Remember when I said Carrier Command: Gaea Mission was one to keep an eye one? Well now the E3 demonstration video is available to view. All 11 minutes and 25 seconds of it are embedded after the jump for your pleasure.
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All posts by Jonathan Hill
As I have found myself playing less FPS games (persistent unlocks and hats to not appeal) my zBoard Merc with it’s dedicated FPS pad has been getting more and more superfluous. The FPS pad, and the resulting lack of a dedicated numpad, was getting in the way more than it was being used. I decided to remedy this by replacing it with a keyboard designed for Strategy and MMO games, the Corsair Vengeance K90. I have been using it for a month or so now so here is the lowdown.
Valve have announced the dates for the second year of the International Dota 2 Championships which will take place over the weekend 31st August – 2nd September. Will Ukrainian team Na’Vi retain their title [1] and take the $1m prize? Thanks to Valve’s attempts to make the game spectator friendly the whole world will be able to watch online like last year, I’m hopeful those of us lucky to be in the beta (or everyone if it is released by that point) will even be able to use the brilliant in game spectator features to watch, but if not there will no doubt be the live stream, with commentary for those who have no idea what is going on.
[1] I wanted to say belt, I don’t think there is a belt but there should be and it should give the wearer +6 Strength.
Are video games art? If you had asked me the question 5 years ago I would have pointed you in the direction of The Orange Box. It included three games all made using the same engine, all made by the same developer, but with wildly different art styles. The developer commentary (particularly that with Team Fortress 2) suggested that this was no fluke and Valve really knew what they were doing. Later they released Left 4 Dead and, again, despite the same engine and same developers it was very different to the three games in The Orange Box. The developer commentary in the game talked about art direction and how colour and light was used to direct the player where they wanted them to go without adding noticeable boundaries. Back then I would have said that Valve were at the top of their game and that they alone could prove that video games could be art. Each of their games, from the (two very different) post apocalyptic worlds of Half-Life and Left 4 Dead to the clean clinical lines of Portal and the cell shaded alternate 60s of Team Fortress 2, each of them tells a story through the visuals alone, each of the characters can be understood before they even speak just by looking at them. I would have argued that not only can video games be art with these games as my sole evidence, but that Valve had a better understanding of art direction than nearly any (current) Hollywood film director.
Then it all went wrong.
It has been a long time since the last UT game (being UT3 in 2008 and die-hard fans would ignore that, preferring UT2004 or even UT99) and even longer since Quake III (1999). Since then all we have really had are casual multiplayer shooters with persistent unlocks and no real place in eSports. The setting of most of the popular multiplayer games also restricts their ability to be taken seriously as an eSport, Contemporary war or WWII doesn’t really mater, it is still war and therefore not a “game”.
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Rocket Science, how hard can it be? Well as BBC’s Top Gear found out, quite hard.
Kerbal Space Program is a game currently in development by Squad and, as is all the rage these days, you can play an early build right now. 0.13 is freely available to everyone and anyone who pre-orders the game gets to keep up with the latest version (0.14.1 at the time of writing).
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This is a re-post of an article I wrote on my own blog back in April 09, being a retro piece it is almost as relevant today as it was then and I have tweaked it here and there to take account of a few changes of the last couple of years – Jon
In these days of 5 hour installs, limited activations and games that crash every ten minutes it is nice to go back and play some old classics to remind you just how good PC gaming was [1]. Some hold up very well to the test of time and some don’t, Re-Volt is one of the former.
The developers, Acclaim, went bust in 2004 and though the rights to Re-Volt IP were bought by Throwback Entertainment it is no longer in print and is available on Abandonia.com, the legality of this I am unsure about, you can still buy the game second hand but I have not seen it new anywhere. Sadly this version (Abandonia) will not have the brilliant music as the game used CD audio, unfortunately it is also impossible to get the music to work in Vista or Windows 7 (as far as I can tell anyway) even if you own the CD, as to get the game running at all you need to use the noCD patch which disables the music. More on getting it to work in Vista (and XP) later though.
Blacklight: Retribution has just moved from closed to open beta, I didn’t get much of a chance to play this free shooter while it was closed beta, but what I did play seemed very good, though the lack of air control was not to my taste (read “I used to play Quake and UT”) the movement was fluid and shooting was responsive, no console type acceleration here. It runs on UE3, so as you can imagine it not only looks brilliant but also runs as smooth as silk. Developer video and E3 Trailer after the jump.
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Unlike my previous retro gaming posts on Doom and Re-Volt, Thief II: The Metal Age is not one I have played when it first came out, we can be sure therefore, that my opinions on it are not tinted with rose coloured spectacles.
Thief II the Metal Age has just been re-released on Good Old Games.com, along with the first in the series “The Dark Project” I thought now was as good a time as any to give it a go. GOG do ensure that any games they sell will work on a modern computer and operating system before they sell them, even if it means shipping them with DOSBox, we can however do better as both games have received fan patches that mean they don’t just run, but run in resolutions suitable for a modern monitor without letterboxing and upscaling. The GOG forums have all the information you need, for the first game you need to go here and for the second have a look at this. Note that for the first one there is an additional step to get the briefing videos to work which can be found in the second post of the thread.
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If you have not turned your 3DS on in a while (why not, there are plenty of good titles for it) or if you have simply not let it connect to the net in a while, now is a good time to do so.
Due to poor sales of the console and subsequent price drop (though frankly I don’t see that they were bad) Nintendo are offering 20 classic NES and GBA titles free to download to early adopters, being anyone who first performed a system update before 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Aug. 11, 2011.
While you may have no interest in many of them there must be something in there for most people, I mean who can say no to Mario and not one but three Zelda games (including the Minish Cap)? The complete list is included below. All you have to do to get them (assuming you are eligible) is open the store select settings/other go to your download history where you will find they have been added to your account for download. The complete list of titles is below the cut.
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Gaming and Tech Network 