower on the Mac than they do under Windows, a fact Valve is familiar with. Now they’ve announced that they’re working with Apple and Nvidia and ATI on performance on the Mac, both in terms of Steam software and drivers. Valve promises that performance will improve, but didn’t provide a time frame.

While Microsoft did everything to showcase the Kinect motion control peripheral, they didn’t reveal a price. Luckily GameStop did, when they put the Kinect up for pre-order at $150. Now Amazon has set the same price for Kinect, and it appears that Microsoft’s newest attachment will be quite costly for gamers, costing half of what an Xbox 360 console costs. To solidify the new price, Walmart and BestBuy have also listed Kinect at $150.

The innards of Nintendo’s 3DS have been unknown — heck, the innards of all of their consoles have been unknown — but now they’ve revealed a few details, mainly, mainly, screen resolutions. The bottom screen measures at 3 inches and has a resolution of 320×240. The top however, is a 3.5″ screen which has a resolution of 800×240 — but those pixels are actually composed of two images, each with 400×240, creating the 3D effect.

At E3, LucasArts revealed the Monkey Island 2 trailer, but not the original, no, the remake, which looks, oh, about a million times better.

At E3 today, Konami announced that the Silent Hill franchise is in the hands of a new developer, Vatra Games, which is working on Silent Hill 8, slated for release early next year on the PS3 and Xbox 360. No other details were released, besides a quite trailer, which will will post as soon as we get our hands on.

The table above illustrates the differences between the two consoles, and the new version is around 17% smaller than the previous, which isn’t much, considering Sony shrank their PS3 by a third. Luckily, there’s built in wires and a much larger hard drive. And it’s a lot quieter. Via Engadget.