Latest News And Features

The GA Podcast – Joaby, Luke and Heath talk about playing Diablo 3, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Dragon’s Dogma, Max Payne 3, Far Cry 3 and more. In the news they discuss all the news on Bungie’s next game, Aliens Colonial Marines date slipping and more. Finally the guys answer people’s emails, and Joaby reads out his favourite comments from his Diablo 3 review. This episode goes for 2 hours and 30ish minutes and contains coarse language.

The GA Podcast 135 - Six Point Five

You can grab the latest episode of The GAP right here or from iTunes if that's your thing. You can also check The GAP out on Facebook if that's your thing!

Andy is back for another edition of The Weekly Update! This week Andy takes a look at Ghost Recon: Future Soldier out now for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with the PC version to follow in June. He follows that up with a look at the 'virus' feature of Resistance: Burning Skies - coming out next week on the PlayStation Vita and the Rayman Origins demo - available today on the Nintendo 3DS eShop.

Andy finishes things up this week with a look at "Enter The Metro" - Metro: Last Light's very own live action short film - which you can watch in our videos library once you finish watching The Weekly Update! You can watch The Weekly Update embedded below, or in our videos library - going full screen for HD of course!

You may remember at the end of last month when MP Ed Husic announced it would be inquiring into Australia's exorbitant prices for video games and other consumer goods. Yesterday the committee formed for the inquiry announced they are now accepting submissions on the topic.

The committee is accepting submissions until July 6th, emailed to emailed to ic.reps@aph.gov.au in Microsoft Word or PDF format. You can read more of the details about what a submission should entail on the House of Parliament's website - if you'd like to submit something, be sure to check out their submission guide. In particular however, it's important to limit your scope to the committee's terms of reference as listed on the website:

(a) Whether a difference in prices exists between IT hardware and software products, including computer games and consoles, e-books and music and videos sold in Australia over the internet or in retail outlets as compared to markets in the US, UK and economies in the Asia-Pacific (b) Establish what those differences are (c) Determine why those differences exist (d) Establish what the impacts of these differences might be on Australian businesses, governments and households (e) Determine what actions might be taken to help address any differences that operate to the disadvantage to Australian consumers

Remember how Blizzard said they were going to honour GAME pre-orders for Diablo 3? They've now established the process necessary for players who had pre-ordered at GAME to get their money back!

I'll quote the relevant information, but if you'd like to read it in the piercing blue of an official Blizzard forum post, head to Battle.Net now! One interesting point - they can't refund more than the amount you actually spent (that is not a refund) on the Blizzard store, so if you bought the CE from GAME they are going to give you the remainder of the money in Battle.Net credit. Which you can use to buy Heart of the Swarm, or Mists of Pandaria, or maybe items on the Real World Currency Auction House when it goes live (I'm not sure if BN credit can be used for that).

38 Studios has laid off their entire staff today, including the staff of Big Huge Games - the development team responsible for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. 38 Studios was originally founded by Major League Baseball star Curt Shilling, drawing on an agreement with the state of Rhode Island to bring 450 jobs for a loan of $75 Million.

Recently it came to light things weren't going so well for 38 Studios however, when a cheque sent by the studio to Rhode Island defaulted on May 1st and staff salaries weren't paid. Now things have come to an unfortunate head, with the company laying off all 378 employees of 38 Studios and Big Huge games. In a company-wide memo reported by Joystiq, the lay-offs were explained:

The Company is experiencing an economic downturn. To avoid further losses and possibility of retrenchment, the Company has decided that a companywide lay off is absolutely necessary. These layoffs are non-voluntary and non-disciplinary. This is your official notice of lay off, effective today, Thursday, May 24th, 2012.

The developers were currently working on an as yet unnanounced MMO - 'Project Copernicus' - thought to be an MMO version of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. What will happen to the Kingdoms of Amalur IP now is not known, but if 38 Studios can't repay Rhode Island the approximate $50 million they owe them, the IP will belong to the state.

The team behind the Trackmania games - including last year's sensational Trackmania 2 - are finally ready to reveal the next evolution in... Mania. Shootmania is the new hotness - a fast-paced first person shooter built with the same philosophy as Trackmania.

That means that when it drops you'll be able to make your own maps with the same sort of ease that you find in the other Mania games - and the gameplay itself looks fantastic, as evidenced in the new trailer,

Ubisoft is looking after the Mania games, and I know I've lined up some time with them at E3 - hopefully I'll have more to reveal soon. As if a trailer wasn't enough, you can sign up for the closed beta over on their official site - though there's no guarantees that you'll get in.

