Ubisoft has released the PC specs for their upcoming tropical shooter, Far Cry 3. The game will require an internet connection for a onetime activation but after that, you can proceed to play the game offline since Ubisoft thankfully ditched their rubbish always online DRM. MINIMUM SPECS Processor: 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 [...]
Top Deal: That six-panel gaming setup you've been planning just got one step closer to reality with today's top deal — an HP 20" panel for just $99 (normally $139.99). These LED-backlit beauties boast a decent 1600×900 resolution, have DVI and VGA inputs, and are available directly from HP. Laptops: Toshiba Satellite U845-S402 14″ [...]
Ubisoft has released the PC specs for their upcoming tropical shooter, Far Cry 3. The game will require an internet connection for a onetime activation but after that, you can proceed to play the game offline since Ubisoft thankfully ditched their rubbish always online DRM. MINIMUM SPECS Processor: 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 [...]
Top Deal: That six-panel gaming setup you've been planning just got one step closer to reality with today's top deal — an HP 20" panel for just $99 (normally $139.99). These LED-backlit beauties boast a decent 1600×900 resolution, have DVI and VGA inputs, and are available directly from HP. Laptops: Toshiba Satellite U845-S402 14″ [...]
Remember when Dead or Alive wasn’t just a fan-service, minigame-ridden, volleyball-infused, T&A bounce fest? These characters were actual fighters, who regularly beat the crap out of each other in a tournament instead of lazing on a beach in a strange pseudo dating sim. When are they going to go back to the series’ roots? When [...]
World of Tanks is getting a little bit shinier and a lot more realistic today. The game's new Update 8.0 includes an overhaul of the physics and lighting of the game. Wargaming is calling this the "most important upgrade since the game's release."
In addition to more realistic physics and improved lighting, Update 8.0 is bringing in new optimization for the UI, better rendering, adaptive camouflage, and new mini-map functions. Four new tank destroyers are gracing the branches of the USSR tech tree, and the Matilda Black Prince, the first premium British machine, is available for purchase in the in-game shop.
Skip below the cut to see how the new physics engine will change your gameplay.
Coming soon to RuneScape is a brand-new area called Botany Bay. It's here that players can be the judge, jury, and executioner for convicted bots, voting on their ultimate punishment. Jagex gives two warnings to botters, after which the player is ejected from the game and his or her avatar is sent to Botany Bay for final judgment. Botters' avatars may be smooshed by a dragon, vaporized, or pelted with rotten fruit.
Lead Designer Mark Ogilvie hopes this will deter players from naughty behavior: "We have wanted to do this for some time and we hope that by bringing the actions of those who cheat to the attention of the wider community, we can make a massive step towards eliminating botting from the game."
You can watch a trailer for the new Botany Bay area after the jump.
Besides various tweaks and fixes, The Cat God offers two new missions, The Binding and Dogs of War. The Binding is an investigation mission that takes you to the City of the Sun God in Egypt, while Dogs of War focuses on the conflict between the vampires and their allies. For full details about the changes, check out the patch notes.
The Cat God, for whom the update is named, will make a personal appearance in October closer to the Halloween holiday. A special Halloween event will run through the end of October and the first week of November that will include the beginning of a new storyline and a new villain. We'll keep you updated as more information becomes available.
Or to take arms against a sea of undead, and by opposing, end them...
You're darn tootin' I'm going to end them! That's me, taking up arms against the hordes of zombies. Or more accurately, chopping them off, along with legs, heads, and anything else that gets in the way of my blade! If you have zero interest in fighting reanimated townsfolk with flesh dripping off of them, then The Secret World is probably not the MMO for you. However, if you don't mind dicing, slicing, slashing, shooting, chopping, blasting, or otherwise obliterating said undead, then Kingsmouth really is the place to be! If zombies were a cash crop, that little town would be swimming in the moolah Scrooge McDuck-style.
For the second act of our co-production, Choose My Adventure undertook a massive scenery change. Instead of the concrete jungle of NYC where we began, the story played out in the sleepy streets of a quiet new England town. Well, quiet if you don't count the lip-smacking of the zombies gnawing on everyone. Armed with my rifle, my sword, and of course, your directions, I set off to explore, ameliorate suffering, and eviscerate the hordes of evil in The Secret World.
The City of Heroes community has been great in rallying to save the game, but I'm wondering whether that's enough.
