3DRealms lets me know that they expect to have a demo for Prey available on June 22nd, and shortly after that we can expect the game to be on retail shelves. The demo will contain 5 levels, contain both single and multiplayer modes. More information on this blog post at 3DRealms.
Archive for May, 2006
May 20th, 2006
May 17th, 2006
Gamers with Jobs has an interesting article about our history with violence over the years when we play videogames. Have you ever sat back and thought about the countless foes you’ve killed, butchered, and disposed of? The big D word, desensitization, is employed as well. A philosophical look at your videogaming habits.
So many of our games are inextricably linked with violence, but it’s a violence which typically does not move us in any way. Think about every game you’ve played. Think about every character you’ve killed. Try and compose a mental list of in-game obituaries. For how many of these deaths do you feel anything resembling remorse?
If you restart Steam, you’ll find it will patch SiN Episodes: Emergence. The patch notes was reported here yesterday.
Don’t deny it. You’ve always wanted to play a baking simulator. Baking cakes is hardcore, and if you haven’t played a cake baking simulator, you haven’t played games. Okay, perhaps I’m being mischevious, but I’m not lying when I say Cake Mania is coming to the PC, and it actually is a cake baking simulator.
It’s called Cake Mania, and sees you taking on the role of Jill, a young girl and a cooking school graduate who discovers that her family’s business has gone down the toilet. So, what else is there to do but set up your own bakery from scratch.
May 16th, 2006
There will be a patch available through Steam tomorrow evening for SiN Episodes: Emergence. A Ritual employee posted the patch notes on Shacknews detailing what the patch will provide when it is available for download. Some of the fixes include the difficulty being too aggressive, sound stuttering issue, the changing of the FOV labels you as a cheater, player stats, and more.
May 15th, 2006
When I went to E3, it was loud. Very loud, and combined with the bright flashes of light, booth babes, sweaty nerds everywhere, and the constant walking, it was an assault on the senses. It’s been known that each booth or stage for each company likes to attract attention with loud noise, music, sound effects, marketing pitches, etc. When two companies do this near each other, they get annoyed when the other try to drown the other out. Then a noise war will develop. Organizers for the E3 event try to keep a handle on the situation by imposing noise restrictions, and fines companies if the rules are broken.
This year, NCSoft got hit with a fine for $5,000 for breaking the noise rule. NCSoft held live music events to promote their upcoming game, Tabula Rasa. They contested the fine, but will pay it, and promised not to attend E3 next year, but pull a Godgames and hold a party nearby the convention center in order to promote their games (as loud as they bloody want.)
NCsoft’s booth at E3 2006 consisted of a large stage area where live music sets were repeatedly played to promote the company’s forthcoming MMO title, Tabula Rasa. The crowd were encouraged to applaud as loudly as possible, although NCsoft maintains that there were louder noise levels from rival publisher’s stands and that the situation was monitored by its staff during the event.
After neglecting the PC gaming industry in favor of their Xbox console, Microsoft says they want to kiss and make up, and pay attention to the PC gamers again. This coming from the company that snatched Halo away from PC gaming, I won’t exactly hold my breath.
Then again, Vista is on its way, so Microsoft want to maximize revenues when it comes out by kissing the feet of PC gamers, who they know are always the early adopters of new software and technology.
“We have neglected the PC business, but it’s time to remember that it’s a strong platform with the potential to reach hundreds of millions of gamers,” said Peter Moore, gaming chief at Microsoft.
Microsoft’s marketing campaign for the PC was depending on shipment of its new Windows Vista operating system in the fall. The consumer version of Vista has now been pushed back to January, and that could hurt Microsoft’s plans to lift demand for PC games in the fall.
GamerWithin talks with John Carmack about the new technology Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is using, called Megatextures.
Q1: What is MegaTexturing technology?
Answer: MegaTexture technology is something that addresses resource limitations in one particular aspect of graphics. The core idea of it is that when you start looking at outdoor rendering and how you want to do terrain and things in general, people almost always wind up with some kind of cross-fade blended approach where you tile your textures over and blend between them and add little bits of detail here and there. A really important thing to realize about just generally tiling textures, that we’re so used to accepting it in games, is that when you have one repeated pattern over a bunch of geometry, the texture tiling and repeating is really just a very, very specialized form of data compression where it’s allowing you to take a smaller amount of data and have it replicated over multiple surfaces, or multiple parts of the same surface in a game since you generally don’t have enough memory to be able to have the exact texture that you’d like everywhere.
In other words, it makes games look better without compromising performance. That’s a good thing.
Long ago I played Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis. It was revolutionary at the time; it was a complex, rich game world that had a story and it was fun to boot. Now over 10 years later, they resurrect the Shadowrun name with a new game, a first-person shooter that bears very little similarities to the original game. It has fans of the original game worried and annoyed.
GamesFirst talks with the developers of the new upcoming Shadowrun FPS to see how they feel about the backlash by fans of the original game.
