It's certainly not uncommon for games to borrow concepts and features from each other, particular when the inspiration is as popular as Team Fortress 2, but it looks like one Korean developer just may have taken it a bit too far.
H.A.V.E. Online is a class-based multiplayer shooter, set to launch an open beta on PC later this year, and according to the developer's site, offers: "Ease and comport anytime 3rd-person-view shooting game. A new enjoyment of selecting weapons fitting for situations Everyone can enjoy with ease and comport anytime.".
Activision have just sent through a press release outlining the involvement of the legendary DJ Grandmaster Flash in their upcoming DJ Hero title.
DJ ready? Dance floor ready? Everybody ready? Let's go! Musical legend Grandmaster Flash, the first DJ to make the turntable an instrument, is coming to DJ Hero, joining the epic list of DJs who will appear as in-game characters and who have created mixes exclusively for the award-winning game. Along with contributing two never-before-released mixes, Grandmaster Flash lends his unique, recognisable voice and DJ know-how to the game's tutorial level, schooling players on the game mechanics and the turntable controller. To top it off, FreeStyle Games created an exclusive mix using two of Grandmaster Flash's original creations – "Boom" and "Tap."
The list of AAA hip hop and rap stars for this game gets stronger all the time. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty excited for it.
You can check out two trailers for GMF in DJ Hero here and here.
Following up yesterday's in-depth preview, here's even more info.
In between closed doors screenings of SEGA's new Aliens vs Predator first person shooter at E3 2009, AusGamers was fortunate enough to score a quick Q&A with Tim Jones, Project Lead on the game at UK-based developer Rebellion.
One of the key things for us about the game is, particularly for the marine gameplay where we're really trying the recapture the sense of fear that a lot of people experienced on the first PC version in particular; recapturing that. It's not good if you just sort of walk around a corner, you get killed by an alien and then you return to checkpoint and you're like "ok that alien is going to be right around that corner again" -- that kind of spoils the scare.
Not to be overshadowed by the recent AmrA 2 launch, Codemasters have released a new batch of screenshots from their realism focused first person shooter, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising.
You can take a closer look right here on our Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising game page. Dragon Rising is due on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, September 2009.
We've all heard the cry: "videogames are bad", and no amount of blue-in-the-face rebuttal tends to change standard, uneducated opinion (try telling people it's your job). But thankfully, every once in a while, proper testing is done and positive results come in.
The University of Rochester in the US has been conducting studies using videogames for cognitive science. The ABC has an interesting article up pointing out the positives researchers are beginning to find.
Today, a growing area of brain research suggests modern fast-paced action video games — in particular first-person shooter games — may sharpen your vision, improve your attention and working memory, and develop your fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination.
It's suggested in the article the positive affects of this sort of thing translate to every day activities such as driving, and may even help reverse brain degradation in the ageing process.
The fourth episode of downloadable content for the massive Fallout 3 has arrived. Fallout 3: Point Lookout offers players a whole new area to explore that shifts the game's setting from one of barren wastes to wet marshland on an island inhabited by dangerous mutated inbreds, tripped-out cultists and two-faced locals.
This is arguably the best of all the DLC on offer and if you haven't divulged in any yet, this is one we certainly recommend checking out.
Blizzard have released some images showing the tech trees for the Zerg, Protoss and Terran sides in the upcoming Starcraft 2.
If you're already laying down your strats to figure out when you can build your Hydralisk Den or Infestation Pit, then you might want to check these out - we've got them available as images in our Starcraft 2 screenshot section.
Rebellion Developments, creator's of the original Aliens vs Predator first person shooter have come back to the series to revive the much-loved three faction formula with a modern touch.
AusGamers recently had the opportunity to check out the new game in action and you can find our our very positive impressions in this in-depth preview feature.
Aliens vs Predator (Still tentatively titled) is currently slated for an early 2010 release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
David Perry, whom some might remember from his work on games like Earthworm Jim and MDK has released a new video showcasing Gaikai, a new technology that lets you stream games in a web-browser, with a remote server doing all the heavy lifting.
Not to be confused with On-Live, which uses it's own client hardware device, all Gaikai needs is a web browser and the latest version of Adobe Flash.
Gaikai is a revolutionary new technology that lets you play any game online in your browser. In the age of the cloud, when all your documents, email, photos and videos are instantly reachable online, it seems archaic that you still need to install gigabytes of game files on an expensive PC with an even more expensive video card. And even then you can only play from that specific computer!
Gaikai takes a radical new approach – we host the games, we run them, we worry about hardware and software updates, and we stream them to you. Full resolution, full speed, stereo sound, low lag, no compromise. The only thing you need is a browser and an internet connection.
