UT3: cheaper for longer

From Steam News:

Free Weekend Encore Begins Friday

Unreal Tournament 3 Black, the fully updated version of UT3 with the Titan Pack, has enjoyed an increase of over 2000% in simultaneous player numbers since its March 5th release and last week's Free Weekend on Steam. In addition, UT3 Black has claimed the number one spot on Steam's bestseller list.

To celebrate the game's overwhelming success and meet the huge demand, the UT3 Black 40% off Steam sale has been extended through Sunday, March 22, and an encore Free Weekend of play begins this Friday via Steam. Pre-load for the encore Free Weekend begins today.

For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com.

Way too much time on his hands...

If you've been gaming online for any length of time, you've probably joined at least one server that has some kind of arbitrary rule set. Bunny-hopping, for example, will get you kicked. Camping will earn you a punishment via the mod. Certain weapons are banned outright. My personal favorites are the "tactical" servers where you're forced to crouch while moving around, because the admin is utterly dedicated to his notion of "realism," and god forbid that someone sprints from one point of cover to another.

It's all about controlling the way other people play in order to give yourself (and like-minded players) a crutch. The beauty of having multiple venues, however, is that no one's forcing you to play on a particular server; there are plenty of other pubs out there that give you the freedom to play the game you bought. I've discovered, however, that the idea behind the various style-of-play limitations has evolved into something more ridiculous, and I'm compelled to call it out for being the bucket of rhinoceros shit that it is.

A sanctimonious little nazi calling himself msleeper has released a server plugin that's designed to prevent "achievement farming" in Team Fortress 2 (that is, earning achievements outside the context of normal gameplay, usually for the purpose of unlocking a weapon). He's apparently running that plugin on a "trap" server (with a custom map designed specifically for farming) that exists solely to catch those damned dirty achievement "cheaters" in the act. If you get even one achievement in his server, Mr. Sleeptard will add you to a blacklist of player names and Steam ID's (3560-strong so far), and send the SQL list to any server admin that wants to ban you.

What's his motivation, you ask?

By joining this server, and earning a single achievement, you show that you are willing to ruin the game for personal gain...

I have heard plenty of incessant bitching from farmers and people who think there is "nothing wrong with farming", and you are wrong. There is everything wrong with farming because it is ruining the integrity of the game, the purpose of achievements. My favorite argument is, 'It's better than people farming them in real games,' to which I say, why farm them at all? You shouldn't FARM them, you should EARN them.

And there you have it. It's not enough to enforce your rules on your server: now you have to enforce your rules on other servers, too. This guy has his own idea about how TF2 should be played, and he's out to punish people that don't agree with him. This, my friends, is what the great philosopher dubbed "epic douche-baggery," applied to a laughably futile endeavor.

Left 4 Dead: Live 4 Minutes

Prepare to get your ass kicked ... and love every minute of it.

IGN has a hands-on preview of the new "survival mode" for L4D, coming soon to a zombie clusterf#*%k near you. The mechanics are simple: gear up, alert the horde, and hammer down. Of course, "simple" doesn't mean "easy":

How furious is it? Consider this: In all of the play testing that the Valve designers have done while creating this mode, none of them have ever survived past the 10 minute mark. We're told the company best so far was about nine minutes, with a team of elite players battling like crazy to keep one another alive. Our experience at Valve averaged around three or four minutes a round, but they're like the fastest three or four minutes of your life.

And you're not dealing with just one or two special infected at a time:

What makes it so challenging is that the Survival mode doesn't waste time building up. After the initial wave of zombies you'll start getting hit by waves of special zombies; these are the hunters, smokers, boomers, and tanks. You'll get multiples of them at a time; I often saw two or three hunters or smokers leaping around the battle while the mindless horde minions were everywhere. In one battle, we had the tank, a boomer, a couple of smokers, and a hunter hitting us at the same time. We're told it's even possible to get two tanks at the same time, a prospect that seems both ludicrously unfair and hilarious at the same time.

The mode will be available on 16 maps, one of which is an entirely new level called Lighthouse. In addition, the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns have been tweaked to accommodate versus mode, to double your griefing pleasure.

Now would be a good time to practice staying in formation.

Facebook infested with worms

From Yahoo! News:

Facebook has seen five different security threats in the past week. According to Trend Micro, four new hoax applications are attempting to trick members into divulging their usernames and passwords. And a new variant of the Koobface worm is running wild on the site, installing malware on the computers of victims who click on a link to a fake YouTube video.

The Koobface worm is dangerous. It can be dropped by other malware and downloaded unknowingly by a user when visiting malicious Web sites, Trend Micro reports. When attackers execute the malware, it searches for cookies created by online social networks. The latest variant is targeting Facebook, but earlier variants have also plagued MySpace.

Once Koobface finds the social-networking cookies, it makes a DNS query to check IP addresses that correspond to remote domains. Trend Micro explains that those servers can send and receive information about the affected machine. Once connected, the malicious user can remotely perform commands on the victim's machine.

"Once cookies related to the monitored social-networking Web sites are located, it connects to these Web sites using the user log-in session stored in the cookies. It then navigates through pages to search for the user's friends. If a friend has been located, it sends an HTTP POST request to the server," Trend Micro reports.