If you missed it, this week has not been a good one for efforts to keep the game alive. I'm not going to reprint everything laid out in TonyV's recent post, but the short version is that there are currently no signs that things are changing. NCsoft has set up an email for players to send letters, one that I suspect is not read vigilantly, and there have been no signs that any of the various talks about the game's future have resulted in anything.
It's the email thing that really set me to wondering about whether or not City of Heroes fans are the right people to be protesting. While I love you guys -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- there's a certain revolutionary spirit necessary for an effective protest. I'm not entirely certain that we've got that. And if there was ever a chance to save the game, we may just be unable to do what's necessary.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to handling achievements in MMOs. The first is to keep it mostly private, the second is to herald it to the world entire. Private achievements are great ways to pat the player on the back while keeping him or her modest. Not everyone likes achievement spam, anyway.
Yet I've come to prefer games that do broadcast achievements guild-wide. Why? Because not all of us are so attention-seeking that we constantly write about what we're doing... but if the game's doing that for us, oh well. It's not me being egotistical, it's the game's doing. But if you happen to notice what I'm doing? So much the better.
I genuinely like seeing what my guildies are up to as well. It feels like we do come together for the typical "grats" after an achievement notice, or even the rare "holy crap, that's awesome!" for significant milestones. Of course, sometimes these games can get silly with the number of trivial achievements, so it can hurt the legitimacy of the real ones.
What do you think? Do you like having achievements broadcast guild-wide, or would you prefer it kept quiet (or even turned off)?
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
City of Heroes players have been rallying around the movement to save the game ever since the shutdown announcement was made. It's been nearly a month with no official response regarding the movement's requests from NCsoft aside from a special email address, and that's enough to make almost anyone start to despair. But a new fan-made video is meant to help inspire the protest, mixing machinima footage with narration, screenshots, and music to produce a tribute to the immense movement to avoid the game's demise.
Starting with the unexpected August 31st announcement, the video shows off excerpts from several of the news stories surrounding the announcement and the major in-game rally at Atlas Park, with footage by several notable fans. The narration is spliced together from a variety of sources, including some quotes from our own Massively Speaking. The video also contains links and information for anyone looking to take part in the Save CoH movement. You can see the full video just past the break.
In what is most certainly a coincidence, Trion Worlds has announced a special promotion today to support pandas with the help of players who purchase a certain expansion. No, not that expansion.
Starting tomorrow, every copy of RIFT:Storm Legion pre-ordered will prompt Trion to donate a buck to Pandas International. Pandas International is an organization devoted to saving the Giant Panda, who probably would not need saving if they were martial arts monks (just saying). The pre-order has to take place through the game's website, and it ends after October 3rd.
If you've had your fill of helping NPCs around the world and advancing your personal story in Guild Wars 2, you're probably going to head into one of the game's dungeons. You may have noticed some changes to the way that the dungeon rewarded your accomplishments if you've already done that today. These changes are the result of the game's newest patch, which has altered the reward structure for dungeon tokens and some of the encounter mechanics within individual dungeons.
Players now receive dungeon tokens by reaching the end of an explorable chain rather than via individual boss kills, which prevents players from farming the first boss that drops tokens. To help increase the overall rewards from a single run, the chains will offer 20 tokens on completion and an additional 40 the first time you clear one in a given day. Thus, clearing all three chains in a given dungeon in one day will reward you with 180 tokens in total. Read up on the full changes, along with some minor balance adjustments and bugfixes, in the full patch notes.
I've been playing MMOs for many years, and in that time, I've realized that the big thing they all have in common is that they get better with age. Unlike most single-player games, MMOs are in a constant state of flux. Besides the social interaction, the fact that I can leave a game for a couple of months then come back to find things have changed makes this gaming genre more interesting to me than your average RPG or FPS. Oftentimes, it's fun to come back to a game that I liked but maybe wasn't sticky enough to play all the time just to see what has changed, and maybe I'd like it more the next time around.
That's kind of what happened to me with Star Wars Galaxies. When the game launched, I thought it was great to explore the Star Wars universe I'd grown up with as a kid, but I couldn't latch on to the game because of the bugs and other minor issues. It wasn't until about six months after launch that I was actually able to grasp the game and play it long enough to find out why people were so smitten.
