The pricing at the end may read GBP9.99 for PlayStation3, but we're sure the action in the BF1943 Guadalcanal trailer will be the same the world over.
At first glance it does look amazing - DICE's Frostbite engine appears to be both smooth and laden with juicy effects. The player models look a little wispy - similarly thin as Battlefield Heroes' are - but that's something people can get their heads around if the rest of the action compensates. We don't know yet, but if the in-tank view shown at the 35 second mark is in-game footage we'll be happy.
The big questions we're all asking. That is: can a 24 player limit capture the Battlefield spirit, and what will change with the PC version, out September?
That said for 1200 Xbox Live points or what should be around the $20 mark, this is shaping up to be a no-brainer for console peeps. And dig on that music, how dramatic!
Valve's marketing man Doug Lombardi was in London yesterday spreading the good word. CVG scored an interview with the great man, and managed to get answers to the questions we all are a little curious to know - just how much of an effect does having nearly 40,000 people signing a petition have?
| It really didn't change our plans at all. As I mentioned we had plans to keep releasing stuff. We put the Survival Pack out for free which I thought was pretty cool on 360 as well as PC - it's sort of uncommon to be able to get new stuff out that way. | |
Answer: about that ^^^ much. Lombardi did add that Left 4 Dead DLC would be announced at the end of summer (winter in Australia).
Other interesting tidbits:
The genesis of L4D2:
| The idea for that really came from the team after they had finished had a bunch of ideas for what they wanted to do; melee weapons, new characters, new game modes etc. Then when the game had shipped they saw a bunch of behaviours in the wild once thousands, hundreds of thousands and then millions of people had played the game. | |
"The petition" | It's [E3] not really the venue for announcing DLC and whatnot. I think folks took our announcement as a sign that we were dropping Left 4 Dead 1 and that's just not the case. | |
And arguably the most interestingly - Valve's reasoning behind its disinterest in PlayStation3 development | We've run a couple of experiments over the years of PlayStation in general; we did Half-Life on PS2 with an outside company and then we did Orange Box PS3 with an outside company. We weren't able to deliver the same type of product on PS3 and PS2 for that matter that we were on the 360 and PC.
If you look at it as a matter of Valve doing it, Valve did the 360 and the PC version of the Orange Box and they both go 96 on Metacritic - The PS3 version was nowhere close to that. Left 4 Dead got a 89 or a 90 on 360 and PC. We're really, really proud of the fact that whatever platform you play the game on you're getting the same experience, you're getting the same Metacritic score. And with Left 4 Dead, you're getting the same DLC with the survival pack and some of the stuff that we have coming.
Until we have the ability to get a PS3 team together, until we find the people who want to come to Valve or who are at Valve who want to work on that, I don't really see us moving to that platform.
We've kind of learned a lesson in that again, if we were customers of that product on PlayStation, we'd feel like we sort of got the stepchild version of the product while the guys on the PC and the 360 got the sweet version of it. | |
There's quite a lot more meat in the article, so good job by CVG. Except how they spell legendary band Nirvana as - errrrrrrrr?
"In the old days Details Magazine used to do a feature that was sort of their music issue and they had this big fold-out where all music led back to like James Brown, Elvis, The Beatles and they went all the way down to every band like
Nervana and back up."
That ain't no typo - what is the world coming to? And why does a company like Valve pay any attention to a crappy metacritic score? That's the tail wagging the dog. RAGE.
Mod makers often create ingenious add-ons, that cannot be denied. Then there are inventions that maybe weren't a good idea. Chief amongst these we submit is TweetCraft, an in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft.
Note: TweetCraft is a standalone app - as opposed to a typical WoW addon that can be loaded in-game. It may not be Tweetdeck, but the feature set seems pretty mature:
| * Send/receive Tweets in-game (Immediate sending reloads your UI)
* Queue Tweets to send when it's more convenient for you
* Upload in-game screenshots using TwitPic
* AutoTweet when you log in, enter an instance or get an achievement
* Extensible so that AddOn authors can register messages or events to AutoTweet | |
No doubt the designers thought they were doing a good thing, enabling the masses who play WoW to let the world know what they were doing. Is broadcasting the kind of chatter that occurs in-game really something we're ready for? The ability to publish screenshots alone should drop the collective internet IQ by 20 or so points.
On a more serious note, there
is a very comprehensive rundown by the authors at Coding4Fun which details how the app is put together if you're someone interested in potentially making your own.
Terrible twosome is a pretty unfair way to describe Benny & Richie, considering Benny's really the only terrible one. This week Richie conducts a professional and interesting interview with legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk about his new game, and talks the sweet science with Aussie boxer and new Fight Night entrant Billy "The Kid" Dib. Benny on the other hand pushes the boundaries of good taste with his booth babe interviews and calls out Gamespot. GAMESPOT? One of them does Krav Maga Benny. What do I do, Couch Fu...
