PC PC GAMES

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:23 — 42.5MB)

Was it Minecraft that made this podcast so late… close, but no. Sorry to all that waited till the end of the week for our 40th episode.
We did however talk a little about Minecraft and if you listen till the very end you will hear Fascinators live first impressions as he purchased and logged in for the first time while we recorded. Other things we touched on are:

• Sins of a Solar Empire
• Civ V
• Minecraft
• AION
• Microsoft and the commitment to PC gaming
• Tim’s top 15 list of PC gaming
• GOG (Good old Games) is not dead… funny fail!
• Is Bungie making an MMO?
• STEAM top 10
• Josh is discovering Minecraft
• What Curlen is using his new computer for

If you have listen to our podcast for a while you know what we think of piracy. We don’t like it, we feel that a good developer needs to make money and earned it if he made some software you enjoy enough to pour your time into it.

Much is made about piracy on the PC. How easy it is, how much money it costs the developers and publishers. You might have even seen the lame excuse by some developers that say developing for the PC is not worth their time since so much is stolen especially on that platform.

Much of these arguments are easily debunkt and don’t hold water… again we talked about them in length in our podcasts. But since FIFA11 just hit the retail channel I figured I take a quick look at the news groups to see if pirates are busy pirating and to see what the black market does offer. Newsgroups are usually the first place you will find software and most of the software that will make it onto torrent sites comes from newsgroups.

So FIFA 11 is right now available for:

• XBOX360

That is it for right now. No PC version yet… no WII or PS3. I don’t doubt that we will see a copy for all of them sooner or later, but can’t we just put the myth to rest that the PC is the one and only platform (and the first) things get pirated on?! Yes, this is just one software, but overall you see a XBOX360 version much much quicker than anything else. I will follow this trend a little more as we go into the Christmas season and post updates as I find them.

It’s time to dust of Borderlands and maybe play a little less Minecraft?! Who is with me… let’s get a claptrap or two!

If you have Minecraft it and want to help us build on the pcpcgames server join us here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:20:17 — 47.4MB)

I hit a raw nerve last week when I wrote about an experience with a game demo. The game might have been pretty and great, but the DEMO got more in the way of the presentation or made things overly difficult, than showing me the cool things. So we took some time this week and talked about the purpose of a game or software demo, what it should accomplish and what good or bad experience we had in the past with them.

The other talking points are:

• RIP All points Bulletin (Dirty Laundry Included)
• Why you shouldn’t get a Tattoo for a game
• New Flight Sim from Microsoft?!
• Pirates of the Buring Sea more content
• Activision CEO in the news again
• Intel now sells unlock codes?!
• STEAM now updates your AMD (ATI) drivers
• SC2 cheaters, watch out!
• STEAM Wallet
• Battlefield Vietnam DLC
• Let’s talk about a Date… errr… DEMO
• Mafia 2 and another DLC
• Hardware Talk (AMD, Intel and Video Cards)
• Corsair Obsidian 800D Computer Case
• And a heck of and “Outtro”

Introduction:

My childhood was dominated by a few select games that I have always regarded as the greatest of all time. These games include GTA: Vice City, B-17 Bomber Command and Crimson Skies and of course my two very favorites, Dungeon Keeper 2 and Lego Rock Raiders.

These sandbox building/digging games always struck a chord with me as the game left me with the tools to build anything I want but not without facing enemies and obstacles that made me improve my style and strategies to get through the game. And this is why Minecraft caught my eye and my mouse pointer.

To start this off it is worth mentioning that Minecraft by created by Markus Persson also known as Notch, a former programmer whom has worked for a unknown company by the name Jalbum and also has worked for King.com, one of the more famous flash game sites.

Norch is also a founder of a little known MMOPRG Wurm Online, which the author of this review didn’t even know existed till he did some research.
It is worth taking note that as I write this review the game is still in Alpha mode but feels like a complete game and therefor warrants a review from my side, both to perhaps attract more players to the game or perhaps just educate the fine people of this website on another game out there in the deep expansive intertubes.

Gameplay:

As the title of the game might suggest the game evolves largely around mining and crafting.
It is a very simple crafting system where certain materials will produce certain items if placed correctly

The game however does feature several modes to suit different needs.

