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Archived News:
A new All Aspect
Warfare Blog Update offers an update on the current state of development on
the upcoming action game from 3000AD, and the closed beta test currently getting
underway in partnership with IGN. He also outlines plans for a derivative work,
an aerial combat game: Seeing the disappointment (well at least for an air
combat grognard like me) that was H.A.W.X (I’m sure you can exchange it for Ace
Combat 6 I think) and the clamouring for good “pick up and play” aerial combat
PC games, we will be releasing a spin off based on AAW later this year.
This would be a pure aerial combat game with a campaign and instant action
scenarios. Missions would range from ground strikes and combat air support to
all out air skirmishes over hostile territory. Unlike AAW, it will only feature
four (instead of twelve) aircrafts and only support [team] deathmatch
multiplayer.
The target price point is $19.99.
The good thing about it is that if you like it and want to extend your
experience, you will be able to upgrade it to the full All Aspect Warfare game
for an additional $19.99. All you would need is a small client update. This plan
is similar to [casual] games which allow you to try certain levels, then you can
buy the rest. In this case, you get to buy a dedicate aerial combat game if
thats your thing.
Steam News has word on a
new Steam Client update, and word on
Shacknews is this
fixes the problem users have been having with Earth 2160. They
also have another catch-up patch, as
this update has word that
the Steam version of the recent version 1.4 patch for Call of
Duty: World at War is now available.
The Stronghold weekend
promotion on GOG.Com offers
Stronghold and
Stronghold:
Crusader together for a 25% discount. Meanwhile,
Worldwide Soccer Manager 2009
on Steam is on sale for 50% off for the weekend. Also, now on Steam is the
Sword of the Stars: Ultimate
Collection, a bundle of Sword of the Stars plus the Born of Blood and A
Murder of Crows expansion packs. And new to the DRM-free GOG.Com is
Postal from Running with Scissors.
Stardock sends a little follow-up to news of the impact of piracy on
the launch of Demigod. One thing they want to clarify is the 18,000
legitimate user figure bandied about represents how many legit users were trying
to connect, not how many copies of the game they sold. They also point out that
this represents more than the current daily peak simultaneous user figures on
the Steam stats page for Left 4 Dead or Team Fortress 2, and a fraction of the
capacity they had planned for, but the unauthorized users ruined that plan.
Here's a bit more: The infrastructure was designed to handle up to 50,000
of these connections.
But on day 0, there were around 140,000 concurrent users of which 18,000 are
validated.
Pirated users can't get updates or play multiplayer but they still touch the
servers.
So over the first 24 hours, we had to essentially scrap together a doppleganger
of the infrastructure dedicated to Demigod's multiplayer network needs, release
an update to legitimate users to point them to it.
The result was that in the first day, day and a half, users couldn't connect to
each other (the connection servers would time out) and even the in game
experience was horrible getting through menus and such because even a simple
HTTP keep alive call (something as simple as a http call to check for the latest
version to inform users if there's a new version) would cause the in game UI to
hang.
The consequence is two-fold: First, early customers got a TERRRIBLE experience.
Second, the reviews (notably Gamespot) based their review on this terrible
experience.
Now today, day 3, it's pretty much taken care of. Users are connecting in
multiplayer, the servers are pretty responsive and we're adding more in
preparation for the weekend.
Kevin
Bachus On The Fall Of The Phantom on Gamasutra is a Q&A with Microsoft's
former DirectX guy Kevin Bachus about his stint at Infinium Labs, and the
Phantom console that turned out to be a phantom product. Kevin discusses his
plans to get back into the industry, and reflects on the Phantom: I think
that for me, there's kind of an empty place in our heart where Phantom should be
because there was tremendous skepticism about the system and a lot of
joke-telling and a lot of criticism.
In some cases, there was also some bitterness and nastiness that was directed at
the product, which is unfortunate because for those who actually spent the time
to get to understand what we were doing and looked at it, I think they saw
something that probably was pretty cool.
Maybe in a way, it was a little bit ahead of its time because it was attempting
to make the whole process of accessing games easier and therefore more
accessible to a broader audience.
I'm not naive enough to think that it was on par with what Apple has done with
the iTunes store and applications for iPhone, but on a much, much smaller scale,
it was trying to address the same opportunity that Apple saw.
The Red Faction Community
Website offers the first developer diary movie from Red Faction Guerrilla,
the upcoming installment in Volitions earth-shattering (or Mars-shattering, at
least) shooter sequel. Here's how the diary is described: "In our first
developer diary, Drew Holmes, Writer for Red Faction: Guerrilla, speaks to us
about life on Mars and the main task at hand for Alec within the game. The EDF
have divided Mars up into six sectors, all of which you'll need to liberate in
order to progress through the game. Included in this video is a sneak peek at
some of the towns found outside of the demo, a first-look at some Martian
vegetation, and a glimpse of the mysterious third faction, the Marauders."
Microïds follows up on their
Syberia 3 April Fools' Joke with word that while the whole PC/PS3 forced
co-op thing is a gag, they are indeed working on a next installment in the
adventure game series for the PC (thanks
Joystiq). All joking aside, they are also hoping to make a PS3 release, but
based on history, are not completely confident that Sony is going to share these
hopes: Paris, April 17, 2009 - Following the countless messages and
questions from fans which followed our announcement on April 1st regarding the
launch of Syberia 3, Emmanuel Olivier, President of Microïds, gives more details
on that announcement.
