7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail

My guess is the author never met the tank or patriarch.

From cracked.com:

Love it though: "Now consider the poor zombie. It lacks every single advantage that has kept humanity from being eaten to extinction. It wanders around in the open, it can't use weapons, it can't think or use strategy. It doesn't even have the sense of self preservation to run and hide when it's in danger. And, it's made entirely out of food."

CoD: Black Ops MP teaser

First impressions:  

The Call of Duty engine is still strong.  We're seeing moderate quality console footage here, so if Treyarch continues to leverage the fatter balls of PC hardware, Black Ops should look noticeably better than Medal of Honor: Tier 1 on our platform.

Sound remains Treyarch's core competency.  After the initial alpha-quality presentation, Treyarch patched the hell out of the sound system in World at War, improving it by orders of magnitude.  They've revamped the whole thing this time around, and even with YouTube's crap audio, you can hear the difference.

The HUD is too goddamned busy.  There's so much bling on the screen, it's like watching CNN in the early 90's.  Which leads me to my next point:

It looks like Treyarch is intent on importing a lot of the balance issues from MW2.  More killstreak shit.  It seems that we're destined to continue down the road towards ever-more arcadey shooters, and old farts like me don't like it.  Hopefully, Treyarch will include a more minimalist option. You know, where the game is about the game, and not gaming the f**king ranking system. 

There is a "record" feature.  This was already confirmed via Twitter (I think), but it's nice to see Treyarch throwing the competitive guys a bone.  Especially since it looks like more than a bare-bones system.

Tired of constantly fighting with the Smoker? Has the Bloat's acid spray hit you one too many times? Maybe you just have a breakdown in communication. Run out to Spencer's and pick one of these up today. Made like a children's book complete with the sound chips - just push the buttons on the book to listen. Almost as good as Berlitz:

TF2 Dance

One of the best animations from TF2 I've seen. Check out the rest of this guys work on youtube. Eventually, he'll piece them all together.

TF2: Beat It

This is quite good:

beat it in tf2 @ Yahoo! Video

More grins

As we noted here almost a year ago, the now-defunct Swedish developer GRIN made three shitty games in a row, and consequently rolled over and died.  A few stragglers formed Outbreak Studios before the body of their former employer got cold, and it seems that the new development house is still (ostensibly) a going concern.  Outbreak's claim to fame so far is that its founder developed the network engine for a handful of games, though he apparently did all that a long time ago.

Today, a few remaining GRIN-ites announced the formation of Whiteout Studios, which according to Blue's News already has a game under development using Crytek's Cry Engine 3.  That's a hell of an expensive license, and it's somewhat remarkable that a team with Whiteout's track record managed to grab the start-up money it needed.

We won't see the game for a while, but it's never too early to say "caveat emptor."

ZOMG! A PC-only game tops the charts

No existing console controller has enough buttons - and no existing console gamer has enough thumbs - for StarCraft II.  And yet, that game currently sits atop the UK multi-format sales charts.  It's the first PC-only title to do that in recent memory, and the charts don't even include digital distribution sales figures.

Don't expect a slew of PC-first titles until some later stage of human evolution, but this is great news nevertheless.  The Personal Computer remains a viable format, and while the death of consoles is nowhere on the horizon, somebody out there can tell the difference between a Lexus and an El Camino.

L4D2: a sensible update

The change-log, via Steam News:

Addons

+ Client's custom HUDs will be reloaded when changing between Official and Non-official servers.

GamePlay

+ Bullets that first pass through an infected character before striking a Survivor are now ignored as friendly fire.

+ Fix for survivors speaking The Passing Finale lines in other campaigns.

Versus

+ Charger now receives 300 points for any Survivor that is insta-killed.

+ Charger now receives 100 points for any Survivor that is insta-incapped by a charge.

+ Any infected that causes a Survivor to stumble into a "ledge hang" situation will receive 50 points.

Tank

+ Tanks go into a stasis when they spawn and leave stasis when the human player takes over.

+ Tanks in stasis are invisible but still show a glow to the infected team.

+ Tanks do not attack when they are in stasis.

+ Tanks in stasis cannot be set on fire or damaged.

SDK Tools

+ Fixed crash whenever a VMT was loaded in L4D2 tools mode.

Evening news

■ Valve unbans MW2 players, gives them L4D2 as an apology

■ Starcraft II midnight launch

■ Natural Selection 2 Alpha releases tonight

■ No one is playing Blacklight: Tango Down (on Steam)

■ More Mass Effect 2 DLC

■ ATI Catalyst 10.7 drivers released

■ Firefox browser is now at version 3.6.8

■ VLC Media Player hits version 1.1.1

Alien Swarm - first person

Console commands:

firstperson
asw_hide_marine 1
asw_controls 0