Gas Bandit Gaming

Finally, You Will Get Your Chance To Kill Fippy Darkpaw

2012-01-30T14:15:00.000-06:00

Finally, You Will Get Your Chance To Kill Fippy Darkpaw:

I claim EQ in the name of the GNOLLS

With the announcement, the frozen-in-amber separate EQMac server is also going away, which disappointed the people who preferred EQ frozen in amber.

Sequelitis - Mega Man X

2011-11-03T23:45:00.000-05:00

MechWarrior Online will be free to play, PC exclusive

2011-11-01T11:45:00.001-05:00

MechWarrior Online will be free to play, PC exclusive:

There's a new MechWarrior game in the works, and it'll be exclusive to the PC. Dubbed MechWarrior Online, the new title will focus on multiplayer combat and be free to play. In-game items will be available for purchase with real money, of course, but Creative Director Bryan Ekman promises that players won't be able to buy items that give them a tactical advantage. Those goodies will have to be earned by actually playing, he says.

...

Broken Toys: A Decade Of Camelot

2011-10-09T14:28:00.004-05:00

Gas Bandit's note: To this day I still remember DAOC's launch as the smoothest MMO launch I have ever experienced (and I've experienced a few of them - EverQuest, AC, DAOC, WoW, Warhammer Online, to name a few). Though it's controls and graphics are dated today, if they could slap Warhammer Online's gui, graphics engine and class balance on DAOC's gear, crafting and RvR paradigm, in my opinion you'd have the perfect PvP MMO. The three years I was subscribed to DAOC were some of the wildest of my online life. To find out opening day was in a basement on a shoestring is awesome... and further infuriates me what supposedly "big time" companies get away with today in the way of service level.

More after the jump...

From BrokenToys.org

A Decade Of Camelot:

Ten years ago, I began my career in the gaming industry by signing on to help with the imminent launch of Dark Age of Camelot. That game and its team still holds a special place in my heart, though most of the founders from that day have went their seperate ways. Matt Firor, the original producer, asked me to post his recollections of that launch.

(Note that he does make me look like a bit of a doof at one point. I have three things to say in response: 1 – I’m still pretty happy with how we managed to get a working CS front-end and back-end system up and running in about six weeks, 2 – it wasn’t *quite* as doof-tastic as Firor makes out, as I explain in annotations to his tale, 3 – I am in fact a bit of a doof.)

And with that, I give you Matt Firor.

We went into October 9 relatively calm and serene. Vivendi, our distribution partner, had forecast 100,000 sales of the game lifetime, with about 50,000 coming in the first couple of days after launch, and as such, they only “sold in” a very limited number of boxes into the retail channel. We were very comfortable that we could handle those numbers, as we had just had a very successful beta program.

Then, just before launch day, Vivendi got in touch with us and said because customer/retail demand was so high, they were going to release all 100,000 boxes into retail. Fortunately, with delivery times, these extra copies would be delivered to stores a couple of days after the initial 50,000 boxes. This was very helpful to us, as all the boxes were not available on the same day which spread out the “opening day” crush of users over five days. Camelot would go on to sell more than a million boxes in the next couple of years.

Camelot’s official launch day (as in boxes were in the stores) would be October 9 2001, but everyone that had a free account (lots of media, some friends/family, and of course all of us) were able to play starting October 8, as soon as we put our first seven servers online starting around 5:00pm that day.

At the time, Mythic’s offices were located in a townhouse office community near the middle of Fairfax, VA. We were about 30 developers in October 2001, and about 40 customer support. We didn’t have enough space for CS in our original office, so we had to lease space in another building in the same complex, about 50 yards from the developer wing of the company, in a basement space.

Everything was done on a shoestring at that time, so to get internet access over to the CS “center” 50 yards away, Rob Denton, the Development Head of Mythic at the time, and an electrical engineer by training, set up a pair of IR “guns” to make a link between the two spaces. We put one “gun” in a window in the development office, and another in a basement window, pointing up, in the CS center. The link worked very well, and allowed us to share our one Internet line with both spaces. However, because the CS Center was below grade, we had one problem: if a vehicle over a certain height (about 5 feet) parked in a particular parking spot, the link would be broken. We lived in fear those couple of weeks that a delivery truck would park in that spot and cut off Internet access to the CS center. We arranged a quasi-official parking schedule to ensure that an employee car (a short one) be parked in that spot 24/7. The link, fortunately, was never broken.

It's on.

All day on the 9th, we watched as the server numbers grew and grew. I ran the login utility on my laptop all day, just so I could see the population numbers of each server, real time. The population numbers started small around 10:00am on the 9th, and grew slowly but steadily until around 5:00pm, when they exploded. All servers in the space of about an hour after 5:00pm were jammed full – and we had a very large server population setting (about 3,000 players). Even with full servers, everything ran smoothly.

By about 8:00 we were jubilant. Everything was smooth and easy. CS was functioning, and had already responded to many trouble tickets and issues. People were playing, the servers were up.

A group of us formed in Rob’s office, talking and generally basking in the glory of the moment. Each of those 30,000 (max peak players that night) was a paying customer, and each represented significant revenue to us (remember we were very small at the time). It appeared that we finally were going to make money on one of our products. We were giddy with excitement – everything was going awesomely.

Brian Axelson, the 21 year old whiz-kid programmer/designer who had been working for us since he was 16 – responsible for inventing, implementing, and designing Camelot’s combat system, including Combat Styles – was so happy he slammed his fist down on Rob’s desk and said, “Ain’t nothing going to bring this house down!”.

At that moment, all the servers crashed, simultaneously.

We all looked at one another in dread, and sprinted back to our offices, each checking on the part of the game we were responsible for. Everything checked out – nothing seemed wrong. But the servers were down and wouldn’t reboot.

All the programmers were summoned to Rob’s office – I was a fly on the wall – and he walked them through the problem. It wasn’t a code problem, although that wasn’t immediately obvious. It was something keeping the servers from booting and authenticating properly.

After about an hour, the problem was traced to the Customer Support tool – that very day programmer Scott Jennings had made a small modification to the CS tool to take advantage of a database feature buried in MySQL to make database queries work faster. That change did in fact significantly increase the speed at which the tool made queries to the database – but at full load, the index that he built quickly became overloaded, and started to time out and lock out other queries. (Editor’s note: This change was actually fully tested… with one low-population test server running. Guess what changed on launch day!) Because the game servers relied on access to the database as well (for player authentication, etc.), they couldn’t keep up with the crush of players logging on and off – and they crashed like the proverbial house of cards. And, because the database was locked up, when they rebooted, they immediately ran into the same problem and crashed again.

The helpful message I added to greet CS reps on launch day.

Once the problem was found, it was very easy to fix, for the moment. The CS tool was modified to not make any of those specific types of queries, the database server was rebooted, the index rebuilt, and everything came up again – this time smoothly and without error – and ran flawlessly until the next afternoon, when we had our first bug-fix patch. Scott had fixed the DB/authentication problem in the meantime (Editor’s note: and said programmer slept three days later), and that functioned properly as well.

In the end, a very smooth launch, but a lesson was definitely learned that when you’re dealing with something as complex as a MMOG launch, you never know what is going to take you down.

There are many more stories to tell about the early days of the service – like how we had to expand servers quickly because of demand, but couldn’t get them delivered from Dell because we had no credit rating. All our purchases up until that point had been made on the spot with no leasing. We had no leasing history, so Dell wouldn’t ship us servers quickly. We were forced to drive to MicroCenter (in Fairfax) and buy a dozen or so desktops, quickly installed Linux, and then drove them (in a pickup truck) to our colocation facility, and stacked them up like firewood in a cage. Those two servers clusters (lovingly called the “gimp servers”) ran for at least a year with no problems, at which point they were swapped out with standard Dell rack-mounted models.

I remember walking into the office one morning towards the end of October. By that time it was obvious we had a smash hit on our hands. Our marketing/sales consultant, Eugene Evans (now the GM of the studio) had a whiteboard near his desk (right by the front door) where he jotted down sales numbers. By October 27 or so, it showed that we were not only the #1 selling PC game for October, but also the #1 selling PC product for that month. Since this was the first boxed retail product Mythic had, I asked him if this success was normal. Eugene, and old industry veteran, looked at me like I was insane and replied, “No, this isn’t typical.” He then broke out in laughter. It seemed so easy at the time: you make a game, put it in a box, and it sells like hotcakes.

Most everyone knows the rest of the story from here – Mythic quickly outgrew its space and in 2002 relocated a few miles away to new mid-rise building, where it grew to take over three floors. A buyout by EA followed in 2006, and the studio is now known as Bioware Mythic. Dark Age of Camelot’s numbers have dwindled down to a fraction of what they were in those heady days of 2001-2003, but it is still up and running, ten years later.

Guy chokes a kid after being made fun of in Black Ops, we're ... upset

2011-09-30T17:48:00.001-05:00

Guy chokes a kid after being made fun of in Black Ops, we're ... upset:

We read in horror today the story of Mark Bradford, a 46-year-old, jobless father of three from Plymouth, Devon (UK). After being killed and then taunted by a 13-year-old opponent in Call of Duty: Black Ops, Bradford tracked down his teenage opponent (in real life) and proceeded to mercilessly choke him. The attack was luckily thwarted by the teen's mother and Bradford later admitted to one count of assault.

It's a grim story, and simply inexcusable. A grown man attacking a child like this turns our stomachs and should turn the stomach of any responsible, caring human. This is the end of our post on the matter, and it in no way continues after the break.

