The
Comic-Con 2010 Schedule indicates a new game based to some degree on
Spore will be shown off at the convention, which gets underway in a couple of weeks. Word is: "Maxis Studio (The Sims and Spore video games) has just announced their next project, a brand new, Sci-Fi Action-RPG based on the DNA of Spore. Join key leads from the dev team, Thomas Vu, Paul Sottosanti and Lauren McHugh, for the first game reveal to the public!" Thanks
Blend Games.
Kotaku has details from the
lawsuit filed by current and former Infinity Ward employees over breach of contract and unpaid royalties. The group's legal filings say Activision created a "police state" involving secret "interrogations" of employees. They also outline the allegations of unpaid royalties, saying: "In March, according to the suit, Activision paid 40 percent of the Modern Warfare 2 bonus money to the team, but withheld the rest, demanding that Infinity Ward develop, produce, complete and publish Modern Warfare 3 by November 2011 to get the rest of the money." Word is the group is now demanding the payment of $216 million USD in unpaid royalties and damages, down from $500 million. They say there will be a hearing on August 5 to see if this should be consolidated with the other two IW/Activision lawsuits, and also
have word that a trial date for the
dueling lawsuits between Activision and Jason West and Vince Zampella, saying this will begin on May 23, just a couple of weeks before E3 2011 kicks off. Thanks joao.
The
Introversion Software Website features the release of the full source code for
Darwinia and
Multiwinia. This is not a free release, however, as the sources are in the
Introversion Store for £30.00/$45.00/€34.50. Commercial use of the code is not discussed, but they do outline some of the other benefits this deal provides:
The code is distributed via an online subversion repository, where you can not only access the vanilla sources, but also create your own branches to share with other developers. Purchase of this product also grants you access to the Darwinia and Multiwinia development forum and wiki, where you can discuss mods with other developers.
For those specifically interested in modding Multiwinia, we are running an entirely separate Metaserver for multiplayer testing. Each copy of the Soure Code includes five authentication keys, meaning you can code changes to Multiwinia and test with 4 players and still have a key spare.
Digital Foundry vs. OnLive on Eurogamer.net offers their full review of the OnLive streaming game service, following up on their
preliminary latency evaluation (thanks joao). Since the practical value of such a service has been hotly debated, we were eager to see their conclusion, and while they find various elements praise-worthy, in the end they say: "In the here and now, the question marks on performance and value combined with the lack of games mean that we can't really recommend the system, but you would hope that the content side of things would improve at least." Here's more that explains why:
However, despite the incredible achievement in streaming gameplay with relatively low latency, the bottom line is that the gameplay experience is not better than what we already have - by and large it's tangibly worse. The varying quality of the graphics is questionable, and the lag is best described as "better than expected" - nowhere near the claims that have been made for the system, and still measurably inferior to current standards. It's just a question of how your personal perception level will interpret it as to whether it's a game-breaker or not.
In terms of buying games, the prices for new titles are too high and the selection of games is uninspiring. The notion of paying so much for what is measurably an inferior product compared to the physical disc means that OnLive simply cannot be taken seriously at this point in time - especially when you don't own the games you are buying. This is something the industry en masse needs to get its head around as digital delivery becomes more important: if you're going to take away basic ownership rights, and offer a lower-quality version of the game to boot, the price needs to diminish accordingly.
Steam News has details on a new
Team Fortress 2 patch that's automatically available for Valve's teamplay shooter. Here are the patch notes.
Continue here to read the full story.
These patch notes outline the automatic patch that added
the new "Four Swordsmen of the Apocalypse" mutation to
Left 4 Dead 2, and
this subsequent update has word on the removal of left4dead2\pak02_dir.vpk from the whitelist. The full notes from the first patch follow.
Continue here to read the full story.
Happy birthday
Nikola Tesla, the late genius who lived a life of amazing genius and tragedy. A good celebration would be to try and go through the day without using anything based on his work, as how impossible that would be would be good testimony to his impact.
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