Perhaps Star Wars: The Old Republic will be the same kind of game. When it launched nine months ago, there were bugs, though not as big as SWG's bugs, mind you. The content needed a little tweaking. And certain systems like the Galactic Trade Network did not function well. But now with update 1.4 coming tomorrow and free-to-play on the horizon, it might be a good time to invite your friends to come back or even come back yourself. Let's examine some of the reasons to do so.
Diablo III was arguably the biggest online game release of the year, but its predecessor's decade of consistent popularity left some pretty big shoes to fill. Despite being the most pre-ordered PC game in history and selling more than 6.3 million units in its first week, Diablo III has started to seriously wane in popularity. I've seen over a dozen friends stop playing completely in the last few months, and Xfire's usage stats for D3 have dropped by around 90% since June. Guild Wars 2's timely release accounts for some of the drop, but there's a lot more going on than just competition.
The Diablo III beta showed only the first few levels and part of the game's highly polished first act, and soon after release it became obvious that parts of the game weren't exactly finished. PvP was cut from release, the Auction House was a mess, and Inferno difficulty was a poor excuse for an endgame. Poor itemisation made the carrot on the end of the stick taste sour, and the runaway inflation on top-end items is crying out for some kind of ladder reset mechanic. But there is hope for improvement, with new legendary items, the Paragon level system, and the upcoming Uber boss mechanic taking a few steps in the right direction.
In this opinion piece, I look at some of the fundamental flaws in Diablo III's endgame and suggest a few improvements that would make a world of difference.
With this week -- and this podcast -- Massively's Editor-in Chief Shawn Schuster departs from helming this barge of insane writers, and an era comes to an end. To mark this occasion, we invited him to join us for one last Massively Speaking with the ultimate goal of seeing whether we could get him to cry. That's easy: All you have to do is mention Tabula Rasa three or more times.
Have a comment for the podcasters? Shoot an email to podcast@massively.com. We may just read your email on the air! Get the podcast: [iTunes] Subscribe to Massively Speaking directly in iTunes. [RSS] Add Massively Speaking to your RSS aggregator. [MP3] Download the MP3 directly. Listen here on the page:
I figured that after the last column's focus on World of Warcraft, I might as well feature the other major November 2004 MMO release: EverQuest II. EverQuest II embraced high fantasy to its core, and the soundtrack for the original game certainly reflects this.
SOE tapped composer Laura Karpman for the project in the early 2000s. The four-time Emmy-winner spent time getting acquainted with the first EverQuest before creating the music for the sequel. Following EQII's completion, Karpman remained on staff at SOE from 2005 to 2006 as the resident composer. She would leave the team after doing the score for EQII's first expansion, Desert of Flames.
"This was one of the most rewarding opportunities I have ever had," Karpman said in 2003. "We had an amazing time recording the score in Prague, a wonderful city with equally great players."
The one-hour soundtrack came with the collector's edition of the game, and a friend mailed me his copy, which I deeply appreciated. There's a lot to enjoy about this score, so let's dig in!
Blizzard bigwig Mike Morhaime gave an interview to GamesIndustry.biz today to coincide with the launch of World of Warcraft's latest expansion. "One of the things people will notice with Mists of Pandaria in comparison to our other expansions is the variety of things there are to do; it will feel like a bigger, meatier expansion compared to Cataclysm," Morhaime said.
He also talks about the ongoing post-launch plans for Diablo III as well as the e-sport community surrounding Blizzard's StarCraft franchise. Morhaime also offers a frank assessment of the reasons for Star Wars: The Old Republic's quick move to a free-to-play model. "Probably if they [BioWare] had to do it over again they might have held the game over and worked on the endgame content a bit more," he said.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600
Memories of an Atari Baby
Cover Story: How the 2600 shaped the life of one gamer before he could even pick up a controller.
I
may not have entirely understood what was going on when I first held an Atari controller in my hand back in 1983. I imagined I put it in my mouth first or shortly thereafter. While I quickly learned it wasn't for consumption, it would be much later that I realized the impact the console would have on me and how I interacted with my family.
I was too young to notice the couch was falling apart or I was half naked. The connection with the Atari 2600 was deep and real. The electronic beeps and boops were alive, reacting to whomever was controlling them. Though looking back, maybe it was those hypnotic effects that brought my family together.
I was thrilled to watch and learn about the games my six siblings liked, which in turn, taught me a bit about my siblings, too.