Continue reading Guy chokes a kid after being made fun of in Black Ops, we're ... upset

Zero Punctuation: Resistance (cough HALF LIFE cough) 3

2011-09-28T17:49:00.002-05:00

Windows 8 and the marginalization of geeks

2011-09-16T15:37:00.001-05:00

Windows 8 and the marginalization of geeks:

On Tuesday, Microsoft made the Windows 8 Developer Preview available publicly without demanding so much as a Windows Live login name and password in return. I know, I was surprised too. After a bit of poking around, I managed to get the DP up and running in a trial installation of VMware Workstation 8.0, and I've spent a good few hours tinkering with it.

Now, I think we can safely assume that the full release of Windows 8 is still a year or so away. That means what we're looking at here is very much a work in progress, and criticizing Windows ...

Counterfeit Chinese USB Hard Drive

2011-09-02T15:57:00.001-05:00

Counterfeit Chinese USB Hard Drive:

The picture above looks like a Samsung USB Hard Drive case right? Looks can be deceiving, the case actually contains come large nuts to make it feel like there is actually something inside and a USB thumb drive to provide some convincing operation. The USB drive has been made to simulate the large hard drive by showing up with a 500GB capacity even though the capacity of the drive is only 128MB. I am thinking some smart people in China made a custom controller for the drive to allow it to work in a loop mode which allows all of the most recent copied data to remain and the oldest data be overwritten. The TOC also works in an interesting way since even though an old file has been overwritten it would remain in the TOC to make it seem that the drive is functioning as it should.

Notch narrates minecraft 1.8 preview

2011-08-31T16:57:00.001-05:00

New graphic settings, better lighting, npc villages, hunger bar, exp, sprinting, critical hits, and ENDERMEN.

Windows 8 offers native ISO mounting support

2011-08-30T18:53:00.000-05:00

Windows 8 offers native ISO mounting support:

Microsoft has a new post up on its Building Windows 8 blog. This time, the company is detailing the operating system's native support for ISO files. Double-clicking on an ISO will automatically mount it using a virtual optical drive. To kill the virtual drive, simply eject the virtual disc.

In addition to mounting ISO files, Windows 8 will perform a similar trick with the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files used by virtual machines. The approach here is almost identical: double-click ...

Razer intros ultra-slim gaming notebook

2011-08-26T13:40:00.001-05:00

Razer intros ultra-slim gaming notebook:

Peripheral maker Razer has long catered to gamers, and its latest creation stays true to those roots while entering an entirely new market: notebooks. The company has unveiled the Blade, a gaming laptop that features a Sandy Bridge CPU, discrete GeForce graphics, and a slender aluminum chassis just 0.88" thick. The Blade looks pretty badass, too.

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EA's Origin Service Is Basically Spyware, According to Origin's EULA

2011-08-24T16:58:00.001-05:00

EA's Origin Service Is Basically Spyware, According to Origin's EULA:

Because today's trifecta of corporate malfeasance and/or generally shitty behavior wouldn't be complete without mentioning something awful EA is doing, let's talk about Origin again. Specifically, how it apparently includes spyware.

You guys? We REALLY need to start reading these EULAs ahead of time.

Once again reminding us all that we really ought to be reading these terms of service that we so often blindly agree to, intrepid users of Origin have discovered within EA's End User License Agreement for the service that, by installing the software on the system and using it, you are giving EA full license to track a number of different things on your computer, including, but not limited to personal information, computer information, application usage, software, software usage, and peripheral hardware usage. The reason for all of this is for the usual "marketing purposes" and "to improve our products and services" nonsense, but the EULA also states that EA will happily sell your information to any third parties it sees fit.

It's fair to point out that Valve's Steam service also does some of the things listed here when you use it. However, the trick is that Steam allows users to opt out of any and all such practices. Origin has no such opt-out feature, and in fact states that you cannot use the service at all unless you agree to their terms.

That does present quite the quandary for the information protective gamers out there who might want to play a game like, say, Battlefield 3 on their PC. Battlefield 3, alongside other EA PC titles, will require an install of Origin to operate, even if you buy a physical copy of the game.

In the end, this is actually a fairly fixable problem for EA. The publisher would simply need to patch in an opt-out option for any and all info scraping that Origin might be involved in. If it doesn't? Here's a deeply enraged Reddit thread that you might want to partake of.

GameStop Discarding Deus Ex: Human Revolution OnLive Coupons

2011-08-24T13:50:00.001-05:00

GameStop Discarding Deus Ex: Human Revolution OnLive Coupons: There's an image of an email on Ars Technica allegedly from a Field Operations Manager with GameStop that instructs employees to "remove and discard" the coupon for a free OnLive version of Deus Ex:...

Guild Wars 2 trailer loaded with in-game footage

2011-08-17T15:55:00.001-05:00

Guild Wars 2 trailer loaded with in-game footage: "

Although I've never really been into MMOs, I've always liked the fact that Guild Wars didn't require a monthly subscription. Shell out for the game once, and you can play it as much as you'd like. Guild Wars 2 will take the same approach, and a new trailer showcases some of what we can expect from the game.

...

Gearbox teases Borderlands 2

2011-08-16T11:05:00.001-05:00

Gearbox teases Borderlands 2: "

Yeah, it isn't much, but the Borderlands fan in me is vibrating with anticipation after watching this quick teaser trailer for Borderlands 2.

...

The Engine Was Just Sitting There!

2011-08-16T11:00:00.001-05:00

From Brokentoys.org -

The Engine Was Just Sitting There!: "

Bioware Mythic announces Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes, which was originally titled Warhammer Online: Battlegrounds And That’s It Because You Gits Have The Attention Span Of A Tsetse Fly And We Added A Third Side Because DAOC Battlegrounds Were Pretty Fun That Way And This Title Is Really Long We Should Change It.

So if you played Warhammer Online and thought “you know, I really liked the battlegrounds, but not enough to pay a monthly sub, but maybe enough to pay extra for a +4 Sword Of Swordening”, this is your thing.

New M-Disc Technology Promises Permanent Data Retention

2011-08-10T15:07:00.001-05:00

New M-Disc Technology Promises Permanent Data Retention: "

More and more folks are turning to cloud services like Dropbox to store their oh-so-precious private data, but when it comes to truly valuable info, it's still a good idea to keep a physical backup disc around in case those virtual services crap out on you. Then again, CDs and DVDs scratch waaaaay too easily and have limited shelf lives. If you've ever been screwed by a big gouge across an important backup disc, you might want to check out the new optical media that's hitting the market soon. Supposedly, it lasts forever, and the Department of Defense vouches for its resiliency.

They're called M-Discs and they're being brought to market a start-up company called Millenniata, Computerworld reports. M-Discs ditch the traditional reflective layer found in standard physical media discs and instead etch the information directly into the body of the multi-layered disc itself, which is made of an undisclosed stone-like substance. Millenniata says that any device that can read a DVD can read an M-Disc – the only special equipment necessary in the whole process is an M-Disc burner.

That's cool in and of itself, but Millenniata also claims that M-Discs are darned near impervious to damage. They told Computerworld you can toss an M-Disc in liquid nitrogen, then dump boiling water all over it, and nary a byte of data will be damaged. A DoD study found no data loss after subjecting the M-Disc to grueling conditions -- a claim no other disc can make.

Although LG's supplying the initial round of M-Disc burners, Millenniata's CEO says that any DVD hardware manufacturer can make the jump to M-Disc by installing a firmware upgrade on their machines. The M-Disc's staying power comes at the cost of burn speed, however; you can only write to them at a 4x rate. At that speed, it's almost a good thing that M-Discs will only be able to match standard DVD capacities of 4.7GB when they hit the shelves in October for $3 a pop. Millenniata puts their money where their mouth is by offering a lifetime warranty for the discs.

Image credit: troveas.com

Trackmania 2 gameplay, editor footage leaked

2011-08-09T12:28:00.001-05:00

Trackmania 2 gameplay, editor footage leaked: "

PC gamers might not be able to get a taste of iconic driving games like Forza Motorsports and Gran Turismo, but we do have the Trackmania series. The latest iteration, Trackmania 2 Canyon is due out next month. We've already seen a trailer for the game, and now there's a couple of minutes of gameplay footage up on YouTube. Check it out:

...

German geniuses hit 800Mbps with light bulb WLAN

2011-08-08T16:53:00.001-05:00

German geniuses hit 800Mbps with light bulb WLAN: "

Last year, Chinese scientists showed off some new old-school tech, transmitting data with blue LEDs that flicker faster than the human eye can perceive. This throwback to the good ol' days of IR receivers was able to hit speeds of 2Mbps, but leave it to the fine folks at the Heinrich Hertz Institute to push the light bulb networking tech to the extremes. Earlier this year researchers hit 500Mbps with white LEDs; now, using a combination of white, green, blue, and red, the team ramped that up to 800Mbps, officially putting Ethernet on notice. The line-of-sight networking won't actually replace your standard Cat 5 line or WiFi router, but it could find a home in places like hospitals where radio-based wireless technology can cause problems for sensitive equipment. With any luck, we'll soon be bathing our homes in HD-streaming illumination.

German geniuses hit 800Mbps with light bulb WLAN originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Slashgear | Email this | Comments"

World of Warplanes Website

2011-08-08T15:34:00.001-05:00

World of Warplanes Website: "Wargaming.net has launched a new World of Warplanes Website as an online home to this upcoming MMO action game set during the 'Golden Age of military aviation.' At this point the site offers some..."

