Halo Wars Field trip to Harvest trailer
Reinforce Alpha Base! Get a first look at the story behind Halo Wars.
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Oct
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Oct
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Otherland MMO Announced
Eurogamer breaks news that German games publisher DPT Entertainment will be making an MMORPG based on Tad Williams’ Otherland series of books. As anyone who has read the books will know, this could be an interesting new spin on virtual worlds. Quoting: “For want of a better soundbite, let’s call it the first cyberpunk MMO: a virtual world about virtual worlds, in which your avatar is an avatar, the NPCs play NPCs, and you explore a multiverse in which you might be in realistic historical surroundings one minute, and cartoon fantasy ones the next. Everything changes, even your own appearance, and nothing is even pretending to be real. … You start the game as one of those consciousnesses in a place called the Land of the Lost, a nightmare scenario which you’re trying to escape. You’ll run, be killed, and reborn in a ‘baby’ state as a simple, low-rent sim (though we suspect the game won’t be using that term, for obvious reasons) - a blank, featureless avatar that can be male, female or even neither.”.
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Oct
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New Final Fantasy Game Coming To Wii and DS
Eurogamer reports on some good news for fans of the Final Fantasy series: a new game is in development for the Nintendo Wii and DS systems. “It’s said to be titled Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time. … the game will apparently be playable on both machines at once, thanks to the spiffing new Pollux engine. So, while whoever is the best negotiator/fighter/Wii owner is playing on the big screen, another lucky adventurer can wade in on the DS, presumably following around and summoning Ifrit on their elder siblings. This harks back to the series’ origins on DS, with the first CC game enjoying the relative splendour of Gamecube/GBA link-up play.”.
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Oct
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Perfecting a Tron Game
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a review of an old but entertaining freeware Tron game called Armagetron . The author heaps praise on the game for its “beautiful simplicity” and its exciting multiplayer options. More screenshots and a wiki are available on the game’s website. Quoting: “It’s all about speed, really. You might think driving in clever geometric patterns would win you the game, but speed is the real the alpha and the omega of Armagetron. See, if you can drive parallel to old enemy trails for long enough to get your speed up to two times, three times or even four times more than your starting speed then you become a hunter of men. It becomes within your power to dart off towards other players, overtake them, and take a couple of quick turns that mean your trail boxes them into a tiny space.”.
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Oct
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Cheaper Car Insurance For Gamers
I know your first reaction is that this story is gonna be an ad, but SpuriousLogic’s story is actually about insurers considering giving a discount to elderly gamers. The question is: does gaming improve mental agility and make you a safer driver? And if so, I’ll have to add gaming to mowing the lawn for my weekly chores..
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Oct
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New Nintendo DSi Announced
justme8800 writes “The DSi has a bigger screen, an SD card expansion, a 0.3 megapixel camera, is thinner (no GBA slot), and has improved audio. To be released in Japan on November 1st, everywhere else sometime in 2009.”.
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Oct
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Nintendo’s Wii Storage Solution — SD Cards
Lucas123 writes “After gamers complained for the better part of a year, Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii’s lack of storage capacity — a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games, adding to the console’s measly 512MB of onboard storage. The card is expected out in the Spring. With the ability to download, the card should allow users to store up to 60 games.” This news came out of the same press conference that announced the Nintendo DSi we discussed earlier today. They made a number of other announcements as well, including Gamecube remakes for the Wii, updated to make use of the Wiimote, Club Nintendo coming to North America this year, and the Wii Speak Channel, an online voice chat utility..
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Oct
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Server Structure in EVE Online
Massively takes an interesting look at the server model used by EVE Online. It’s unusual for a MMOG because it doesn’t divide the player load among different servers or “shards.” Instead, the same cluster handles the entire EVE universe and all 300,000 subscribers (total; record concurrent load is around 40,000). The EVE Dev Blog recently announced some upgrades to keep things running smoothly and allow for battles involving over 1,000 ships. They call the technology StacklessIO..
