The Las Vegas CES show kicked off what would be one of the most exciting, yet controversial topics of 2010: 3D gaming. With all the major consumer electronics manufacturers showing off their brand new 120Hz, HDMI 1.4 displays, Sony demonstrated its commitment to stereoscopic gaming by showing a range of titles running on the new sets. Then-forthcoming titles such as Gran Turismo 5 rubbed shoulders with existing 3D wares like Ubisoft's Avatar and upgraded games like Housemarque's brilliant Super Stardust HD.

Having missed CES this year, and sensing that we were really missing out, I got into contact with SCEE to chase up what was going on and hopefully get some hands-on time. Credit to the PR team here - they gave us some superb access which I hope translated into some great coverage. Housemarque confirmed a full 720p/120FPS upgrade for Super Stardust HD, while a trip to Evolution Studios near Liverpool allowed to us to go hands-on with the new 3D tech and talk to the architects behind Sony's implementation of 3D gaming. Excellent stuff from a personal perspective: it's breaking this type of story and talking to the key people that is the most exciting part of running Digital Foundry at Eurogamer.

In other news, iPhone hacker George Hotz, aka Geohot, announced to a disbelieving world that he had hacked the PlayStation 3. By hotwiring the console's memory bus, Hotz effectively glitched the system into allowing Linux to read and write to parts of the system RAM it had no business accessing. The piracy-hungry hordes descended to pour scorn on Hotz's achievement since it did not immediately translate into free games, but other hackers were busy behind the scenes intent on honing the exploit into something more usable...

Meanwhile, nine months after emerging from "stealth development" at GDC 2009, OnLive's much-vaunted beta finally got into the hands of real gamers, who spilled their guts on the internet. Simultaneously it was revealed - as Digital Foundry had long suspected - that OnLive uses h264 video encoding, with one of the foremost minds on the subject blogging the core principles behind the firm's supposedly revolutionary compressor.

And finally, Apple unveiled its years-in-the-making iPad tablet, opening up a new front in the hotly contested handheld gaming arena. Presented as a device for comfortable browsing and "consuming" media, my first thoughts were on the technical make-up of the new A4 processor, its GPU and the implications for gaming. Answers to our questions wouldn't be forthcoming for several months...

Other Digital Foundry articles: Image quality is clearly a serious matter. The anti-aliasing effect was our attempt to provide an insight into the kinds of custom solutions developers employ in their pursuit of improved edge-smoothing without the overheads of traditional GPU solutions. I'm always pleasantly surprised at how well read this type of feature is - more people read and shared this than the majority of the Face-Offs we published in 2010.