Halo PC = Gold
Finally this game belongs on the PC, stupid consoles.
Quake III Arena AMD Optimization
checkout this link for some news on AMD, 3DNow! and SSE. The new AMD dll will make your Q3 run with SSE instead of 3DNow! giving signifigant FPS boostage. Awesome.
Shacknews News Story
“The Steam Beta has delivered several Valve games and popular Half-Life MODs to over 300,000 gamers, and will come to a close Tuesday evening (Pacific Daylight Time). The first full version of Steam, Valve’s broadband platform for the delivery and management of digital content, will launch at 11 am PDT on Wednesday. Set up installers for the full version, which will be free of charge to existing Half-Life and Counter-Strike players, will be available from www.steampowered.com and leading game sites. Anyone interested in hosting the installer or becoming a Steam Service Provider, please email biz@steampowered.com.
Valve would like to extend its thanks to everyone who participated in this beta.”
WoW updates
Blizzard Entertainment - World of Warcraft
There are a number of new updates on the WoW site including eight new screenshots that look really good. This game is going to knock your socks off!
suweeeeeeeeeeet
Slashdot | Sony’s Linux DVR Can Record Two Weeks of TV
I cant wait until this comes to America.
Nokia’s N-Gage Getting Slack?
Wired News: Nokia’s N-Gage Gets Second Look:
“Unlike other cell-phone makers that offer games on their devices, Nokia is stressing deeper, richer games of up to 8 MB that will be sold on swappable memory cards, typically for $29, through traditional game retailers such as Electronics Boutique and Game Stop.
In addition, the company is breaking many of the established rules of cell-phone marketing for the N-Gage. The company is initially targeting traditional gamers, albeit older ones — men between the ages of 16 and 35 — with an emphasis on college students.
Cell phones are typically sold through wireless carriers such as Cingular and Verizon and through consumer electronics retailers such as Best Buy. But N-Gage displays have already sprouted in game stores nationwide. Nokia is carpet-bombing gaming sites with N-Gage advertising.”
I dont care, being a hardcore gamer, give that thing to the newbies, the 8-year-old poke-punks, the 16-year-old FPS loudmouths, and the college-boy sports-nuts. I’ll stick with my GBA SP, and if the PSP delivers, I’ll migrate to that.
Half-Life 2 Pricing Plans
Got this from ShackNews.com- looks good.
1: Retail box, singleplayer, no multiplayer - ONE TIME FEE!
2: Retail box, singleplayer and multiplayer - ONE TIME FEE!
3: Retail box, singleplayer, multiplayer and other unknown cool stuff (collectors edition) - ONE TIME FEE!
4: STEAM, singleplayer and multiplayer - ONE TIME FEE!
5: STEAM, subscription model. Pay a montly fee and have access to all Valve titles, including the stuff on STEAM now (HL, OpFor, CS, TFC, etc), Half-Life 2, all future stuff they put out, and so forth.
Second, patches (bugfixes, maintenance releases, etc) will be free no matter which of the six option you decide to go for.
Community-based mods will be free unless the authors want to charge for them. Free community based mods will/can be made available though STEAM free of charge.
Laura Fryer: Make Games More Fun
BBC NEWS | Technology | Games suffer from ‘geek stereotype’:
Laura Fryer, director of the XBox Advanced Technology Group, said “You want a game that is challenging but never frustrating” to a group of game developers meeting in London. She also had to say:
“Video games are never going to be as popular as films or music unless the people who make them concentrate on making them fun”
This comes as some surprise to me. Sure, if we made games easier for a wider range of players to have fun, it would include more people, but there would also be a sector of that group who beat the games in under 3 hours. These are the people who are going into the game development industry, and they are also the people who are spending the most money. Without them the industry might not be so hearty. But, Ms. Fryer does bring up a good challenge… bringing on new faces in the gaming realm. Also: do we even want new faces? Sure it would be good for the industry, more money in the system, but as a hardcore gamer I doubt it will be done right by a bunch of suits.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
FFTA is awesome. The story is awesome, the gameplay is awesome. It’s like they took the gameplay of tactics for PS1 and put in a way better story. Get this game.
Stratics Interview with Horizons Creative Director
Stratics Central - Horizons - Log of Second Horizons House of Commons, August 29, 2003
Havent gotten a chance to read, skimmed, looks good.
Half-Life 2 Interview: Part Two
I’ve skimmed the interview and highlighted on misogame the important stuff. Enjoy.
About limited inventory
Actually, in Condition Zero we really looked at the idea of limiting the amount of weapons that you have and making choices, and that’s really something that seems like it will be interesting, but turns out to be not a lot of fun. Some choices are cool, but having to constantly manage your inventory is tedious - at least, that’s how I see it.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say the inventory in Half-Life 2 is completely unlimited, but I would say that inventory management is not fun so we’re not going to place that onto the player.
About anti-cheat measures:
You’re constantly connected, and we can constantly touch your bits. Steam allows us to do an arbitrary number of updates per day/per hour/per minute, so if your code base is constantly changing then it’s hard to write a hack for that code base.
About supporting the mod community and the industry:
People ask me about the best way to break into the games industry - should they go to this or that university? And I’m like: “Screw university, make a mod. Get your feet wet, start building something, get it out there and show it to people”.
Game development happens in front of your computer, busting your arse, and so… We try to help those guys get better because we probably want to hire them at some point. And it also helps extend the viability of the product. Natural Selection, Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike - they helped sell Half-Life.
On hardware upgrades:
Well, we’re actually going to release a benchmark pretty soon, and once we put that out and we finalise it, folks will be able to decide for themselves what they want. I don’t think that there’s a bad experience out there for folks, but for the absolutely hardcore guys, they are going to want take a look at what’s available.
If you’re a hardcore guy, then you’re going to want to look at the latest from ATi and nVidia, and the latest from Intel and AMD.
on the release date:
The release date’s unchanged.