Borderlands 2 Announced

2011-08-03T12:02:00.001-05:00

Borderlands 2 Announced: "Gearbox Software tweets a confirmation of yesterday's indications that Borderlands 2 is in development. The official Borderlands 2 Website is online, offering a bit on plans for the role-playing..."

Z-Drive R4 SSD combines blazing speed, PCIe 2.0 interface

2011-08-02T18:04:00.001-05:00

Z-Drive R4 SSD combines blazing speed, PCIe 2.0 interface: "

PCI Express may be the future for solid-state drives, and the interface has already taken root in OCZ's Z-Drive SSDs. The company has just announced a new one: the Z-Drive R4. Available in full- and half-height models, the Z4 has a PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface with 4GB/s of peak bandwidth to and from the system. You're gonna need the bandwidth, too, because the fastest Z4 is said to be capable of pushing data at nearly 3GB/s.

...

Space Marine cinematic trailer

2011-07-27T14:59:00.000-05:00

Release date September 6!

Computer Reads Manual, Plays Civ

2011-07-14T14:23:00.001-05:00

Computer Reads Manual, Plays Civ: "

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab report that they have boosted the effectiveness of a game-playing AI by enabling it to read the manual: “When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent.”

What’s most amazing about this is that despite the trial and error nature of this kind of machine learning, the ability to correlate text instructions with events in the game do seem to have a significant impact on the system’s capacity to learn how to play, as the article explains: “The researchers also tested a more-sophisticated machine-learning algorithm that eschewed textual input but used additional techniques to improve its performance. Even that algorithm won only 62 percent of its games.” So, you know, RTFM is sound advice, even if you are a machine.

Gratuitous Tank Battles Announced

2011-07-12T13:03:00.000-05:00

Gratuitous Tank Battles Announced: "Independent developer Positech Games announces Gratuitous Tank Battles, an upcoming alternate-reality RTS/Tower Defense hybrid to follow Gratuitous Space Battles. The concept behind this is that the..."

'Only' 999 more days left for XP security updates

2011-07-12T12:11:00.001-05:00

'Only' 999 more days left for XP security updates: "Yesterday marked an interesting milestone for Windows XP. In 1,000 days (or 999 as of today), Microsoft will stop providing security updates for the OS. XP's extended support period ends on April 8, 2014, and Redmond is using the countdown milestone as an excuse to trumpet the..."

Cryptex flash drive uses combination lock sleeve, brings a whole new meaning to hardware encryption

2011-07-12T10:19:00.001-05:00

Cryptex flash drive uses combination lock sleeve, brings a whole new meaning to hardware encryption: "

256-bit AES not doing it for ya? Now you can replace that dedicated-processor encryption with actual mechanical hardware, thanks to the Cryptex flash drive and its five-wheel combination lock sleeve. Modeled in AutoCAD and constructed using various glistening metals, the Cryptex's five-digit combination will keep prying eyes far from you sensitive files -- and, well, it just looks insanely awesome. Like many shiny objects that seem too good to be true, it's barely more than a concept at this point, so you'll have to settle for the digital version for now.

Cryptex flash drive uses combination lock sleeve, brings a whole new meaning to hardware encryption originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Technabob | Steampunker (Russian) | Email this | Comments"

The fanless spinning heatsink: more efficient and immune to dust

2011-07-12T10:18:00.001-05:00

The fanless spinning heatsink: more efficient and immune to dust: "

There’s a fundamental flaw with fan-and-heatsink cooling systems: no matter how hard the fan blows, a boundary layer of motionless, highly-insulating air remains on the heatsink. You can increase the size of the heatsink and you can blow more air, but ultimately the boundary layer prevents the system from being efficient; it’s simply a physical limitation of fan-and-heatsink cooling systems in specific, and every kind of air-cooled heat exchanger in general, including air conditioning and refrigeration units.

But what if you did away with the fan? What if the heatsink itself rotated? Well, believe it or not, rotating the heat exchanger obliterates the boundary layer, removes the need for a fan, and it’s so efficient that it can operate at low and very quiet speeds. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger [PDF]. Developed by Jeff Koplow, a researcher at the US government’s Sandia National Laboratories, the new heatsink (which has also been dubbed the “Sandia Cooler”) basically resembles a big, metal fan. The cooler consists of a static metal baseplate, which is connected to the CPU, GPU, or other hot object, and a finned, rotating heat exchanger that are cushioned by a thin (0.001-inch) layer of air. As the metal blades spin, centrifugal force kicks up the air and throws it up and outwards, much like an impeller, creating a cooling effect.

This new technique is so efficient that if these heat exchangers can find windespread adoption in computers and air conditioning units, Koplow estimates that the total US electricity consumption could drop by 7%. Furthermore, if you’re a computer geek, there’s another big advantage of the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger: it’s intrinsically immune to the build up of dust and detritus. The Sandia Cooler may also be the technology that smashes down the “Thermal Brick Wall” that is preventing computer chips from moving beyond 3GHz.

So when can you get your hands on one? Koplow is now working on a design that can be mass-produced — and hopefully he’ll soon be able to bring this awesome piece of technology to market.

Read more at New Scientist or read the research paper

APB Reloaded: What a load

2011-07-10T20:50:00.005-05:00

So I took the time to download and try "APB Reloaded," free to play and allegedly in "open beta." Found out there's a reason for it. If they took money for this game, it'd probably be illegal.

This game's performance is ass on a platter. Oh, don't get me wrong, it looks nice, the ideas are good, and it'd have some real potential if taking more than 3 steps in any direction didn't reduce your framerate to 2 FPS or lower. It's plain to see why the first game company that tried to actually launch this game went belly up - this is unplayable. And my system is no slouch - I've got an 8800 GTX, quad core processor and 3 gigs of ram (windows XP, not 7).

Everyone involved with this endeavor should be ashamed of themselves. I cannot remember a gaming experience as frustrating as this. Ever. I've previously reviewed games that were terminally broken or downright awful, but they've got nothing on this. Forget APB. Play Saint's Row multiplayer. Yes, even with the framerate issues and the awful controls, it's millions of light years better than APB. I'm not even sure I want to go back and check on this one in 6 months because I'm downright insulted they'd even entertain the notion that this horrendous pile of fecal matter is in any way ready for public consumption.

To add insult to injury, the game installs its stupid third party "live" software on your computer in order to play, and pathetically, it requires you to install punkbuster as well. What does it say about your dev house when you have to rely on a decade-plus old third party memory scanner to police your client? Get. That. Shit. Off. My. PC. And burn in hell.

F. F. F. F Minus. Minus minus. Suspension. Expulsion. Permanent record. Juvenile hall. Summary execution. F.

Minecraft 1.7 pistons = Punchcard Memory

2011-07-06T17:57:00.003-05:00

Since redstone current can be transmitted one meter through solid blocks and no meters through transparent, all of a sudden, punchcard memory in minecraft is possible. Add this to the APU and display modules shown by previous minecraft pioneers... and having a computer in minecraft is all that much closer.

Report: Serious gamers spend more time on PC than consoles

2011-07-05T15:08:00.000-05:00

From the "Duh" department...

Report: Serious gamers spend more time on PC than consoles: "During March and May, research firm Newzoo surveyed over 20,000 gamers from a range of countries. The results have been tabulated in an official report available only to paying customers, but some detail have been released in a series of infographs. The data is sorted..."

Really Bad Day at Black Rock

2011-07-01T11:08:00.000-05:00

Really Bad Day at Black Rock: "Eurogamer has a report that Disney has closed the doors on Pure and Split/Second developer Black Rock Studios. This was originally a rumor, but they have since confirmed the news. In May it was..."

Age of Conan Now Free-to-Play

2011-07-01T11:07:00.001-05:00

Age of Conan Now Free-to-Play: "Funcom announces that Age of Conan has made the promised transition to a free-to-play business model. A new Age of Conan: Unchained launch trailer celebrates the news, and here's word: Players now..."

Review: Duke Nukem Forever

2011-06-30T17:12:00.009-05:00

Great gobs of unpleasant avian sinus drainage! It's a review! Do we do that on this site? I forget!

After 15 years, Duke Nukem Forever has finally come out. All the vaporware jokes, all the wailing and gnashing of teeth... the king is back. But is he still the king?

Alright, you've probably read a lot of other reviews that tell you Duke Nukem Forever isn't a good game. Some even say it's a bad game. Myself, I'm not so sure. And I definitely don't agree with the reasons other pundits put forward when they call DNF a bad game. They want to talk about the dated references, the sexism, all that rot.

Well, I'm here to tell you DNF is not a bad game. It's not a GREAT game. It's hard to even call it a good game. Maybe that's why everybody badmouths it so harshly, because Duke Nukem 3D left some impossibly huge shoes to fill. Duke3D(dot ee ecks ee) was an absolute revolution in the first person shooter genre. The first FPS game that let you have multiple floors in the same 2 dimensional space (later referred to as "2.5d" because it used chicanery in a 2D plane to create the effect), the best multiplayer of the late 90s, and of course the shocking, edgy content - it all created a perfect storm that made Duke3D the staple of just about every LAN party and gaming rig I ever saw.

