Archive for the 'Gaming' Category

Yep. That’s all I have to say about the game at this point. I’ve played some of it, and it’s just excellent.

Aside from the few quirks that the Unreal 3 engine has, I don’t have anything negative to say about this game so far. And even the texture pop-in is under control, only noticed it twice so far. So, excellent.

Oh yeah, Nolan North is the leading voice. That guy sure gets around these days. He is the new Prince in the PoP games, he was Forge in Halo Wars, Drake in Uncharted. Also Desmond in Assassin’s Creed, Vossler in FF12. And in a bunch of upcoming games as well.

Not Gordon Freeman, just so you know

Be quick, this deal will only last for the weekend! You can now get all the Half-Life games in several different pack configurations or as individual games, dirt cheap. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 for example is $5.09, and the Half-Life Complete Pack is $16.99. And that pack has quite a few games. So if you ever missed out on all things Half-Life, now would be a pretty good time to catch up. Head over to Steam to view the various packs that the deal includes.

Oh yeah, there is also a deal on the Valve Complete Pack, that’s 10% off. While not as big of a deal as 66%, it’s still pretty good if you are in the market for it.

If you haven’t played Braid yet, but would like to, now’s your chance! Direct2drive has it on their deal of the week, so you have until Sunday to buy it for just $9.99, that’s $5 less than the regular price. Don’t remember what Braid is like? Here’s a little reminder.

Here it is, embedded for your convenience. The first is called The Call, this one is called The Duty. Though this one has quite silly ending.

Here it is, embedded for your convenience.

Visit this link to hear what I’m talking about.

I wish I knew what the story behind this little thing is. It’s just a little surreal. Maybe it’s an accessibility option in the application. Doesn’t make it any less surreal, but hey, I try to find reason where there may be none.

Even the cover is totally nuts

So I heard that Nuts & Bolts has awesome music. You may have heard it too. Well, it took them some time, but the official Rare homepage news tells us that you’ll be able to buy an official soundtrack for the game pretty soon. Infact, Amazon US lists the release date as June 30, 2009. So, you know, pretty soon. You can pre-order it now, also from Amazon UK, if that’s your preference. Though as you can clearly read from the Amazon UK page, it’s an import that way as well. So, do whatever comes cheaper for you I guess. :D Order it! I know you want to.

Oh, right. I guess I should also mention that the soundtrack is composed by Grant Kirkhope, Dave Clynick and Robin Beanland. In case you didn’t know. Which you probably didn’t, so now you do. You can thank me later.

If you didn’t hear this yet, BioWare has released the minimum and recommended system specs for the PC version of Dragon Age: Origins, so here I am to paste them to you. Minimum specs aren’t too bad, but recommended specs, quad core, seriously? Maybe this is the first game to properly use more than one or two cores then? Just makes me wonder how the fucking hell are they going to make it run on either of the consoles? Something smells like bullshit here, and it’s not me. In any case, here’s the E3 trailer for that game, embedded from GiantBomb.

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If you like flying Russians, you'll like Street Fighter 4

Interested in Street Fighter IV? Don’t have a console? Excited about the upcoming PC release? Not sure if your PC can handle it though? Well, today is your lucky day! The good folks at Capcom released a benchmark for the PC version, it weighs in about 400 megs and you can download it from Fileshack. It has 3 bouts between some of the fighters filled with hadoken’s and whatever else, all kinds of nice effects and shit, probably designed to stress the machine somewhat the same way a real bout would. It has a good number of graphics options to tweak if you need to, but the good news is that it seems like the final product will be lean and mean PC version. I was able to run the bench on my system with constant 60 frames per second with all settings in high, at my native 1680×1050 resolution, and it looks pretty great. Well, all settings high except for antialiasing, but who needs antialiasing at this resolution and in a game like this. It looks fantastic. There are also few interesting post processing effects that you can apply to the image, watercolour, ink and posterizing. I’m undecided if they look interesting or not, but the good news is that I was still able to run at full 60 frames per sec, so if you choose to use those they don’t seem to hurt the performance at all. Though your mileage may vary. All in all, looks like it will be a good version.

So, that gives me great hope that the PC versions for Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2 will also be great. Capcom and PC’s looked pretty bad for a while there back in the day when Devil May Cry 3 and Resident Evil 4 was ported for PC. DMC3 was just horrible game and even more terrible port. And RE4 was, while functional, really ugly quick port. At least with RE4 they updated it with some lighting effects later which made it a little less horrible, and fans have made a huge effort to mod it with higher resolution textures and all that.

But that was last gen consoles. For this gen consoles and the PC, Capcom made a new engine called MT Framework, which is basically a development framework that runs on the PC, and is the kind of ported to the consoles, at least according to one of the developers behind DMC4. This shows in super awesome PC versions, Lost Planet and Devil May Cry 4 for example both run on PC like a dream. This same MT Framework is also the engine in Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2, so I expect them both to run like a dream as well. Capcom has really learned their lesson with these things and their approach to multiplatform games is great. Street Fighter 4 doesn’t run on MT Framework I think though, but who cares, it runs great regardless.

Now, if they’d just make it so that other developers could license the engine as well, so we could finally rid the world of the terrible Unreal 3 engine.

Yeah, I’m testing it. Seems like a neat app, if you are too lazy to open your browser and post your blog from there. I mean, yeah. That’s all it seems to do. Considering that WordPress at least has pretty good interface to begin with, this seems kind of useless. I was initially under the impression that this could be used to cross-post, and while it’s sort of possible, not all blogs have same kind of setting for tags and categories and stuff, so it’s not so handy after all. And, of course, not everything is supported. I mean, every god damn site these has their own blog service thing, like last.fm, X-Fire or My Opera or whatever else. How could anyone keep up with them. So cross-posting kind of possible, but not as useful as I had initially hoped for.

There is one thing that people could use this for I guess. Writing offline drafts in this interface might be useful? Maybe. But then again, you could just use notepad or something. So I don’t know, this just might not be that useful at all. And it seems that at least by default it insist on adding some extra html in here in form of paragraphs. No, just no. I want the text field to be pure text, not some silly html codes. And something in this writing interface annoys me, but I can’t put my finger on it.

In other news, Dollhouse hasn’t been canned yet. Which is a good thing. But it hasn’t really gotten a lot of viewers at all, so who knows how long it will last. Joss Whedon doesn’t seem to catch a break on tv anymore. I’m also watching Castle with Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic. And that show seems to be doing quite well, and is also good. So watch that too. Go, watch it.

Also, if you haven’t seen, Final Fantasy 13 demo is out in Japan and there has been a lot of videos floating around. My impressions basing on the videos I’ve seen… Soundtrack will kick ass, not so sure about the rest. After the awesomeness that is Final Fantasy 12, it seems that the battle system is a step backwards with pretty much everything. Graphics seem nice, but that can’t really be the thing that will get you to play games these days, even the worse games these look pretty awesome, so yeah. I guess we’ll just have to see how it pans out. But yes, Masashi Hamauzu on the soundtrack makes a good backing at least.

And that’s that I guess. Now I’m submitting this from Windows Live Write, I’m probably going to have edit it later or something.

Update: Yeah, I’m editing this post right now, removing all the paragraph html that was added in the text field. Other than that, it seems like the integration with WordPress is good, adding new as well as using existing tags and categories worked well on Write, and it seems that they have been properly added to the server side as well.