“Syberia 3 is not an April Fool's joke. The game is highly expected by the
community of fans of adventure games and fans of Kate Walker and it will be
launched, it is one of our most strategic projects at Microïds and we have been
anticipating it for a long time.
It will be released on PC for sure, however, on PS3, this could actually turn
into an April Fool’s joke because SONY is the only decision-maker on this point,
as strange as it may seem to some people.
Benoît Sokal, the author of Syberia and Syberia 2, has mentioned several times
in the press that he would only participate in a sequel to his masterpiece if he
had enough financial means to design and develop an exceptional title. Today
Microïds is ready to invest in this ambitious production. But everyone knows
that to amortize the development costs of a major video game with that level of
quality, it is essential to develop it for multiple platforms, PC and consoles.
However Sony Computer Entertainment has already censured Microïds in 2003 by
denying that Syberia was released on PS2 in the United States though it had
previously been released in Europe on that console. The same refusal happened
for a dozen other Microïds titles for the U.S.
Beyond this censorship of the authors and their producers who believe in their
creations and who take the financial risks when building up productions for the
console without knowing whether they will be approved or denied by SONY in the
last minute, the exorbitant royalties demanded by SONY to manufacture the games
on its consoles seriously hamper the financing ability of independent producers.
Microïds has paid more than 15 million Euros of royalties to SONY for its entire
catalog, which represents 55% of the Microïds turnover for this platform. April
Fools? Well no! It is unfortunately the “rule of the game” imposed by SONY.
The revenue shortfalls due to the PS2 games we were not able to sell in the
United States, a highly significant territory, coupled with the excessive
royalties paid to SONY for the European territories, have so far prevented
Microïds from having the ability to reinvest in an ambitious sequel to the
Syberia series.
So today we launch an SOS to all fans of the Syberia series: let us rally to
support the independent creation and convince Sony to change its rules. Send all
your messages of support to:
supporToSyberia3PS3@microids.com
SYBERIA 3 on PS3, an April Fool’s? It’s up to SONY!”
Battlefield Heroes Finally Open This Summer on Giant Bomb reports EA has
told them that Battlefield Heroes
will enter open beta testing sometime this summer. Last August DICE
made the point that the game is already basically live, as they
planned on continuing to open the closed beta to more testers, so you can try
and parse all this to suit your own needs. Meanwhile,
The BF Heroes Twitter
Feed has word that another 75,000 beta keys have been distributed for the
subscription-free online shooter.
There's a Demigod: Day 1
Status Report we missed between the day 0 update and the
day 2 report with some details on how much piracy they saw after
the street date was broken for Gas Powered Games' action/strategy
game, which has no DRM protection (thanks
GamesIndustry.biz). Some of the issues related to an influx of unauthorized
users have been addressed, but the ratio of stolen to legitimate copies is
pretty startling: The system works pretty well if you have a few thousand
people online at once. The system works…less well if there are tens of thousands
of people online at once. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, you get
horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive due to simple
web service calls that were considered pretty benign during the beta that
suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due to the sheer massive number
of calls that are being made.
Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About
18,000 are legitimate. So anyway, we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate
out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery
to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly “ha ha pirate”
message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy). Mind you,
the game makes relatively few server calls, it’s just the sheer number of
people.
A new Gothic 3 patch is now available from the
Community Patch Team, the folks who
have taken on the task of updating Piranha Bytes' fantasy-themed RPG sequel. The
accompanying post indicates this unofficial support is now concluded: "After
about 4 weeks of work we present you a hotfix, which resolves some mayor and
some minor issues. With this our work on Gothic 3 has now come to an end." The
patch is mirrored on
AtomicGamer and Gamer's
Hell.
A new movie from R.U.S.E. offers the first look at gameplay from this
upcoming real-time strategy game. Word is: "This trailer focuses on Radio
Silence, one of the tactics you can use within the game against your opponent."
The clip is posted on
AtomicGamer and Gamer's
Hell.
A new movie from The Sims 3 shows off the in-game movie-making tool in
the upcoming lifestyle simulation from EA Maxis. This clip is posted on
AtomicGamer and
Gamer's Hell, and there
is also a new "Chessmaster" movie, which can be found on
Gamer's Hell.
Gaming Nexus - US Army vet discusses Six Days in Fallujah.
"I'm as patriotic as anyone else (note my Captain America belt buckle,
and Purple Heart), but I think that the issues we face today in the 'war on
terror,' both in the sphere of actual combat and the underlying social
issues (how poverty and social dysfunction create an environment for radical
Islam, for example), are certainly serious enough that they deserve an
even-handed and measured treatment. Again, it's a maturity question: is the
gaming community ready for a truly morally challenging and thought-provoking
narrative? I'm not as sure as Konami apparently is."
I happened to look out the window yesterday because Hudson the wonder dog and the
Gunnar-man were out in the yard barking their heads off at something. This
allowed me to catch sight of some guy and his dog (dogs are the only thing other
than the mailman that make our doggies go so nuts) just as the dog was finishing
making a deposit on our lawn. Naturally when they started walking off I jumped
on the opportunity to run out and ask the guy whether he planned on cleaning up
the mess. He said he yes, and when I asked when, he said "in about 10 minutes."
Sure enough he did return to pick up to poop, but the large paper bag and paper
plate he used suggested this was not a planned clean-up. During our conversation
I had pointed out to him we'd been getting a lot of this sort of crap lately (so
to speak), and I hoped it wasn't him. He said it wasn't, but I suspect it was,
but I may have put an end to this by catching them in the act. Here's hoping.
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