Latest Gaming and MMORPG Updates |
- Watch our Modern Warfare 3 DLC Livestream Tuesday
- Star Trek Online (F2P)
- TGS: Sony Press Conference Roundup: Lots of Vita
- With SOPA and PIPA Reeling, the ESA Looks Forward
- League of Legends
- [PAX 2011] Firefall
| Watch our Modern Warfare 3 DLC Livestream Tuesday Posted: 21 Jan 2012 05:32 AM PST When: Tuesday, January 24th, 2pm PT In our first-ever IGN/1UP livestream collaboration, watch as we play the new downloadable content for Modern Warfare 3. Join @teanah, @bobbya1984, @peykemans, and @Steven_Hopper as we test our FPS skills on Piazza and Liberation. For more information on the latest content for Call of Duty Elite Premium members, click here. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 21 Jan 2012 05:32 AM PST When it was released in 2009 Star Trek Online was met with a collective 'meh' from the majority of the MMO playing community. While its If there's one thing die-hard Star Trek fans are rarely accused of, it's being stupid. Sadly, Star Trek Online was, and still is, a bit stupid. It's tale of woe doesn't quite unfold quite like that of fellow Free To Play convert APB, since Star Trek Online never went away – it's been pootling around its own corner of the internet non-stop since release. This, then, is less a re-boot than a fresh start. Though the original release was a shambles of confusing stats, broken ground missions, non-existent crafting and offered a complete lack of end-game content, to be fair Cryptic have released a consistent amount of new additions and improvements over the years. Five 'seasons' of content have arrived in all, adding a multitude of much-needed fixes. Better PvP, high-level raids, playable ground combat (which, it should be said, is still a gaudy aside to the 'functional' space combat at Star Trek Online's core), not to mention the ability for players to create and share their own missions among a multitude of other things. There's little doubt Star Trek Online is a better game today than it was in 2009. Season 5, the content update designed to prepare Star Trek Online for its F2P re-launch goes even further to patch, fix and manhandle the game into a half-way appealing F2P experience. The skills have been revamped to be more accessible and understandable (but in MMO tradition they're still largely incomprehensible at first glace), the card-game-esque Duty Officer system offers excellent risk and reward incentive, epic gear sets have been introduced – in short, there's plenty here to tempt a lapsed player. Sadly this check-list of improvements doesn't tell the whole story. The developers have broken promises, failed to deliver in key areas and have shirked their responsibility to maintain regular community communication (the number one unspoken rule of any MMO). We're also sad to report that the reception of F2P players by long-standing players (read: 'bitter vets') leaves a lot to be desired, perhaps a product of a highly frustrated core community. This is galaxies apart from the transition for Lord Of The Rings Online, for example. Star Trek Online is still a far cry from the kind of experience Gene Roddenberry would knowingly embrace were he with us today. Socio-political overtones aside, at its heart Star Trek is about exploration, discovery and diving headlong into the great unknown. To do the license real justice Star Trek Online should be a living, breathing economy-led sandbox game where the players themselves have the scope to become captains of legend and, by extension, an intrinsic part of game lore. Factions and alliances should rise and fall and great battles should be fought to the dying breath. Instead we have what essentially amounts to MMO-lite – quick access to meaningless PVP and PVE events, unwanted ground combat (beyond the odd phaser fight, Star Trek has never been about ground combat) and underwhelming and unfulfilling space-battles. Sure, you can tweak your starship to within an inch of a warp core breach, but its appeal to the Star Trek faithful is shallow at best. 6/10 Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| TGS: Sony Press Conference Roundup: Lots of Vita Posted: 21 Jan 2012 01:26 AM PST Beyond what we’ve already covered, there wasn’t a whole lot of newsworthy information shared. Sony employees talked up Vita and a number of noteworthy Japanese developers (like Hideo Kojima and Yoshinori Ono) came to the stage to talk about various projects, mainly those tackled in the stories linked to above. We did get a demonstration of some Vita features, including a far-too-long look at how the initial system setup works. (Scrolling through a list of years with the touchscreen, whee!) New red and blue colors for the PlayStation 3 were announced, along with a new PSP that’s colored both red and black. This was a Japanese-focused event, so don’t consider on any of that as being guaranteed for release abroad. The Vita portion of the event started with a number of casual games being shown along with Gravity Daze, Monster Hunter, and Hot Shots Golf. The system’s interface was shown off, including the music and video players, plus the browser and photo viewer. With the ability to multitask, you can listen to music in the background while doing something else, like looking at pictures; you can also tweet or post messages to Facebook while playing games. Sony demonstrated the Welcome Park, a tutorial application that teaches users how to use the Vita. It has minigames that demonstrate its various features like a sliding tile puzzle game or one where you tap on a series of numbers in sequential order. There are more than 100 games in development for Vita, with 26 being prepared for launch. That’s in addition to the many hundreds of digital PSP games that will be playable on the system through the PlayStation Store (remember, Vita lacks a UMD drive). A limited number of early units sold in Japan will contain a free 100-hour prepaid 3G data plan (more on 3G here) when it goes on sale in December. Expect to hear a lot more about Vita and its games as TGS really gets underway. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| With SOPA and PIPA Reeling, the ESA Looks Forward Posted: 20 Jan 2012 05:31 PM PST The Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act are deeply flawed pieces of legislation which threatened to censor the Internet. While many in the games industry — including Mojang, Runic Games, Riot Games, and Epic Games — spoke out against them, the industry’s trade association, the Entertainment Software Association, was openly in favor of it. Contrary to what has been suggested, it hasn’t come out and condemned the bills, but it is now looking towards the future. Following an Internet protest (in many cases, in the form of a blackout) by the likes of Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and numerous other prominent members of the web on Wednesday, both bills began to lose supporters. This was followed by news earlier today that PIPA was being shelved for the time being. