Latest Gaming and MMORPG Updates |
- Aion goes free to play today
- OP-ED: Netflix’s Failures Highlight Steam’s Strength
- Assault Fire (CN)
- Kritika (KR)
- SSX Review: The Former King of the Mountain Returns
- Shadow Company (KR)
| Posted: 29 Feb 2012 09:27 AM PST NCsoft today passes European operation and support for Aion, it's eastern inspired MMO, to the German gaming giant Gameforge. If you want to areactivate your account and catch up with new developments, Gameforge asks that you to log on to your NCsoft Master Account and follow a few simple instructions. Aion's updated website holds all the details regarding limitations of the free to play model, but as we discovered in December, it's nowhere near as limiting as you might think. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| OP-ED: Netflix’s Failures Highlight Steam’s Strength Posted: 29 Feb 2012 03:27 AM PST Netflix subscribers will find their movie selection gutted tomorrow, as the service removes thousands of movies and TV shows due to the end of its contract with the premium cable movie network Starz, which, while providing only around 5% of the overall Netflix library, just happens to offer some of the more popular content. The same thing happens to online game providers, from Netflix-like streaming services like OnLive, to more traditional digital distribution platforms like Xbox Live or Steam. With all this uncertainty one might be tempted to simply stick with physical media, but despite what its ardent defenders will tell you, the physical media sold by normal retail channels comes with a finite lifespan. Regardless of whether you stream, download, or buy optical discs, no game you purchase will last forever, and any streaming service will face periodic mass delistings like Netflix as contracts change every few years. Meaning downloadable game services may offer you the best chance of playing your favorite game thirty years from now. Though OnLive hasn’t shaped the way we play games in the same way that Netflix changed the country’s viewing habits, the game-streaming service will one day have to cope with losing valuable content like Netflix. The value of the service to customers changes with every contract signed or partnership ended. While the same could be said of more traditional digital distribution services like Xbox Live Arcade and Steam, which allow users to download their purchases, those platforms utilize a set of robust policies that minimize damage done to their users — when a title disappears from either of those providers, those who previously purchased the game can still download it at will. Some may choose to wash their hands of digital distribution all together, but data degradation on physical media may very well render your disc-based games unplayable long before they’re removed from Steam’s catalog. The ever moving pace of technological development turns the simple act of playing an older game into a trial. How many players purchased Chrono Trigger in 1996 and still have their SNES ready and TV connected? Does anyone still keep a 5.5-inch floppy drive connected to their machine just in case they just so they can play the original version of The Secret of Monkey Island at a moment’s notice? In principle, purchasing games stored on physical media means that one will have access to that game anytime and anywhere in perpetuity. In practice, it means hunting down the right hardware in the attic or basement (assuming you still have it) and overcoming numerous other challenges like how to hook a SNES or Genesis up to a modern TV. Even after one goes to all that trouble, the media, be it cartridge, disk, or CD, which stores the games has a very finite lifespan. Most NES cartridge batteries died years ago, along with most floppy discs, and a good portion of CDs or DVDs. Steady and perpetual data degradation cannot be stopped. A small number of hardcore gamers may choose to jump through the hoops necessary to preserve game data and maintain hardware, but most won’t. The troubles don’t justify the gain when we live in age where five or six dollars will allow you to play most (but by no means all) classic games on modern hardware via digital distribution. The systems worked out to serve Origin or Steam customers after a delisting may not function for every title. In all likelihood, our collective Steam libraries are unlikely to make it to the end of the decade or beyond without losing playability on a handful of titles, but the convenience is worth re-buying old favorites on the cheap once a decade or so. Though critics of digital distribution make a fuss about the ability to play a game indefinitely, standard industry practices already place a de facto time limit on all games purchased. Meanwhile, the supposed “long-tail” of streaming services is subject to the whims and desires of individual publishers and their relationship with service providers. Maybe you won’t be able to download the same purchase of Dead Space 2 from Steam in twenty years, but will you jump through the hoops of finding a non-red ringed 360 capable of interfacing with a futuristic 4320p display, or track down whatever streaming service happens to host the game for the time being and subscribe? Players shouldn’t be forced into making a decision like this, but the business realties of the industry are more than enough to surpass any pro-consumer idealism, and they heavily favor downloadable digital distribution. |