DNF could have been that again. The problem is not that its conventions are too dated, the problem is developers tried to shoehorn in too many "contemporary" conventions and paradigms. For example,

Duke3D let you carry one of every weapon in the game
DNF lets you carry two weapons.
D3D let you carry huge amounts of ammo
DNF lets you carry very restricted amounts of ammo, but boss fights and other heavy conflict areas usually have an inexhaustible ammo crate you can return to multiple times
D3D largely consisted of open, free roaming levels that had you hunt keycards to find the exit
DNF largely consists of highly detailed rooms and hallways, each with one entrance and one exit
D3D let you shoot, reload or sidestep while sprinting, and there was no limit to sprint distance.
DNF does not let you do any of that while sprinting, and your sprinting is limited by a fatigue mechanic.

Starting to see the pattern here? What hobbles DNF and makes parts of it irritating are not dated old 90s paradigms... it's the adoption of the bad "quasi-realistic" modern gaming mechanics that everybody gripes about today! I remember late nights with friends playing deathmatch, sprintstrafing in circles firing unbelievable numbers of rockets at each other until someone got lucky. Can't do that in DNF.

A particular sticking point for me as well is the way the alien-stolen "chicks" are handled. Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling "sexist" here or anything, but consider another difference here between D3D and DNF - In D3D, the stolen chicks in alien pods were largely scenery. Usually there were ways around them, so you didn't have to kill them even though they would beg you to do so... but if you did kill them, the game penalized you in the form of health loss or by spawning extra enemies. DNF however turns all that on its head - the girls do NOT beg for death (in fact they beg not to be DUMPED), they are placed in bottlenecks in the levels so you HAVE to kill them to get past, and if you leave them alive for too long they will die anyway and you will be punished by additional enemy spawns. That whole part just didn't sit well with me.

And don't even get me started on the load times.

It's not ALL bad though. The "gimmick" portions of the game are mostly enjoyable - the "Duke gets shrunk" portions I found particularly entertaining, less so the strip club scavenger hunt. I liked the driving portions, but maybe I'm the only one who did. I thought the ego mechanic was a nice innovation, where you raise your max health by interacting with objects (though I could have done without the blinding red splatter whenever you get wounded). And I have to tell you, it felt to me like the final boss of the game almost came halfway to redeeming the single player campaign. It was the first part of DNF that felt like the Duke I remember.

So that's basically the story - Duke Nukem Forever isn't as good as Duke 3D felt back in the 90s, but I can name several recent games that are worse - such as Homefront, Turning Point: FOL, Call of Juarez 2... At this point though, that it even came out at all is something of a triumph.

Grade: C+.

Minecraft: Back in the office, and some words on 1.7 and 1.8!

2011-06-27T09:51:00.001-05:00

Looks like Minecraft's "Adventure" mode is pushed back to 1.8. 1.7 will have pistons and some bug fixes. The 11/11/11 release date also likely to be pushed back.

Back in the office, and some words on 1.7 and 1.8!: "After a few weeks out of the office (E3, then Italy, then F.3.A.R this weekend (great game!)),..."

There Ain’t No Drama Like Spaceship Drama Cause Spaceship Drama Don’t Stop

2011-06-25T01:29:00.001-05:00

From Brokentoys.org:

There Ain’t No Drama Like Spaceship Drama Cause Spaceship Drama Don’t Stop: "

This week in Eve:

Incarna shipped! You can now walk in your spaceship. No one else can see you walk in your spaceship but yep you’re walking. So there you go.

The in-game clothing store also shipped. You can now spend $60 on a monocle. To be fair, it’s a really nice monocle and I think monocles cost about $60 in real life. Oh wait, sorry, I meant $6. So there you go.

Most players responded with “What was CCP thinking?” This being Eve, someone promptly leaked exactly what CCP was thinking. (hint: pretty much exactly what you think they were thinking)

The Eve player base responded with the calm demeanor you’d expect by, um, literally rioting. The devs responded with, uh, yeah.

People have been shocked by the price range in the NeX store, but you should remember that we are talking about clothes. Look at the clothes you are currently wearing in real life. Do you have any specific brands? Did you choose it because it was better quality than a no-name brand? Assume for a short while that you are wearing a pair of $1,000 jeans from some exclusive Japanese boutique shop. Why would you want to wear a pair of $1,000 jeans when you can get perfectly similar jeans for under $50? What do other people think about you when they see you wearing them? For some you will look like the sad culmination of vainness while others will admire you and think you are the coolest thing since sliced bread. Whichever it is, it is clear that by wearing clothes you are expressing yourself and that the price is one of the many dimensions that clothes possess to do that in addition to style and fit. You don’t need to buy expensive clothes. In fact you don’t need to buy any clothes. Whatever you choose to do reflects what you are and what you want others to think you are.

If you do not buy a $60 monocle A LOSER IS YOU. So there you go.

Saints Row: The Third Trailer

2011-06-24T17:15:00.001-05:00

Saints Row: The Third Trailer: "GameTrailers has a new trailer from Saints Row: The Third, with a walkthrough of open world gameplay in the sandbox action game sequel. This includes beating on random pedestrians, hitting homeless..."

Star Wars Galaxies Ending in December

2011-06-24T17:10:00.001-05:00

Star Wars Galaxies Ending in December: "The Star Wars Galaxies Website announces SOE's Star Wars MMORPG will be ending on December 15, 2011, which clarifies how it would operate alongside BioWare's upcoming Star Wars The Old Republic..."

Team Fortress 2 now Free to Play

2011-06-24T01:28:00.003-05:00

Great googily moogily, they did it. Team Fortress is now free to download and play off steam, having been switched to a "freemium" model. That is, you can play for free, but spending money in the store gets you extra stuff. FAQ here.

Details at Teamfortress.com

Study contends that video games decrease violent crime

2011-06-23T11:23:00.000-05:00

Study contends that video games decrease violent crime: "For years, decades even, we've been told that violent video games are bad, mmmkay. The violent ones are supposed to be particularly insidious because they desensitize folks to brutality and encourage them to act out virtual fantasies in the real world. What if violent video games actually decreased..."

Zero Punctuation: Duke Nukem Forever (for real this time)

2011-06-23T10:26:00.000-05:00

TF2: Don't stab me now

2011-06-22T15:08:00.000-05:00

Seems like a good time.

TR's Summer 2011 system guide

2011-06-21T18:29:00.001-05:00

TR's Summer 2011 system guide: "AMD's next wave of processors may be on the horizon, but some of us need to upgrade sooner rather than later. So, here's a new edition of our system guide replete with some of the fastest gear and best deals money can buy right now."

And The Lamb Lies Down In A Crate On Broadway

2011-06-21T12:07:00.000-05:00

From Brokentoys:

And The Lamb Lies Down In A Crate On Broadway: "

Your frequently asked questions about the dude shipping himself cross-country while playing LotRO.

1: He has a friend driving him across the country on a truck, so no, it’s not just “sticking a tag on a box and mailing yourself Fed-Ex”.

2: Performance art would be my guess. Also the fact that bloggers like myself really can’t resist stupid stories like this.

3: Probably not a Warden since they’re pretty latency-dependent!

4: 7 days.

5: Yeah, it is pretty dumb

6: I’m pretty sure it’s not technically against the law to lock yourself in a crate for a week.

7: Yeah, I’d be worried about the hard drive, too.

LEGO Universe Going Free-to-Play

2011-06-21T09:45:00.001-05:00

LEGO Universe Going Free-to-Play: "The LEGO Group announces that LEGO Universe will go free-to-play this August. This involves the addition of a free zone, though they are not adding microtransactions at this point: 'LEGO Universe..."

City of Heroes Going Free-to-Play

2011-06-21T09:44:00.001-05:00

City of Heroes Going Free-to-Play: "The City of Heroes Website announces that City of Heroes Freedom will launch later this year, brining a free-to-play component to Paragon Studios' MMORPG. This will be a hybrid method which will..."

Tropico 4 Trailer

2011-06-20T15:37:00.002-05:00

TROPICO 4!

Y U LOOK LIKE MERE EXPANSION PACK FOR TROPICO 3?!

Serious Sam 3 stays true to franchise's roots

2011-06-20T13:51:00.000-05:00

Serious Sam 3 stays true to franchise's roots: "Earlier this year, we learned that a third chapter in the Serious Sam franchise is due out this summer. The game isn't ready yet, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun spent some quality time with one level and came away impressed. Serious Sam 3 appears to stay true..."

GRID online multiplayer meets early demise on PC

2011-06-20T11:21:00.000-05:00

GRID online multiplayer meets early demise on PC: "Allowing users to host dedicated multiplayer servers was once a staple of the PC gaming scene. Such freedom is rare these days, which is a real shame. As Bruno highlighted in his 10 commandments of PC gaming post, dedicated servers are desirable because allow for user customization,..."

Minecraft: West Freeport

2011-06-16T18:15:00.001-05:00

OUCH MY NOSTALGIA

I Have Nothing I Could Possibly Add To This Story

2011-06-16T17:26:00.000-05:00

I Have Nothing I Could Possibly Add To This Story: "

Fox announces Family Guy Online

40k MMO news from E3

2011-06-16T10:26:00.002-05:00

It Came from E3 2011, Part 15: "Warhammer 40k MMO playable next year at E3."

Quote of the Day

2011-06-16T01:20:00.001-05:00

Quote of the Day II: "'We're blackballing any sites that don't love banana pancakes from reviewing Serious Sam 3: BFE. You've all been warned. #BetterBetOnSam.' -- Devolver Digital."

DNF Review Dust Up

2011-06-15T10:44:00.001-05:00

DNF Review Dust Up: "Ars Technica has a screenshot of a since-deleted tweet from PR firm The Redner Group with an overt threat about negative reviews of Duke Nukem Forever, saying: '#AlwaysBetOnDuke too many went too far..."