There is the survival mode which includes a health bar and evil zombies, spiders and blobs of goo that pursue you when day turns to night.

A creative mode which enables you to build as many blocks as you want without having to collect them and generally just lol around and do whatever you want to do ( This mode is free to play on the Minecraft website in their in game browser, look for a link at the end of the review )

And a adventure mode whereas you cannot build and focus on roaming the cool dungeons of the world that are filled with respawning zombies and the like ( Just as in survival mode )
While Creative mode can be accessed through the servers in Minecrafts multiplayer part ( More on that later ) it is in Survival Mode that the single player is centered around.

In Survival Mode you start off on a random generated island with no tools, no food no nothing and must from there build adequate shelter and gather materials to build armor, weapons and other new more durable tools.

-My adequate shelter is a tower with a swimming pool ontop of the entrance to my mine! Brilliant!-

As I mentioned it is here that both the crafting system comes into play, it is ingenious in its simplicity and indeed it feels very well worked out, almost as a small easy puzzle in itself.

-Hurray for building stuff!-

The crafting section centers around placing the adequate resources in the correct position so as to achieve the item that you want, however when I said puzzle, I do mean puzzle, as the game in no way shape or forms will help you with guessing how, for an example, a pickaxe is to be built.

(continue reading…)

You’ll never guess what I’m doing with it.

I think the title says it all.  As I must confess before I right this review, I am a major fan of the Civilizations series having played every version except colonization.  For those who want to know from the beginning, is this game worth the $49.99 price tag? Yes.  And here is why.  Civ 5 has taken a lot of information, a lot of original game play and what it’s learned over the 4 previous versions, compiled it, mixed it, cleaned and created an extremely beautiful, smooth and intelligent game.

This is not a twitch RTS by any sense of the imagination.  This is a thinking man’s game where you want to start seeing the whole picture 10 or 20 moves in advance.  It is about taking gambles on decisions of which technologies to choose, how to move your units, which ones to sacrifice and which to hold back.  And as effectively, who to become friends with and who to back stab. (continue reading…)

Tonite – at 9:15PM, I will be gathering anyone who picked up Civ5 for a multiplayer session.  I’m posting this on the front page as we want to get as many folks involved as possible.  My hope is (1) we all have a blast (2) to find away to record some of the audio (3) will be taking everyone’s comments, thoughts and posting a preliminary first taste response to Civ5 for the site. 

This is a great chance for you to be apart of PCPCGames and the community.  Again, 9:15 PM ESTD, we will be hosting a large (hopefully massive) round of Civ5 multiplayer.  I’m looking forward to this and hope everyone else is too.

According to Kinect creator Kudo Tsunoda Halo killed the first person shooter on the PC. At least now I know why so few people have been playing with me the last couple month (I hope you hear my sarcasm) Here is what he said in an interview with GameInformer:

If you think about the way that first person shooters evolved, they started on the PC. People for the longest time tried to port shooters from the PC onto the console. And people said the same things that they are saying now about Kinect – “It’s never going to be responsive enough to do this,” or “You’re never going to get a fun first person shooter on the console – it’s only made for a keyboard and mouse and that is the way it is supposed to be played.” And as long as everyone was just porting the existing shooters over to console, they weren’t as fun as the PC ones. Of course, they were built for the PC.

Halo did an awesome job of building a first-person shooter exclusively for the console, and now hardly anyone plays first person shooters on the PC anymore. It’s all about the console. And I feel it is the same with Kinect stuff. If you are constantly trying to take something that is made for a controller and port it over to Kinect, it’s not going to be a good experience because it is made for a controller. If you take the time to build it for Kinect from the ground up, however, you can make something that is a very new experience, but lots of times even more fun than it was before.

Now here is a surpice. I expected a full blown Vietnam game, but it seems the Bad Company 2 team made it DLC and with that it should be very affordable (if you have Bad Company 2 that is). Here is the news as posted at Kotaku:

Through the grass, I see a North Vietnamese troop before me. I dart ahead and, poof, he’s gone.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam is a downloaded expansion pack for Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The game keeps the same classes and gameplay as Battlefield: Bad Company 2. If you are familiar with that title, there are no surprises. (You’ll need to be familiar with it as this DLC title requires the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 game disc.)

