The computer maker’s latest line of gaming laptops promise to deliver on-the-go gaming in a slick looking new laptop. But can the Area-51 m15x deliver the goods at an affordable price and in a package you’d want to take with you?

Loved

Blistering speed: There’s no arguing that the m15x is a laptop built from the ground up for gaming. My loaner shipped with an Intel Core i7 920XM processor that delivered 3.2GHz in Turbo Mode and came with an 8MB cache. That’s enough power to get pretty close to topping out the official Windows Experience Index for gaming and certainly enough muscle power to run anything on the market today.

High Def Screen: The m15x comes with an astounding 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M GPU delivering 1920×1080 (1080p) resolution on its 15.6-inch screen.

Winning Aesthetic Design: True to its core, the Alienware laptop is a flashy bit of kit with back-lit speakers, a glossy Alien head with glowing eyes set in the centre of the laptop’s lid and a pleasantly tactile surface beneath the keyboard. The curved and vented shape of the front edge of the laptop and lid give the computer a delightfully unique look.

Backlit Keyboard: The m15X, like the XPS laptop line, has a backlit keyboard that can be personalised with the Alienware Command centre. Controls let you light up the keyboard with any colour you want. The keyboard is actually broken down into four sections, so you can choose colours for each section and they don’t need to match.

Light Show: The keyboard isn’t the only thing you can light up and control. The Command centre also gives you control over the colour of the speakers, that fancy lid Alien head, the power button, the touchpad, the above-keyboard media strip and even the company’s logo. The centre lets you set up different colours depending on whether your running the laptop on battery or a power cord and even light up to show different events, like when new emails arrive. You also have access to an impressive selection of colour swapping options that will strobe, morph and cycle through colours on any part of your laptop

Hated

The Power Cord: The XPS laptop’s power brick was so big it initially struck me as a gag. The m15x isn’t quite that bad, not quite. It’s still about 20 percent larger than a DSi, which strikes me as too big to power something meant to be portable.

Laptop? Not If You Want To Walk Again: This is one of my biggest complaints about the m15x laptop. It’s not a laptop, not really. It’s nearly 15-inches wide, 12 inches deep and almost 2 inches thick. It also weighs nearly 10 pounds. Most importantly, though, is that the laptop’s visually pleasing design, makes it incredibly unwieldy to rest on your lap. The laptop’s battery in particular, which juts out by about half an inch for use as a stand, makes lap use of this laptop unlikely.

Pricey: All of those bells and whistles, the high-def GPU, blazing fast CPU, 4GB of dual channel DDR3 memory, a 500GB SATA II hard drive, the brand and the design, it all comes with a pretty hefty price tag. While you can land an entry level m15x laptop for $US1,200, this bad boy will set you back nearly $US3,000.

While Alienware’s m15x is a much lighter, sleeker gaming laptop than was parent company Dell’s XPS M1730, it’s still a heavy, awkward beast. I get that packing all of that processing muscle power and a sizeable screen into a laptop is tricky, that it means an inevitably large and heavy form factor. But I wouldn’t be willing, at $US3,000, to put up with that.

I spent a month or so carting this laptop around the world. I took it with me to Australia, flying both locally and internationally, to see just how portable this portable was. It’s not very. But once landed, it did a great job of performing as my desktop abroad.

If you’re looking for a laptop that you plan to use for gaming at a desk, not on a lap, than the m15x could be a good choice. Me? I’m more interested in the m11x sub-12-inch, sub $US1000 gaming laptop.

The Area-51 m15x is developed and sold by Alienware. Retail starts at $US1,200 USD. The review laptop rang in at about $US3,000. A loaner m15x was sent to Kotaku for reviewing purposes and then returned. Used the laptop for more than a month, including travelling with it Australia.

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The Sega Genesis Ultimate Collection will be a free app that supports a store filled with emulations of classic Genesis titles. The app, said to hit the iPhone next month, will come with Space Harrier II and the ability to purchase four other games.