| Posted: 29 Feb 2012 01:27 AM PST
Although there is only 1 map for this mode now, I did enjoy the newbie-friendly shooting aspect of this mode. As you all might have read previously, I am not exactly keen playing online shooters given the face the fact seasoned players with tactics can easily pawn newbies like me. The Mecha Storm mode is more for casual players, similar to the Monster Spawn PVE mode found in my previous post. Fora few rounds, players will play as Humans while a few others will play as the Mechas. Mechas have slightly different weapons with gatling guns as the normal attack with rocket missiles as the secondary, both highly immense in raw power. With much slower normal movement speed, Mechas are gifted with a hover ability and a short sprint action which will knock into Human players, killing them. Playing has Humans, there will be mysterious small portals scattered around the map at fixed positions. Once in awhile, there will be question mark signs spawning there, which players will be noticed. These signs will provide players with a random extra weapon (flamethrower, rocket launcher etc) which deals much more damage to Mechas compared to the default sub-machine gun. Before I forget, Assault Fire has a leveling system as well. Given that this is still the Alpha Test Phase, more modes are in development and Tencent Games’ first foray in using the Unreal 3 Engine, Assault Fire is panning out pretty well for me despite critics saying the graphics and actions are kind of underwhelming. Tencent Games is really slow in expanding their reaches into the English market, with Perfect World currently the expansion king, hence I doubt we will see this game reaching English shores any time soon. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 28 Feb 2012 09:25 PM PST
Developed by Korean studio, All-M, the creator of Lunia Online (link), Kritika is hailed as a “super fast” action MMORPG with combat similar to console games’. Like most of the action online titles out there, Kritika will be dungeon-based and focus mainly on combat combos with inspirations from fighting games such as Tekken and The King of Fighter, as well as Lunia Online. When asked about the game’s core features, the producer simply replied “Combat, and more combat”… Kritika is currently scheduled to enter its first Closed Beta in Korea before the first half of this year. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| SSX Review: The Former King of the Mountain Returns Posted: 28 Feb 2012 03:25 PM PST Three teenagers — a mutable boy with headphones, a nervous and slightly nerdy boy, and a busty girl they barely know — are hanging out in Tokyo Shibuya’s ward one day. Suddenly, disaster strikes! A massive earthquake rips the city apart, knocking out the power grid, phone service, trains, utilities, everything. The city’s harried survivors huddle together in parks and other open spaces as the trio, brought together by this disaster and unified by their possession of mysterious cell phones that still work, find themselves responding to eerie predictions of their own deaths by summoning demons — pixies, ogres, kobolds, and more — with their phones. Soon, they become embroiled in a much larger tale as the vanguard of humanity’s battle against an incursion of otherworldly monsters that threatens the whole of the world, facing off against ever more powerful invaders through turn-based combat with grid-based deployment. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because this is the premise of 2009′s Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor for DS (and last year’s slightly tweaked 3DS remake, Overclocked). It is also, to a word, the premise of Devil Survivor 2. You’d be forgiven for writing off DS2 as a copy-and-paste rehash of its predecessor, because the similarities between the two games’ opening are downright uncanny. It’s not until you’ve invested a couple of hours into the game that it begins to spiral away from what’s come before and take on its own shape and identity. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 28 Feb 2012 01:26 PM PST
Finding Team A vs Team B getting stale in most shooters? Well, the unique part of Shadow Company will be having 4 different teams (Battle Squad mode) going against each other in the PvP maps. The 4 different outfits are shown below.
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Gameforumer.com: MMORPG | Gaming News | Reviews | Gaming Community | Gaming Directory and more To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