The Vietnam expansion pack is the U.S. Marines versus the North Vietnamese army. It includes 4 new maps and brings 15 new Vietnam-era weapons like the M79, 6 new vehicles like the UH-1 Huey, forty-nine different 1960s-era tunes (Fortunate Son!) and new Achievements and Trophies.

The map that EA was demoing for the Tokyo Game Show was called “Phu Bai Valley”. In Conquest Mode, it is familiar territory for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 players. But the new Vietnam vide really offers a new experience. It feels far more than simply a fresh coat of paint. It feels fresh.

Phu Bai Valley is another well-designed multiplayer map from EA Dice, the developer behind the series. The map is quite large and expansive, but still feels intimate. I never felt like I was going to hit a wall, and I never felt like I was playing alone. There are multi-player games that can handle many more players, but EA Dice does an excellent job of not only balancing out the map, but making it flow in a logical progression and opening up the sky for intense combat.

Growing up watching Vietnam film after Vietnam film during the 1980s, I always noticed how everything feels muddy and damp. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam’s Phu Bai Valley feels muddy and damp. That is a good thing.

A multiplatform release of Bad Company 2 Vietnam is slated for later this year.

When you lay off people sooner or later they will talk about their experience online. Especially when you talk about APB! So here is a link to one of the former employees and his take on why APB didn’t make it. Good and also sad reading. It shows what happens when you discourage your own people from caring about your own product. Big business getting in the way of a love for a game!

The really sad part is that, more often than not, we prevented or discouraged such people from helping out by building these bizarre internal divisions between groups. I think this was a misguided attempt to imitate how other big online games run things. For example, I once heard one of our fine QA staff being berated for – wait for it – emailing a summary of forum activity around QA. This guy had gone through every single forum post looking for complaints that might signify bugs, and summarised it in a plan of action for the QA team to investigate further. Commendable stuff indeed, but here he was, being told that ONLY OUR DEDICATED COMMUNITY TEAM were allowed to summarise forum activity for others (usually in the form of a number from 1-100 representing how favourable forum feedback was that week. Never found out how they computed that or what we were supposed to do with it.)
Stern-sounding codes of conduct were emailed around that, whatever their intent, in practice scared many developers away from interacting directly with our users. Not to worry, though, because our Community team was on the case! Except if a forum post was about a bug, because that wasn’t their area … bugs were for Customer Support. Who, naturally, didn’t read the forums … because that was Community’s job!

Ran across this last night.   Looks pretty cool.  For anyone that is interested, here is a link.

http://www.impulsedriven.com/blacklight

APB the game closes!

shacknews.com/onearticle.x/65611

Karsten says:

Wouldn’t you like to be this guy now… that has to sting worse than the ZUNE tattoo:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:57:38 — 58.9MB)

How can we not talk about one of the biggest news that hit PAX. So we stroll down memory lane and take a look back on good times and what Duke Nukem means or meant to us. But not just that, we also look at what Duke promisses or rather should promise to a whole new generation that does not come laden with grand memories of Duke.

Other things we touch on:

• Brink
• APB
• Firefall
• Borderlands expansion
• Need for Speed Online now ALL for free
• STEAM adds you a wallet (add money now in anticipation of the Christmas and New Years sales)
• Elemental War of Magic on the way to recovery
• Civ 5… a week from release
• Duke Nukem Memories and Expectations
• More community gaming in planning
• Battlefield Vietnam Tokyo reveal
• Win a game or two, submit some sounds!
• Torchlight II
• What will WOW look like after the expansion
• We are down on Chris Taylor (what happened to you man?)
• Whats the deal with Diablo III Beta pop ups (be careful!)
• Amnesia The Dark Descent
• Waiting for Tim to buy RUSE

Hot on the heals of PES 2011 EA release their DEMO of FIFA 11. I will write a small review about it when I have a chance. For now here is a video of my first game. make sure you hit that HD button.

We said it before and I like to say it again. If your game wants to sell, give us a DEMO. Konami seemed to be on the right track with the release of Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) 2011 and the PC demo even hit a day before the console versions.

PES has been trying to take a bite out of EA’s FIFA franchise for a long time and with the release of the 2011 version of the series is trying it’s hardest to fight against the king of licened sport. One of the hurdles PES has to overcome is that for someone that likes soccer you like to play with people you know and watch play. EA of course knows this and owns just about any franchise license name there is, be it Football, Baseball, Hockey or Soccer. It seems Konami made some headway into the license deal showing a complete Barcelona or Bayern Munich team roster in the demo, complete with players such as Messi, Mueller or Lahm.