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tweeted, “In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT IP Act.” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith then did the same with SOPA. “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy,” Smith said. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.” Not everyone in Congress is suddenly opposed to the two bills; the sponsor of PIPA, Senator Patrick Leahy, said in a statement, “The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously reported the PROTECT IP Act in May. Since then, I have worked with both Senators and stakeholders to identify concerns and find meaningful ways to address them. Only when the Senate considers this legislation can we do so. In the meantime, more time will pass with jobs lost and economies hurt by foreign criminals who are stealing American intellectual property, and selling it back to American consumers. I remain committed to addressing this problem; I hope other members of Congress won’t simply stand on hollow promises to find a way to eliminate online theft by foreign rogue websites, and will instead work with me to send a bill to the President’s desk this year.” So while the bills could very well return in a different form, the immediate danger is over. The bills’ opponents — those who blacked out their website, sent letters to members of Congress, and raised awareness for the issue — helped to accomplish a remarkable thing. The ESA was not among those opponents, as noted above. Its name was among those those on an official list of SOPA supporters (PDF), and as recently reported, it spent up to $190,000 last spring and summer lobbying for PIPA and other issues. “As an industry of innovators and creators, we understand the importance of both technological innovation and content protection, and do not believe the two are mutually exclusive,” the ESA said in a statement regarding its support of SOPA earlier this month. “Rogue websites — those singularly devoted to profiting from their blatant illegal piracy — restrict demand for legitimate video game products and services, thereby costing jobs. Our industry needs effective remedies to address this specific problem, and we support the House and Senate proposals to achieve this objective. We are mindful of concerns raised about a negative impact on innovation. We look forward to working with the House and Senate, and all interested parties, to find the right balance and define useful remedies to combat willful wrongdoers that do not impede lawful product and business model innovation.” Compare that with what it now has to say: “From the beginning, ESA has been committed to the passage of balanced legislation to address the illegal theft of intellectual property found on foreign rogue sites,” reads today’s statement. “Although the need to address this pervasive threat to our industry’s creative investment remains, concerns have been expressed about unintended consequences stemming from the current legislative proposals. Accordingly, we call upon Congress, the Obama Administration, and stakeholders to refocus their energies on producing a solution that effectively balances both creative and technology interests. As an industry of innovators and creators, we understand the importance of both technological innovation and content protection and are committed to working with all parties to encourage a balanced solution.” The statement has been construed by some as meaning the ESA is now anti-SOPA/PIPA. That doesn’t actually appear to be the case, and the ESA instead seems to be interested in lawmakers working towards a new anti-piracy bill that will actually be able to pass. (Some might quip that it doesn’t seem like the government even needs SOPA or PIPA to shut down foreign websites, as evidenced by Megaupload’s surprising closure yesterday.) Even if the ESA had decided to begin railing against the bills today, it would have been a largely meaningless gesture given the state SOPA and PIPA are now in. It would have been like, in response to the ESA asking for their help, gamers waiting until the Supreme Court made its decision in last year’s Brown v. EMA/ESA case before doing anything. It remains unclear exactly how the ESA arrived at its decision to support the bills. It would not address the matter when I asked them earlier this month, and we know at least one (but more likely far more) members of the ESA were not consulted. As far as we know, no member of the ESA — including the ones that spoke out against SOPA/PIPA — threatened to pull out of the group. With SOPA and PIPA out of the way, the issue of the ESA’s support should go away for the time being. That could, however, change if Congress decides to rush a similar, vaguely-worded bill to a vote. Whether or not that happens, if and when there is a next time, it sure would be nice if the ESA looked at the whole picture as opposed to supporting legislation that alleges it will stop piracy no matter the effect it will have in reality. Full disclosure: 1UP parent company News Corporation has voiced its support of SOPA. See here for IGN and 1UP’s stance on the matter. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 20 Jan 2012 05:31 PM PST
If you have seen Tom Cadwell’s picture from 2 years back (link), it is really obvious he has grown much more… Well, in the Chinese saying over here, it is “wealthy”. Anyway, Tom hates Volibear with a vengeance apparently, one which could not be explained by words when I asked him. I started playing the game just 2 months ago, and am still enjoying the daily AI matches. Being a carebear, the PvP section is not for the weak-hearted, like me. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 20 Jan 2012 01:28 PM PST
Before I forget, here are some pictures taken at the event as well. Merchandise… Me want… I am a sucker at collecting all these stuff, heck I wear World of Warcraft T-shirts to work almost everyday~ There are tons of Firefall @ PAX 2011 pictures here (link) !!! Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
Nimoy-voiced intro, turbo lift doors, communicators and beamings up certainly make for a fair distraction from the realities of not actually being a starship captain in the 24th century, it certainly didn't have the muster to provide true fans with the experience they deserved.
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