MSI and More
The next stop was MSI’s riot van, which made for an interesting location. Tentatively we approached, making sure we wern’t stepping into some shady back room. Commendably though, this actually turned out to be a working version of MSI’s community outreach program that teams up with local constabularies to work with under funded areas. It travels around and allows the bored youth to play the latest games on high speed gaming notebooks and desktops. It also encourages interaction with the local police.
The gaming notebook inside were quite impressive, sporting i7 CPUs, high end onboard GPUs and some fancy gamer styling. I’ll be kissing ass in the next few weeks to see if I can get one to review. Watch this space.
John Inwood recognised us which is always nice and we had a good chat about getting some reviews done. Hopefully should lead to some good stuff in the future.
Acer had hardware everywhere but finding someone to talk to about it was a different matter altogether. We got pushed from one stand to another, eventually finding a dutch gentleman to give us a run down on their latest case. A robotic front paneled orange beast. I want one.
One of the other trends at the show were custom gamer seats. BoysStuff had a lot of these available and I gave them all a try. The main downside to them is that while they all included some kind of speaker setup, not a single one had a built in sub. There’s no bass in any. Useless.
With the world being dominated by smartphones at the moment, it was interesting to see one company going in a slightly different direction. Here we have sWaP, the smartwatch phone company. They bundled a textable, talkable, several gigabyte storing phone into a silicon watch. While they will run you a couple hundred pounds, it still looks like quite an interesting idea. Especially for those that want somethinig a bit cool without all the additives found in modern handsets.
Taking the gaming seat to the next level wereOpen Wheeler. They had a full racing seat, steering wheel, pedals and gear stick combo. All a nice idea and in theory, it works great. In practice, I had a few problems.
The main one being that the support beam that runs between your legs prevents right foot braking as you can’t move your foot over. This removes some realism from a device that’s supposed to give you a pretty good racing experience.
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