OK, ill be honest, I did consider not posting this up as the fewer of you that signup the more likely it will be for me to get into this, but its not fair of me to hold back what could be the most incredible gaming experience you are likely to get involved in for years to come.
Its safe to say I’m fairly excited about this one!
If you want to get involved in the BETA the signup is now publicly available here
What are your thoughts on making a communist internet? Sounds really appealing right, the congress resumes the discussions on Wednesday 21st December today. What are they discussing you ask? Well it’s the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) & Protect IP Act (PIPA) both of which could change the internet as we currently know it. It’s allows DNS blocking and the take down of websites that actively promote and take part in piracy. The main reason this is happening is because of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) & Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). SOPA isn’t just about piracy; it’s about intellectual property-all property.
The entertainment industry has already proven that they can’t be trusted. Just this week, they abused the DMCA filters on YouTube to take down a video that they had no legal claim to, merely because they didn’t like the message it was spreading about these Acts. The song was called Mega Upload named after the great website for file sharing. It was made by many famous artists including – Diddy, Drake, Lil Wayne & many more artists. Mega Upload is a site predicted to have about 4% of the internet’s content. For a while the video was taken down due to Universal trying to claim Copyright infringements that just didn’t exist at all. This was in useless thought people were already re-uploading the song.
With the proposed ideas on the act there comes a lot of downsides sites you use might just disappear. Google has been filtering its search results for years. That’s proven very useful for the content owner representatives like the MPAA and RIAA. Many security problems also arise with the fact that people will try to work around these issues. Just remember that PIPA is just as bad an act and could cause just as many problems.
Our little group have now been hitting a bit of a wall recently where we have more than 4 players that want to play a game but can only find co-operative games that support groups of 4.
Obviously games like Bad Company allow you to have more on the same team however critically, squads can only be 4 players which makes co-ordination trickier and given that we are a friendly bunch we are mostly trying to avoid competitive games.
There has been some discussion in the forums about games that could allow us to play with more than 4 players co-operatively however our attempts so far have met with mixed results.
Any one else found a solution to this problem?
Below is a list of some of the suggestions our group has made so far:
The biggest challenge seems to be finding something that is readily available and isnt a complete nightmare to a) get running on modern machines and b) still has support for multiplayer
If there are any other suggestions I am definitely interested in hearing them!
The end of the year is approaching fast and I have to say it has been a very good year for PC games. We have had plenty of good stuff to sink our hungry teeth into but as always, the question is what did you like best?
I am going to open the discussion with a list of categories and I will comment my personal choices. Everybody is welcome to contribute their comments and their own favourites. At the end, I will make another post with some kind of consolidated results. So here are the categories:
1.- Best single player:
2.- Best MMO/Free to play:
3.- Best Indie game:
4.- Best Coop Game:
5.- Biggest surprise:
6.- Biggest disappointment:
7.- Best Game of the Year:
So what are your choices? Do not hesitate to vote, the more votes we have, the better.
Well, it’s my first post here and it’s going to be about my career. My supervisor pulled me off today and asked if I’ve got any plans, if not will I like to extend my contract. I gave him the two thumbs up but did mention I’ll be flying back to Hong Kong to spend the holidays with my family. He said that’s fine but the studio will resume work on 2nd Jan 2012. However, he’ll need to speak with the Producer on the length of the extension but it’ll most likely be till Feb 2012, which is the shipping date for the game.
On other news, our studio unfortunately failed to obtain the Square Enix project despite some cracking effort for the 2 week assignments done by our lads. To be honest, I was alittle disappointed since well, if they do get the project I might get a chance to extend a weebit longer but I really feel our studio are more than capable enough to take on the task to work on another potential AAA title. Anyways, I’m still delighted to end 2011 on a positive note and maybe, just maybe I might get to stay at my studio….for good.
Both of the big indie game distribution campaigns have been in full force in the last couple of days but I will kick off with news from Indie Royale who have just launched their ‘Really Big Bundle’ which includes:
All of which are available on both Desura or Steam. At time of writing you can get all of this for less than £2.70 which is not a bad deal or if you are feeling charitable to others you can help push the price down by paying more.
Not to be beaten, the Humble Bundle team have added Dungeons of Dredmor to their previous Introversion bundle which you will recieve if you pay more than the current average ($3.99 at time of writing). For those of you who have already paid for this bundle it will automatically be added to your account, just log back in to retrieve the code for your distribution platform of choice.
In addition to this you will also receive access to two bonus prototypes from Introversion as well as the source code to Darwinia, Multiwinia, DEFCON and Uplink!
I have to say that rightly or wrongly the Indie gaming scene never really grabbed me before but the work that Humble Bundle and Indie Royale is doing to promote them is making them almost unmissable!
CD Projekt are best known for their award winning Witcher series. The Witcher 2 looked beautiful and excelled in the RPG category, they listened to the community and offered free, quick patches and free future content. Now they are talking about making a new AAA title that will be “set in a totally different universe” from the Witcher series. Having experience in making a great RPG one can only assume they’ll be making a new RPG set somewhere else. What do you think?
It’s great to see a company make a new, original IP. Publishers are so scared of investing in an original idea today that they will only invest if the developers are pitching to make a sequel to a successful game.
CD projekt are in no rush to spill details and will do so “…when the time is right.”
Sounds like something to look forward too.
More from the Firefall developers with this video focusing on the classes themselves.
Im still not entirely convinced by firefall at the moment. I was hoping for Planetside meets Borderlands but I dont think that this is the scale that they are targeting. Its looking more and more like Team Fortress 2 meets Unreal Tournament.
This is not a terrible thing I suppose, the environments are unique and very rich, the development team themselves are very experienced and I sure this product will be well polished but I just dont see it breaking any moulds.
Firefall…. prove me wrong.
After lots and lots (and lots more) research, our team did finally reach a verdict on this year’s best whiskeys. We were extremely thorough and you can believe that we put the best of our soul into it.
I think that the team member that deserves a special recognition is without a doubt Invisible Johnny, who was key into drinking the 250 whiskeys that the rest of the team could not try.
So anyway, these are the winners:
Balvenie Peated Cask 17 years, really awesome stuff.
Connemara Single Cask, catholics make whiskey too!
And chosen by Invisible Johnny as we all know he would because he loves Japanese Whisky, Yamakazi 18 years.
EDIT:
The surprise of the year has to go to an amazing discovery by Labchimp. Kavalan is a very, very good Taiwanese Whisky that can easily stand by the best single malts in Scotland.
I hope you are ready, because the double sale is starting. We are now going to see lots of good games from the beginning of the year at very good prices. If you kept your head cool and did not buy under the influence of an impulse (or too much booze), then you should be able to find some gems. However do not go all crazy, you can miss some titles and still be able to get them, do not forget the BIG sale after Christmas.
How does the sale work? It seems to follow the format of past years. There some permanent discount prices from publisher catalogues that go from 15% to 50%. Then you have the daily deals, those have been known to go all the way to 85% discount. Obviously the proper way to deal with this is to let the whole sale pass and get to see all the daily offers and the last day, search for any catalogue discounts that you may still want and never went on a daily.
Ok, so what is cool this first day? People in the forum are interested in Orcs Must Die (yay!) and in Renegade Ops (boo!)
And Portal 2 of course. I cannot understand how anyone would not have Portal 2 yet, but if you do not, just get it, you can thank me later.