LittleBigPlanet, stunning displays highlight CES

As GamePro prepares to abandon the Las Vegas desert for the cozy confines of San Francisco, we'd like to put forth the top 5 trends, games, and interesting gaming-oriented developments of this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

It's all about displays. Arguably one of the two or three most important inventions in human history, displays continue to evolve at an astonishing rate. This year, however, the bigger-bigger-bigger trend took a back seat to cooler/better. In fact, two of the two coolest tech products at the entire CES this year were Alienware's magnificent 2880 x1990 curved display and Sony's hyper-thin, super-bright OLED display. (Check out the Alienware display in action by clicking here. )

LittleBigPlanet rocks. Sony's packed-house demonstration of collaborative platform game builder Little Big Planet sent massive ripples of energy through the show. The demo featured the game's designers demonstrating the community and level-building tools in the game. Then the guys built and played through a custom level. Even a crash right at the beginning of the demo couldn't mute the audience's very favorable reaction. (For a complete recap of the event, click here.)

Creative's X-Dock HD Imagine taking your iPod and placing it in a dock that upconverts the video to 720p. It exists, thanks to the minds at Creative. In this day and age of downloadable videos, movies, and TV shows, the X-Dock is one of those no-brainer gadgets. Oh, and it also allows you to wirelessly connect your iPod to remote stereo systems as well.

Wireless video at home The migration away from cables behind the living room TV is finally - finally! - underway. Belkin's Flywire Wireless Video Cable allows you to connect your DVD player, Xbox 360, and whatever else to the back of this device, which then broadcasts a crisp, highly responsive 1080P video signal to a TV using a wireless receiver. The range is 100 feet.

Triple SLI PCs. In a closed-door session, nVidia showed GamePro a new motherboard architecture that allows gamers to connect three video cards together for super-duper high-resolution gaming. They also explained a brand new technology named "Hybrid SLI". A new line of nVidia motherboards are being designed so that, when used in conjunction with nVidia video cards, gamers will receive an automatic 40% to 50% boost in performance. That's the simple version at least - GamePro will give you a more detailed explanation in the near future.

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