Guild Wars 2's biggest strength is that, for the most part, it knows when to stay the hell out of your way. From its Skyrim-style fast travel system to the way the game handles player death, ArenaNet's MMO follow-up to the original Guild Wars doesn't spend much of its time wasting yours. And as someone who plays these things way too much already, I really, really appreciate that.
Many of the game's innovations aren't colossal, but they make a tangible difference all the same. With something as simple as allowing you to, at the click of a button, instantly send all of your crafting materials to the bank back in town, Guild Wars frees you up to concentrate on the stuff you actually want to do. It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you're no longer saddled by the burden of constant inventory management.
Even the act of crafting itself benefits from this seemingly across-the-board reduction in tedium. Let's say, for instance, you've gathered enough ingredients to make 30 pairs of sandals. Most games would force you to sit through 30 lengthy progress bars while your character slowly toils away, but in Guild Wars each successive product assembles more quickly than the last. By about the fourth sandal or so it's as if they're rapidly and spontaneously bursting into existence like some kind of transdimensional popcorn.
Digital versions of retail games being sold on PlayStation Network are nothing new; we've seen numerous games made available in this fashion. In most cases, these digital versions have been released at some point after the game in question debuted at retail. Last week's release of Borderlands 2 was a notable exception -- it could be downloaded from PSN on the same day it became available in stores and online. That's something we'll be seeing a lot more of soon, as it will be far from the only game released in that fashion on PSN this fall with Sony today announcing the PSN Day 1 Digital program.
Eight games coming out in October will be released on PSN on the same day they hit retail, including Assassin's Creed III, Dishonored, and Resident Evil 6. That the number is so high is an aggressive move by Sony -- it's one thing for the occasional game to be released simultaneously on PSN, but this list now accounts for almost every high-profile game release in October. There are some missing, like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, WWE 13, and the HD Collections of Zone of the Enders and Killzone (the latter of which I'm sure will end up on PSN), but it's pretty comprehensive otherwise. The omission of Skylanders Giants is not a big deal, even though it is sure to be a major seller. That's because it's a game that relies on the player having more than just a controller to play, and also because it's not a game geared toward core gamers, which is the primary market for downloadable versions of games.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600
Absent On Atari
Cover Story: Why 10 of the era's notable arcade never came to the 2600.
T
he Atari 2600 had it made. The little wood-grain beauty all but owned the home console market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and that was precisely when arcades were in full bloom. Every week brought a new round of promising attractions to arcades, and the most popular of them were ripe for Atari 2600 adaptations. Sure, the VCS could never hope to replicate the look of a coin-op title, and its ports didn't play quite the same either. Yet it was the perfect pipeline for the console. If people crammed Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong full of quarters in the arcade, they'd gladly buy some recreation of it on their Atari 2600s. It didn't really matter if Donkey Kong resembled an angry half-melted gummy bear and Ms. Pac-Man gobbled minus signs instead of dots.
Not every arcade standout came home, however. There were a number of curious absences when one compared a local arcade's gallery to the 2600 library. Some games were too complex for the console, some just weren't immediate hits, and some arrived just as the Atari 2600 catalog crashed and took a good chunk of the industry with it. Atari conversions of these notable arcade games couldn't have prevented that crash, but they would certainly have helped the system.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600
Atari 2600 and the Pixelated Imagination
Cover Story: A 1UP member looks back at the worlds that existed on gaming's first blockbuster console, if only in our minds.
A
s a child of the early '80s, I discovered video games at a rather young, impressionable age. It was my cousin who first introduced me to the Atari, an unassuming hunk of plastic and faux wood paneling. So unassuming was it, in fact, that I promptly ignored the game system and went back to playing Lazer Tag. It wasn't until I heard the familiar, it somewhat distorted, sounds of the Ghostbusters theme song that I finally took notice. I did not realize it at the time, but that lazy afternoon would lead to a lifelong fascination with video games.
My cousin had chosen the ammunition for his war well, knowing that I could hardly resist the call of Ghostbusters. At 5 years old, anything Ghostbusters was immediately elevated in my childhood obsession. If Ghostbusters was on the Atari, clearly, the Atari was good. The opening battle had been won with the first salvo, but his assault on my video game resistance did not end there, as I soon found myself the surrogate owner of the system and an assortment of games.
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Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's 
I was thrilled to watch and learn about the games my six siblings liked, which in turn, taught me a bit about my siblings, too. 
