Wandering Crosshair

Valve hopes to be releasing very soon the Source remake of the Half-Life multiplayer along with the graphically improved version of Day of Defeat. View more pics here.
The Source engine continues to impress.

Action Trip is reporting that "media tycoon" Rupert Murdoch (FOX) is further extending his empire to videogames as he plans on purchasing IGN Entertainment (IGN.com, Gamespy, Fileplanet, Rotten Tomatoes, TeamXbox, 3D Gamers, Direct2Drive, GameStats.com and a number of owned and affiliated web sites within the Vault and Planet networks).

I imagine he will be giving good reviews to his own game developers. Kinda like patting yourself on the back....sigh

Blizzard, the developer of games such as Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and their Battle.net gaming portal has recently suspended (via their CD keys) 28,000 accounts for one month and closed another 3,000 permanently for cheating in Diablo 2: "(the) account closures reflect our zero-tolerance policy against cheating".

Hoping some of the other developers took notice


Bravo to Blizzard.

In development by the PCI Special Interest Group (SIG) is a possiblity for an external PCI Express cable with a bandwith of 5GB/sec from an external module.

Sounds like an innovation that could take some "heat " off of our comps that are soon going to be filling up with dual processors and dual videocards to go along with our multiple hard drives and multiple RAM sticks.

Maximum PC appears to be of the opinion that computer technology is headed in the direction that more is better instead of bigger is better as they construct a $12,000 dream PC with:

• 2 Dual (that means 4) 2.2GHz AMD processors (Opteron)---almost 8.8GHz combined
  
• 8 sticks of 1GB DDR400 (Corsair)
• 2 Video Cards GeForce 7800 (Nvidia)
• 5 500GB Drives (Hitachi Deskstar)
• 2 Monitors 23" (Dell)
• 1 Sound Card Sound Blaster X-fi (Creative Labs) featuring all new 3d rendering engine clocked at 400MHz due in late august
  

Now a beast of a machine such as this is going to necessitate a hell of a power supply and cooling system which would encourage more innovations such as the one from PCI-SIG and their external module to assist in any way the already overburdened computer terminal.

The demo of F.E.A.R., the latest shooter from Monolith (makers of TRON 2.0) and Vivendi Universal, has been released. The demo weighs in at 645MB and runs at a native resolution of
1024 x 768 and similarly to Doom 3 relies heavily on the dynamic lighting to set the overall mood and feel of the game.

Gamespy has a "hands-on" critique of the demo here and they claim the demo will take at most 30 minutes to complete. The "innovative" features of the game are described as:



"(t)he first is the ability to temporarily go into "slo-mo" mode, which plays on the super-fast reflexes your character purportedly possesses. The other is the ability to use melee moves, such as a jump kick or a slide kick, which works really well in conjunction with the slo-mo mode"

Whereas they go on to desribe the actual firefights as:

"Before long, you're in combat with the cloned soldiers, which shows off the new graphics engine. Because of the dynamic lighting, firing some of the weapons can create something of a strobe effect in dark areas, and a lot more dust and smoke tends to kick to compared to most other shooters. The end result is that you can quickly find your vision clouded in the middle of a firefight, and you'll often need to back off a little bit so you're not just shooting blindly into the smoke"

(Sounds like this is going to take a beast of system to run smoothly)

To download the demo and for more info go to www.whatisfear.com where they have an overview and more screenies in store on this possible contender for "Game of the year".

Also worth checking out is the bit-tech.net review of demo from the tekkies perspective.

TweakGuides has released a two page guide for the demo covering the basic and advanced settings for optimization. View the guide here.

Due in September is an FPS called Bet On Soldier and bit-tech has preview here.
It will involve actual betting of your online performance in combat across various classes who all have advantages and disadvantages as do the weapons available to them:

"There will be a choice of six different classes of fighter:

THE TROOPER has normal speed and a good choice of weapons
THE SNIPER is very fast but weaker than a normal soldier
THE SOLDIER is very good at protecting areas but rather slow
THE DESTROYER is very resilient with special exoskeleton armour and very powerful weapons but he is also pretty slow
THE ENGINEER can repair armour but he is a little weaker than the normal soldier
THE GRENADIER can use all the different types of grenades"

The betting system is described by a slogan (hehehe, i like this one)

"Killing is your currency" its all about money:

"Money is interwoven into every facet of the game. You cannot progress through the game without money. Health packs, armour and weaponry all cost money. The only way to reload, re-arm, repair and upgrade your weaponry and equipment is to buy ammo, weapons and upgrades with money that you’ve won. Killing soldiers on the battle field will slowly build up your funds but it’s in the Bet on Soldier match ups that big money can be won.

The betting system is at the very heart of the game. Before you begin a level a screen will allow you to bet on enemy champions that you'll face in the near future. You will be able to analyze his profile, his current rank, his level of difficulty and his weak points. You choose who you want to fight with and bet on this fight. During the game when the two of you meet, the others soldiers will clear the battlefield, and the TV network will start broadcasting the fight.

"This is where the solo play comes into effect. When a BoS fight is instigated only those two players can fight it out. The other team members watch and place bets to try to increase their overall winnings. The more zones the team controls, the more tickets they gain and the faster they can then win money through the BoS duels. The multiplayer will allow 32 players to play together, in two teams of 16 each"



Of note for techies is that this game is being programmed to take advantage of not only Shader Model 3 support but also it may be the first game to support the Ageia PhysX PPU, the dedicated physics processor, an actual chip designed to assist the GPU in processing information that will be going on mobos.