Johnny Xbox plays Monopoly:
Online Gamer Plays Monopoly - Watch more Funny Videos
Jan 16, 2010
IUN webcast - January 16, 2010
This week: Jailbreak Source, Division 9, the Spitter, no dev console for BC2, Aliens vs. Predator, Modern Warfail 2, Games Radar's "Anti-Awards," and more.
Jan 14, 2010
Yep ... it gets worse
Did I say "super soldier" before? Call this one the "hyper soldier." Or the "pwn star." Or just call him "the game-breaker."
Remember how everybody hated the grenade launcher from MW1? Infinity Ward heard your cries of exasperation, and balanced the sh*t out of it. In MW2, you can select a perk ("danger close") that increases the blast radius and the damage of all your explodey things. That includes your thrown grenades, your noob tube grenades, your claymores (available via yet another perk), and ... AND ... all the explosive ordnance fired out of the aerial vehicle sh*t you "earn" through killstreaks.
But that's not the end of it. No, sir. In the same kit, you can also select a perk called "one man army," which lets you change your class any time - and as often as you like - within a round. The bitch? You can switch to the same class you were just using, and doing so replenishes your claymores and tube grenades. You'll never run out of them.
Watch this guy go 103 and 3 in half a round of domination:
This new kit hasn't come into widespread use yet, but just wait. Among the various gaming news sites I read every day, there have been one or two "WTF?" pieces on Call of Duty: Even More Modern Warfare almost every day this week. Maybe all the sheep will finally start to realize that Infinity Ward's execution has fallen far short of Activision's marketing hype.
Or maybe the lambs will just keep getting slaughtered.
Bucking the trend
Valve has invited the Team Fortress 2 modding community to submit custom models and avatars for review. If the submission is approved (both on technical and style grounds), Valve will enable it in-game. It seems that the custom content will work even in stock servers.
The best part: you can submit custom models for the existing weapons. So if you wanted to replace the Scout's baseball bat, for example, you could in theory submit a medieval torture device, a prosthetic arm, or Plucky's Cane.™ The weapon will retain all the statistics of its predecessor item, however; no super weapons allowed.
Check out the TF2 Contribute page for more information.
Jan 13, 2010
MW2: exploiting the exploitable
It really is hard to argue with a billion dollars in sales, but if there's another recurring theme with Modern Warfare 2, it's this: to love the game is to hate its players.
Following on the early trend of glitch exploiters - the javelin suicide bombers, the infinite care package mongoloids, and the hiders in what should be solid objects - a second wave of griefers have begun relieving themselves in MW2's swimming pool. The aforementioned slash-and-stab super soldier is one species, of course, and now we've discovered another: the nuke booster. Geek.com provides the profile:
[B]asically players on opposite sides can team up, use tactical insertions to spawn in out-of-the-way places (near one another) and then one repeatedly kills the other until they have their nuke.
The thing about the nuke: it ends the round for everybody. When it's hard enough to find a game setup that interests you (in terms of ping, map, gametype, etc.), a round aborted by an exploit might cause some frustration.
The use of such exploits is garden-variety unsportsmanlike conduct, which has infected every online multiplayer game ever made. In MW2's case, however, you have to view that type of behavior alongside the douchebaggery-by-design: the noob tube, the akimbo shotguns, the martyrdom "deathstreak" award, et al., all of which work exactly as the developer intended.
Most of the common complaints about the game (and its predecessor) relate directly to all the silly, unbalancing novelties introduced with the perk mechanics. It's a system that's ripe for exploitation, and there's no way to stop it from overwhelming the fundamental "move, aim, and fire" aspects of a shooter.
Well, there is a way. Custom rule sets on player-administered dedicated servers would have gone a long way toward making the online experience tolerable for a range of different tastes. (Note to IW's Jason West: this is why gamers form the "insular communities" you hate so much.) There would be no cause to describe any intentional feature as a "gamebreaker" - a word increasingly associated with MW2 - because individual server admins could just prohibit its use.
Instead, players got IWnet: a social sandbox that allows you to play the game with everyone and everything in it ... or not at all.
And people went out and bought it in droves.
And people went out and bought it in droves.
Splinter Cell: Conviction delayed
As reported at Gamasutra, Ubisoft announced today that it is pushing the release of Splinter Cell: Conviction into April 2010.
The game was originally scheduled for release on November 16, 2007, but that version was reportedly scrapped in favor of a total revamp. After issuing a new street date of Fall 2009, Ubisoft delayed the game again - to February 23, 2010 - ostensibly for "minor tweaks [and] balancing."
Ubisoft also revised its projected income for this fiscal year (ending in March 2010) from $101.6 million to a loss of about $72.5 million. That's a hell of a swing, and it could explain Conviction's delay: since FY 2009 is going to be a bust either way, having Conviction's profits on the books for 2010 makes more sense.
Eurogamer previews BioShock 2
There's not much in the way of new information, but Mr. Donlan provides some reassuring color commentary:
The studio's gift for disquieting juxtaposition helps, too: any game that shoves you into a blood-soaked street fight against waves of women in pearls and sensible calf-length skirts while "How Much is that Doggy in the Window?" plays in the background must be doing something right.
