PC PC GAMES

OK, I just read an article over at “GAMEZONE” that raises 5 issues of PC gaming. And all I can say is… are you sure you are a PC gamer?! But I digress and let you take a look. Is he right? Since most of the people that comment on their site seem to be console guys why don’t you folks take a stab and let me know what you think. Here is how he starts and the 5 issues he has:

As a PC gamer, I love my platform of choice. I love that I can customize my machine, that I can mod my games, that I can download a mod from another user, that my games have the potential to look better than on any other platform… However, I also recognize the PC’s many shortcomings, a few of which I’ll examine in more detail here.
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Competing Platforms
Lack Of Killer App
Hardware
Lack Of Split-screen

I kind of want to ask him to hand his true PC gamer members card in. But I would really like to hear what you guys have to say. Should make a great next podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:45:04 — 30.1MB)

Staying within my delayed release schedule. This week I blame it all on Blizzard and you know why! We talked quite a bit about Blizzard this week. What does it mean for PC gaming, how big is Starcraft2 going to be and is Blizzard going to be contending with STEAM for the Digital distribution crown?
Also talked a bit hardware. After Nvidia made a bit of waves with the GTX460 what will ATI do to answer? And on the CPU side, is AMD going to challenge Intel with it’s next generation of CPUs? Competition, it’s a wonderful thing, so let’s hope so.

And this is what else we talked about:

• Alien Swarm
• Magic the Gathering
• Midnight opening for Starcraft 2
• CGI in Blizzard games
• What makes a real gamer
• BIOWARE and  DLC
• AMD CPU talk
• Mail call
• Monitor size and video card relation
• Digital distribution, what would it take to compete with STEAM
• Blizz-Con, now you too can be there

Foxtrot and StarCraft 2

Nerd Rap and Tron Girl

StarCraft history in 5 minutes

No Crossplatforming!

Gamestop wants to be their own online thing!

More Mass Effect 2 dlc!

Bulldozer, AMD chip coming soon!

No Netflix disc needed soon for PS3

The Wizzile gets a new SSD

Blizzard live!

About 25 hour in the ride that was Starcraft 2 single player (on medium) is over. It was a fun ride and it was a worthy ride. I enjoyed every bit of it. Yes, I could wish that it was a longer ride. But just like it was with Lord of the Rings, even a great movie has come to an end. Blizzard packed a great story, awesome cinematic in a great package and now I have Multi-player to look forward to.  All in all you are actually watching a full feature movie in CG. If you pack all the scenes together I bet you get close if not over a full feature film. Nothing feels like a filler and all somehow fits nicly into the story. A Blizzard polished game, what else can you say.

Click on the PCPCGames Livestream and watch.

First impressions, very nice. Game install does a “Starcraft so far” recap.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 0:35 — 171.3KB)

Gamestop just called! Funny!

Wanna join us celebrate SC2? Meet us in Douglasville and see us play the first couple hours. Drop me a mail if interested. Get ready for some news tonight and maybe even a live stream.

You tag it… if it’s funny you might get a prize!

So Gamespy put up an interesting find and after reading, I just had to post. I give som credit Microsoft for at least attemtping this.

Microsoft collected some of the best console gamers around and some basic PC gamers to test the viability of merging XBox live with PC gamers.  The results?  the “Mediocre” PC players routinely smoked the console gamers proving to Microsoft that Key Board and mouse trumps consoles in game play. 

They’ve put a stop the project, for valid reasons, but I do resonate with the comment by the Gamespy editor that too bad they can’t move forward.  At least they tested the waters.

Check it out here: http://www.gamespy.com/articles/110/1107892p1.html

Why is it that Blizzard can make me want to buy so many games that they make! JUST FROM THE FLIPPING TRAILERS THEY PUT OUT!

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In Sword of the Stars, and its three expansion packs: Born of Blood, A Murder of Crows, and Argos Naval Yard, you can play as one of three races! The ever-so-popular Humans! The bug-like, infestation of the Hivers! The aquatic yet very psychic Liir. The lizard-tailed Tarka. The ever hungry, very dumb, yet tough Zuul (argh). And finally Morrgi, the flocking birds of the Galaxy! You can build ships of various types and missions from the scout, all the way to the Flagship Dreadnought. Have space stations for Trade, or build outer reaching asteroid monitors to keep an eye on the other races! The Zuul have very tough minded ships, while the Hivers build the ever so annoying Warp-Gate ships. Research mass-drive based weapons, or the most devastating of plague ever let lose on a planet, turning the very beings of a world on into beasts!

A lot of ways to play Sword of the Stars, I am psyched that the whole set is on sale right now on Steam, and also because of the announcement for Sword of the Stars 2. Steam is just one of the many sites offering it, at the end of the article I’ll list all that I know.

