• Grab it from Fileshack
• Gamespot for Previews and Screenshots
• Visit the official site

I haven’t played the demo yet (I’ll try it tonight), and I’m sad to say that I haven’t played the original Serious Same either. From what I hear, though, I missed a lot. The series is known for: bright textures, droves of inventive enemies that storm you all at once, and providing you the explosive weapons to make them all go big-bada-boom. Surprisingly the original was only 20 bucks (SS2 is 30).

It’s designed to be mindless fun. Just check these screenshots… bomb-carrying football players, giant mechanized spidery…things.., and a gun that shoots exploding parrots. Whazza?

After 3925 kills, 3152 deaths, and 4.5 days of playing, I’ve finally made fourth rank in BF2. And there’s a patch in the pipe that reworks the rank system that’s due in a couple of weeks , so I might go up a rank again! Sweeet. I think I’m gonna unlock the AT shotgun (I hear it deals great pain).

I know most of you don’t care, but at least take this as a testament of the online shooter staying power of Battlefield 2. And the Special Forces expansion is due in November…

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Here’s a nice little chart that I found browsing forums for tips and tricks. It lists weapon stats for all the standard and unlockable guns, scanned from the official Primus BF2 strategy guide. Click on it to go to the full sized image. Enjoy!

Announced at E3 back in May, Hellgate: London hasn’t made as big of a splash on the PC Gaming hype wagon that I would have expected. The game has got quite a few things going for it, including one of PC gaming’s strongest legacies.

Set in the depths of London five years after a demon apocalypse, Hellgate is an action RPG and not a FPS (despite what the screenshots look like). The gameplay is more ‘point and shoot’ than of ‘aim and shoot’ — due to RPG gameplay elements your effective weapon accuracy increases as your character levels up. Don’t let this layer of disconnection scare you - the game is under development by the same crack-team that designed and wrote a little phenomenon called Diablo.

The game has the paper-doll inventory like most other RPGS - drag items and weapons into slots to alter your appearance, and increase armor, damage, or other abilities. Weapon upgrades are significant part of the gameplay as well, so much so that there’s an inventory screen dedicated to your weapon. Dragging items to your weapon significantly alter the weapon’s appearance and performance. It even has it’s own paper doll — Their goal is to let you design your own weapons to your liking using the components that you’ve picked up through your adventures.

And like Diablo, this game has a built in Random Map Generator. No two game sessions will ever be the same. Awesome.

Check out Gamespot’s Hellgate: London gamespace for links to movies and previews. Also click on any of these screenshots to enlarge ‘em.

The publisher hasn’t set a release date yet, but I would assume that it’ll come out sometime next year. Probably Summer. I’ll keep you posted.

Apply for the closed beta here.

The winner of MMORPG.com’s Best Graphics at E3 2005 award, and also my latest game-crush, PotBS just opened it’s doors for beta applications. Yarrr.

The application process requires you to upload your DirectX Diagnostic file (DxDiag.txt) which causes some issues with certain versions of Firefox — best use Internet Explorer to avoid any problems.

Here’s another info-bit about the game lifted from the Game Features page. There’s also a ton of great info in the Developer Logs. The more I read, the more I trust the designers and developers to produce an outstanding game.

Our mission system gives you a starring role in your own epic. Each player accumulates a personal supporting cast of NPCs, including old enemies, new friends, lost loves, and treacherous allies. No two players have the same cast, and their stories will take them to different places and fight in different battles. And since each NPC can have multiple roles, the pirate who is your arch-nemesis may be the good friend and ally of an enemy player. Your long-lost cousin may turn out to be your best friend’s sweetheart - or a treacherous spy! We bring the plot twists and the bold adventure of classic adventure fiction to life every time you play.

Ship battles aren’t just spawn camps. Our AI personalities and dynamic goals ensure that no two battles are alike. Unexpected reinforcements, nighttime stealth missions, and optional secondary objectives mean you get gameplay as intricate as any handcrafted single-player game level.

Call me a glutton for punishment. I’m preordering the sequel the one of the most over hyped games of all time. I think it’s going to be really good this time around.. really.

*gulp*

I’ll let you know how it is when it arrives.

Shakycam Video of the CryEngine 2 Tech Demo.

Ahh.. the first glimpses into the Farcry maker’s new graphics engine. There’s some very impressive stuff in here. For one the engine is as bright as ever - virtual archipelagos never looked this good (I love that word). There’s also some impressive new technologies here . Foliage models brush and bend as people walk through them, and there’s an impressive scene of a truck crashing through a hut, crashing down the walls, supports and the roof in different directions. All of the pieces interact with each other in a very believable way.

Two newsworthy side-bits attached to this story. #1 This screenshot is from Farcry 1 (I couldn’t find any official screenshots of CryEngine 2). #2 There’s some potential downside to this news. Current rumors have the game shipping simultaneously with Windows Vista and DirectX 10. We’re nearing a new OS cusp, and dammit, I don’t want to upgrade to a crappy bug-ridden Windows OS just to play games. Here’s hoping XP will have DirectX 10 support.