Crysis 2 dropped from Steam, others may follow

2011-06-15T10:40:00.002-05:00

Crysis 2 dropped from Steam, others may follow: "Could we be on the cusp of a war between game download services? Valve has dominated the market with Steam, but at least one major title has been pulled from its catalog. Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports Crysis 2 will now only be available through EA's new..."

(edit) or not...

EA Didn't Pull Crysis 2 from Steam: "GameFront has a statement from Electronic Arts saying they did not pull Crysis 2 from Steam (thanks Computer and Video Games), in spite of the implications of the 'only on Origin.' button they..."

The 10 commandments of PC games

2011-06-14T10:41:00.001-05:00

The 10 commandments of PC games: "Picture this for a second: you just unpacked the latest PlayBox 720-X blockbuster game, Gran Gears of Duty Fantasy XVIII. It's a game so juicy and dreamy that it'll send you flying into all the colors of the rainbow, twitching and jerking with pleasure-induced spasms just from looking at the..."

Codemasters, Epic fall victim to hax0rs

2011-06-13T11:00:00.000-05:00

Codemasters, Epic fall victim to hax0rs: "Sony and its PlayStation Network have been hacked multiple times in the last little while, but they haven't been the only victims. As Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports, Codemasters and Epic have both been hax0red. Neither intrusion compromised customer credit card data, the companies say, but it looks like email addresses and passwords were nabbed in the attacks. Codemasters also admits that user addresses and dates of birth were exposed. There's word that Nintendo is the target of a new phishing scam, as well.

At least some of the attacks on Sony were in response to the company's lawsuit against George Hotz, who hacked the PlayStation 3 console and posted its root keys online. So-called hactivist group Anonymous claimed responsibility for the initial assaults. However, it doesn't appear to be behind the latest attacks on Codemasters and Epic.

While it's comforting that the most recent efforts to nab customer information fell short of gaining access to credit card numbers, it's unsettling to know that game publishers have now become targets—seemingly for no reason at all. I guess everyone with a web presence is getting hacked these days. Here's hoping Steam remains immune to the onslaught."

Gaming – now and then

2011-06-07T17:34:00.000-05:00

Gaming – now and then: "

Something for you to think about..

Which games pop in mind if you look at that comic?

Minecraft coming to 360 and Kinect this Winter

2011-06-07T14:00:00.001-05:00

Minecraft coming to 360 and Kinect this Winter: "

Man, Mojang's little indie darling is getting some major mileage with the gaming industry's biggest players. The Microsoft E3 press conference brought the announcement that Minecraft would be making its way to Xbox 360 with some unexplained Kinect support this Winter. No other details were announced, but we're thrilled to punch trees to extract logs using our real hands.

Update: Microsoft has announced in a press release that Minecraft will 'feature cross-functionality between the PC and Xbox 360 versions.'

Minecraft coming to 360 and Kinect this Winter originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments"

Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless

2011-06-07T13:56:00.001-05:00

Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless: "StrongGlad writes with a story at ZDNet describing how it's getting easier to use GPU processing against passwords once considered quite strong.
'Take a cheap GPU (like the Radeon HD 5770) and the free GPU-powered password busting tool called 'ighashgpu' and you have yourself a lean, mean password busting machine. How lean and mean? Working against NTLM login passwords, a password of 'fjR8n' can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds, at a rate of 9.8 million password guesses per second. On the GPU, it takes less than a second at a rate of 3.3 billion passwords per second. Increase the password to 6 characters (pYDbL6), and the CPU takes 1 hour 30 minutes versus only four seconds on the GPU. Go further to 7 characters (fh0GH5h), and the CPU would grind along for 4 days, versus a frankly worrying 17 minutes 30 seconds for the GPU.'

New Carmageddon!

2011-06-01T11:51:00.003-05:00

Between this and Duke Nukem Forever, I feel like I'm regressing back into high school.

Via Kotaku

Carmageddon Returns With New Car-Smashing Game

Luke Plunkett —Vintage car combat series Carmageddon is making a comeback, with original developers Stainless Games having quietly re-acquired the rights to its old property.

The new game is called Carmageddon: Reincarnation, and will be a downloadable title due sometime next year. No platforms or any more tangible information are available than that.

Duty Calls

2011-05-05T17:37:00.000-05:00

Review: D-Link EBR-2310 wired router

2011-05-05T15:38:00.003-05:00

We had a router die at work. It was an old D-Link DI-524 that was pretty dependable, if nothing special, and it served us well for over 6 years. Surprisingly, however, that model is no longer made or sold in the US, so we got its current replacement... the EBR-2310.

The D-Link EBR-2310 has a nice black and silver rounded rectangular form factor that fits well on shelves or wall mountings. The RJ45 jacks hold ethernet cables in a secure and yet convenient to unplug manner.

That's all I have nice to say about it.

20 minutes after setting up the router, it walked down the hall, going from office to office kicking every user in the nuts and then shooting them in the head with a .45 ACP one after another.

Ok, that's not true, but it would have been less of a pain in the ass than what it DID do. Namely, go autistic every time more than 2 users attempted to transfer anything more complicated than an ICMP ping at the same time. Namely, increase latency by at least 300ms on all traffic. Namely, bring our internet connection and all critical systems to their knees, crippling our email, audio streams, and other must-have activities. It literally took me a week huddled in a dark, hot server closet over an eerily glowing sniffer to figure out there was absolutely nothing on our network that should be causing our problems.

We just got an absolutely crap router is all. Kind of sad. D-Link was never exactly top shelf, but its latest generation of products (20 minutes research online revealed many other people with the same experience on the entire suite of d-link wired and wireless routers currently on the shelves) seem to simply not be up to the task of actually... routing traffic. Which is... you know... kind of what you buy a router FOR.

So, unless you're the kind of net admin who likes the feeling of a weed whacker shoved up their backside and cranked to full speed, I would recommend you avoid the EBR-2310. If you ARE that kind of admin, dear god for the love of all that is good and holy get some counseling.

Review: Words With Friends (Android)

2011-04-21T14:43:00.004-05:00

Or as I like to call it- FORCE CLOSE: THE GAME.

The end.

No Amount of Force or Weight

2011-03-11T13:24:00.001-06:00

From Achievement Hunter:

Zero Punctuation: Bulletstorm

2011-03-10T13:41:00.001-06:00

Likeability of various angry birds.

2011-03-01T12:30:00.004-06:00

Netdevil mass layoffs, maybe closing?

2011-02-24T13:04:00.005-06:00

Via Broken Toys:

The axe fell at long-troubled NetDevil yesterday – and according to some developers, word actually circulated among the devs themselves via Facebook before the company got around to letting people know that yeeeeeeah, you’re not going to need to come in on Saturday.

Unfortunately a lot of talented folks lost their jobs as we have found out on Facebook! I personally think it’s pretty terrible to find news out that way and not to be correctly notified. We all were receiving phone calls tonight and I just got mine about 2 hrs ago.

From what we’ve been told a handful of artists will be kept on board and continue working on Lego Universe. But at the moment that will be a very, VERY small team.

There’s been no statement from NetDevil or owners Gazillion Entertainment as to the fate of NetDevil, Lego Universe, new browser-based Fortune Online, or perpetually-in-development target-of-lawsuits Jumpgate Evolution. Scott Brown, NetDevil’s former CEO, had this to say:

"For everyone that get let go from what used to be NetDevil, please please use me as a reference, and if I can help in any way please let me know. Thanks for going on the ride with me while it lasted."

Off the record, however, I’ve heard that NetDevil still technically exists, but 30 to 40 people have been let go, and it’s hard to see how the studio can recover from a wound of that magnitude.

Personally, I wonder if this isn't because Minecraft turned out to be what Lego Universe SHOULD have been.
.
.

17 worst PC games ever

2011-02-18T11:09:00.001-06:00

I remember playing some of these... now. I think my brain had repressed the memory of Xenophage: Alien Bloodsport to preserve my psyche.

Zero Punctuation Reviews: DC Online

2011-02-16T13:28:00.000-06:00

Video game Bingo

2011-02-01T12:42:00.000-06:00

Found via kotaku - click to embiggen.

Zero Punctuation Reviews: Minecraft

2011-01-26T16:46:00.002-06:00

Ok, and I absolutely had to throw this one in there...

Duke Nukem Forever Release Date Set:

2011-01-21T10:48:00.001-06:00

May 3rd, 2011, we all become teenagers again.

Zero Punctuation: Top (and Bottom) 5 of 2010

2011-01-12T13:26:00.001-06:00

I haven't posted too many ZPs lately because I found they only serve to accentuate when I'm slacking off (and I've slacked off a LOT lately, I know :P ), but this is definitely one to see.

On Wargame UIs

2011-01-11T09:58:00.001-06:00

Found via brokentoys - how hard-core wargames actively alienate potential customers through having painful UI.

Here’s another example: this is the control panel that you use to control units in Norm Kroger’s Operational Art of War III:

So in the world of TOAW, “Next unit” is as important as “resolve battle” which is as important as “show/hide hex grid” which is as important as the twenty-five other miscellaneous options, some of which you will never use. It is to weep.

Great Moments in Customer Support: DC Online

2011-01-10T15:00:00.002-06:00

From the blog of Scott - formerly known as Lum the Mad -

SOE’s kind of busy with launching DC Online and all, so could you just uninstall the beta manually yourself? And come in on Saturday? Yeah, that’d be great. (GoogleCache due to DCO beta forums being taken down.)