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Alien Swarm is a top down shooter multi-player co-op game. It’s a free game that Valve released that is shaping up to be very promising. I’ll put up some videos of game play sometime tonight, so you can see it’s goodness. Right now it’s a two gig download and if you loved classics, like, Smash TV or any other semi-frantic shooters – this will be right up your alley. It’s also fairly pretty as well.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/630/

or the official site:

http://www.alienswarm.com/

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:40:37 — 28.8MB)

This week on time and with lots of different topics. Some more in detail look at World of Tanks and some insight into APB from a players perspective. Also looking at some of the crazy headlines this week, all sorts of people calling each other by name…

• World of Tanks
• APB, a players perspective
• E3 a special look (The PC is back baby!)
• Bobby Kotick is a D***
• Mark Rein is a bully and got on Cliffes bad side
• Pachter is off his rocker. Yet again!
• Why Valve does it right, and TF2 is still in the top 10 selling games
• Alien Swarm, a Valve freebie
• StarCraft 2 Requirements
• UBI in the NEWS
• More GTX460 info
• Is ATI releasing a new Video Card this year? (6000 series)
• Intel is making major MONEY
• Kommie is looking forward to a game
• Tim Sweeney is apologizing for EPIC
• If you missed the Old Spice on YouTube…you missed a good one
• Don’t miss the opportunity to win a free game! 

Betas are the topic of the day!

• Lord of the Rings Beta on Fileplanet (Yes you need to be a subscriber!)
• Beta for the Team-Based Free to Play Tank game: World of Tanks!
• You a cop or a robber! Find out at: APB (All Points Bulletin!)
• Magic World Online (Chinese Diablo like game being made for English speaking, The Dragon liked it!)
• Our Buddy, Marcus’s site where he has interviews and stuff. Check it out, he is pretty well hooked up in the community.
• Someone has an issue with the CEO of Activision! & Round 2
• Cliff has some words about communicating, and Epic’s opinion on it.
• Pacter at it again… thinks activision should charge a fee for CoD multiplayer
• Rust on our Forums pointed this out! Looks like its time for some co-op Bug Smashing! OH YEAH! Talk about this game here!
• CE-oh no he didn’t!: Microsoft’s Kevin Turner says iPhone 4 might be Apple’s Vista
• Windows XP till 2020!! WHAT!?
• StarCraft 2 Spec’s!
• Just Cause I wanna Co-Op! (4 player co-op in Just Cause 2!)
• OnLive needs people to sign up! (Extends Founder status offer till Sept 6th)
• EA sales its stake in Ubisoft! (15% ONLY CRAP)
• Ubisoft Sales… check it out. We won’t stop if you want too! (Some good deals)
• Crysis and Warhead on sale! PC digital copies only!
• GTX460 has been redesigned! (When the podcast is up, listen to what the Chang-man has to say about it.)
• Six Core, the i9 from Intel!
• http://www.joystiq.com/2010/07/16/cyanides-first-song-of-ice-and-fire-game-detailed/
• Bioware says Consoles are the past!
• And WOW, Epic Founder apologies for Rein’s outburst! (See Cliff bashing above)
• Videos of Old Spice

THQ has quite a sale going on. If you don’t own the THQ complete pack from STEAM yet you might find something worthwhile. Just a bit of a heads up, they hit you with a special fee at checkout for downloads down the road. That is a pretty lame fee THQ!

List of games:

• Metro 2033 $12.50
• Warhammer® 40,000™: Dawn of War® – Chaos Rising $7.50
• Warhammer® 40,000™: Dawn of War® II $7.50
• Warhammer® 40,000™: Dawn of War® – Dark Crusade™ $5.00
• Company of Heroes®: Tales of Valor™ $7.50
• Supreme Commander™ Gold Edition $7.50
• Titan Quest™ Gold Edition $5.00

Here is something that slipped passed me in the last couple weeks. If you don’t check Cliff’s blog on a regular basis you are bound to miss something good. If you listen to us any time you know that Cliff has a special spot in our hearts. He seems to be a genuine nice guy, that loves what he does and aims to please his customer base. Well… he is doing it all wrong… if you believe the voice of Epic Games that is! Here is the story from Cliff’s Blog:

I’ve mulled over whether to say anything at all, but if you can’t say what you think about the games industry when you own your own company, when can you?

I was part of a panel yesterday at Develop, the games conference for developers in Brighton UK. I was speaking about ‘microstudios’ with Robin Lacey(Beatnik), Sean Murray(Hello Games) and Mark Morris(Introversion), all of whom are good guys. As a one-man outfit, I’m the real baby studio there, but at 13 years of experience, also the grandfather, so I guess that makes me middle aged. Anyway… all was cool, and there was much joking and mutual silliness. Apparently I am the Barry Manilow of game development, and a mug to spend £75 on jeans. And the topic then came up of how indies can respond directly to gamers on stuff like messageboards. Basically I started making the point, and mark was also agreeing about how someone can email you as an indie dev, and you can reply personally back to that potential customer, and hopefully, that way you have converted that guy to buying the game.

At this point, there was this derisive snort from this guy in the front row, who said something to the effect of ‘one guy? who cares, that’s a waste of time’. He then started to lecture us on how that’s a silly way to do it. I’m 95% sure that all four of us on the panel thought ‘what the fuck?’ as well as ‘who is this guy’? compounded by Robin asking him if he worked in marketing.

Anyway… it turned out this guy was Mark Rein from Epic, although he seemed to assume everyone within earshot knew exactly who he was, and why he must obviously be right. I got the impression he was there to laugh at the little guys, or to just inform us how we are all wrong. Interestingly, it seemed there was someone from sports interactive (one time indies, as I recall) there, who seemed more on the indie wavelength than Mark. It would have been cool to chat with him.

So… I’ve given this a lot of thought, and weighed up the pros and cons of just putting this down to misinterpreting someone, and so on, and I have reached this conclusion.

Mark Rein is a jerk.

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