Gametrailers - Invisible Walls (43)

The video runs just over a half-hour, and includes all the footage you can stand from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune 2, Final Fantasy XIII, and Resident Evil 5. The first eight minutes feature video from Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage, and includes some particularly useful information about the PC version (which is not encouraging).

New F.E.A.R. 2 trailer

CoD5 patch 1.2 sound issues (Vista)

If you're running Windows Vista and you're experiencing problems with the sound, try this:

Go to start\configuration\sound\speakers\advanced, and set the bitrate to 16 bits - 44100/48000 hz.

If that doesn't work, say "POW" every time you press the left mouse button with a single-shot weapon, and say "POW-POW-POW-POW-POW..." rapidly if you're using an automatic weapon.

EDIT: the fix may screw with Teamspeak.

No sooner do I speak ...

... and the announcement is made:

Patch 1.2 for CoD5 is out tomorrow.

* * *

For the record, this doesn't change my mind.

Valve vs. Activision ... developer pwnage

Check the money quote from my last post...

Read the last sentence again.

Now, think about CoD4, which needed seven patches in seven months to make it work the way it was supposed to work.

Now think about CoD5, with its day-one patch, and the three months we've waited (so far) for a patch to clean up a steaming pile of [problems] that never should have existed in the first place.

The Orange Box was released on October 10, 2007. For 50 bucks, you got Half-Life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. Every last one of those games was polished to a mirror shine right out of the box. The "patches" that followed have tended to be enhancements (most geared toward gameplay balancing) rather than fixes for broken parts. A year and three months later, TF2 is still getting free content updates (no mere patches) at semi-regular intervals, all of which have been the product of hundreds of hours of play-testing and refinement.

I say screw publishers that hype betas as final releases. Screw months of patching before you finally have a functional game. And f*uck all to spending $50 for a retread of the last game, made primarily for the console tards, with the PC release given all the attention due to afterbirth.

When brand loyalty is taken for granted, the loyalist gets bent over his mouse and keyboard.

DLC for L4D: R3V3LRY!

Valve has announced the release of the "Survival Pack" for Left 4 Dead, due sometime in the spring. We're getting a new game mode, two new campaigns (for Versus mode), and a Source Engine SDK for making custom maps. Money quote from Steam News:

'Since Half-Life launched in 1998, Valve has made continuous efforts to expand the offering of its products beyond what's included on the day of launch,' said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. 'With Half-Life and Counter-Strike, and more recently Team Fortress 2, we've learned that we're no longer making stand-alone games but creating entertainment services.'

Browser updates

Firefox to 3.0.6

Google Chrome to 1.0.154.48

FO3: Operation Anchorage review

Apparently, you're an American soldier, fighting Chinese soldiers with special "stealth armor" that allows them to become virtually invisible, in a remote location.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Full review on First Person Shouter.

Hackers increasingly targeting online gaming

Money quote:

"A big part of it is really around the reselling of what I'd like to call 'virtual assets', whether it be the actual characters themselves... weaponry, shields, energy, any of those things that you can actually transfer in the virtual world... that's the goal behind getting the username and the password, and literally stripping it of all of its assets."

But it's not that the games themselves are compromised by the malware creators, though, cautions Debrose - rather, the user's machines are hacked to extract their passwords.

SOURCE (full article): Gamasutra

Skype 4.0 released

Indeed, with this release, Skype has turned itself from a VoIP and instant messaging service into nothing less than a real soft video phone. In Skype 4.0 for Windows, we decided to focus on three objectives: great call quality, better video calling and ease of us," Said Mike Bartlett, Skype's Director of Windows Product Management. The major differences between prior betas and the Gold version appear to all be performance- and ease of use-related improvements.

SOURCE: GGmania

Your new gaming rig...

...and it still can't run Crysis.

20 petaflops. That's the speed rating of IBM's slated Sequoia supercomputer, the future world's fastest supercomputer that promises to be faster than every system on the Top500 supercomputer list, combined ... The Sequoia will be powered by 1.6 million cores (specific 45-nanometer chips in development) and 1.6 petabytes of memory. It will be housed in 96 refrigerators spanning roughly 3,000 square feet.

SOURCE: Gizmodo

WoW bots are very, very bad

Glider is a third-party program that caters to people who want better WoW dolls, but don't want to deal with the tedium of actually playing the game. A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that using the "bot" is a violation of the game's EULA. Once you've done that, says Judge Campbell, your license is revoked, and you're committing copyright infringement if you continue to play the game.

Windows 7 OS editions

Paul Thurrott has a breakdown of the five different versions of Windows 7 that will be available. He likes the beta release on the whole (his review is here), and he's thrown up several articles dealing with various aspects of the OS.

F.E.A.R. 2 launch trailer

Wish they'd make this for the PC

Although I'm automatically suspicious of console ports, I'd get this game almost without reservation. Alas, it's PS3-only.

Another TF2 / Steam update

The Steam client update includes some welcome enhancements to the friend invites system.

The TF2 update is more extensive, with several gameplay changes (the Soldier and Heavy class players should be happy). The Scout updates are still a few days away.

Best selling PC games (US)

The ranks, as of January 24:

1. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe / EA Maxis / $19
2 .World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King / Blizzard / $39
3. Spore / EA Maxis / $46
4. The Sims 2 Apartment Life Exp. Pack / EA Maxis / $20
5. Fallout 3 / Bethesda / $48
6. World Of Warcraft Battle Chest / Blizzard / $39
7. World Of Warcraft / Blizzard / $20
8. Left 4 Dead / Valve / $48
9. Civilization IV / Firaxis / $24
10. Call Of Duty: World At War / Treyarch / $48

Source: Game Guru

EDIT: I only posted this to give Steve a jumping-off point for his inevitable rant about how WoW is better than any FPS, or hand jobs, or Jesus.

CoD5 server blackout

As of January 31, an unknown number of clans shut down their Call of Duty: World at War servers to protest the continued delay of the game's second patch (1.2). The blackout was organized by Raiders Game Net, which has been relentless in their effort to publicize the laundry list of problems currently plaguing the game.

This isn't the first "server strike" for the CoD series.  Servers shut down in droves on the same date in 2006, due in large part to the absence of any sort of anti-cheat measures several months after CoD2's release (Punkbuster was a late addition).

CoD5 has its own set of game-killing problems. Most significantly, there are still no Linux binaries available, which has effectively screwed everybody that can't afford to rent a Windows box (which, I think, constitutes the bulk of people running multiplayer servers). Treyarch's "community manager" on callofduty.com has promised that the patch should be here shortly, but there's no hard release date.

As of today, game-monitor.com reports a total of 52,091 players (both online and offline) and 2109 servers for CoD5. For CoD4, the numbers are 313,483 players and 15,796 servers.

Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage

Bethesda has released its first downloadable content package for Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage. For ten bucks, you'll get another 2 or 3 hours of gameplay.

Team Fortress 2 patch

Changelog here.  To get the update, restart your Steam client.

Crysis Warhead patch

The aptly-named "Patch 1" for Crysis: Warhead is available for download here.  The patch contains four general fixes, some of which are significant (assuming they work as advertised).  It also includes 64-bit binaries for those of you with unnecessarily beefy operating systems.

Yahtzee reviews Left 4 Dead

Star Whores

Infiltration

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