I’m sure you all realize that the focus of the development staff is currently going to be bmaking the game as awesome as possible for the retail release. The broken uninstaller is a forgivable and understandable over-sight.

Response from the Internet?

If a user has to hand-delete every file associated with your product, including digging through their registry, that is bad and your programmers should feel bad.

Accurate Math in Processors may not be important

2011-01-04T15:03:00.003-06:00

At least not for certain tasks, such as rendering video, even of 3D environments.

An interesting bit over at Kotaku.

"The difference between the low-precision and the standard arithmetic was trivial," Shaw says. "It was about 14 pixels out of a million, averaged over many, many frames of video." "No human could see any of that," Bates adds.

Why is this a big thing? Because apparently, you can fit 1000 low precision cores in the space where 12 normal cores would go.

Nice.

2010's most popular gaming videos

2010-12-17T12:46:00.001-06:00

Some cool, some yuck, all popular... for one reason or another.

Minecraft video - the search for diamonds

2010-11-22T10:29:00.000-06:00

Spelunker HD

2010-11-17T17:45:00.002-06:00

Of all the games of my NES-dominated youth, I never thought they'd end up remaking Spelunker 25 years later.

Oh Bullshit! (Part 2)

2010-11-12T14:58:00.001-06:00

Odd how this seems to only happen in COD games?

Minecraft - It's hooked me

2010-09-29T15:10:00.002-05:00

So, yeah, I'm playing some minecraft. Here's a video I fraps'd last weekend. Maybe I'll make another one soon.

What if Civilization had lyrics?

2010-09-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

GOG.COM: J/K LOL.. U MAD?

2010-09-23T10:57:00.002-05:00

Looks like we all just got trolled. GOG.COM is not, in fact, out of business, nor even sold to someone else. The whole thing was apparently a stunt to generate buzz for the launch of their new website.

Since when was trolling (or even worse, a forum GONE FOREVER post) a marketing strategy?

RIP GOG.COM

2010-09-20T14:07:00.002-05:00

Too bad. I had hoped these guys would do well. At GOG.com, there is now:

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we'll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,
GOG.com Team

Review: Wings of Prey

2010-09-11T16:07:00.007-05:00

I'd been jonesing for a good flight simulator for some time, practically ever since Chuck Yeager's Air Combat fell off the radar. Is Wings of Prey a good simulator? Well, it depends on two things: How much you like or dislike realism, and how important to you the between-mission fluff is in a game.

Wings of Prey is a technologically impressive WW2 flight simulator from Russian developer Gaijin Entertainment. And when I say it's a flight simulator, I mean it's a simulator. The ground, the sky, the planes, the water, the boats, even the cockpits are all very detailed and impressively rendered. Combining 3D rendering with high resolution textures and some very good postprocessing, WoP manages to convey a very immersive flying experience.

There are 3 settings to the game: Arcade, Realistic and Simulator. Arcade mode has lots of HUD "augmented reality" instrumentation like most games do these days, and on top of that it plays "physics nanny" to help keep you from smashing into the ground like a hefty bag full of beef stew. In arcade mode, the game is almost too easy... not much of a challenge at all.

But when you flip that switch to Realistic mode... hooo buddy.

Realistic mode still keeps the augmented reality targeting and instrumentation of arcade mode, but when it comes to flying, physics and damage, the training wheels are most definitely OFF. The phrase "punishingly realistic" kept coming to mind. And I'm not talking "100 different switches and buttons to pay attention to" realism like in Falcon 3.0 (for those of you who remember it back in the day), I mean in regards to physics, damage, and the scientific principles governing flight.

Never before have I played a flight simulator where I could stall simply by maneuvering. I don't mean "whoops I pointed straight up and now I have no speed" stalling like just about every flight sim, this is different. See, what makes an airplane generate lift is the uniform and rapid movement of air past the wings, the shape of which cause lift. In previous games, including my fondly remembered CYAC, I've never experienced a stall by rolling 90 degrees and pulling back on the stick all the way. That, I had been led to believe by every sim ever, was your standard way to turn.

How misinformed I have been.

The performance characteristics of your average WW2 fighter plane apparently are such that you can change your bearing faster than you can change your momentum - IE, if you start out facing north, roll to the right, and pull back on the stick, your nose will be facing southeast about the time your velocity will still be sending you northeast. This means that air is no longer rushing toward you from the front, but rather rushing "up" from "under" you... no longer generating lift, and pretty much guaranteeing you to go into a spin and start spiralling toward the ground. Assuming you can wrestle your way back to control (and you have to do it firmly but gently or it just gets worse), you'll still lose several hundred feet of altitude. Hopefully several hundred feet you had to spare, otherwise you're now an impromptu bonfire.

That's not the only way things "get real." As you take damage to your airplane, it suffers. Damage to your engine makes it harder to maintain airspeed. Damage to your wings (Actually visible in the form of real polygonal holes in them) makes them generate less lift and makes it harder for you to roll your airplane, thus making you easier to kill. And let me tell you, these planes don't take much to kill. I was under the impression (again from previous flight sims such as CYAC) that it took many seconds of sustained gunfire to shoot down a plane... such is not the case. A withering half-second barrage from most planes (especially those with large bore cannons) will start you streaking for the earth... and much more than that will cause such structural damage that a the wind might rip a wing right off you. Also, so many of these planes only carry so much ammo. I had no idea that the machine guns on an ME-262 could basically be exhausted by 10 seconds of continuous fire. Light, quick bursts are the name of the game here. And it goes without saying that you have to lead your target.

Switching from "arcade" to "realistic" mode is a shock, like going from "easy" to "expert" in terms of difficulty... but heaven help you if you crank it all the way to "simulator." In addition to the physics realism of the previous mode, Simulator mode takes away all the augmented reality. You want to know your airspeed, heading, or altitude? You have to LOOK AT THE INSTRUMENTS in your cockpit! That plane coming toward you, is that a friend or foe? Well, I hope you've boned up on silhouette recognition charts, because there's no "targeting" feature or any kind of labels. If you can't distinguish a Messerschmidt from a Mustang in pretty quick order at 100 yards (while being shaken like a wet dog), you're probably going to be having a hot lead sandwich for lunch, and it's all you can eat.

Now, I'm a fella who enjoys a challenge, as long as the BS factor is kept to a minimum. I find Arcade to be too easy, but I find Realistic to be very difficult. Forget about Simulator mode. Fortunately the developer realized that it would probably be too difficult for most people, so the game gives you (now hear me out on this), infinite lives. Well, not lives so much as "do-overs." If you get shot down or crash for whatever other reason, you simply hit enter and you're back up in the air a little behind where you died, at full speed again. "Well, what's so hard about that?" you might ask - well, it keeps track of how many times you get killed, and at the end of the mission it rates your effectiveness. So there's still the achievement factor for those who want it, and yet the content tourists can still progress through the game instead of being denied access because they aren't aces.

These are the guts of the game, and for the most part it's pretty solid. The garnish, however, leaves a little to be desired. Much like other games I've reviewed from Russian developers, the localization leaves something to be desired. While the voice actors don't have inappropriate accents (in fact they usually have correct accents for their nationalities), the verbiage is just ever so slightly off, the emphasis usually in the wrong places, or the vernacular out of place. It's clear they were reading from cards without knowledge of context. Some of the tertiary controls are also a little confusing, and the joystick throttle controls are a little too sensitive - pushing the throttle all the way to the stop takes it past 100% and into WEP, or "Wartime Emergency Power," a kind of super-nitrous flank speed that will burn out your engine before too long... and it becomes difficult to find 100% throttle without bumping over into WEP.

I have to say this is probably the best Russian game I've played since Tetris. Unfortunately, as loyal readers will no doubt recollect, this is relatively faint praise. There's also a point where it becomes possible to have too much realism. Wings of Prey flirts dangerously with that area, yet I can't bring myself to dislike it. It's not a bad game, but it'll never replace Chuck Yeager in my nostalgia hall of fame.

Verdict: B-, or if you aren't into realism, C+.

Video Games | Wings of Prey | Launch Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Zero Punctuation Reviews: Split/Second Velocity

2010-08-18T14:01:00.000-05:00

Review: Starcraft 2

2010-08-14T13:54:00.008-05:00

It's been over a decade in coming. Starcraft 2. Probably the most anticipated and definitely the most hyped title of the last couple years. Those are some pretty big shoes to fill. It's interesting the road that Blizzard/Activision has chosen to go down.

I'm going to get this out of the way right off the bat: Starcraft 2 is fun to play. Starcraft 2 is beautiful to see. Starcraft 2 continues the story that we were left hanging in the middle of back in the 90s. The cutscenes and production values are top notch, which is what we've come to expect from blizzard as long as we've known them.

Now that that's all out of the way, I can start griping uninterrupted.

A lot of people say that instead of Starcraft 2, it should be called Starcraft HD. That's what it feels like. The game is a lot prettier and fully 3D, and despite the addition of new units and situations to the game, it still plays exactly like Starcraft 1/Broodwar. The units still clump the same, behave the same, are ordered around the same. Unlike the transition from warcraft 2 to 3, Starcraft 2 does not have the option for your units to move in formation (they just all clump and move the exact same way they did in starcraft). There's the same amount of moderate micromanagement, the same resource gathering, the same... well, everything. It feels like a pretty polish job on a new starcraft 1 expansion.