Fulton’s answer to my question of Shadowrun’s graphics was met with a mixed answer. “I think that you’re reacting to the artistic design,” he said when I asked if the graphics were going to be improved before release. I pointed to the large, blurry Trees of Life and compared them unfavorably to the foliage in Perfect Dark Zero, hardly the best looking game on the Xbox 360. I walked my character close to the wall for a better look at the textures. Objects in the levels they showed at E3 looked jagged and featureless. Artistic differences or not, I can’t help but hope they make improvements to the levels before the title ships; at the moment the walls look flat and unimpressive, and climbing up and down ladders is a matter of watching your teammates float vertically into the air in the vicinity of a wooden splotch on the wall.
May 14th, 2006
It looks like Atari wants to stop the bleeding by knocking the price of all of their games to $20. This goes for all games, on all formats, only in North America. It is being dubbed, “GamersFirst“, and will even allow you to purchase and download all games digitally via Steam or Direct2Drive, starting June 1st.
“Atari is committed to providing great gaming experiences to the largest possible audience,” said Atari chief executive officer Bruno Bonnell. “With our GamersFirst program, Atari is taking another step forward to make our unique catalogue of games more accessible to everyone. We are proud to announce our unique GamersFirst $20 program and reaffirm our commitment to consumers.”
Here’s a list of games from Atari that are generally considered good, and should be a steal at $20:
It’s arguably said that headphones are the best device to use for gaming, as they provide intimate details that regular computer speakers can’t provide. With that in mind, the Audio Technica ATH-A500 headphones are superb for gaming, as well for other multimedia uses such as listening to music or watching DVD movies. I’ve posted a review in the foogaming forums, complete with pictures, of these headphones, detailing my thoughts after over 2 weeks of jamming to reggae, blasting foes online, and replaying the best explosions from Die Hard 2 over and over again.
Paired with the Headroom Total Airhead headphone amp, it has made my listening experience better than I ever dreamed of.
My old earphones, Shure E2c, gave up the ghost after 2 years of extensive use. It served me well, but I want headphones that actually last. So thus my research on the net brought me to the purchase of the Audio Technica ATH-A500, which is only made in Japan. Word is that it is great for gaming, having a soundstage that is great for closed circumaural headphones. Along with the headphones, I also invested in the Headroom Total Airhead headphone amp.
May 13th, 2006
Scott Miller talks with Hollywood Reporter about original content in video games and why they are the bee’s knees. Scott Miller works for 3DRealms, the development studio working on the much delayed Duke Nukem Forever, and producers of the upcoming Prey. Miller is pretty confident they will make back the money they’ve invested in DNF within a day or two after the release of the game:
THR: What about the latest “Duke” game … the one that seems to be taking forever to build?
Miller: We’ve put about $7.5 million into that and we’ve been working on it since late 1998. So it really hasn’t been that much of an investment. And once it comes out, if it’s as successful as we think it’ll be, we’ll make that money back in the first day or two of sales.
This article also prompted DailyTech to claim Scott Miller said that Duke Nukem Forever is almost done. However, GeorgeB of 3DRealms says it was irresponsible journalism on DailyTech’s part. They’ve since changed the original article multiple times to cover their tracks. So if you hear rumors that the game is almost done, you’ll know why.
1Up got a chance to check out the expansion for the pseudo-MMORPG, Guild Wars: Factions, which was just released recently. They were shown the new setting, creatures, and concept sketches of the new professions. How can they crank out an expansion so soon after the release of Factions? It seems NCSoft has two teams working on Guild Wars content.
Where the original game had a pseudo-medieval European environment and Factions features a more Asian setting, the new expansion will take place in a North African-themed world. The architecture and locations look inspired by Tunesia, Morocco, and the savannah, and the theme music composed for the presentation had a very Marakesh sound to it.
BF2S has a new in-game video and some screenshots along with their impressions of the game from a playtest at E3.
E3 wasn’t too kind to independent game developers, as the panel at the event told aspiring game developers to just give up, there’s no room in the game industry for their kind anymore. Perhaps the harsh reality is that most independent game developers won’t be able to secure funding and make a profit, but they are forgetting why most indies create games: passion. Most of the games they create are done either for fun, as a learning experience, or a combination of both.
“You have a zero percent chance of success,” said Warren Spector, a game industry veteran and the current president of Junction Point Studios, a company that develops games for consoles and PCs. “The barrier to entry in terms of cost, quality required, access to a market… forget it.”
I’d hate to see a bad omen like this stifle creativity in the industry. Independent game developers are the only ones willing to take risks these days, and without that, we face a period of stagnation. Remember when Serious Sam first came out? People mocked the name, they scoffed at the idea that a small team in Croatia (Hey, where’s that at? We’d say.) Then the demo came out, it was insanely fun, and the rest was history. It would suck to not see little treasures like that pop up out of nowhere again.
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