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Oct
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South Korea’s Free Computer Game Business Model Hits the US
Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from AFP via Yahoo! News: “Seoul-based ‘free-to-play’ computer game titan Nexon on Wednesday blasted into the US videogame arena with a ‘Combat Arms’ online first-person shooter title that makes its cash from optional ‘micro-transactions’ by players. The game makes its money from players that buy animated helmets, outfits, emblems or other virtual items to customize in-game characters. To keep the battlefield even, players earn experience or advanced weaponry by skill so people essentially can’t pay for power. … Startups and established game makers including Japanese goliath Sony are venturing into the free computer game market, according to DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole. ‘It looks like it could be very big,’ Cole told AFP. ‘It’s one of the things everybody seems to be looking at. The challenge is it is a very new model and it remains to be seen whether customers used to a free model will be tight when it comes to actually spending money on it.’”.
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Oct
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16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress
vmartell writes “The 16th World Computer Chess Championship is now in progress in Beijing, as part of the Computer Games Championship. Currently in the lead are Rybka 3.0, recognized as the world’s strongest chess engine and Hiarcs, another commercial engine. Another curiosity is a Java ME based engine running on a Nokia phone, which is currently being trounced by the other engines. A very interesting sideline: before the computer tournament, a Women’s Grandmaster played two games against Rybka. The result? Rybka won both games!”.
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Oct
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Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Spawns Real-Life Car
Car Analogy Please writes to tell us that a new car unveiled at the Paris Auto Show was modeled after the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue car. GTbyCITROËN is the first car that has been designed in tandem with a video game to then spill out onto the actual pavement. “The GTbyCITROËN is the product of a partnership built up during the creation of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Takumi Yamamoto, from Citroen and Kazunori Yamauchi from Polyphony Digital Inc, the games developer were inspired by each others industries to design a concept car for the game that then flowed further into the real-world. The game version of the car mirrors the real-world performance of the concept.”.
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Oct
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Future Sony MMOs Will Be On Consoles
The MTV Multiplayer Blog interviewed John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, about the future of MMOs. He discusses some of SOE’s current projects and comments that they’ll be focusing on consoles for all of their upcoming MMOs. “I would say that we would be one of the early adopters on [bringing MMOs to consoles], and we plan on becoming one of the dominant players in the MMO space on consoles.” Sony’s plans may include games for their hand-held console, the PSP. Smedley goes on to talk about bringing existing, popular franchises into MMO development, and remarks, “It’s pretty safe to say that ‘EverQuest’ has not seen its last game.”.
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Oct
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Diablo 3 Dev Talks Multiplayer Options, Long Dev Cycle
AusGamers spoke with Blizzard’s Jay Wilson recently about Diablo 3’s multiplayer experience. Among other things, Wilson said the developers were making an effort to encourage cooperative gameplay. For example, each player within a particular game will see different loot drops from monsters, which prevents competition over who can click an item the fastest, and encourages trading. He also mentions that a team is already working on methods to prevent cheating, and he discusses why Blizzard games tend to be announced so long before they’re completed. “One of the reasons why we actually prefer a really long window before we release a game is because we want a lot of feedback; we want to hear what people like and don’t like about it; we want to give them several opportunities to play it before release.”.
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Oct
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Stargate Worlds Beta Begins Oct. 15th
Kotaku reports that the closed beta for Stargate Worlds, an MMO based on the popular Stargate television shows, will begin on October 15th. Registration is open at the game’s website. Gamespy has some new screenshots available, and a Youtube channel has been opened for videos about the game. We discussed the early plans for Stargate Worlds a couple years ago..
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Oct
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Game Devs Using One-Time Bonuses to Fight Used Game Sales
ShackNews reports on an emerging trend which sees game publishers offer one-time bonus codes to unlock extra content for certain titles. Rock Band 2, for example, comes with a code which will allow free 20-song download, but is only usable once. NBA Live ‘09 has functionality to update team rosters on a daily basis, but will only do so for the original owner. “‘This information and data is very valuable and it wasn’t free for us,’ an EA representative explained on Operation Sports. ‘T-Mobile is paying for it this year for all users who buy the game new. This is a very expensive tool to use, and if you don’t buy it new, then you’ll have to pay for this. It isn’t greed at all.’”.
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