The Price

$149.95 RRP in Australia

The Verdict

If you upgrade to the new Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor from the old, 802.11g version, you won’t notice any difference while gaming. But media streaming over your home network will see a legitimate speed increase.

For a moment, let’s ignore Microsoft’s traditionally ridiculous price for their Xbox 360 Wi-Fi adaptors. Instead, let’s just focus on performance.

Upgrading from 802.11g networking to 802.11n has a few key advantages: range is longer, speeds are faster and, since 802.11n sits on the 5GHz band, you won’t interfere as much with 2.4GHz frequencies used by 802.11g and basically everything else in existence.

But there’s one big thing that stops 802.11n from being any better than 802.11g for gaming: latency. Overall throughput may be faster on 802.11n (the pipe is bigger), but latency is really no less present than on 802.11g (it takes just as long for that first burst of water to come through). So those quick gaming commands aren’t faster on n, and my multiplayer testing (Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands… it was a real chore) confirmed it.

Media streaming, however, is where those big throughputs pay off. Using Connect360, I streamed HD episodes of Mad Men from my Mac to the Xbox. I timed from the moment I hit play to to the first frame of video playback. And the difference was noticeable.

Buffering occurred between 2-3 times faster, which was well beyond my expectations, despite how fast 802.11n is on a spec sheet. Clips went from taking as many as 15 seconds to playing (rounding up) to actually breaking the five-second barrier. I’d love to have tested 1080p streaming over Live as well, but my DSL is the bottleneck in that scenario.

Yes, the Xbox 360 Wireless Adaptor is still profanely expensive. No, if you have an older adaptor (or you’re just using some other solution), I wouldn’t recommend the upgrade (nor do I think Microsoft is even marketing it that way). But it’s nice to see a tangible improvement all the same.

Streams intra network media between 2-3 times faster

Tiny form factor still unique to the industry

No perceivable speed increase in gaming

It’s $149.95.

Costs half the price of a new 360

It’ll set you back a month of dinners at McDonald’s.

I don’t even want to think about what that is in White Castles

PC Watch are the ones who sacrificed their unit in the name of science, and say the unit is well organised, and has an easy to assemble design that should mean benefits in terms of ongoing production costs. [PC Watch via Kotaku]

You can change the details of the invasion in any way you choose: Zombie speed, infection rate, number of civilians, percentage of civilians armed, number of highly effective police and more.

You can play around with it to either defeat the zombies (boooooring), let them take over the city and pretend like some of their more gruesome kills are of your opposition politician of choice (take that, Michael Atkinson!), or try to make the odds even and see who really wants it more.

Warning: Turn down your speakers if you’re at work. The eerie post-rock soundtrack is accompanied by the expected array of flesh-hungry moans, which is the kind of thing that’s sort of tricky to explain away as part of your quarterly PowerPoint earnings presentation. [Class 3 Outbreak]

Nothing says “functional relationship” like destroying someone’s property rather than talking things out. I’d like to think this is fake, but this girl has a whole bunch of other videos where she’s equally horrible. She’s not worth it, buddy.

What you will get is a kind of “service offering with premium content and services” that you can’t get in the free edition, but what that is is unclear. But it’s unlikely that Sony will charge for the services they give away now, such as the ability to play for free online. [Gamespot via Engadget]

Did I say brick? I meant surf board. [GameWatch - in Japanese]

Seriously now, my youngest sister has a phone she never uses – save for texting. LOLs and TTYLs have long replaced spoken word and the clickity-clack of her slider phone keyboard easily drowns out the family small talk at the dinner table during holidays.

It’s only natural that some entrepreneur would turn this phenomenon into a game and make a little coin off of it. The game features arcade and race the clock modes, as well as a two-player competitive mode. The joysticks are toy mobile phones. Obvi.

And I’m just speculating wildly here, but since Rockstar didn’t develop this one I’m pretty certain there’s no hidden Hot Coffee sexting level. [ChipChick via Ubergizmo]

In the olden days of pinball, there wasn’t much to adjust. Free game scores were hard wired into the machine and couldn’t be changed. But with the introduction of Williams High Speed in 1986, things got more complicated.

The new machines would dynamically adjust the free play score based on an algorithm. It also introduced a method where if you had already scored a free game, it was impossible to win a random free game.

The post goes into much more detail over at Cheap Talk, but ultimately, these algorithms exploits, and the layouts of the tables themselves got so complicated that new players couldn’t figure out how to master them. And, as we all know, pinball faded into the night. If you’re at all a fan of pinball, it’s an interesting read. Head on over to check it out. [Cheap Talk via Retro Thing]

Image via ktpupp

Here’s what Texas-based law firm AbingtonIP says to justify their new suit:

Although modification of Xbox consoles is arguably against the terms of use for Xbox/Xbox Live, Microsoft ‘conveniently’ timed the Xbox console ban to coincide with the release of the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game and less than two months after the release of the very popular Halo 3: ODST game.

I’m not sure that modding consoles is “arguably” against the terms of use; it is against the terms of use. And why wouldn’t they want to keep people from pirating their biggest game of the year?

Certainly, anyone who is banned who hasn’t modded their console has a legitimate bone to pick with Microsoft, and there’s no defending their heavy-handed banning tactics and their collateral damage. But to suggest they’re intentionally banning legit accounts in order to get people to sign up again, well, that’s pretty stupid. [TG Daily via Engadget]

The two were married when a man brought his DS along with a copy of Love Plus to a church in Guam. There’s no word on honeymoon plans, but the two will be holding a small reception for family, close friends and the internet on November 22. (Seriously, there will be a webcam and stuff.)

It just goes to show, the power of Woman has no bounds. Stick her in a digital fortress, simplify her beauty to Nintendo DS rendering limits and give her a shrill, anime voice. Woman will triumph all the same. [Tiny Cartridge via technabob]