It’s not really fair to pit an enterprise grade PCIe solid state drive (SSD) against a typical consumer grade model sporting a SATA interface, like Samsung’s 840 Series announced earlier today, but that doesn’t mean we’re any less impressed with the fact that RunCore’s new Kylin III SSD manages 3 million random read IOPS and [...]
If you haven’t been able to tell by the fairly large number of headphone reviews I’ve done for this site, I have a thing for audio equipment. It’s probably the single biggest investment I make beyond my daily caffeine intake. As a result, I have a tendency to care quite about about how my things [...]
MMORPG.com and Aeria Games have partnered up to give out some cool in-game items for Shaiya in celebration of the just announced Trinity Artifact expansion. We'll be giving away codes good for both the game's Phoenix and standard servers.
MMORPG.com is very excited to announce that we have been given 25,000 beta test keys for World of Warplanes! This is the exciting follow up to the hugely successful World of Tanks tank combat MMO - now you can take to the skies for head to head dog fighting action! Get your beta key now while supplies last!
Want to get inside the minds of an MMO designer when design a dungeon? Bill Murphy will be joined by members of the Age of Conan development team, who will share some of the secrets behind what it takes to craft a dungeon experience for a modern MMO. This exclusive live video stream will also be the first reveal of a new playable dungeon coming to Age of Conan with the new Secrets of the Dragon's Spine free content updates. You will get the first look at one of the great new dungeon areas.
The PlanetSide 2 team has posted the latest Command Center video. This time, we get a recap of PAX Prime, a bit of new information about Friday Night Ops, a beta report and some information about what fans can expect to see in October's SOE Live convention in Las Vegas.
Elsword Awakened is going through a complete overhaul of major game systems and is turning out to be something special. We've partnered with the dev team to bring our readers exclusive first information about what's coming. Check out the latest developer diary and then leave us your thoughts in the comments.
With last week's release of Torchlight 2, the proverbial gauntlet has been thrown down between Runic Games and Blizzard to find the reigning King of ARPGs. We take a look at Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 to see how the battle fares. Read on and then let us know what you think.
With GDC Online coming up, we took the opportunity to chat with two of the industry's biggest names, Microsoft's Tom Abernathy and Ubisoft/Redstorm Richard Dansky about industry trends. See what they had to say and then leave us your thoughts in the comments.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600
The Adventure of a Lifetime
Cover Story: How a secret message in an Atari game unlocked a world of discovery.
I
n the summer of '82, my family took a trip from our home in Iowa to central Arizona for a visit with our extended family. My dad was going to drive our AMC Hornet the whole way, with planned stops at the Petrified Forest, Mesa Verde National Monument, and The Grand Canyon. He draped maps marked with red pen over the dining room table and showed my sister, mother and I the different routes we would take. Touching the map, we followed his finger as it twisted over the flatlands of Kansas, climbed up and over the Rockies and then meandered through miles of cactus-strewn Arizona desert. My dad was overjoyed. My mother was excited. My sister was enthralled.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600
The Console That Wouldn't Die
Cover Story: Fans and enthusiasts have added decades to the Atari 2600's 15-year lifespan.
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ake a look at that game console perched under your television set, and consider its future. It may have been state-of-the-art when you first purchased it five years ago, but will it still be there five years from now? How about in the near future, after the next generation of consoles has launched? If you're like many gamers, you may have already retired your Nintendo Wii to the closet, where it will spend the rest of its life buried under last year's fashions.
Here one day and gone the next: That's the fate of modern game consoles in this age of rapidly evolving technology and planned obsolescence. However, one system has managed to buck that trend, bearing fruit for more than three decades. The Atari 2600 was the uncontested leader of the video game industry throughout the late '70s and early '80s, but when Atari planned to phase out the aging machine in 1982, a funny thing happened. Its successor, the questionably designed Atari 5200, floundered next to its rival, the ColecoVision. One year later, the entire video game industry was snuffed out, the victim of Atari's hubris and an overcrowded market.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600
A Stella Anniversary: 35 Years of Atari 2600
This week, 1UP commemorates the console that took video games into prime time.
Not long ago, I put out a call for feedback from 1UP readers: What memories do you have of the Atari 2600? As you've seen from our recent "oral history" features, when we ask the 1UP community for feedback, we get it in abundance. Except... that wasn't the case with the Atari 2600. On the contrary, your responses were few and far between; we saw more apologies than reminiscences.
And then it struck me: We're celebrating the 35th anniversary of the 2600 -- it launched in the U.S. in October 1977 -- and 35 years is a long, long time. Longer than most of our readers have been alive. And while Atari supported the 2600 into the '90s, if you can believe that, for most consumers the system's life effectively crashed to an anticlimactic end in 1983 when Warner (who owned Atari at the time) reported that its games division had overextended itself and lost billions of dollars. The U.S. video game industry reeled from those losses and didn't recover until Nintendo performed triage a few years later with the NES -- the system that a large percentage of 1UP readers regard as their entry into the medium.
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600
Atari's Immortal Legacy
Cover Story: Though its time in the limelight is long over, the 2600 left an indelible mark on the game industry and gaming culture.
H
indsight has a way of making landmark designs seem inevitable. We look at the Atari 2600, and it seems to tick all of the "console" checkmarks like interchangeable cartridges, replaceable controllers, and a slick appearance. Yet it's easy to lose sight of the fact that no system had ever done all these things at once before. The minds behind the 2600 didn't know what they were doing would define a multi-billion-dollar industry for decades to come. They didn't even know if it would survive on store shelves past its first Christmas.
