Games Archive

"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.

"The major functionality - gaming - is all there. Shield runs 'stock' Android, but NVIDIA's TegraZone curated app space is downright beautiful. Some thought was put into that UI. From there, you can play your Shield-optimized games, purchase new ones, and (if you have the proper NVIDIA graphics card on your PC), use Shield to control games being played on a PC gaming rig. The latter feature will launch in beta. We've used it twice now, and it's surprisingly lag-free, though it does have the occasional connection hiccup." I don't really know what to think of this thing. It looks insane and I don't see it competing with smartphones and other handheld gaming devices, but it does have some cool technology and I must admit that as a gamer, I'd love to have one. I have no idea where this will go.

Good news by Ars' Peter Bright. "According to an internal Microsoft e-mail sent to all full-time employees working on the next Xbox, 'Durango is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today's Internet.' It continues, 'There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should 'just work' regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game.'" Conveniently 'leaked' of course.

"As mentioned earlier, many developers understand the principles behind modular level design, but we hope to offer insights gained from our extensive exploration of this topic. To do this, we'll go over the various benefits and drawbacks we've found over the years, with an emphasis on how to get the most out of the workflow." A glimpse of just how complex one of the best games of this generation really is.

The Wii U isn't doing well. "We're told by someone with access to the NPD's data that sales for January were 'well under' 100,000 units. By our estimates, sales were somewhere between 45,000 and 59,000 units for the month, which is lower than any of the three previous-generation home consoles sold in their worst months, with the possible exception of a recent performance by the original Wii." All that is old will be new again.

More and more evidence is pointing towards the next Xbox requiring an always-on internet connection in order to play any games - i.e., once you lose your connection, you can't play any game at all. Three minutes after losing your connection, "your" game will suspend itself and stop playing. Microsoft's Adam Orth took to Twitter to defend this anti-consumer practice, but he did so in the most ungraceful of ways.

"In all the fuss and mess of the disastrous SimCity launch, one refrain has been repeated again and again. While legions may be begging for an offline mode, EA representatives have been abundantly clear that this simply isn't possible. Maxis' studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, has told both Polygon and Kotaku that they 'offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers', and that it would take 'a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game' for single player. A SimCity developer has got in touch with RPS to tell us that at least the first of these statements is not true. He claimed that the server is not handling calculations for non-social aspects of running the game, and that engineering a single-player mode would require minimal effort." This keeps getting worse and worse for EA. It's also clear that Maxis' own developers are not happy with EA's meddling.

"To see anyone defending EA and Maxis for the state of SimCity, even were it in perfect working order on launch, depresses me to my core. This self-flagellation-as-skincare notion, where gamers loudly and proudly defend the destruction of their own rights as consumers, is an Orwellian perversity. That it might be considered in any way controversial to call them out on their crap, to point out that no, always-on DRM is not an advantage to anyone, is bewildering. It's a sign of just how far the gaming world has fallen into the rabbit hole of the publisher's burrowing." As usual, RPS hits the nail on the head so hard it shoots through the board.

So, SimCity has been released - the fifth instalment in this venerable series of fantastic games. However, just as everyone suspected, the game has been completely ruined by the always-online DRM. So much so, in fact, that Amazon has ceased selling the game. Update: and it's only getting worse - EA has suspended all marketing efforts for SimCity, and has asked third parties to do the same. Wow.

Late last night, Sony unveiled the PlayStation 4 - sort of. It's got a custom 8-core AMD x86-64 processor, 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, and a custom Radeon-based graphics chip. It's also got additional chips to offload specific tasks like video (de)compression (livestreaming is built-in!), and there's a large focus on streaming games, but most of it is "an ultimate goal" instead of a definitive feature. It won't play PS3 discs (but will eventually stream many PS3 games), and, while there's some weaselwording involved, second hand games are safe. The biggest surprise? The console itself wasn't shown because it's not done yet. No joke. No price, no release date (other than somewhere before the holidays).

"Valve today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST. The Steam client is now available to download for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. Ubuntu is the most popular distribution of Linux used by millions of people globally and known for its well-designed, easy-to-use customer experience." The beginning of the Steambox. We're on the cusp of a sea change in the gaming world.

"Sources with first-hand experience of Microsoft's next generation console have told us that although the next Xbox will be absolutely committed to online functionality, games will still be made available to purchase in physical form. Next Xbox games will be manufactured on 50GB-capacity Blu-ray discs, Microsoft having conceded defeat to Sony following its ill-fated backing of the HD-DVD format. It is believed that games purchased on disc will ship with activation codes, and will have no value beyond the initial user." Crap like this should be illegal. If I can't buy second-hand games at my local favourite game store, Microsoft can shove this new Xbox where the sun don't shine. Which it obviously doesn't do in Redmond if they can come up with this kind of user-hostile bullshit. You can pretty much guarantee that they have made a silent agreement with Sony to implement similar anti-user feature on the next Playstation.

"EVE Online's complicated inter-corporate politics are often held together by fragile diplomatic treaties and economic agreements. So fragile, in fact, that a single misclick can lead to a fracas that quickly snowballs into all-out warfare. That's what happened to two of the spacefaring sandbox MMO's largest player alliances in the Battle of Asakai, a massive fleet vs. fleet onslaught involving 3,000 players piloting ships ranging from small interceptors to gargantuan capital ships. Straight from the wreckage-strewn outcome of the battle, we're breaking down the basics of what happened for everyone to truly fathom one of the biggest engagements in the game's history." The costs of this battle in in-game currency is, so far, 700 billion. While MMO's don't float my boat, I have to say that this is still pretty awesome. Penny Arcade looks at the technical details server-side, and what a battle like this does to the game's backend infrastructure.

It seems to have so far escaped OSNews' notice (if the top few hits for a site-search for 'Steam' is any indication) that Steam for Linux is now in Open Beta; you can get the Linux steam client from steampowered.com. So far, they appear to only be making an Ubuntu .deb available, and the client will require closed-source GPU drivers in order to work.