Ultimately, the worm's agenda is to transform the victim's computer into a zombie and form botnets for malicious purposes. Koobface attempts to do this by composing a message and sending it to the user's friends. The message contains a link to a Web site where a copy of the worm can be downloaded by unsuspecting friends. And the cycle repeats itself.

FULL ARTICLE

Hidden within the image...

Find Luke Skywalker in this picture:

UK govt links games to "early death"

From gamesindustry.biz:

The UK government's Department of Health has launched an incredible attack on the videogames industry with an advertisement linking the playing of videogames to an "early death".

The poster, also backed by charities including The British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research and Diabetes UK, shows an image of a child sitting on the floor holding a PlayStation controller in one hand, accompanied by the slogan: "Risk an early death, just do nothing."

The Change4Life campaign, which also features a second, similar advertisement with another child about to eat a cake, is aimed at promoting physical exercise in children, but the clear and public connotations will be unwelcome, to say the least, to an industry working hard to overcome unfounded stereotypes.

The government's own Byron Review last year noted that there was no solid evidence to link obesity to videogames, while the high profile launch and subsequent stellar sales of Nintendo's Wii Fit points towards an increasing trend of more active videogames on offer.

It's only a matter of time before the stink of this propaganda wafts over to the US. It's just not enough these days to promote any ideology on its own merits. The ideologue must also construct an enemy, define it as the aggressor, and march to war.

Team Fortress 2 update

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Gameplay changes
* Added a duck timer that prevents duck spamming while running around on-ground
* In-air, players are only allowed to duck once before they touch ground again
* Fixed several bounding box issues with jumping, falling, and rocket jump air-walking. Bounding box should be much more accurate there now
* Increased backstab check so that Spies can side-stab again
* When disguising, Spies now always start showing the primary weapon in their disguise, and can then switch it with the last-disguise key

TF2 Fixes

* Fixed flamethrower loophole that resulted in the flame effect being stuck on while the flamethrower wasn't really firing
* Fixed exploit that allowed players to circumvent the force-fire timeout on the pipebomb launcher
* Fixed a bug that caused Natasha's slow on hit effect to be inverted from 75% to 25%
* Restored sawmill_logs.mdl file, fixing some user maps that used it
* Fixed some localization issues with Scout achievement strings
* Removed the "Final" phrasing in the map loading screen

Engine fixes

* Fixed a server crash on startup under Linux
* Fixed a buffer overflow issue related to network string tables
* Gamestats uploading is now done asynchronously. This fixes the client timeout issues on map changes

CP_Junction

* Fixed an exploit where engineers could build a teleporter exit in an invalid area
* Fixed a few bad overlay assignments and other minor issues

Unreal Tournament 3: (massive) patch 2.0

Weighing-in at 309.42 MB, the patch - with the Titan Pack - is available on Fileshack (and elsewhere, I assume). A full description is available here.

If you don't have the game, you can play the full game with the patch for free this weekend through Steam, or you can grab everything for 12 bucks.

Warhammer Online: free 10-day trial

Sign up here.

Metacritic data used to rank publishers - some will be pissed

From gamesindustry.biz:

A new survey of Metacritic data published yesterday has identified the most consistent, and least consistent videogame publishers, according to the scores that their games receive, placing Rockstar Games at the top of the list and Ubisoft at the bottom.

The findings, from research conducted by GameQuarry and highlighted in David Perry's blog, assign a points value to each scoring bracket in the Metacritic system, with 2 points awarded for a game in the 90-100 bracket, 1 point for an 80-89 score, no points for 70-79, -1 point for 60-69 and -2 points for anything scoring a Metacritic average of 59 or below.

The results saw the Grand Theft Auto publisher score a total of 19 points from 23 titles, closely followed by TellTale Games with 14 points from 23 titles and Blizzard with 11 points from 7 titles.

By comparison Ubisoft ranked bottom with -148 points from a total of 237 games, while Activision fared little better on -138 points from 227 games and THQ sat just above them both on 120 points from 150 games.

Ubisoft's low score is the result of 75 titles which were rated at a Metacritic average of 59 or less, compared with just 4 that managed a score of 90 or above.

"Using this method, publishers who may have created stellar titles, would also be penalised for each low scoring game and given no credit for average games," wrote the report's authors, adding that the findings only reflect historical data, and don't necessarily indicate current trends.

"It is imperative to keep these results in perspective as they do not reflect trends towards an increase or decrease in quality trends. For example, a publisher on the Most Consistent List may in fact be trending towards a decline in quality whereas a publisher on the Least Consistent List may trend towards an increase in quality.

"It is also entirely plausible that the publisher noted, may be a standout leader in a particular genre or platform but performing poorly in another. These variations and possible trends are not presented as it was not inclusive of the requested scope."

In his blog Perry suggests that the research findings add an interesting angle to the debate over the use of Metacritic data in the industry: "This is based on Metacritic data, and let's just say many of my friends are having a VERY heavy discussion (right now), on the validity of the Metacritic data. (So this is incredibly timely and will add fuel to that fire for certain!)"