Trackmania Nations is probably still a good demo of what's in Canyon.

The new vehicle handles well, and the engine is an improvement over Forever. Apart from that, you pretty much know what you're in for if you've played Nations or any other TM game.

Dear Media, please stop referring to Valve as some sort of hold-out against the evil DRM overlords. They pretty much wrote the book on modern DRM. Love, Domgrief.

• Until Half-Life, you could rent online games
• Until Steam, it was considered normal to be able to loan, give or sell games to your friends
• Early versions of Steam behaved so poorly offline that it was effectively an almost-always-on DRM scheme
• You can't buy, install and play an off-the-shelf Steam game without connecting to the internet and attaching it to your Steam account
• They might speak out about some piracy-encouraging behaviours like localising late, but as a publisher they still support piracy-encouraging behaviours like it-costs-twice-as-much-in-Australia

I hope by "building something that's cool, and then worrying about monetization" he's referring to making the game and then coming up with a suitable pricing model, and not releasing the game for free and then microtransactioning it to death.

Looking at previous acquire-then-monetize properties like CS, Portal, TF and Alien Swarm, and the vastly different ways they've been commercialised, it's anyones guess as to what happens with Dota 2.

This comment was edited on Aug 29, 2011, 22:31.

Success at last!

After about a dozen attempts over 4 sessions a few hours apart, I've finally managed to get through to the payment screen and then have my payment (Australian Mastercard) accepted.

Edit: The EULA is something from the 1990s - I don't know if it's changed since Trackmania was released, but being able to install it on only one computer and granting perpetual and unlimited rights on any content I create is something I haven't seen on any EULAs in a while...

This comment was edited on Aug 17, 2011, 11:46.

Me three.

Are the rest of you also buying from overseas? Gametap never liked Australians very much.

That happens on my rig, too (MSI motherboard). It usually doesn't boot first time, but if I give the machine a reset after the initial power-on it seems to POST OK.

xXBatmanXx wrote on Jul 9, 2011, 05:31:
Well, the gamer community doesn't matter as much as future clients. You start suing your users, and you end up not having any new users.....

Yeah, that part is really interesting. A publisher suing a developer, especially over the sort of matters that developers are routinely concerned about? Way to alienate your clients.

The iPad2 is also a factor of a couple larger than what most people would consider a "portable cell phone".

1) Reviewer makes negative review
2) PR agent indicates that he will not give the reviewer more material for review
3) Media coverage ensues
4) PR agent defends right to blacklist reviewers but grudgingly concedes that negative reviews will still occur
5) Reviewer defends right to make negative reviews but grudgingly concedes that PR agents will still be selective

The more coverage this gets, the more it feels like it wasn't really news in the first place.

This sounds like nothing but marketing babble, but after reading through the full interview I can kind of see where they're coming from.

If you boil it down to "we're providing a way for you to transition between games without having to find your friends all over again" and "we're trying to make it easier for you to find out which people from your existing social networks are already CoD players" then it actually sounds kind of useful.

It reminds me of a great feature that used to be in PC multiplayer games where I would regularly go to one place and play against the same group of people, plus you'd know where to look if a new game in the series was released. I think it was called a "dedicated server".

I'm fascinated that the views on this are so polarised.

Whoever was responsible for the security of Epic's websites had the sense to encrypt the passwords, to limit the amount of personal data kept at the edge of the network, and to take the appropriate response as soon as an intrusion was detected.

We don't have enough information to know whether this was the result of a lazy network administrator, but it's not hard to believe that the servers could have been compromised even if Epic had taken reasonable measures to keep them secure.

A platformer? Frequent combat? Shootouts? Wall jumping?

And that's just from a one minute trailer...

I hope the film is nothing like the game.

SectorEffector wrote on Jun 1, 2011, 05:12:
So this is pretty much a straight port of Q3 for web playing?

with more maps?

That, except there's a fat plugin to handle all of the 3D and the data, or at least when I looked it it a year or so ago.

So it's kind of like Quake 3 with leaderboards and a pay-to-play option, but the installer looks different.

I'm disappointed that there's no mention of anything to do with soundfonts or music - that's the only thing I still miss about the AWE/Audigy cards.

Some of the THX stuff looks good though, some decent volume leveling and voice boosting technology would be great (in fact, any audio controls that don't include the words "Rock" or "Underwater" would be an improvement over most of the onboard drivers I've used).

nin wrote on May 22, 2011, 16:40:
Wasn't he on a poster, early in the first game?

Yeah, and it looks like the poor taste makeover is a fresh idea since they included his image in Arkham Asylum.

I thought Rocksteady did a great job with AA, using so many Batman characters without alienating the unwashed masses (like me) whose major exposure to these characters has been through movies and TV shows. Reinventing a character is a gutsy move, and I hope it works out for them.

I ignored most of the negative feedback for DA2 (people do tend to complain) and bought the game with anticipation, but probably shouldn't have.

DA2 is still a moderately entertaining RPG story in its own right, but DA:O feels like the big, epic, open sequel to DA2 rather than the other way around.

peonjohn wrote on Apr 1, 2011, 16:10:
From what I've read from others, Telltale always releases episodes in a timely manner and finishes their series.

But from the reviews I've read, this series hasn't gotten off to a good start( this is all based on the first episode review).

Telltale have stuck to their planned release schedule for every game except their flagship adventure title, Bone. Which is a shame, because I love that story.

I've seen mixed reviews for BttF, but I'd give them a couple of games before they hit their stride. Sam and Max didn't really hit its stride until Episode 4 of the first season (which is now, probably not coincidentally, is available for free).

DI-MeisterM wrote on Mar 30, 2011, 01:06:
1983-2001 Origin : We Create Worlds
2001-? EA: We Destroy Worlds

Actually, Origin Systems painted E C A as a destroyer of worlds pretty clearly in Ultima VI and Ultima VII, which were released in 1990 and 1992 respectively.

Jerykk wrote on Mar 27, 2011, 00:49:
The games industry is becoming more and more like Hollywood with each passing day.

I can't help but feel that the gaming industry is following the same trend as Hollywood but lagging maybe a decade or two behind.

We've hopefully reached the peak of utterly derivative garbage, and seem to be entering the phase where, in a knee-jerk reaction, "indie games" (read: arthouse cinema) is heaped with praise, a lot of it unwarranted.

I'm kind of looking forward to the video game equivalent of the 90's-00's of movies, where independent ideas start to get some big budgets, and today's overused franchises get a reboot and some attention from people who remembered how great they were back in the day.

That said, we do seem to be drawing a few cues from Hollywood's current reboot frenzy. Medal of Honor? Seriously?

I think we're missing an important point that was raised by that opinion piece - we're already a minority.

If a major publisher decided to release the Next Big Thing (Dragon Age 2, Skyrim, CoD MW3, whatever) only on the latest generation consoles and not on PC, I'm about the only person in my circle of friends (formerly hardcore PC gamers) who wouldn't buy it.

I hope that is not a representative sample.