• Sonic the Hedgehog: $US5.99
• Golden Axe: $US4.99
• Ecco the Dolphin: $US2.99
• Shining Force: $US2.99

This seems like a fantastic way to break free of the increasingly bloated App Store and have your own space in which to hawk and sell your games. I’d love to see more publishers doing this. Can you imagine a Capcom Arcade packed with retro emulations?

Ultimate Genesis: Sega’s Official Console Emulator for iPhone [Gizmodo]

Two of the ten bazillion HDTVs on display at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show were the LE9500 and PK950, previously noted for manufacturer LG Electronic’s claims of a “Wii-like experience,” courtesy of its Magic Motion remote. How Wii-like was it?

In terms of pointing a remote at a screen and things happening, it was dead on. Like the Wii, LG’s TVs equipped with Magic Motion support can also play games, as you’ll see in the video above. It’s certainly not as intuitive as the Wii, as you’ll see by my signature fumbling and struggle to play a game of Cooking Burgers.

And it wasn’t the experience I’d have chosen to interact with a TV, based on the sometimes sloppy pointer recognition, which required reorientation now and then.

But if you consider a Wii-like experience to be having access to an on-screen mouse pointer and shaky gesture recognition, plus a few mini-games, you’ll see that the LE9500—the set we tested—has those aspects in spades. You’ll also see what it was meant to be like in the quick ad spot for the TV below.

Next year, I’m getting Crecente one of those iPhone steady cams, to prevent reader nausea. Promise.

It’s appropriate then that the biggest new innovation of sin city’s Consumer Electronics Show this year is itself a bit of visual slight of hand: 3D.

Giving images a sense of substance and heft have long been a goal in video gaming. More than once, that has meant playing around with the idea of pumping graphics at gamers through glasses or peripherals meant to deliver an extra dimension.

But there’s a reason they’ve never taken off. Often the 3D tech required wearing glasses to work, putting one more barrier between a gamer and the experience.

What’s different this time around? Very little.

Speaking to a gathering of media at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman, CEO and president of Sony Corporation, detailed the interest the multi-faceted company has in 3D, spending an hour pitching the technology and new Sony 3D TVs to the crowd.

He showed us a Jimi Hendrix concert in 3D, sea turtles swimming in 3D and even brought singer Taylor Swift up to sing and be recorded and instantly rebroadcast in 3D.

The heads of IMAX and Discovery promised us that the time was right for 3D on TV. The head of ESPN took to the stage to explain how FIFA and PGA were getting the 3D treatment.

And it will be Sony’s video game console, the PlayStation 3, that will bolster these efforts. 

“The PlayStation 3 will be our foothold for bringing more 3D into the home,” Stringer said. “All of our existing PS3 units will be firmware upgradeable.”

One upgrade to the console will allow the PS3 to display video games in 3D on supported TVs, another will upgrade the Blu-ray player to support 3D, he said.

The mammoth CES Sony booth included playable versions of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Super Stardust HD.

While Gran Turismo’s 3D visual added a bit of flair to the game, when seen in 3D, the high-speed racing title seemed to have a few visual issues.

Super Stardust HD, on the other hand, used the 3D tech to give a sense of surprising depth to the Asteroids-like space shooter. The ship and the planet it floated over rotated in layers of graphics that appeared to drop away from the screen.

But neither of the games playable in Sony’s booth was built from the ground up for the new technology. That is coming, though.

“We are going to announce a [3D game] lineup soon,” said Sony hardware marketing director John Koller. “The first and third-party lineup is going to be substantial, it’s a pretty robust list of games…new IP, new franchises but also existing franchises [that] really kind of place the player in the game.”

Sony may have been the only game maker at CES with so direct an interest in 3D gaming, but they weren’t the only ones showing off 3D video games. 

Computer games have been chasing the 3D dream for decades using an odd collection of video cards, peripherals and special glasses. 

This year’s CES included a new offering from graphics card maker NVIDIA that can be used by game developers to add 3D to a game.