But it needs more than franchised player names to make a good sports game! That is why this demo is so important, especially on the PC PES has a great chance to be real competition to FIFA. EA has not focused on the PC and made many mistakes with the past releases of it’s soccer game on the PC.

So as a PC loving soccer fan I downloaded the 1GB demo with much anticipation. Install was quick and painless and starting the game was no issue. But once the game runs… that is where things go horribly wrong at least what this demo is concerned.
Nothing, but absolutely nothing was learned by the mistakes of the past and the mistakes that FIFA made on the PC. It’s not worth making many sentences about it, so let’s just go down the list shall we:

1. Only one game mode and 4 teams in two different divisions in total (for a demo almost expected)
2. No access to the options menu
3. No ability to change screen resolution
4. No ability to change details settings
5. No ability to look at the controller configuration
6. No ability to change controller settings or button mapping
7. No training option (kick the ball around with your own team)
8. Default button placement for pass, shoot and such very different from the norm (at least for me, which is a issue, see point 5,6 &7)
9. Default settings are on Pro Mode (I found out you have access to a game menu once you setup a game) which, while showing you other options only lets you change the difficult settings
10. No commentator of the game

(*Since this review has been written I learned that you can change settings if you track down a settings.exe in the game directory. So you can change certain things, such as resolution and controller configuration. But come on… you couldn’t run this on first start up? Maybe make a note of it somewhere or link it from within the game?)

Nothing here says that Konami takes the PC serious as a platform. This smells of unpolished console port and does not look promising. To make my mouth water let me set my resolution, let me see the players, the stadium and the crowd in high detail. Why are you afraid to show me the game in high resolution?

Once in game things got a little better. Aside from the fact that the default difficulty was set to max, I struggled to learn what the buttons do and I was a goal down mere seconds into game-play even if I lost the ball deep in the opposing half. You can see how Bayern Munich (the team I choose since I am German) got hammered and outplayed at the video as a part of this review. I considered re-recording a game once I found the match options menu (which only gives you access to the difficult settings of the current match) and was more in tune with the controls. But you should see how one struggles to get a handle on things when the developers don’t want you to know anything, configure anything and generally don’t seem to care how a demo is experienced by their potential customers. Here I was thinking that a demo should do the best to show the cool and good about your product… silly me!

On the positive side of things is the fact that while I was not able to choose resolution (which according to my capture is 640×360) it still locked surprisingly good. Although you can’t really make out player faces and barley their names. Game-play was smooth and once you get a hang of the controls it feels like sprints, quick turns and passes are great and give you good control of your players.

I wished I could say more but since the training option was not present and the teams to play with where limited I did not have the chance to get really deep into it. Especially because (and forgive me for slipping one more time into the negative) some person at Konami thought it a good idea that when the game you played is over they show you a video of all the extra features the full version will include. A whole 5 minutes and 40 seconds worth of features, such as carrier mode, player transfers, be a pro and such… but here is the kicker, you can’t skip it! No pressing of any keyboard buttons short of CTRL+ALT+DEL or the controller will let you bypass FIVE MINUTES FORTY SECONDS. Are you kidding me Konami?! I figured it must be a one time thing… but no, after the second match here we where again. At least it gave me a chance to time it and yes try again every possible button to see if I am not missing something.
At least I learned in that video that I can create my own team and even a club emblem. I can make my players wear funny heads or hats, kick a keg (yes a small beer keg), a trash ball or a super sized candy around the field. Last but not least even design a stadium that you can make look like Mario lost his Princess yet again. Ohhhh brother!?!

The last part of the video has this tag-line “Engineered for freedom”. The demo didn’t show it, the video you are forced to watch makes it more look like they tried to throw everything anyone ever mentioned in a brainstorming session into the game, regardless of how silly the idea was.
So I am coming away from this demo of PES 2011 very sceptical if the team behind this game is serious about soccer and the PC as a valid platform. I guess we will have to wait for the full version and let other people do a review on that, because I will not “risk” my money on what I saw or experienced in this demo.

…. a keg of beer… are you serious….