We've good reason to expect that the world of Rapture will be every bit the lead character it was in the first BioShock. As it should be.
Read the full preview here.
Red Dead Trepidation
From Joystiq:
When we recently spoke with our trusted sources from Rockstar San Diego, in addition to yesterday's information regarding the Midnight Club franchise, we were also told about the allegedly troubled state of Red Dead Redemption. One source said that the game "was a complete disaster for most of 2009 and previous ... it has since turned around a little bit, but there are huge problems with it still." Unsurprisingly, the issues with the game are repeatedly claimed to be the result of mismanagement -- along the same lines as what was mentioned in the recent "Rockstar spouse" letter.
"Red Dead [Redemption] has been in production for six years (mainly because of horrible management/lack of direction due to fear of disrespecting Rockstar NY) and it will never get the money back in sales it cost to create for those six years," claimed another source.
Don't expect Red Dead Redemption to make its end of April 2010 release target.
Jan 12, 2010
This too shall pass ... to you
From Develop:
New research suggests development budgets are soaring dangerously fast.
The average development budget for a multiplatform next-gen game is $18-$28 million, according to new data.
A study by entertainment analyst group M2 Research also puts development costs for single-platform projects at an averge of $10 million.
The figures themselves may not be too surprising, with high-profile games often breaking the $40 million barrier.
Polyphony’s Gran Turismo 5 budget is said to be hovering around the $60 million mark, while Modern Warfare 2's budget was said to be as high as $50 million.
The new figures put into focus concerns often fired out by the development community.
Robert Walsh, the CEO of Australian outfit Krome, recently told Develop that game budgets are rising at a frightening pace.
“I think that’s one thing that the press, to a certain extent, is forgetting,” said Walsh in an interview.
“They’re saying sales have increased over ten percent since last year or whatever; I mean, dev costs have probably doubled or tripled in the console transition.”
Walsh’s Krome studio has recently announced layoffs across all three of its studios, citing poor sales that – presumably – failed to satisfy investments.
Restructuring Rebellion
From Shack News:
Claiming that it is positioning itself for growth, independent developer Rebellion (Aliens vs. Predator, Rogue Warrior) today revealed that it is in the process of "corporate restructuring" and may close one of its three existing offices.
"Positioning itself for growth" is catchy euphemism, isn't it? I also like Jason Kingsley's description of Rebellion's pending layoffs as its understanding "that a number of staff have already been made redundant."
So will AvP be the "maximum absorbency garment" that Rebellion so desperately needs? Or will it be the "controlled flight into terrain" that was Rogue Warrior? We shall see.
Metro 2033 - technical Q & A
Games.on.net scored an interview with Metro 2033's Chief Technical Officer, Olez Shishkovtsov. There's no doubt about it: this game is going to be a beast for anything but high-end hardware. The most impressive bits: multithreading will (theoretically, at least) scale up to 16 cores, and tessellation for character models.
The Games Radar "Anti-Awards"
The gaming industry's 2009 roster sported more than enough finger-in-the-butt moments to fill a six page article. Games Radar was up to the task of writing that article, and it's a pretty entertaining read. The categories and the respective "winners" follow. (Be careful to note how many time Activision is mentioned.)
- Winner - Eat Lead
- Runner Up - Darkest of Days
- Winner - Bionic Commando ("the Wife Arm")
- Runner Up - Modern Warfare 2
- Winner - Killzone 2 shi*tstorm
- Runner Up - Flaccid L4D2 boycott
- Winner - Halo 3: ODST
- Runner Up - Star Wars: the Old Republic
- Winner - Modern Warfare 2
- Runner Up - Ghostbusters: the Video Game
Jan 11, 2010
BC2 dedicated server FAQ
This FAQ has apparently been available for a while, but I only found it today. In short, you will be able to rent and remotely administer dedicated servers, and players will be able to connect to your server through a server browser.
With no access to the dedicated server app itself, and no mod tools, it's safe to say that there will be no (or extremely limited) FTP access. Presumably, configuration will be handled through a web interface like TCAdmin. Although DICE's Gordon Van Dyke has said that "a majority of the the games [sic] logic is controlled by the server," the only settings that are confirmed at this point are: (1) custom server name, (2) reserved slots, and (3) password protection. The option to enable "hardcore" mode is probably a given, though.
The game also lacks demo recording and first-person spectating. The absence of those two features will diminish the game's suitability for competitive play, and may reduce the effectiveness of the Punkbuster implementation (along with the aforementioned absence of support for PB streaming; at least for now).
While the inability to mod the game is disappointing, Bad Company 2's online component should be vastly superior to Modern Warfare 2's. Dedicated boxes will still sit in datacenters and move packets through nice, fat pipes. In that regard, the only major source of apprehension that remains is pricing: as far as I know, no GSP has announced what these things are going to cost per slot.
Check out this pricing list from Game Servers if you wish to speculate.
IGN reviews Mad Moxxi
Short and to the point, Eric Bridvig's review of the second Borderlands DLC confirms both my presumptions and my decision to save $10. There's a gameplay video, too, if you're still on the fence.
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