The video demo showcases a surprisingly smooth experience and is purportedly running on a client with a 21ms ping to the server (similar to the latency most here would experience to local gaming servers in Australia). David demos a variety of recent games including Spore and Need for Speed Pro Street, World of Warcraft, Eve Online and even a Nintendo 64 emulator running Mariokart.
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If it's as good as it looks, this may well be the perfect way to play a lot of modern games without having to upgrade, but we're going to stay skeptical at this point because there's no way to judge what kind of input latency we're seeing there.
Most gamers can probably recall playing a first person shooter or other fast-paced game on a laggy plasma or early LCD monitors and how bad that lag feels, so 20 or 30 more ms from an Internet connection could only be worse right?
Nevertheless, it's still very cool tech and would be extremely handy for say, trying a game before you buy. Purchasing a 20 minute trial of a full game with no need for lengthy installs or hefty system requirements would be way better than any demo, input lag or no - even from a Mac or Linux machine.
Famed id Software programmer and mad rocket-scientist John Carmack recently spoke to MTV's Multiplayer about the iPhone projects they have in the works. There's two separate articles, the first confirming that Quake, Quake 2 and Rage are going to be coming to the iPhone, and that Quake 3 might also make it (especially with the 3G S in the picture, which offers increased processing power). Wolfenstein RPG and Doom 2 RPG are also in the works already, and Doom Classic is apparently only a couple of weeks away.
The second discusses Doom Resurrection, a lightgun-on-rails shooter in the Doom universe. Definitely will be interesting to see how much id can push the hardware of the platform!
Brisbane-based developer Fuzzy Eyes have sent along a few new screenshots from Edge of Twilight, their dark vs light third person action game, in the works for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Gameplay is split between combat, puzzle-solving and exploration. These elements will in turn be split between the two parallel planes of reality that only the player may
traverse; the spiritually influenced, Lithern night realm, and the industrial, Athern dominated, day realm.
More screenshots and trailers can be found on our Edge of Twilight game page.
As pointed out by SUPERBOSS, Firefox v3.5 has now been released! Here's the full list of release highlights:
Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:
* Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
* Support for the HTML5 video and audio elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
* Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
* The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing.
* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, canvas text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.
You can wait for the automatic update or you can download it now for Windows, locally from AusGamers!
Anyone who knows comics has likely heard of Joe Madureira, and if you haven't, you're about to find out why he's considered a legend in the field.
Moving on from comicbooks though, Joe is the co-founder of Vigil Games, the studio behind the much anticipated, and very cool, Darksiders, which we've already had an extensive look at.
We were lucky enough to get some one on one time with the comic legend though, and so have a full video interview you can watch right here, as well as a written transcript.
Nats has updated his article explaining the benefits of jailbreaking and how to do it with 3.0 firmware (only for the regular iPhone 3G for now, not the 3G S). The guide goes into detail on what jailbreaking is, why you might be interested in doing it, how you actually do it, and some of the cool things you can do with a jailbroken iPhone.
If you're interested in getting the most out of your iPhone then make sure you check out our how to jailbreak for a step-by-step tutorial on getting it done.
Just a quick heaps up; AusGamers will be blinking offline in the near future for hopefully around 30 minutes for some scheduled maintenance. During this time please consult one of the other handful of websites for gaming news and information.
Maybe in the meantime you could join our fan page on Facebook; I'm giving away some old gaming-related bits and pieces over the next couple weeks.
Blizzard have revealed, by way of an interview with incgamers.com, that the hotly anticipated StarCraft 2 won't support multiplayer over local network, only via their battle.net online service.
The reason given for this from Blizzard VP Rob Pardo was a vague "because of the planned technology to be incorporated into Battle.net". Obviously this doesn't mean people on a LAN won't be able to play against each other, just that they'll need to have internet connectivity and login to battle.net in order to do so.
Perhaps it's not such a huge deal these days, as most anywhere you'd be playing on LAN would have Internet access. Still, we can't help but feel a little stung. It's arguable that much of the original StarCraft's popularity is owed to it's strong local network component and WarCraft 3 was well supported on LAN as well, so why the sudden lack? Will Diablo 3 suffer the same fate?
It's been a hectic few weeks, not just the one, and with settling in after E3 as well as getting on top of all the great info we grabbed from the event, AusGamers' Weekly Wrap took a short break. But we're back with arguably the biggest wrap yet, and it's only going to keep being full (and tasty) with all the great gaming we have for you ahead (on top of more post-E3 stuff, we also have new hands-on sessions in the works as well as a massive manifest of reviews to roll out).
