Slashdot | Computer Game Improves Children’s Hearing
A post ran at Slashdot reveals a number of articles and links pointing to sources praising video games for their positive results. Some include improved hearing and hand-eye coordination.
Yay for games!
Blues News: “‘it’ll be tight, but Half-Life 2 is still on for a September 30th ship.’”
Music to my ears. That means in nearly a month we’ll be playing Half-Life 2. Horray! Oh, and there are some new movies up at FilePlanet, GameCenter.cz and Worthplaying.
This Article:The GameBoy Advance: Creativity Wasteland at Curmudgeon Gamer analyzes the exactly what kind of games make up the GBA title list. Here are the results:
Of the 375 games catalogued:
200 (53.3%) are licensed games
170 (45.3%) are sequels or franchise games
58 (15.5%) are remakes
28 (7.5%) are retrofits
31 (8.3%) are original
I dont think this is really a bad thing. The GBA is a portable and a whole lot of its allure is its portability. That’s why games that I have played on big consoles and PC are fun to play on my GBA. That’s why I play pocketNES. Furthermore, counting licenses and franchises as unoriginal games is pretty silly. There are plenty of franchises that release original games, just look at Mario. He’s a franchise but he has multiple game types.
While this article is well done and at a level of scientific analysis I enjoy reading, I think they should spend their time more wisely and figure out why the XBox sucks.
Atari is releasing a lot of games soon. Here’s a list:
Unreal Tournement 2004
Temple of Elemental Evil
Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark
Shadow Ops: Red Mercury
Terminator 3: War of the Machines
Horizons
Gothic II
Dungeons & Dragons Online
Civilization III: Conquests
Checkout http://www.atari.com for more info.
Shacknews recently posted two reviews of Ultima X: Oddessey. This new Unreal Engine-powered MMORPG from Origin and EA should be good. Here is an interesting quote highlighted by Shacknews.
“By far the best part of the Quest system is that it can be private. Many quests will spawn a private area for just you and your companions. So, if you’re told to go to the underground hall of the dreaded mountain king, you won’t reach his terrible throne room only to discover a crowd of other players waiting for him to respawn. A private copy of his dungeon will open up just for your and your friends, to live or die by your own means without interruption. Because of the dynamic difficulty and the choices you can make on each quest, no two missions will turn out the same for different groups of people. “
The four-player limit and peer-to-peer networking do raise some concerns. With these limitations, will DOOM 3 offer enough to compete with games like Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 in the multiplayer realm? id has made it clear that the focus for DOOM 3 is single player, but lets face it, id has a huge installed base of gamers, ranging from DOOM and DOOM II, all the way up to Quake III, each preferring one style of play for one reason or another. You can’t just ignore them all. Yet the public really hasn’t received solid answers on why these changes were made.
This article brings up some good points and fills in the gaps to why a lot of us (me) have been feeling deep in our guts that Half-Life 2 would be better than DOOM3. Even though HL2 has released much more footage publically, and is probably much more complete than DOOM3, it makes you wonder. Plus, why would id Software want to make a single-player focused game again, after Quake2. Then again, what id Software game since quake has really been about the shipped content? They’ve pretty much been about the engine to sell to others.
Oh well, we shall see this winter!
CNN recently interview Carmack. In the interview, Carmack reveals that he isn’t done with video games and that his next big project will not be a sequel, it will be, in fact, a totally new story. That is music to my ears.
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
Very cool, uses havoc physics engine, looks almost as good as Half-Life 2 graphics-wise. Nice textures. Fall 2003. Awesome.
GamingFM.com: “Halo as some of you may or may not know, was originally developed for the Mac. Apple CEO Steve Jobs proudly debuted it at the MacWorld expo way back in 1999. It stood as the first Mac game to signify Apple’s newfound pledge to gamers that the new Macs (I believe they were G3s) would not just be for Photoshop and sound editting. It impressed the entire gaming community with it’s beautifully rendered environments, massive amounts of vehicles and 32 player network support. It even impressed Bill. Gates that is.
He liked it so much that he bought Bungie, it’s developer, and christened Halo as the launch title for the Xbox. The rest, as you know, is history.”
CNN.com - The shifting culture of video games - Aug. 17, 2003: “‘It’s pretty exciting,’ she said of winning. ‘It gets tense. After games, I’m all shaky.’ “
Fast Company | Catch Me If You Can
good read about an Ebay scammer.
Shacknews News Story: “A high quality trailer for the C&C Generals Zero Hour expansion pack has been released by EA to FileShack. You can grab up the video in a couple of different resolutions to suit your pleasure.
- Zero Hour Trailer : 400×300
- Zero Hour Trailer : 640×480
Zero Hour is scheduled for a release this fall. There is also a C&C Generals playable demo scheduled to be released in the next few weeks. “
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