L4D: "The Sacrifice" trailer

IUN caption contest

Come up with a caption for this picture.  The winner will receive a handjob from IT()E Plucky.

CoD:BO in the Crosshairs

This Saturday (September 18) at 3:00 p.m. EST, the BASH and SLASH "Crosshairs" webcast will feature a discussion on the current direction of the Call of Duty series, and Black Ops in particular.  The bulk of the conversation will focus on ranked vs. unranked servers, and the future of user-created content (i.e. maps and mods).  If you're at all interested in CoD:BO, you should have a listen.

For those of you that don't know, bashandslash.com is a CoD community hub that focuses on competitive gaming.  The Crosshairs hosts are Jock Yitch, the founder of BASH, Sam Reese ("iBleedv20") of omnilinkit.com, and Sam Babbit ("{PST}*Joker"), the owner of mycallofduty.com and the creator of the eXtreme mod.  These guys broke the story that became a shit storm over MW2 and IWnet, and they're all highly respected throughout the "oldschool" CoD player community.

Know irony

If you’re looking for your first job in games, it’s worth thinking very carefully about your future employer. Do you want to work on jaded, derivative titles that receive scathing reviews and go straight to the bargain bin? Do you want to work large amounts of unpaid overtime because your project is underfunded and poorly managed? Do you want to work on codebases that are messy and poorly-designed because there’s never time to do things properly? Do you want to live in fear of your company’s financial security?

It’s sad that these and other games industry horror stories are more frequent than they should be, but it’s not like that here. We only work on original, ambitious projects: our first title, Crackdown, was a number-one hit, winning critical acclaim and multiple awards, and our best is yet to come, beginning with our first online game, APB. And while making games is great fun, we take our work seriously. We pride ourselves on our unusually sensible, sustainable and professional development practices, resulting in smoothly-run projects and far less overtime than is normal for many game developers. We’re passionate about engineering and crafting our games to the highest of standards. We cultivate an open working environment where ideas are valued on their own merits, no matter whose they are. The growth of our company and size of our projects allows us to provide a wide range of opportunities. And the investment we’ve raised puts us in a strong financial position with security and creative control over our projects.

That's a quote from the graduate recruitment section on the Realtime Worlds website.

And here's the news:  Realtime Worlds is no more.  They went into administration (meaning they declared bankruptcy) six weeks after releasing All Points Bulletin:  a game that took five years to develop into one of the biggest suckfest MMO's ever spawned.  The forums are shut down, the servers are about to shut down, 200 people are out of a job, and every player that sank money into the game is shit out of luck.

CoD: BO "FAQ"

Treyarch Community Manager JD_2020 posted this on the Black Ops forums.  While it's not everything we want, it's pretty damned close.

Quote:

After Call of Duty: World at War, we set out 3 goals for our next PC title:

1] PC gets every single game feature that the consoles get, but in a way that makes sense for PC.

2] PC gets even more features – the ones that PC gamers want like dedicated servers and more customization.

3] Keep it fun. Protect the integrity of the title through design and post-launch support.

Keep that in mind as you read through the decisions outlined below in our FAQ.

Call of Duty: Black Ops PC Multiplayer FAQ

Full feature support: Confirmed

Ranked Servers: earn XP and currency. Wager Servers: gamble your currency. Customizable Unranked Servers. Combat Training against practice dummies. Theater. Create-a-Class "2.0." Contracts. Emblem editor. Everything the consoles get. Implemented in a way that makes sense for PC (*cough* no lobbies *cough*).

PC Features: Confirmed

Dedicated Servers. New Server Browser. Dev console. /record. Customizable game modes, perks, killstreaks, classes, and higher player counts on unranked servers. Map rotation. RCon. Kick & Ban. MOTD. In-game custom Server Banners. And more.

Mod Tools: Confirmed

We will release mod tools sometime post-launch. We need to finish the game first. Then we will make sure any urgent issues are handled. Then we will begin work on tools. The extent of the mod tools package will not be known until this time.

COD: Black Ops

Some interesting new features for COD: Black Ops. Personally they sound very frustrating - the entire upgrade system for COD4 was crap in my opinion.

Redirector was down...

I have no idea for how long, but the itoeunited.net redirecting server has been down. Sometimes the virtual machine it runs on just locks up - I've never figured out why. Unfortunately it was still responding to pings, so my monitoring software didn't tell me, and the DNS server is replicated elsewhere, so the secondary DNS server was still feeding the IP's correctly.

Yeah, I know - it's all serious geek speek. But here's the important part:

It's back up now.

Playing For Change

Probably the best version of this song I've ever heard. Click the title to check out their site. If you like music, you'll be there a while. ;-)

Stand By Me
Four years ago while walking down the street in Santa Monica, CA the Playing For Change crew heard Roger Ridley singing “Stand By Me” from a block away. His voice, soul and passion set us on a journey around the world to add other musicians to his performance.

This song transformed Playing For Change from a small group of individuals into a global movement for peace and understanding.

This track features over 35 musicians collaborating from all over the world; they may have never met in person, but in this case, the music does the talking.

TF2 Bandwidth Usage

For having 20 players in at one point, we only peaked at 1.5 Mbit outbound, a lot less than I expected. I don't know for sure if that's due to a QOS cap that kicked in at 1.5 or not, but even so, you can see the average was closer to 1 Mbit of traffic.

Inbound traffic hovered around 0.5 Mbit while gaming, but spiked to 8.2 Mbit when I was installing TF2 :-)

Goodbye, ATI

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday said it will remove the ATI name from its products by the end of the year, killing a brand name synonymous with graphics enthusiasts for 25 years.

AMD offers a range of graphics products under the ATI brand, including the Radeon, FirePro and Eyefinity offerings. The chip designer will instead attach the name AMD to those products by the end of the year, said Drew Erskine, an AMD spokesman.

The change in brand name won't affect the company's graphics product offerings or plans, Erskine said.