March 29, 2006

NoE Watch

That’s Nintendo of Europe. This site names and shames the Nintendo releases that take far, far too long to get released over here. Sony deserve a kick for letting God of War and Shadow of the Colossus take months to get here, but Nintendo have long been the worst at this kind of thing, the very reason I bought a US GameCube. Yes yes, you need to localise for the European market - does that really take so long?

March 28, 2006

Manage Your Xbox Live Friends On The Web

It’s about damn time! While not quite the ideal of a universal clan system (imagine entering just one clan name to add all your gaming friends) this should still be pretty damn handy. Now I just need a 360.

Savage 2 Free Offline

You can play Savage 2 solo and on a LAN for free, however online play and persistent stats will require a fee. Very cool idea and just another sign of how small developers are trying new revenue models to compete with the big boys. I really hope it works for them. (via Blue)

Savage 2

March 27, 2006

GDC Game Design Challenge 2006

This is always one of the most fun things to come out of the GDC and this year was no exception. The challege this time was to create a game that could win the Nobel Peace Prize. Harvey Smith’s idea of using the DS to co-ordinate peaceful flashmobs is particularly clever. I know the guy got a lot of flak over Deus Ex: Invisible War but I still think he’s got what it takes to lead some great games in the future. Mistakes are there to be learnt from and all that.

NES Emu on 360

Those clever coder types, they’ve done it again! No sound yet, but it runs in 480p and works through Windows MCE of all things - very cunning.

Oblivion

The game name references what it does to your social life. Most of the reviews are truly spot on - you do don’t play Oblivion, you lose yourself to it. I dreamed about it last night for crying out loud. The settings, story, and sheer amount of stuff to see and do in this game is just mind blowing. Finally a bitter fantasy MMO hater like myself gets to taste many of the good elements (massive world to explore, endless quests) without the negatives (dull combat, griefers, endless travel, unengaging story).

Oblivion

LED Spinners

Sometimes technology can be used to benefit mankind. This is not one such example. One of the promoted features of Pimpstar (I really don’t have to comment on that, do I) is the option to change the images on the fly. While driving. As if these things weren’t already going to cause enough accidents from people staring at the sheer stupidity.

Pimpstar

March 25, 2006

StarCraft Ghost “Indefinitely Postponed”

Oh for crying out loud. Swingin’ Ape had added multiplayer, seemingly finished much of the rest of the game, and now Blizzard pull this. Maybe I’m just desperate for them to release a new game that isn’t WoW but Ghost surely now rates second only to Duke Nukem Forever on the delay charts, and at least 3D Realms are now being up front about what happened there.

I hope, if it’s ever released, we don’t get another Warcraft 3 - repeatedly revamped, visually polished but ultimately average.

Nova from Ghost

March 24, 2006

Half Life Trailer from ‘97

Dear Valve,

Thank you for taking two extra years on this.

Hugs and kisses,

Pixel Kill

Half Life '97

March 23, 2006

Nintendo GDC Keynote

It just finished, sadly not much new info. The inevitable Zelda DS was announced and they think their emulator classic game download service will be top. Did I miss something?

At least Sony finally announced some solid PS3 details - the guaranteed 60GB hard drive is a major strength as is the fact that it’s supposedly easier to code for. After their previous efforts (with both PSP and PS2) I can only imagine the network service being garbage again though.

Commandos: Strike Force

Commandos: Strike Force currently sits at position 18 in the charts, it’s probably only headed downwards from there. I’m getting a Hostile Waters flashback here - brilliant game, terrible sales. But then this sort of self-co-op game is very much my sort of thing.

Best moment so far: the Resistance have setup a crashed lorry to act as a road block. The spy has slowly dealt with half the German troops by applying piano wire to neck. A German General pores over a map while a group of soldiers stand nearby. The sniper peers down his scope, takes a deep breath and pulls the trigger. The crack of his rifle shot is my signal to switch to the spy and cut the rest of the soldiers down with machine gun fire. Maybe you had to be there but it really felt like one of those classic gaming moments somehow. Top game.

Router Death

Apologies for the lack of posting recently, our router blew up last Sunday and the new one (cheers Aaron!) is taking its sweet time arriving. Things should return to normal (whatever that is around here) in a day or two.

Word of warning - EuroPC (no link for you, EuroPunks) a) Take forever to send your item out b) Don’t email you purchase or shipping confirmation c) The item purchase doesn’t even show up in the relevant section of your web account! What a rubbish system - at least their phone number connects straight to a real person but they weren’t much help either.

Update: It’s here, but they sent me the wrong one! Unbelievable.

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