Argent Dawn Realm Forum -

Blizzard seems to have unleashed a plague in WoW and while it seems unintentional, it is pretty damn cool if you ask me

Basically here is what happened: In patch 1.7 is a new instance Zul Gurub. At the center of Zul Gurub is a new boss (a blood god) named Hakkar. Now Hakkar, being a god of blood, has a new ability: A disease of the blood, that basically does lots of damage to you, OH.. and spreads to other players.

No big deal right? WRONG. See, the disease (henceforth plague) can spread even to players not in your group, even NPCs.. and NPC’s can generate enough life to carry it, but not die from it. So some players leave the zone while still infected. They head into their favorite city, other players get it… the NPCs get it… and pretty soon anyone below lvl 40 dies when in contact with it, and the cities become wastelands of death.

See the link above for some pics of the devastation.

As of now, not all servers have the plague in their major cities, but now that its publicized, you can bet that griefers will be making infecting your server a top priority.

Also.. to give an idea of the rate of infection. A city seems to become unlivable in about 20 minutes.

Awesome. I love wow. Even when it messes up its cool.

Nintendo Revolution Tokyo Game Show Teaser Movie

The movie shows numerous people playing games on the Revolution console. Don’t get your hopes up — the movie doesn’t show any game footage. The entire thing is from the perspective of the TV watching people use the new controller from the couch, and infers the types of games people are playing (and thus the various different uses of the controller) . Gotta say.. despite how oh-so-dorky people might look while playing games on the Revolution, the game ideas are very inventive. The party-game ideas alone are exciting. A Warioware mini game of swatting flies would/will be fantastic, and imagine controlling a flashlight in a dark-atmospheric horror game. Oh wait.

IGN Updated Preview
Pirates of the Burning Sea Official Site

Sid Meier released 3 games in the early 1990’s of such fantastic design that each still exist in a modern form today. The games are: Civilization, Rail Road Tycoon, and Pirates!. That’s quite a list. ‘Burning Sea’ triest to capture the greatiness of Sid Meier’s engrossing Pirates! and place it into a Massively Online RPG.

Incase you missed my preview back in May *cough*, Burning Sea lets you work your way through the ranks of one of three colonial powers as you attempt to lay claim to the Carribean during the age of Pirates. Sea battles are in real time with specular graphics and FX (click on any of the images in this article to zoom in). WASD controls steer your ship to capture wind and get into a good position to both dish-out and receive fire from your enemies. There are 3 main classes of ship: Scouts, Hunters and Dreadnoughts - each with a role to fill in a hunting-pack of friends, and each dishes out pain with 12 ammunition types. Chain shot rips through sails, grape shot tears through the limbs of deckhands, etc.

The map will be littered with ports and towns where you can get out and walk around. Once ashore you’ll be able to repair ships, trade merchandise for profit, hire crew, and interact with NPC quest givers. Towns are up for capture as well, so players can form raids to capture and defend key positions (the meta map resets every 6 weeks so things won’t get stale).

As you level up so does you’re entourage, granting bonsues to crew and ship upgrades. You’ll gain access to new ships as well (obviously), and there’s an overarching “single player” plot line you can progress as an alternative to the PvP smackdown of junior high kids with your friends.

Pirates of Burning Sea is bright alternative in a MMORPG market chalk full of fantasty themed games with turn based sandwich combat. You have all the obvious gameplay implications of sea combat’s battle for positioning, the explosiveness of high seas cannon fire, and it all rests atop a free market trading game with gorgeous graphics and a light hearted theme. Even better Flying Lab Studios sincerly listens to suggestions from their public forums.

The game was supposed to ship in January of this year but the dev team decided to push that back to redo the graphics engine and to add town exploration to the initial release. It was a very VERY wise move, and in the meantime they continue to refine game system and add more fun stuff (like user created ship and sail designs).

The game is set to enter beta in October and to ship early next year.

Some more visual Goodness:

I have to admit that at first glance I felt the “Oh No’s, Nintendo what have you done?”. But I’m feeling much better after reading over some of the controller’s features.

The ‘remote’ is like the Power Glove and Light gun rolled into one. There are sensors that you place on either side of your television which, in coordination with a signal chip in the controller, tell the Revolution console each joystick’s position, directional facing, and it’s relative pitch, and roll. That means you can control your online alterego by steering the remote in 3D space (think driving and flying games) . Similarly you can point the controller to shoot at things like a light gun, or even change the direction you’re looking (FPS).

The remote is wireless and has built in rumble pack support. The ‘home’ button is for menu navigation and the series of lights on the bottom of the joystick signify which player you are.

The remote can also rotate 90 degrees counter clockwise into a classic NES configuration, so that the DPad sits on your left thumb and the a/b buttons slide under your right. The bottom is beveled so you won’t scar your hand on the hard controller edges like back in ‘86. With Nintendo’s promise to distribute all NES games on the Revolution - you’ll comfortably be playing Bionic Commando in no time.

1UP.com has a great writeup with some hands-on experiences at the Tokyo Game Show.

I can’t wait to get my hands on one. The 3D positioning system is a dream. Still - the slim remote seems like quite the step back (makes sense for light-gun games, but not much else) and where are all the buttons? Minimalist buttons are great for arcade games but how am I supposed to play Madden (or 2k Football X) on this thing? *Scratches head*