Now, that can be good or bad, depending on your perspective. The original starcraft definitely had its merits - there was a reason why it sold so well, and why in Korea, to this day, they still have professional Starcraft Leagues where players can pull down 6 figures... from playing starcraft. This sequel is probably the least jarring sequel I've ever experienced - an expert at Starcraft 1 will find no real new learning curve to starcraft 2, as no inputs or tactics have really changed all that much. It will make the Koreans pretty happy, I'm guessing. But for those of us who long ago moved on from Starcraft to Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, and Supreme Commander, it feels like going back down to the minor leagues. The genre has grown and developed since 1998... evolved. Cover dynamics have come in to play, new gameplay modes and victory conditions, epic changes in scope and scale... but starcraft 2 remains stubbornly loyal to its roots, and it feels like going back to read Dr. Seuss after you've spent the last 10 years reading Tolkien, Heinlein and Tolstoy. Sure, it can stir good feelings of nostalgia, but it's a bit bland.

If you've got steam shooting out of your ears at this point, just go back and read paragraph 2 again. It was fun to play, I guess I was just expecting something as revolutionary again today as the first Starcraft was in 98. Perhaps that's my fault for believing the hype. But the blame for that hype rests firmly on Activision/Blizzard's shoulders.

So those were the design decisions that I found "interesting." Sticking to the formula of what worked in SC1, not breaking out into any new experimental paradigms, for better or worse. Now we get into the business decisions... most of which are the reasons why the amazon ratings for Starcraft 2 are pretty much evenly split between 5 stars and 1 star. Bobby Kotick, head honcho of Activision/Blizzard has made it no mystery where he stands when it comes to gamers. He sees them as cash cows to be milked and discarded. He has no love for video gaming. If you needed an example of the stereotypical businessman who cares about nothing but the bottom line, you need look no further than Bobby Kotick. If he could find some way to legally kick you in the crotch and take your money from you while you twitch on the pavement, he would form a business empire around it. His influence is clearly felt in the business model for Starcraft 2.

There's no LAN play allowed, for one. The game is absolutely, positively, inseperably married to the battle.net service. Plainly, Blizzard was in mind to curb piracy AND to force every single person who wanted to play multiplayer to buy their own copy. I can't speak to how successful the latter has been, but judging from statistics on torrent sites, there's still been quite enough piracy to go around. Despite that, however, Starcraft 2 has been the fastest selling strategy game in video game history. Tell me again how the PC gaming market is dead, Mr Video Game publishers?

Battle.net "2.0" also doesn't let you play with people outside your region. If you live in australia or europe and want to play with an american friend, you're pretty much SOL. Features from previous battle.net games are missing, to the annoyance of many. Also very unsettling is the idea that adding "friends" or posting on the official forum reveals your real life information to the not so tender mercies of the internet. Maybe you don't care if your name is John Smith, but people with unique names or who are revealed to be "a girl IRL" might find themselves unduly harassed. Now, Blizzard HAS decided to back off on this requirement... for now. The uproar was just too overwhelming I guess, but I personally do not feel comfortable that they might not do something else similar in the future and NOT back off from it, considering their recent track record of bad ideas and disregard for their customer base as individuals (to which anyone who has ever tried to get support in World of Warcraft can attest).

But, by far the most egregious sin of B/A and Starcraft 2 is the pricing and the division. Starcraft 2 only comes with the terran campaign. It costs 60 dollars. We've been told that the other two campaigns will be made available later as for-pay expansions. Can't you hear Bobby Kotick wringing his hands and smiling? In my opinion, it is NOT a good thing that games have been becoming shorter and shorter over the last decade. Probably the most blatant example of this are the notoriously short single player campaigns of the Modern Warfare games. These days, 9 or 12 hours of single player content seems to be the average, and that's just sad. Remember how many levels there were in Doom 2? Remember how long you spent on Starcraft 1 and its expansions? It's more than a little disappointing to find that the only concept that Starcraft 2 has adopted from its contemporaries is diminished length of content. And don't give me "multiplayer," every game has that (or should), and it doesn't count any more than the ability to make custom maps - it's players making the game longer and more interesting, not developers.

So let's sum up my impressions of Starcraft 2: Expensive, content starved, fun but dated gameplay, flashy and pretty visuals, no LAN, and a dash of invasion of privacy thrown in.

All in all, I'd have to say my recommendation for this game is to wait until it all comes out in a battle chest, then wait for that battle chest to hit the bargain bin. You waited 12 years, you can probably wait a couple more. Not that you ever listen to me.

Grade: B-.

Video Games | StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty | Cinematic Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Zero Punctuation Reviews: Shadow of the Colossus

2010-08-13T13:48:00.002-05:00

Yahtzee refuses to review Starcraft. I expect to have my review of Starcraft 2 done by next week.

Tropico 4 goes to the dogs.

2010-08-13T13:38:00.002-05:00

Via Kotaku:

Fresh from the success of last year's Tropico 3, Kalypso Media and developer Haemimont Games bring El Presidente into the 21st century, adding in Facebook and Twitter functionality into next year's Tropico 4.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

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Zero Punctuation Reviews: Deathspank AND Limbo

2010-08-06T14:12:00.001-05:00

Zero Punctuation Reviews: Singularity

2010-07-22T12:46:00.000-05:00

So apparently I write like David Foster Wallace

2010-07-17T14:43:00.003-05:00

After trying a few of my posts in this analyzer, the most frequent author that came back was -

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

One thing that was interesting though, was my review of Necrovision came back as William Gibson.

Zero Punctuation Reviews: Super Mario Brothers Galaxy 2

2010-07-14T13:39:00.000-05:00

Review: Singularity

2010-07-11T16:23:00.006-05:00

I left this title languishing at the bottom of my to-do list, mostly because it's gimmick sounded a little too similar to that of Timeshift, a game which thoroughly failed to impress me. Now, after having played it, I must say that was a mistake on my part.

Singularity is a first person shooter that borrows a lot from previous titles. One could almost use the word "derivative" except that this word carries a negative connotation of unoriginality which would not entirely be deserved by the title. Rather, it does what I wish so many other games and genres would do - they take good ideas from myriad previous games and use them all in a new game. Sometimes it gets a little obvious, even egregious, but for the most part it serves to make the player comfortable and pleased with the gaming experience because the damn game plays like it should. I suppose as some others may have pointed out in other reviews, the comparison that most readily leaps to mind is Bioshock, as the game uses the same health meter and first aid kit dynamic as Bioshock, and also has a second bar that is EVE in that game and E99 in this game. You're also gathering a numbered resource to buy upgrades to your equipment and yourself, and there are a number of abilities of Singularity's "Time Manipulation Device," or TMD, that mirror plasmids from Bioshock, such as the ability to catch airborn projectiles and hurl them back at enemies. There's also the fact that everything around you is rusting, falling apart and awash in 50's paraphenalia, but that felt a little more to me like Fallout 3 than Bioshock, slim differentiation though that may be. The game also borrows the "aiming down the barrel turns anything into a sniper rifle" dynamic from Call of Duty, as well as the grenade danger indicator and the ability to only carry two weapons. There's also a heated spike launcher that feels suspiciously like the Half Life 2 crossbow (not to mention you also get a gravity gun power later), a boss fight right out Borderlands, a "sidekick" NPC that looks suspiciously like a certain L4D survivor, the "listening to audio logs that fill in the backstory" dynamic that just about every game has used since Doom 3, quickdraw/shoot sequences like in Call of Juarez, and a weapon called the "Seeker" which fires bullets you remote control in slow motion that brings back memories of the drones you use in Frontlines - Fuels of War. There's even a little bit of "companion cube" type puzzling a-la Portal.

It's all crammed together into the Unreal 3 engine (the prolific nature of which is why so many games these days all feel like each other) in a way that plays well. As much as the game might have borrowed from Bioshock (another U3e game, incidentally), it left behind the clunky, plodding, inaccurate feel of the controls and also reduced the operation of the TMD to one or two context-sensitive keys, making the use of multiple effects easy and intuitive without having to juggle and switch between umpteen plasmids. The conventional weapons also perform well, being as accurate down the sights as in Modern Warfare but unlike it, still being acceptably accurate when fired "from the hip" instead of turning your assault rifle into a rapid fire blunderbuss. The rate of turn feels natural, and the movement speed feels right as well - two areas that bioshock didn't quite feel like it got right.

But enough about what Singularity borrowed, let's talk about its originality. The game takes place on a moon-shaped island called "Katorga 12" just off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Back in the 50s, the Soviets discovered a new element deep underground there called "E-99" which (apparently, apart from displacing Einsteinium in the periodic table) causes chronological distortions in matter. Unfortunately for the Russians, research involving E99 proves to be hazardous and fraught with accidents, and as such the research is suspended indefinitely and the island is abandoned. With anomalous radiation readings coming from the island in 2010, the Americans decide to risk international incident to send a military expedition to the island to investigate. An EMP burst of unknown nature causes the helicopters to crash, and in trying to reach the extraction point after the mission is aborted, the protagonist unknowingly stumbles through a time rift to the past where he saves a Russian scientist who would have otherwise perished in a fire. When returned to the present, suddenly the only two remaining soldiers are unable to contact their base, and the statuary around the island has changed from depicting Stalin to depicting the scientist you rescued. Something in the timeline just got screwed up... and you're about to spend the rest of the game trying to figure out how to fix it.

