Archived News:
GameTap has
word they are going to make you their… well, that they are offering the
chance to play Daikatana for free through the end of this year. To accompany the
free play, they have posted
a Daikatana Retrospective that looks at the storied history of this first-person shooter from John Romero and ION Storm, robot frog-induced warts and all.
GameSpot on Gerstmann offers an internal Q&A about the firing of editor Jeff
Gerstmann in an incident they refer to themselves as "Gerstmanngate." The
article looks to answer lingering questions over the action and reassure readers
that it is not a negative reflection on their editorial integrity. While still
unable to go into detail on why Jeff was fired, they attempt to explain the
reasons for pulling and reposting both the text and video versions of his
review, how Eidos reacted, the reasons the Kane & Lynch skin and ads were
removed from the site, and how they are attempting to restore the credibility
this incident has cost them, all the while maintaining that neither the lukewarm
review nor advertiser pressure triggered the firing. Not done yet, they promise
a webcast on the topic tomorrow.
The Flash intro on the Kane & Lynch:
Dead Men Website has been revised, and while it still offers quotes from
previews, rather than reviews of the game, the quotes are no longer preceded
by the five stars they were decorated with originally ( story),
which created the incorrect impression the game had received perfect review
scores from GameInformer and GameSpy. Thanks Mike Martinez and
Kotaku.
BeyondUnreal offers a change log for the third beta version of Patch 1 for
Unreal Tournament 3, Epic's just-released shooter sequel. The beta patch is
apparently already running on some servers as it has been released via private
channels.
The EVE Online Website
announces the deployment of the new Trinity update for CCP's MMORPG, adding new
features including an overhaul to the game's graphics engine. The site offers
manual downloads of client patches, along with information on the update, but
not much more for the time being, as it is locked down in an "extended downtime"
mode to help roll out the patch. The
Trinity Page is still
live, however, offering details on the free expansion. Update: The
EVE Insider Forums offer a dire warning that Windows XP users who updated
the "Classic" client to the "Premium" client, using the content upgrade run the
risk of hosing their Windows installation. The update shows how to see if your
system has been impacted by this and offers possible solutions (presuming you
haven't rebooted already), and says they are working on a solution for this.
Massive Entertainment announces plans to release another free map for World in
Conflict early next week. The multiplayer map for the real-time strategy game
is titled Countryside, and there's a screenshot on
IGN.
The Official Penumbra Website
is online, dedicated to Penumbra: Black Plague, the upcoming conclusion to
Frictional Games' horror/adventure series. The site offers screenshots, a new
trailer, and the first in a series of developer diaries chronicling the project.
Also, a newly launched Ageod's American
Civil War Website is live a home to AGEOD’s American Civil War: 1861-1865 –
The Blue and the Gray, the upcoming military strategy game for which the title may or
may not fit on the box.
A new movie is now available showing off Sudden Strike 3: Arms for Victory, the
upcoming World War II strategy sequel from Fireglow Games. Word is: "In this trailer you will see that the famous proverb 'the best defence is
offence' is not always right. Allied forces attack Germans in the beginning but
German stands and then counterattack and capture an enemy strategic point." The
clip can be found on
AtomicGamer,
FileFront, and Gamer's
Hell.
Happy Hanukkah! Woops, forgot that last night.
Gamasutra
offers some reflections from Richard (Lord/General British) Garriott at the 2007
Independent Game Conference
after the Destination Games/NCsoft designer was asked about the marketing of
Tabula Rasa. While he feels the marketing (which he describes as a "black art")
was "fine," he reserves some criticism for himself and the development team,
saying something that hurt the game was the invitation of too many beta testers
before the game was fun enough to be worth playing. Garriott commends the Guild
Wars team for how well they handled their own testing, but has this to say about
testing Tabula Rasa: “We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers
when the game wasn’t yet fun," he said, adding, "As we’ve begun to sell the
game, the people who hadn’t participated in the beta became our fast
early-adopters.”
He continued, “And the people who did participate in the beta, we’ve had to go
back to and say ‘look, look, we promise: we know it wasn’t fun two months ago,
but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.’ We’ve had to go out and
develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy
it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a
marketing process.”
A new demo for Eschalon: Book I is now available, offering a sample of Basilisk
Games' role-playing game updated through the most recent version 1.04 of the
game. In addition to tweaks and bug-fixes the new demo includes two new maps
adding over two hours of additional gameplay. The 67 MB download is available on
AtomicGamer,
FileFront, and
PixelRage.
The Unreal Tournament 3 Q&A on
Music 4 Games
offers some sound thinking about Epic's shooter sequel by chatting with audio
director Mike Larson and composers Rom Di Prisco, Jesper Kyd, and Kevin Riepl.
Each participant offers reflection on his participation in the creation of the
game's soundtrack.
As noted here,
a new video is now available showing off the upcoming "uber" patch for Theatre
of War, focusing on the "newly re-engineered" map editor the patch will include,
though the patch will also offer scads of additional gameplay content. The clip
can be found on
AtomicGamer,
FileFront, and Gamer's
Hell.
Another sure sign of the changing seasons comes from my own mind, as I'm
starting to get the bug to make some chili, which only happens after a bit of
cold weather. Time to start looking for some habanero peppers and a side of
beef!
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