Capcom’s CES showing included a PC version of upcoming third-person shooter Dark Void. In the game, players zip through an alternate dimension shooting robotic aliens. Adding 3D to the mix gives the game an almost nausea-inducing level of realism. 

Many of the television manufacturers packed into the Las Vegas Convention Centre also used video games to show off their television’s ability to deliver 3D video. There were TVs showing off Gears of War 2, Batman Arkham Asylum and a video game based on Avatar.

Some TVs used polarisation, some used alternate-frame sequencing, some could add 3D to any video. But every one of them from LG’s to Panasonic’s to Sony’s technology, television or computer, have at least one similarity: They all require the viewer to wear glasses.

Over the course of the week I tried on a dozen different 3D glasses. While some were more comfortable than others, I can’t imagine wanting to wear any of them on a regular bases.

More importantly I can’t imagine that my wife and my son would be willing to pop on a pair of glasses every time they sit down to watch television. 

It’s one thing to wear glasses while sitting still for a two-and-a-half hour movie at a theatre, but introducing such an unreasonable bit of technology into the home seems like a bad idea.

It seems like an even worse idea when you consider that the 2010 3D televisions could become obsolete in 2011 when Phillips hopes to introduce 3D televisions that don’t require glasses.

Die hard early adopter that I am, I think I’ll be sitting this one out.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion. 

I had a chance to play arund with the X65F Pro Flight System a bit earlier this week and was impressed with the design and seeming sturdiness of the set-up.

The flight stick includes three 8-way hats, an 8-way thumb hat, a trigger, two buttons and two pinkie switches. It also ships with a throttle controller that includes two rotaries, a mouse hat, four 8-way hats, a 2-way “K” switch, a scroll selector, a 4-position mode switch and a split throttle that can be locked together for single-engine fighter control.

Testing the stick out in H.A.W.X. and Flight Sim X, I was impressed with how sensitive the force-sensing technology was, even detecting when I twisted the stick for rudder controls. Because the stick is made of steel, the heft gives the entire controller an added sense of realism and, I suspect, a longer life.

The one issue I did run into was that when I tried pulling off steep banking turns the base of the flight stick tended to lift up or try to fall over. The controller does come with pre-drilled holes so it can be mounted to a surface, but it would be nice if it also came with temporary clamps of some sort.

I suppose with the stick running $US400, the people who will be picking it up won’t be too worried about mounting it to their furniture or life-sized cockpits.

We saw this Wii PC peripheral knock-off while strolling through the halls of CES this weekend.

The fact that the oddly-named CyWee Z lets you play the likes of Shaun White Snowboarding with motion on your PC wasn’t all that interesting. What was interesting was that the controller transformed from a straight Wii remote-like stick into a gun shape.

I can’t imagine they will sell a single one of these.

While stalking the halls of the Las Vegas Convention centre this week during the Consumer Electronics Show, past women in evening gowns playing snowboarding motion games and people getting Tased, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a man holding a full-sized plastic automatic rifle pointed at an LCD displaying Modern Warfare 2.

The controller, packed with buttons, thumbsticks and a tiny speaker, lets you play the game while armed with a bit of plastic weaponry. The prototype is awkward to hold while playing and the speakers and rumble were so weak as to be unnoticeable on the show floor, but it certainly drew looks from the usually jaded CES goers.

Unveiled at Sony’s CES keynote earlier this week, the Dash is a “personal internet viewer” that includes some pretty nifty technology.

The little wireless device can run a bunch of different apps on its touch screen, letting you check weather, traffic, email, browse the net, all sorts of things. It also lets you play games using the devices built-in accelerometer.

The device is being built by Chumby for Sony so it will have access to the thousands of apps already available for the beanbag original version of the device, some of which will work.

When I asked the spokesman why someone would want to buy the Sony version versus the Chumby version, he said because their device would also tap into Sony’s vast experience with entertainment. When I asked what that really meant, he couldn’t say.

He did say that in theory the device could be used to interact with the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable.

Sadly, this is exactly the sort of thing I will end up buying.

Man, imagine playing an iPhone game on this bad boy.