Soon after, you are contacted by a member of a resistance group who call themselves "MIR-12" who helps explain what is happening and gets you to once again travel to the past to prevent the scientist you rescued from killing another scientist to co-opt his work. This leads to you getting the TMD, which for the rest of the game lets you rejuvinate or decay various objects and organisms around the island (there being a convenient plot device in place that the TMD only affects things that have been "infused" with E99... a plot device it happily ignores whenever convenient). But it seems no matter how much you try to fix the timeline, it only gets more and more screwed up, leading up to a dramatic final confrontation and decision that will decide the fate of the entire world. Not that I'll spoil it any more than I already have.

The trek across Katorga 12 involves a lot of shooting, both of mutant beasties and more mundane soldiery and some basic problem solving, but by and large the path through the game is linear to the point of almost being on rails. What little side-trips there are are extremely short, mostly of the nature of opening a room off the main hallway to loot it for items. The story is interesting (and unlike Timeshift, actually able to be followed) and keeps you wanting to play further. The graphics are excellent, and I am very thankful that the developers saw fit to let you customize your visual experience to your liking (IE, letting me turn off bloom and depth of field, two of the most overrated and overused visual abominations of the current generation of games). I was a little disappointed that there was no subtitles option, but I suppose it didn't hurt too much.

The game does have some shortcomings, even if you don't consider a vast repertoire of borrowed paradigms to be a negative. Sometimes textures are a bit slow to load, some details have been left out (such as walking in front of a movie projector doesn't cast the player's shadow on the screen), and probably the biggest gripe of mine is that the game's autosave points have been tailored in such a way so as to always let you know when something tense is about to happen, even more obviously than the spike in the music's soundtrack. The flashing words "SAVING - DO NOT TURN OFF" at the top of the screen might as well be saying "GET READY TO DO A LOT OF FIGHTING IN A SECOND." On the sound front, Steven Jay Blum is everywhere. He narrates some parts of the game as well as voicing the primary antagonist. Now don't get me wrong, he's a great voice actor and he does a good job, it's just he feels a little overused in this title. And, of course, there's also the fact that as you start to progress through the second half of the game, your character has become so strong that the challenge noticeably depreciates. The game clocks in at about 7 or 8 hours on the single player campaign, which is not as long as some but certainly longer than others... still, it feels like it could have gone on to have a much more epic storyline if it wanted to put in the time.

But all in all, it's an enjoyable experience I recommend to any fan of first person shooters. Your time is not wasted in Singularity.

Verdict: B+. And that's the word from Bandit Camp.

Video Games | Singularity | Age Revert Trailer

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Via Kotaku: A Visual Guide to the First Person Shooter

2010-07-06T15:32:00.003-05:00

Article here.

Every time somebody talks about how good a FPS Goldeneye was, I feel a little sicker on the inside. It wasn't bad.. for a CONSOLE game. But it couldn't hold a candle to Quake, Duke3D, Unreal, or even the original Doom.

It's depressing, because the only reason the PC gaming market isn't completely dead right now is because, despite having perfectly good USB ports, console makers and developers are still inexplicably ignoring the mouse as the world's best analog input device, one that is prerequisite for FPS dominance. When they DO figure that out, you can pretty much kiss PC gaming goodbye. There were already some PS2 games that had USB keyboard support... keyboard and mouse support on XB360 would mean you no longer have to spend ~$1000 on a gaming computer, when you can get a console for less than $500 that plays every bit as good, has less support issues due to hardware standardization, and is much less complicated for your average person to use... all while now getting the same games and comparable experiences.

With the glass barrier of input type shattered, other genres that have been up til now largely exclusive to PCs would also be fair game... particularly MMOs and RTSes. Heck, the PS2 might have had a trimmed down version of Sims 2, but you know with access to KB&M, the next Sims sequel would blow away all sales records if released on consoles.

Then we'll ALL be console 'tards.

Zero Punctuation Reviews: E3 2010

2010-07-05T16:38:00.001-05:00

Motion controls and 3D.

It doesn't look good for APB

2010-07-05T16:29:00.003-05:00

Too bad, I had hoped it would be better, but aside from the comments section ranting of some rabid fanboys, the reviews coming in are calling APB mediocre to bad. For example, play.tm says:

I first saw APB in action almost exactly 12 months ago. It looked spectacular. The room, filled with developers and members of the press, was buzzing. When the demonstration finished, the conference was alive with applause.

The game I've been playing this week is a feeble shadow of that impressive first look. While it's conceptually the game we were told it would be, every component is so underdeveloped, the game world so patently artificial. Only the customisation tools stand tall, but even they're of so little consequence that they're almost instantly forgotten. Initially fun, initially somewhat impressive, APB ultimately remains a game that a lot of people are going to aggressively hate. They'll be quite justified in their position, and one suspects Realtime Worlds will have quite some explaining to do.

Layout Changed

2010-06-28T10:36:00.003-05:00

So I finally ditched the desert background tile. Now you guys can stop ridiculing my terrible site layout and start ridiculing my terrible authoring.

Subscription Fees, DLC, and In-Game Advertising

2010-06-28T10:12:00.002-05:00

A surprisingly level-headed soapbox rant from Tim over at Ctrl-Alt-Del today about the above topics and why they're here to stay. Recommended reading for all three of my readers.

I mostly agree with him - MMO games need subscription fees because servers and patches take money. Lots of money. In-game advertising is fine, if done right. The geico billboards in my Burnout Paradise do not harm my experience in any way, shape or form. DLC usually is a good thing, there have been countless times in the past where I would have gladly paid $5 more to have a favorite game that I just beat have more content... EXCEPT! Here is where I differ - all too often (I'm looking at YOU, Dragon Age) DLC content feels like it is NOT a bonus. It feels like it was developed concurrently with the title, if not being ripped right out of the main game itself to be sold separately. That's the kind of DLC I object to - the kind where it was ready before the game launched and should have been in the game to begin with. If you wanna see DLC done right, take a look at Borderlands and the General Knoxx DLC. DLC should be that. An expansion pack that adds new content beyond the main arc of the game. Now, some games abuse this a little, charging you 5 dollars a pop for things that should have all been lumped together as one single DLC (cough*MassEffect2*cough), but if the market will bear it, more power to them, I suppose.

So yeah, that's my two cents.

Gas Bandit Gaming

Finally, You Will Get Your Chance To Kill Fippy Darkpaw

Sequelitis - Mega Man X

MechWarrior Online will be free to play, PC exclusive

Broken Toys: A Decade Of Camelot

Guy chokes a kid after being made fun of in Black Ops, we're ... upset

Zero Punctuation: Resistance (cough HALF LIFE cough) 3

Windows 8 and the marginalization of geeks

Counterfeit Chinese USB Hard Drive

Notch narrates minecraft 1.8 preview

Windows 8 offers native ISO mounting support

Razer intros ultra-slim gaming notebook

EA's Origin Service Is Basically Spyware, According to Origin's EULA

GameStop Discarding Deus Ex: Human Revolution OnLive Coupons

Guild Wars 2 trailer loaded with in-game footage

Gearbox teases Borderlands 2

The Engine Was Just Sitting There!

New M-Disc Technology Promises Permanent Data Retention

Trackmania 2 gameplay, editor footage leaked

German geniuses hit 800Mbps with light bulb WLAN

World of Warplanes Website

Borderlands 2 Announced

Z-Drive R4 SSD combines blazing speed, PCIe 2.0 interface

Space Marine cinematic trailer

Computer Reads Manual, Plays Civ

Gratuitous Tank Battles Announced

'Only' 999 more days left for XP security updates

Cryptex flash drive uses combination lock sleeve, brings a whole new meaning to hardware encryption

The fanless spinning heatsink: more efficient and immune to dust

APB Reloaded: What a load

Minecraft 1.7 pistons = Punchcard Memory

Report: Serious gamers spend more time on PC than consoles

Really Bad Day at Black Rock

Age of Conan Now Free-to-Play

Review: Duke Nukem Forever

Minecraft: Back in the office, and some words on 1.7 and 1.8!

There Ain’t No Drama Like Spaceship Drama Cause Spaceship Drama Don’t Stop

Saints Row: The Third Trailer

Star Wars Galaxies Ending in December

Team Fortress 2 now Free to Play

Study contends that video games decrease violent crime

Zero Punctuation: Duke Nukem Forever (for real this time)

TF2: Don't stab me now

TR's Summer 2011 system guide

And The Lamb Lies Down In A Crate On Broadway

LEGO Universe Going Free-to-Play

City of Heroes Going Free-to-Play

Tropico 4 Trailer

Serious Sam 3 stays true to franchise's roots

GRID online multiplayer meets early demise on PC

Minecraft: West Freeport

I Have Nothing I Could Possibly Add To This Story

40k MMO news from E3

Quote of the Day

DNF Review Dust Up

Crysis 2 dropped from Steam, others may follow

The 10 commandments of PC games

Codemasters, Epic fall victim to hax0rs

Gaming – now and then

Minecraft coming to 360 and Kinect this Winter

Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless

New Carmageddon!

Carmageddon Returns With New Car-Smashing Game

Duty Calls

Review: D-Link EBR-2310 wired router

Review: Words With Friends (Android)

No Amount of Force or Weight

Zero Punctuation: Bulletstorm

Likeability of various angry birds.

Netdevil mass layoffs, maybe closing?

17 worst PC games ever

Zero Punctuation Reviews: DC Online

Video game Bingo

Zero Punctuation Reviews: Minecraft

Duke Nukem Forever Release Date Set:

Zero Punctuation: Top (and Bottom) 5 of 2010

On Wargame UIs

Great Moments in Customer Support: DC Online

Accurate Math in Processors may not be important

2010's most popular gaming videos