Since a lot of people in Xbox 360 community has complained about the D-Pad on the current console’s controller, Microsoft’s engineering team is coming with something surprisingly different on the spot. Let’s take a look!

The brand-new toy is a genuine Xbox 360 wireless controller with a “twistable” D-pad, which revamps the “plus sign” twisting it clockwise when needed. Weird, but seems to work well. It also has a new greyish look, with redesigned gray buttons and analog sticks with a more deep shape. Neat!

While it looks great on paper, people’s major concern about the original D-pad lies on the accuracy rather on design or ergonomics. So we have to put our hands on it to satisfy our curiosity on the pratical side.

For 64,99 bucks you get a new wireless gamepad plus the Play & Charge kit, the same price of a regular wireless X360 controller plus the kit. So it might be a big deal in fact.

The bundle will launch on 9th November -- meanwhile let’s stay focused on our job with our traditional controllers, guys.

Following the wave of 3D display devices, Sony just revealed RayModeler 3D, its 3D autostereoscopic display prototype to be showcased at Siggraph 2010, event that starts tomorrow, 25th July, in Los Angeles.

To create a holographic illusion, the monitor uses LED light sources for 360 degrees of freedom, and pictures from various angles that once processed result in the right image for each eye of the spectator. Although with only 96x128 pixels of resolution, the picture is colorful and the video runs smooth. The device can also respond through sensory movement, rotating the displayed object.

Several applications have been studied for the future display in areas such as advertising, object viewing, and of course, games -- as the video shows at 3:00.

Things are changing again in casual games development and market. While some indie developers are getting their share of attention, some publishers are in need to correct their heading as fast as they can.

A good example can be RealNetworks layoffs. Their 1st party dev team is no longer working at GameHouse. They have few titles published in-house, and all portal operations will continue to go on, now only with 3rd party and 2nd party contracts. It just shows how rough times internal studios are living everywhere.

RealNetworks said it will continue to focus on social networks, but there is a kind of runaway train heading to social gaming like those in Facebook. It is even harder to define how casual gaming works in social networks. It can be appropriate to call it social gaming. Anyway it is not just another bandwagon, so publishers and developer must pay extra attention when dealing with these markets.

DrPetter always aroused curiosity with his games and inventions. Last Saturday he has released version 1.0 of Sculptris, a 3D sculpting and painting software, the result of six months of solitary work. It’s free to download, well optimized and lightweight. The official site has a very active forum already featuring several works published.

The big deal of Sculptris is its dynamic mesh tesselation that will provide additional detail where necessary. As well as ZBrush, Sculptris brings intuitive and productive methods of working. Even without detailed knowledge in modeling, in minutes you can be already addicted playing with it. However, Sculptris is not intended as a software to compete with ZBrush or similar. Even with some bugs in this version and rudimentary tools, in skilled hands it becomes a professional weapon.

There are lots of new games coming to XBLIG (acronym for Xbox Live Indie Games, former Xbox Live Community Games). Gamasutra selected 10 titles to have a look and download the trial, among hundreds of new titles.

It seems people (developers are actually people!) are getting their hands dirty with XNA, so we see increased activity on this Live channel. With that, it gets much harder to find a specific game, or keep track of new releases. Websites like XNPlay are working to make this task easier for everyone, as most indie games don’t get a fair amount of media coverages from major reviews websites.

Let’s support these brave developers and give a try (and buy) on those cool games!

Our friends at Merscom are now part of Playdom!

“Merscom’s core team has produced over 250 games and over 30 casual branded games”, Playdom said in a statement.

Check out the full story.

Apple and Adobe fight continues to rage on. After announcing iPhone support on its new CS5 suite, Adobe decided to cease investments on the new project. The reason for this is the new agreement made public by Apple last week, where it prohibits explicitly a conversion or translation tool. Only apps generated on Apple frameworks (for instace XCode) will be valid.

Read Apple and Adobe fight over iPhone development.

After a while, the new site Quantix is in the air. How nice! There is a lot of information and images about our projects, especially Cashtown for iPhone and the train simulator for Vale, in partnership with USP. With direct information about the company, who’s ahead and what we can do, surf the website of Quantix is like surfing in California Games: fun and no shark at the end.

Good ride!

Welcome to the Quantix Blog!

Here you’re gonna find news, ideas, videos, releases and any information related to games as so as understand a bit more of our way of thinking and developing.