And we wouldn't have it any other way.
Watch the latest episode now to see it all in action, and boys - don't change. (Also GameArena would totally whoop Gamespot's arse).
This week's update sees Andy talking Monster Hunter Freedom Unite with Ben Dwyer-Roberts - they're not kidding about the friends thing by the way. This game
needs people with you to be any fun. He also takes aim at Obama again, although this time the Prez has resigned himself to the idea that kids will play video games. We also reflect on MJ's career in videogames, and Suze was back on the street asking people questions again!
Watch the latest episode now! If you were going to make a Michael Jackson game today, what the hell would you make? Nobody say anything related to kiddy touching.
Okay Hollywood, we get it. You now love all things videogames. But even the most ardent gamer with an open mind towards film adaptations may sheer away from licensing "Asteroids" and trying to make a movie out of it.
Not so Universal - who apparently were just one of four - count 'em one-two-three-four studios bidding for the rights to make a film out of the old 2D vector game.
The Hollywood Reporter, er, reports...
Pricing may still be TBA for Australian versions of DJ Hero, but if you thought you were getting any change out of $200 you may wish to start thinking again.
The $RRP for the game in the States? $USD120. Which thanks to the US economy being in the toilet comes out to $148 and change as of the time of writing. Scary fact - the Aussie dollar only recently strengthened, so it could be a lot worse.
It's safe to assume our DJ Hero $RRP at launch will not go under this point (say $150 in nice round figures). If it does, I will eat a bar of soap while playing Guitar Hero (and upload the video).
However with the announcement of the UK's recommended retail - which our pricing usually follows closely after conversion - it may be that $200 is a closer mark. Eurogamer is reporting Activision has told at least one retailer the recommended price for the game in the UK is GBP107.99. Most retailers are likely to hit up punters at launch for around 99 pound, just to put off the psychological factor of shelling out triple figures. This - in Australian dollars - is just over $200 at the time of writing...
It's not easy being number one. Just ask Electronic Arts. After ruling the games industry for over a decade, a few reversals and a timely merger by the opposition saw Activision assume top spot like it was theirs all along.
It doesn't take much to get toppled, and the first real test of Activision Blizzard's top dog rating may come this Christmas, if Janco partners analyst Mike Hickey's comments - circulated to partners - are to be taken seriously.
Hickey - who previously predicted Modern Warfare 2 would be the biggest selling game of 2009 (if not the biggest entertainment launch of the year) - has communed with the spirits and identified a cluster of risks that could "compromise" Activision's end of year sales bonanza.
1. StarCraft II may not launch in 2009
Hickey believes it is "increasingly probable" StarCraft II will launch in "fiscal 2010" period. It seems Hickey is basing this on comments made by Blizzard to Kotaku (...) stating the beta period will run for 4-6 months - meaning a Christmas window would be very tight...
The upcoming "There is Only War" update for Dawn of War 2 is going to be made available in beta form to existing Dawn of War II owners, starting in a few hours from now. The beta program will run until July 13th US time.
The catch? You'll need to do it through Steam...
Earlier this year when OnLive started talking up the vision of streaming gameplay to your PC, most people were impressed with the vision (if perhaps a little dubious about the ability of the company to deliver). Industry legend Dave Perry...not so much. Perry had been working on his own game streaming service, Gaikai (pronounced "Guy Ky") and now OnLive was threatening to steal his thunder.
At the same show (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco, while OnLive was talking up its tech, Perry started showing a tech demo of the service behind closed doors, and then backed it up at E3, where OnLive was nowhere to be found.
Perry has now put up a video demonstration on his blog, (
www.dperry.com). In it, he launches several games and applications from a menu screen that includes tiles for World of Warcraft, Spore, Photoshop, EVE Online, Mario Kart 64 (Dave Perry is an emu fan!?), Lego Batman, Call of Duty 4, Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy and Need for Speed Pro Street.
He then fires up Spore - which he states is the full game, not a cut down version. Perry is running the game in a Window, which is a lot easier proposition to render than full screen HD. Then he moves to Mario Kart 64 - which should theoretically punish any server lag from the streaming server to his PC. Perry weaves through traffic without any noticeable response delay - although when he later fires up Pro Street either his reflexes are off or there
is.
Perry then opens World of Warcraft followed by EVE Online. WoW logs in and loads almost instantly - certainly faster than on any PC I've seen it on before. EVE too is up and runnign with minimal downtime.
He closes out the presentation by demoing Photoshop CS4 extended. It loads in roughly five seconds, which for anyone who uses the app knows is crazy. He promises he will "try and get Adobe to look at this as a potential model for software". Good luck with that DP...
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