So don't mind us as we recap some of the early post-E3 features we managed to put together. After all, you might have actually missed the, and we wouldn't want that now, would we? So sit back and click through with all of the links provided below...
In the headlines Codemasters and Atari revealed new cricketers have signed on for Ashes Cricket 2009, we found Xbox Live Gold Memberships running at AU$1 for a month's trial, Splash Damage revealed Brink would indeed be using a dedicated server system for PC multiplayer, more revelations in the Duke Nukem fiasco unearthed the existence of "Duke Begins", we decided to add Usenet to your AusGamers file grabbing abilities, Infinity Ward all but officially revealed we'd see a snow map for multiplayer in Modern Warfare 2, Rockstar moved GTA: Chinatown Wars to the PSP and also gave us a glimpse at the all-new Max Payne, NCSoft's Aion will be hitting Aussie store shelves in a Limited Edition bundle, id Software accepted an acquisition by Bethesda parent company Zenimax, BioWare and Mythic are teaming up over at EA to make an uber RPG studio, will the loss of "Call of Duty" from Modern Warfare 2's title affect sales? Age of Conan received its biggest content update yet, original Killzone 1 maps landed on Killzone 2, the Arma 2 demo launched, Valve released updates for both Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 and finally, EA very sneakily launched Battlefield Heroes.
In local video and editorial we have an absolute feast for you as well with a host of video interviews and transcripts from our time over at E3 as well as key previews and impressions of some of the year's biggest releases. A few of these editorial/interview pieces happened over a week ago, but just in case you missed them:
That's it from us for last week, but this week has heaps in store, so be sure to stay tuned for more news, review, previews and interviews, right here on AusGamers.
With the release of Starcraft 2 approaching, AMD have published a paper (which safe to assume was presented at the '08 SigGraph conf on all things graphically magic) on the technical aspects of the effects and lighting techniques that have gone into making their next bread winner looking crisp and shiny.
It's like one of those phat Nvidia yearbooks, only easier to digest. PDF via reddit. promoted forum item
We're not done yet, and what better middle-of-the-journey game to focus on, than a game that focuses on a roadie! We had a chance to pull Brutal Legend gameplay programmer, Anna Kipnis aside from her duties running people through the game at this year's E3 and asked her a few quick questions about what is quickly gearing up to be one of my most anticipated titles.
She touches on what the game's about, design, art-direction, Hot Rods and Black Sabbath!
As noted on various places around the tubes, Battlefield Heroes has quietly snuck out and is now publicly accessible. It'll be interesting to see if it crumples under the load or if this quiet release will make a difference to the uptake as everyone finds out about it more gradually.
Anyway, you can check it out over on the official site right now. They've also released a pretty cool cheesy new trailer to promote the game, so check it out.
In follow-up to our extensive preview of Assassin's Creed 2 posted yesterday, we also have our promised video interview with Associate Producer, Vincent Pontbriand, which reveals heaps of information about the game.
How you'll be travelling between areas, the size of areas, which renaissance areas you'll be visiting as well as information on the all-new dynamic AI system, mission-structures, the new character, Ezio, the old character, Desmond Miles and whether the older avatar, Altair, of the first game will have an impact on the game and Ezio are all touched upon, as well as so much more.
Required updates for both Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 have been uploaded, and can be applied - as usual - when next restarting your Steam client.
TF2 features some Linux Dedicated Server love, Missed Notes from previous updates as well as the usual bug/crash/exploit type of stuff. While the L4D update has some nice updates for authoring tools and equally more of the above - business as usual really.
To check out the list of Team Fortress 2 addresses, hit this link. For the Left 4 Dead update list, hit this link.
Armed Assault and Operation Flashpoint developer Bhoemia Interactive have released a PC for ArmA 2, the newest addition to their acclaimed line-up of realism-geared combat-sims.
Featuring the most realistic warfare gameplay ever, ArmA II promises to build on the excellent features that have made Bohemia Interactive a respected name amongst both gamers and the US army, who use a modified version to train recruits for combat situations. Team-based combat, a comprehensive playbook of military tactics and an enormous battlefield to explore are just some of the features that will make this the military simulation of choice this year.
ArmA 2 demo allows you to experience the unique gameplay featured in the full version of ArmA 2 including multiplayer, as well as samples of the vast amount of vehicles, weapons and units and realistic environment. The demo also contains a part of Chernarus terrain.
You can nab the 3GB sampler, right here from AusGamers files.
ArmA 2 is available now from Steam and due for an Aussie retail release on August 20, exclusively for PC.
