Entrants will compete for top honors in five categories, including Best Comedy and Best Drama. Every winner will take home a Saxxy, and the overall winner will also win a trip to Valve and have a chance to see their work aired on GTTV's VGA Preshow this December.
"I am absolutely inspired and stunned by the early work I've seen from fans experimenting with SFM," said Geoff Keighley, executive in charge of publisher relations for Spike TV. "All of us at Spike are excited to work with Valve to give someone in the community the chance to world premiere their original SFM short on TV in over 99 million homes."
In the business section of the gamescom show floor, journalists were able to see the Witcher 2 toolset – REDkit. The editor allows modders to create adventures in the world of Geralt of Rivia. REDkit gives players the power to create detailed environments and complex, nonlinear quests as they tell their own Witcher story. Starting today, modders from all over the world can apply for early access to the REDkit by going to thewitcher.com/redkit before September 30, 2012.
With the release of patch 5.0.4, we’re making all the races of Azeroth playable by anyone, no matter which version or expansion of World of Warcraft they own. This includes the enigmatic pandaren, who will become available for play when Mists of Pandaria is released on Tuesday, September 25. We want the entire World of Warcraft community to be able to embrace their inner goblin, blood elf, worgen, draenei, or pandaren from the moment they step foot into the world of Azeroth.
Now, the only hard part will be choosing a name. Who will you be next?
Exciting changes are afoot as we aim to implement a "less is more" philosophy in HoN with our new game mode called Core Pool. Core Pool will feature 40 iconic HoN heroes and encourage players to focus on their game and take their skills to the next level in a controlled environment. As Core Pool is an optional game mode, any player can choose the mode at any time to hone their skills, develop strategy, or just have fun playing a classic game of HoN. With well over 100 characters to choose from in normal mode play, even experienced players can have difficulty keeping up with frequent new character releases. The difficulty associated with getting into HoN or any MOBA for that matter and staying current is well known and frequently lamented by gamers everywhere.
Core Pool directly addresses the steep learning curve prevalent in all MOBAs. No other MOBA offers a controlled environment like this, and we hope to help players who are struggling with learning new characters all the time by providing them a game mode option that will help them learn the basic conventions of HoN. Core Pool, and the concept behind it, is something the MOBA genre was missing and we’re really excited to bring it to our players. Core Pool is great for both experienced players, new players, and anyone looking to play HoN, as it offers a place to improve your skills and try out new techniques by yourself or with your team in a more controlled environment.
When shown a collection of locations on maps that included one of their home, the headset-wearers’ brains emitted tell-tale hints that allowed the experimenters to determine their home’s general location with 60% accuracy on the first try among a collection of ten choices. And when the subjects were asked to memorize a four-digit PIN and then shown a series of random numbers, the researchers found they could guess which of those random numbers was the first digit in the PIN with about 30% accuracy on the first try–far from a home run, but a significantly higher success rate than a random guess.
In fact, none of those results point to a realistic possibility of cybercriminals reading victims’ minds through their gaming headsets any time soon, Oxford’s Martinovic admits. The Neurosky and Emotiv devices, which sell for between $200 and $300, have hardly entered the mainstream, and the mind-reading attacks the researchers describe aren’t reliable enough to make them a profitable avenue for data theft, anyway.
But Martinovic says that the main challenge in looking for signs of the users’ mental responses was sorting through the noisy and often inaccurate signals the headsets produced. Those signals are likely to improve.
Bitmob - Every game needs a -Girlfriend Mode.
I’ve met a legion of female players who could cheerfully take me apart in any game of my choosing. And I’m here to tell you that a “girlfriend mode” addresses a real use-case scenario, one the industry must understand better and should cater to in every co-op game and that is neither sexist nor elitist. Quite the opposite, actually.
Links: | Thanks Ant and Acleacius. |
Play: |
Acorn Story. The Expendables: Deploy and Destroy. |
Links: | World’s most expensive speakers. Riggght. Thanks HARDOCP. |
Stories: | West Nile aerial attack creates controversy in virus-stricken Dallas. |
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OMG! I just dropped my brand new iMac. Amazing Acoustics! Halo theme sung in an oil chamber. 100 Greatest Maniacal Movie Laughs. |