Displaying items by tag: Gaming

The days of the long campaign game are almost dead and gone. Since Half Life 2 we have not really seen a game with the same sprawl even with its linear path. The reason for this is that game developers are under increased pressure to get the title out. They do not have the time to create the massive world that we saw in Half Life and Half Life 2. To combat this game have been turning to the idea of the side quest. These are little mini games inside the world of the larger game that provide opportunities to explore the world further. Of course games have moved away from the end to end style of games like Half Life, Modern Warfare etc. The need to allow for player development has moved games in a new, and needed, direction.

I have to admit that I am a big fan of the whole Zombie genre. There is something about a game where the “bad’ guy is predominantly the undead out for your brains. Added into most of these games is an element of hardship. You do not have all of the trappings of modern technology, food, medicine, ammo and weapons are all scarce. Well… at least that is the way it is supposed to be. In a lot of current games you still have access to some pretty heavy firepower even if ammo is thin on the ground.

In 2004 Valve released the follow on to their wildly popular Half Life series in the form of Half Life2. They followed this up with an attempt at spacing out the next few games as chapters. This was supposed to benefit fans of the game by giving them a new “game” on a much faster schedule. Sadly for fans of Half Life this plan did not go well and the episodes dried up after getting only two out to the masses. This was despite the fact that three full episodes were planned. Since the release of Half Life 2: Episode 2 fans have been waiting for something, anything from Valve that features their favorite PHD hero, Dr. Gordon Freeman.

CES 2015, Las Vegas NV - Palazzo
Out of all of the people we visited during CES 2015 Thermaltake’s suite was one of the most interesting. When we walked in we found three full suites packed with cases, cooling, power supplies and items aimed right at the gamers out there. I was rather impressed even before Shannon Rob came by to show everything off.

Remember how Ubisoft offered that free game to everyone that had issues with AC Unity? Well despite many people thinking that this was to make things right it was really all about making sure that Ubisoft did not end up the target of a law suit. According to multiple sources on the internet there is verbiage in the EULA that says you are giving up any and all rights to sue Ubisoft over the issues present in AC Unity. To call this a jackass move on the part of Ubisoft is something of an understatement.

Valve has decided to remove the game Hatred from their project green light program and the decision has been met by strong comments for and against the move (which has led to them putting it back). The game is, shall we say, interesting in that it puts the player in the role of someone that is planning to go out and kill a large number of innocent people. The trailer shows a number of disturbing images (in our opinion) including a scene of the main character putting a gun in someone’s mouth and pulling the trigger. From most aspects the game is not good for anything other than just senseless violence, but then again there are many other games in genre that follow the same story line and they are still available.

Just when you thought it could not get any worse for Ubisoft it turns out that the patch they designed to fix all of the broken stuff is also sort of broken. According to a post on the Assassin’s Creed Unity site some Xbox owners were seeing a 40GB download when they were trying to grab patch 4 for the game. It seems that the patch was attempting to re-download the entire game and simply overwrite all of the game files instead of just trying to replace the messed up ones.

With the launch of Windows 8 the gaming world was a tad shaken up. It seems that Microsoft was abandoning the PC gamer in favor of their own console. Everything about Windows 8 seemed designed to push the Xbox as the center of the gaming world. It was a decision that made many development houses more than a little angry. It was bad enough that Valve made the choice to begin working on their own Linux based OS to support games. The gaming community responded favorably to this change which we are sure made Microsoft more than a little nervous. To add insult to injury the Xbox One did not do as well as expected at launch and in the first months of its life.

Ever since the announcement of Windows 8 there has been a renewed push for gaming on Linux. We saw one game developer even go so far as to make their own semi-customized flavor of Linux in the form of the SeamOS. Although interest in Linux gaming has tailored off due to delays in the “Steam Box” and other problems (lack of games) we are hearing that at least one very popular AAA title will be coming to Linux.

Ubisoft is at it again with an announcement that they will delay review copies of the game The Crew until launch day. Their justification for this is that there is no way to properly test the game with such a small group of people. On their blog they claim “it’s only possible to assess our game in its entirety with other real players in the world. And by other, we mean thousands and thousands and thousands of players – something that can’t be simulated with a handful of devs playing alongside the press.”