The video games right now seem like icing, geared primarily toward families who purchase the player more for its home-theater advantages. Bundled with the Extiva is Ballistic, a game that sounds like a firefight between Tetris and Pong. It's fast and jammed with hi-res 3-D graphics. Six other titles will hit stores soon. Some, like Cyan's best-selling Myst, have been ported or revamped from older platforms; others, like Freefall 3050 A.D., are brand new. By spring of next year, Nuon developer VM Labs of Mountain View, Calif., expects to see 25 or 30 games on the market.
All-in-One DVD Player Gets Thumbs-Up From Movie Buffs
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When the Nuon chip was born, it was touted as a
next-generation video game console tucked into a
DVD player not necessarily a comfortable fit on
a shelf already crowded by the Nintendo 64, the
PlayStation and the Dreamcast. Now that
Samsung is rolling out the Extiva ($500) the
first Nuon-equipped DVD player the chip
reveals a subtler feature that may prove much
more interesting: It can handle the heady math
required for such cinema-nut necessities as
infinite zoom, jitter-free reverse and on-the-fly
program adjustments. Because the chip performs
tasks the same way your PC does, it can replace
six or seven pieces of hardware and still dedicate
its processing power to whatever is most
important at a given moment. It also allows the
player to read additional information on a DVD,
such as a customized navigation program or a
multimedia movie quiz.