I usually avoid linking to Kotaku, joystiq and Slashdot pieces simply because everyone has almost certainly seen them already. Guess I conclusively broke that rule today, but with good reason. Just check out this beauty!

I used to be into Warhammer back in the day (in fact I ran a fairly massive site devoted to it for seven years) and Games Workshop would give away a fairly impressive Slayer Sword each year to the winner of theirGolden Daemon painting competition. Somehow, every single one of those swords now pales in comparison. Do check out some of the stunningly painted pieces on that page though.

I’d like to put forward that we have Starbuck alone to thank for this news, however that’s probably ignoring the bigger picture. (via /.)

Apparently. While it’s nice to see a pro gamer on this list (though they’ve also got a competitive eater) is he really that “feared”? I’m told he’s got a tendancy to be very good at a game in the first competitive season but there are better Quake 3 players out there these days. He’s also very good at marketing his name - he’s as much a brand as a pro player, though all credit to him for being smart enough to take that route. Still, it’s almost like he’s on the list because he’s the only pro gamer known outside hardcore circles.

Oh Ken Kutarugi, you so crazy. Now, this is stupid for one obvious reason - console game developers will rarely nudge things past 60 FPS because the polycount payoff is way more noticeable. Regardless of platform, running at 120FPS means you’re sacrificing a lot of detail.

I will say that running games over 100FPS does look nicer though. I ran Quake on my P4 recently at well into the hundreds of frames per second and it’s just sickeningly fluid. It’s not the actual frame rate, more the consistency - even if it drops 50 FPS during a franic fight it’ll still be smooth. I’ll still take the extra eye candy though thanks.

It seems Microsoft, or one of their agencies, tried to dupe joystiq into accepting a news piece under the pretence that it was community members submitting it. Do they really think they’re being subtle here?

An agency did something similar for Atari - they got caught as the only people posting positive forum comments on Driv3r. Why do publishers do this kind of thing? It’s hugely blatant and looks terrible when they’re found out. If someone suggested anything of the sort where I work we’d shoot it down without hesitation.

While some might call it unreasonable that Blizzard are charging for entry (given how much cash they have), it would seem quite the opposite is true. People are making money, close to $200 through selling the Baby Murloc pet you get for attending.

It’s also slightly sad that there are no Starcraft costumes in these photos (though I can see them being harder to make). WoW really is taking over the world, but what’s worse, it’s apparently taking over Blizzard too, according to a recent PC Gamer Podcast anyway (or so I’m told - I’m still catching up). As you can imagine, it sounds like it’s literally consuming all the resources they have on hand. Hopefully their recently acquired Swingin’ Ape studio will move onto a new, non-WoW project after Ghost.

F.E.A.R. was good, verging on very. Thrilling slowmo fire fights matched with an intriguing story with, saints be praised, a great ending plus other highly memorable moments. It can get slightly confusing if you miss a key plot element or two though, something I ended up doing. Thankfully, Wikipedia outlines what I missed very nicely (be warned that it’s spoiler laden, of course).

Not too sure I’m entirely sold on this system of hiding the story in newspapers, or phone messages - I missed a bunch of stuff in Half Life 2 despite keeping an eye out. On the one hand you’re not being spoon fed the narrative, on the other you’ll inevitably miss one or two details, possibly crucial ones.

Now I await Call of Duty 2 with Dark Corners of the Earth on Xbox to tide me over in the mean time. Still not sure I want Quake 4 just yet but I’m sure I’ll eventually give in once I run out of other shooters.

The new Garry’s Mod is out but with a twist. You see, its not just about putting characters in amusing poses. You can now create game modes on the fly using something called Lua scripting. Essentially, if you join a Garry’s Mod 9.0 server you never know what game mode you’ll be facing. It’s like a 3D online WarioWare. I hereby dub this “very cool”.

The Quake multiplayer community has their kickers in a twist about Quake 4 because… it’s not Quake 3. Esentially, the problem is the weapon values are practically identitical but the level and character scales are different. It’s CS 1.6 vs CS: Source all over again - at least they had valid gripes about the lack of HLTV and VAC.

Let’s be clear here - they’re different games. If we got the exact same game in a different engine that’d be really, really boring and quite pointless too. While I’m sure Quake 3 players like to consider the weapons utterly perfect it’s really just about what you’re used to and adapting when neccessary.

I was wondering how the Havok physics guys would respond to the Agei PhysX card. Turns out they’re going to use spare GPU cycles instead. An interesting idea that could pay off, particularly if PPUs crash and burn due to the high price of the first cards.

There’s a lot to agree with here. Basically, they rightly acknowledge that the big publishers aren’t going away, but that’s not what they’re after:

em>I don’t want to destroy EA; I just want developers who have really cool ideas that will never get greenlit by EA to feel they have an alternative.

They’ve realised that it’s just as hard to find and appraise great niche games as it is to fund them, no matter how much you want to do either. They haven’t fully outlined how they’ll be rectifying this but the direction they’re going seems right to me. Best of luck to them, we need this kind of thing.

A very cute dig at iPod obsessives here. It is actually for sale and apparently they donate a couple of bucks to charity with each sale, which is nice. And don’t worry, I’ve got an actual games-related post coming right up!