Sorry about the caps

I stumbled upon this about two years ago. Since then it has made steady progress, and it is quite fun - even if you don’t have a wheel and pedals. Mouse control can revolve around quadrants of the screen for acceleration, breaking and steering. It may sound dull/weird here but its a nice way of controlling the car.

There are hundreds of cars and many community developed tracks out there, ranging from in development cityscapes to a fully-fledged version of the Nürburgring.

Go download it. Now!

Today we witnessed the deadliest shooting at a US school. I am now going to be horribly blunt.

The first thing that sprung to my mind was “Bloody hell, Jack is going to have a field day with this”. I was not to be dissapointed! For those not familiar with Jack Thompson, he is a lawer in the US set against blaming computer games for anything and everything - regardless.

So, not surprisingly, we see him on Fox news pulling more media stunts to preach his thoughts. It sickens me people like this can be put in such a position of power within the media. Within a few hours after a major incident he can come on millions of TVs and claim anything; even before the shooters are identified.

P.S. Some may get a little peeved I am posting anything about him (the more attention he gets… etc etc), but some of the people I know read here may not have heard of the guy, hence the post.

UPDATE (2007-04-17):

A comment left by Robert included another article on a similar subject, you can find it here. Thanks for the link.

Seems like there is a thread on the Xbox 360 forums causing a stir. Those of you with GH2 may want to read it.

A select quote:

I, too, am a proud owner of a white brick that flashes red lights. Called up MS and have to pay for the repair. If the patch is the cause of the hardware failure, the I hope that Red Octane picks up the bill.

Recently I took a trip to the Virgin Megastore on Buchannan Street, Glasgow. As always, I went to have a look at the games floor.

As soon as you step off the escalator, you find the small Xbox360 stand. It was surrounded by say 5 or 6 teenagers, all playing this driving game. It looked fantastic. The attention to detail was evident: from the small view movement on turns and bumps to the camera flashes in the crowd. Unfortunately I didn’t stay long enough to catch the name of the game - the PS3 stand beckoned!

Whilst I may have been programming on the console for months now (and now have an extra shiny 22″ HD display on my desk for it), I have never once played a game on it. So, when I turned to see a huge PS3 stand, seats included, I went to see what the lone player was playing.

Sonic the frakking Hedgehog.

Not only that, but a really bad looking Sonic. Every time the player jumped, the screen stuttered down to some 10-12 fps. It may as well have been 2D for how I saw it. Certainly not a very good first impression!

Doesn’t seem true, does it?

In the UK, major retailers such as Game and Gamestation pull a huge amount of profit from pre-owned games. The publishers get no money from these sales. With the huge leap in direct-download and all the DRM involved in that (which makes it impossible to resell your game, hence increasing publisher profit) you would have thought Sony would want to get up close and cosy with the idea.

What I am trying to say is, if they are not going to do away with retail, then the content model is going to change. Think episodic content. Think paying for extra stuff. The game you buy in retail spaces is only the base; they will make the money in selling you the extra content which you used to get anyway when buying a game.

This doesnt include the huge wads of cash people now pay for subscriptions to games like WoW now, though!

Valve have stated that the ‘its-done-when-its-done’ Team Fortress 2 has cross platform play over the xbox 360 and the PC.

Why?

I sure hope that this did not add to development time. Quake 3 on the dreamcast anyone?

When will people learn…

Just a quick post about a previously commercial game which is now available for free.

Purge is free and currently 100% user supported. A new version of Purge, called Final Purge, will be released as a free promotional title for the PushTop.com free games website.

Purge is an online-only PC computer game. It is a hybrid First-Person-Shooter / Role-Playing-Game set in the near future accounting a war between the diametrically opposed forces of science-fiction (the Order) and fantasy (the Chosen). Technology versus magic. Science versus religion. It is a great divine war, where followers pray for intervention from the extraterrestrial deity Evod or the supernatural deity Mabus.

Read more about it, and if you like the sound of it already, download.

We have lots of rumours going about lately about asset stealing. I am not going to go into whether or not it really is stealing, rather, what should happen if the developers were indeed using unlicensed content within their game.

Coming from a MOD background, if a team was to use content from another game without permission, we would be shut down/sued. People have said ‘aww, it is just a few textures’ but if they are really did use these assets without permission I do hope they treat commercial companies the same as a bunch of individuals doing something they love.

Previously I noted ‘Battlestar Galactica: Beyond the Red Line’ looked an extremely polished demo, with much promise. I was not let down!

The demo features a very short campaign; extremely short for the file size, I thought, but for a demo it does everything required. Graphics, controls, sound and interfaces are all shown off to varying degrees. Gameplay was something I thought the demo lacked, but I believe this was because of the fact only a few missions are included.

Things I noted were:

1. User interface: I was confused. The first screen presents you with four main panels, one of which I thought should have been along the lines of ’start’ or ‘go’: a ‘quick, I want to play now!‘ button. The button I was looking for was named ‘brefing’ to the top. The design of the GUI made me think that briefing was the title of this area, so more thought needs to go into UI design. The labels for some of the standard buttons do not stand out enough, so I found myself searching for the accept button many times.
2. The controls: There should be an ‘I’m a noob, make it easy for me’ option. People download games to have fun, and learning controls certainly is not fun. It’s the FS2 complex style, which while great for advanced players, needs dumbing down early on if people want that. Gently bring in the advanced nature over many missions.
3. Graphics: Fantastic. The game looks and plays great on my modest machine (GF 6600GT, XP2800+, 1280MB) and it was a pleasure to play.
4. Sound: The sound is excellent - those who watch BSG will notice they have included character quirks in briefings and the music is fitting for the game, it could be straight from the series for all I know. One annoyance was the computer generated voices at some points; it was too fast and hard to understand.
5. Missions: We started with a training mission which is the norm for these sort of games, which went down well. The dialogue is good, and stories believable, but I thought the demo too short.

I have not tried the multiplayer aspect, I just do not have the time to look at it. From the singleplayer demo, however, many good points are clear to see. I hope the BtRL team keep up the good work, as they could have a great game in the works here.

Colins’ rating: 9/10

Pros: Stunning graphics, true to the current series, believable storylines and great sound.

Cons: Confusing interface, lack of a training ‘newbie’ control scheme, and not long enough!

Its great to see Urban Terror (UrT) is still going strong. I can remember downloading the first beta they released - and hating it. Downloading the first major release, however, was different and I fell in love. A great example of a true total conversion, moving away from the original game (quake 3), pushing the engine and pulling the talents from the MOD community.

I have not had a game of UrT for a good couple of years now, so as soon as I heard they had released version 4.0, I grabbed it. A new feature for this release is that they have bundled in ioUrbanTerror (based on ioQuake3, and of course the GPL’d source for Quake 3), so players without Quake can play. I chose to install the ioUrbanTerror version as to not fumble around with installing Quake and its Point Release updates again.

One thing I have noticed is that they have packaged the BattlEye anti-cheat engine into ioUrbanTerror. This is a good thing, and from what is being said on the UrT forum many servers are already moving over to ioUrbanTerror from Quake3 and PunkBuster. There seem to be a good number servers online already for it.

So, give it a try. What is there to loose?