Blizzard's Action RPG launched last Tuesday, and while the launch wasn't flawless, at least it seems like it was for a half-decent reason... they set a record for the fastest selling PC game on the day, with 3.5 million games getting snapped up in the first 24 hours.

At the end of the first week of launch the game had reached 6.3 million copies sold, which is extremely impressive for a PC-only launch. Mike Morhaime, CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, said,

We’re definitely thrilled that so many people around the world were excited to pick up their copy of Diablo III and jump in the moment it went live. We also regret that our preparations were not enough to ensure everyone had a seamless experience when they did so. I want to reaffirm our commitment to make sure the millions of Diablo III players out there have a great experience with the game moving forward, and I also want to thank them for their ongoing support.

The regrets are in reference to the login issues the game had when it went live at 5pm last Tuesday - with so many people trying to get online at once, the servers simply weren't able to handle the load. With 3.5 million sales and 3.5 million customers unable to login, does this make it both the best and worst launch of a PC game ever?

Last night, roughly around the time when Greg Inglis was sort-of-not-really scoring a try to seal Queensland's victory in the first State of Origin game, GameArena was getting attacked. Luckily our team of Super Admins were on the ball (probably because they are Queenslanders), and they reacted quickly, but not before these attackers made off with 35,000 usernames, emails and passwords.

This information was limited to the encrypted passwords of people with non-BigPond.com email addresses attached to their GameArena and Games Shop accounts. If you use a BigPond.com email and password to access these sites, you have not been affected by this attack.

I know we already said some of this here, but it bears repeating - no credit card details for GameArena or Games Shop are stored on the site, so they didn't get any of those.

Because we deleted all the passwords stored on GameArena - a precautionary measure - we are currently emailing everyone with new passwords, and this is putting extra load on our mail server. This means that if you want a new password sent to you there will be a delay - at the moment the delay is about 30 minutes.

Also - the 'reset password' site somewhat condescendingly advises you to make your password something easier to remember. We know you didn't forget your password and that's not why you're getting it reset, we just didn't make a site for this situation and we're piggy-backing off that one!

Further, if you used an old, disused email address on your account you won't have gotten the email - you can head to Account Support to lodge a support ticket and get this fixed up.

Finally, while your GameArena or Games Shop account is now secure, if you used that same password for any other accounts it might now be vulnerable - you should definitely change those passwords as well.

We have reset the passwords of some GameArena and Games Shop members, after the sites were victims of an attack.

Information that might have been obtained was limited to GameArena or Games Shop usernames, the email address used to join the site and the encrypted GameArena and Games Shop passwords of members who access the site using a non-BigPond email address (e.g. hotmail or gmail).

If you use your BigPond email and password to access the sites, you have not been affected by this attack.

No financial or credit card details were kept on the sites.

While your password for access to the site has been changed, and the new password is being emailed to you, we encourage you to change it at any other site where you might have used the same password.

To clarify, Telstra BigPond Broadband account password details have not been affected.

If you have not received an email with your new password, please click here.

Mechwarrior Online will be Free to Play once it launches, but if you want to get in on the action beforehand, you can now developers Pirahna Games have outlined the game's Founders program. The program comes in two tiers and will be available from June 19th, with early access and Founders assets going out on July 17th.

For $30 you will get one month of premium access, $40 of in-game currency and a Founders tag. If you want to spend a little extra, $60 will get you two months premium access, $80 in game currency, a Founders tag and an exclusive "Founder's BattleMech" - which comes with a lifetime per-match C-Bill booster. Premium access worryingly allows you to gain XP and C-Bills faster, although how much of an impact that will have on the game is yet to be seen. Mechwarrior Online enters closed beta today however, so if you want to get in and check it out, make sure to go to the official website and check it out.

Embedded below is the Debut Gameplay trailer for Mechwarrior Online, showing off the sweet, sweet mech on mech action. Of course, you can also watch it in our videos library - and don't forget to go full screen for HD!


Edit: I thought I'd mentioned it but I hadn't - the sign up is meant for North American customers and they may make similar packages for other regions. It seems unlikely they'll make one for Australia however and they have confirmed there is no IP blocking in place, so you are free to sign up when the Founders program begins - keeping that in mind.