The Evil Genius Demo Will be available for download from gamespot today!
If you have ever had fantasies of world domination this may very well be the game for you.
Some of you may know about my plan to take over the world using a team Of Tamarin Monkey (taught to use screw drivers and wrenches) and a weather machine. Well the Weather Machine is in this game, but the Monkeys might need to be a Modd add on.
This game looks like a lot of fun and right up my ally! I will have a full review of the demo soon.
Take it easy Monkeys

Its not a movie. But its on a movie screen.
The link on the title above will take you to a story about how a small cinema decided to liscence XBOX to play on its 4 movie screens, and run a tournament. This is so awesome. We can only hope it catches on. I would LOVE to see that here.

Just not today.

Yeah.. that was evil. I know.

Russ and I decided to dive back into the World of Warcraft beta to see what’s new. I thought you should know that you, too, can get your hands on the beta.

There’s the catch - you need a Fileplanet account. I know a few of you have been on the cusp for a while now. Here’s the deal -

Starting today you can download the Half Life 2 Client using Valve’s “Steam” software distribution framework. Now .. you can’t play Half Life 2 yet - the downloaded code is encrypted. However, as soon as Valve ships HL2 to stores ( or sometime shortly thereafter ) Steam will allow you to purchase HL2 and they’ll instantly send you a code to unlock the binary.

The benefit of this, of course, is that you’ll have the game preloaded onto your computer ahead of time and you’ll be able to start playing the game immediately. Since this initial file seed is only 600 megs, I’m sure Valve will have a software patch at release - but that’s the “beauty” of Steam. The client downloads missing game-data to your PC while you play.

Steam has been in development for a long while. The last I heard someone speak of their experiences with it was 6 months ago, and they reported that it was pretty buggy. since then Valve has used a few new versions of Counterstrike to test the Steam “push” distribution, and my hopes are that most bugs have been ironed out.

Straightaway my confidence isn’t high. This morning I attempted to download the Steam client and immediately the installer gave a checksum error. Grr. I’ll try again later today.

I have a track IR3 (not pro) at home, i got it about 2 months ago. I would say that this review is pretty accurate.

The device takes some getting used to, but then its pretty damn sweet. In short, its a head tracking system. Its relatively inexpensive *around $150* and it has a couple modes of operation. Nicely , one of them is mouse emulation. This means you can get head tracking pretty much instantly into any game you play. Not so useful in an RTS, but put it into any FPS or Sim, and you’re rockin.

For my own setup: I mounted my reflective dot on the mic of my headset. This turns out to be a convenient place for head tracking. Even better, when I’m extra lazy, I can just use my head to move my mouse around. Awesome

Any way.. The people getting paid at Ars Technica can write up a much better review than I can.. so go check it out.

I recently had to reinstall my machine (ultimately due to a combination of fried power supply and inappropriate spontaneous reboots) — but in the end I got a large increase in performance for DOOM3. Combined with the memory cache suggestion Jay turned us on to, I was able to run 800×600 (256mb image cache) on an A7N8X-E Athlon XP 3200+, ATI A9600XT at nearly 60 fps constantly on HIGH detail.

It’s WAY scarier than it was before these tips… partly because my system would “lag” a little before creatures would sometimes come out (texture loads, etc.) — now creatures simply come out without warning — and the animations are so creepy at 60 fps! I definately have to side with fps for environment and feel over low fps for better res.

(These tips are what worked for me on an nForce2 motherboard — if you follow this keep in mind that you will need to start from a fresh reinstall of Windows XP (and that I used SP2 updates — not without its own risks) so “reader beware”! This advice is strictly given AS-IS… I take no responsibility if you nuke your system or don’t know what your doing.)

Here’s how I did it:

1. went into bios, and set APIC Mode to “disabled”. Apparently, there are reported performance problems with APIC enabled. AMD went so far as to recommend disabling it to some mobo reviewers of the nforce2… kinda sketchy if you ask me.
2. clean installed XP.
3. installed XP SP2 from MS update.
4. went to nVidia and installed the latest nForce2 unified drivers.
5. installed the latest ASUS-issued drivers for my ATI A9600XT.
6. increase the imagecache setting in Doom3 cfg to 256MB.
7. set detail to HIGH
8. set vsync to on
9. set 800×600 res.

I had all the same pieces before, the only things I changed were: APIC disabled, WinXP SP2. From what I’ve read it sounds like nForce2 owners need to disable APIC — however the catch is that you have to do this BEFORE you install the OS.

The sequel to infamous arcade side-scrolling game seems to be coming along nicely. The title ties in with the modern action shooter paradigm and allows you to explore a living city ( like GTA ) in attempt to infiltrate and take down a drug cartel.

It looks like the game will maintain the level of violence of the original. This time around you can also play the bad cop - plant evidence, involve yourself in a drug habit, beat information out of “suspects”, etc. The game offers a robust hand to hand fighting engine which includes grapple moves, punches and kicks. If a suspect wrestles themselves away, expect a dynamic foot chase down city streets. Shooting civilians forces your captain to bust your rank, but that’s only a temporary punishment. Besides, if you want to go nutzo on the city GTA-style, simply don’t save the game afterwards.

Violence in video games can be fun.

Don’t Do Drugs.

Midway is securing quite a bit of celebrity talent including Michael Madsen, Ron Perlman and music from a variety of artists. I enjoy when a publishing house applies themselves to add that extra umph to a game.

NARC will ship for both the PS2 and Xbox in February 2005.

One of my favorite online game stores, Go Gamer.com has a 48 Hour Madness Coupon sale. Enter one of the following codes before Friday Midnight (Eastern) to unlock special discounts:

• GIVEMEFIVE - Save 5% on any PC or Mac order
• GIVEMETEN - Save 10% off any PC or Mac order greater than $50

The site is also offering discounts on Chessmaster 10K ( 25% off ) and the new classic Civilization III ($5.90).

GoGamer.com has a semi-regular weekly mailing with special discounts on recently released popular games. They call it their Madness Mail, which I think is fitting - a week after Doom 3’s release GoGamer.com had it 10% off. You can sign up for the Madness Mail on GoGamer.com’s front page.

Dungeons and Dragons recently celebrated its 30th birthday. As part of the world-wide celebration (come on, admit you had a slice of pizza and a soda to mark the occasion), GameSpy ran a series of very informative articles about the history of Dungeons and Dragons.

For instance, did you know that D&D started out as a system for resolving the combat of plastic miniatures? Or that the legendary creator, Gary Gygax was sued by TSR when he tried to introduce a competing product, Dangerous Journeys? Learn all this and more at GameSpy.