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Advertisements have shown us that the iPhone is a tool with a wide array of functions -- YouTube perusing, calamari ordering, and astronaut deafening, to name a few. But no commercials have warned of the iPhone's (and the iPod Touch's) sinister, newly implemented abilities -- fragging, railgunning, and gibbing. We speak, of course, of the handheld's recently developed Quake 3 Arena application, which uses the device's touch screen and accelerometer to crudely recreate that warm, familiar mouse-and-keyboard feeling. Just thinking of the possible on-the-go LAN parties we'd be able to hold is making us consider finally trading in our Zack Morris phonebrick for Apple's sexy cellular device.

The MacBook will play many of your really old games at an acceptable level, but you can forget about playing any recently released intensive 3D games (i.e. the ones you want to play). That's the conclusion MacWorld has reached in its first look at the MacBook as a gaming machine. The article suggests maxing out the RAM in the machine if you want to play games: the writer saw a 50fps increase in Quake 3 Arena when he upgraded the machine from 512MB to 2GB. A nice finding for owners of MacBooks interested in a bit of retro gaming.

However, lets get something straight here, the MacBook is not a gaming machine. It has an integrated graphics card. No computing hardware that lacks a dedicated graphics card should be even mentioned in the same sentence as "gaming." We understand that some Mac owners may need to be persuaded to overlook this machine's blatant Achilles heel but it isn't MacWorld's job to do this. The site is doing a disservice to its readers by pointing to the poor gaming performance of the MacBook and then suggesting that people "understand [the MacBook's] limitations" and go "buy an XBox360 or Playstation2 for [their] gaming needs."

It's this sort of advice that gives Apple free reign to charge $149 for a paint job (um, can I have a graphics card instead?) and allows the mainstream media to say things like "Mac users aren't into games."

[Via TUAW]

This setup might be enough to make any hardened gamer weep with envy. Especially hardened gamers who've just splashed out on a new monitor themselves (we're not bitter). Running Quake 3 at a resolution of 10240x3072, this custom multi-panel display consists of 24 monitors powered by 12 Linux servers, created as part of a wall-based user interface research project. Warcraft II has also made it big, but at 3840x2160 it looks positively tiny next to the Quake 3 setup.

[Via Opposable Thumbs]