It wasn't even called the 2600, originally. Its initial christening was as the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), a Trojan Horse of a name designed to make parents think it might be good for more than playing games (and to steal attention from the recent release of the VCR). The system's aesthetics followed suit: Black with metal switches, radiator-like fins, and a wood veneer that made it seem more like a piece of high-end electronics than previous, more toy-like home game systems. A later revision of the system would abandon the wood veneer for solid matte black throughout, and a third revision (the 2600 Jr) reduced its size, traded the matte finish for a glossy one, and added chrome accents and aggressive angles.
There was something initially unnerving about being given permission to roam around the world of Assassin's Creed III at my leisure. No one from Ubisoft was looking over my shoulder, ushering me on to the next objective. There was no timer hanging in the air to warn me of when my play session was coming to an end. In an era rife with handholding and tutorials, I was free to pick up one of 2012's most anticipated titles and simply indulge in the act of playing. Ubisoft awarded me with a wealth of freedom, leaving me to explore the world of colonial New England on my own accord. After a few hours, I realized that this freedom to take on the world as you see fit is exactly what ACIII is all about.
For the past few months, it's been common knowledge that the historical franchise has now moved forward in time to the American Revolution. Our demo began just past the halfway point in the game at the Homestead of Connor, ACIII's new protagonist. The Homestead acts as an analogue to Assassin's Creed II's Villa system, in that the player's actions can help forge and ultimately grow a sort of home base for your hero. From here, we were given the freedom to venture forth into the world and do whatever we desired. As I ran forward into the lush greenery of the frontier, an absolute truth dawned on me -- ACIII once again reaffirms the series status as the king of video game movement.
Assassin's Creed III: Liberation is a wildly impressive feat; there's honestly no other way I could possibly begin this preview. The Vita title, launching on October 30 alongside Assassin's Creed III, isn't some shoddy port or strange offshoot -- it's an original title featuring a new story, protagonist, and location. You simply have to be impressed by Ubisoft Sofia's ability to cram true Assassin's Creed game onto the portable platform. But with that being said, I can't help but feel like the Vita and 3DS excel when developers create with mobility in mind, and not try to emulate experiences that you can have in front of your television.
Set during the French and Indian War, Liberation places you in the role of Aveline, a former slave in New Orleans who finds herself in the middle of a simmering revolution. Desmond isn't featured in the game, the developers were coy in mentioning how Liberation fits in with the rest of the series. Regardless, New Orleans is vast, the mechanics and systems all work as they do on console, and Aveline's athletic prowess matches any of her previous assassin brethren.
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Heaven's island is oriental fantasy MMORPG based on the legend of Yuldo existed in Asia. Heaven's island doesn't offer you not only hunting down the monsters, but also specialized economic features such as trade the product, managing city facilities, and so on.
Hey peeps, it looks like some people are exploiting some events, they get into a certain place and use a third party program to spam AoE spells.. The idea is that every friggin NPC will get into a small bottleneck location full of Spammed AoE skills... So the NPCs die quickly and they get tons of XP every time the event is triggered...
The search for the Trinity Artifacts in Shaiya spreads to fresh and enigmatic territory with the release of the new expansion from Aeria Games, a leading global publisher of free-to-play online games. Also known to Shaiya players as the long-awaited Episode Six, Trinity Artifact unleashes an increased level cap and dangerous new zones to explore in the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
The 3D fantasy MMORPG Forsaken World recently announced the coming of the new race - the mysterious werewolf for the CN server. Perfect World plans to released a new trailer about the coming wolf in October for players to get a better understanding of the huge world and the unknwon space. Are you ready for the fantasy adventure?
To celebrate the arrival of autumn in Rubi-Ka, Anarchy Online is offering both new players as well as existing members the chance to grab some great offers when subscribing or updating their membership!
Ultima Online has a big anniversary today, one that you can only really celebrate if you're the first graphical MMO on the market. This marks the game's 15th anniversary, and that's definitely the sort of thing that merits a celebration. So the staff has decided to celebrate by deposing the current ruler and ushering in a new king.
Mists of Pandaria is only hours away, therefore, it's time to do a a quick recap about everything what awaits you. This article covers my every single article I wrote in the past few months. The links below will redirect you to the article.
According to Pearl Abyss Facebook Fanpage, some new information on Black Desert's housing system is revealed. It is a very interesting to allow a lot of things you can do in your house.
Guns of Icarus Online's launch has been delayed to October 29th, announced by Muse Games, which allows more time to put the finishing touched on the game.
Durham, USA – September 24th, 2012 – Funcom is excited to announce that Joel Bylos has taken the new position as Game Director on 'The Secret World',the company's recently launched massively multiplayer online game (MMO). Mr. Bylos will work together with Creative Director Ragnar Tørnquist on expanding and enhancing the game through quality post-launch content. The team has already launched two major content updates in just over two months following launch, and focus going forward will be to expand the storyline, introduce entire new areas such as the upcoming New York raid, and much more.
SOE CEO Jack Tretton may have given away DUST 514's launch window. The EVE Online shooter sidequel has been slated for a 2012 release for some time now, but developer CCP has remained coy regarding the details.
Dungeon Hero, comeback 2nd MMO title of EyaSoft, has been signed to several regions. That would be a exciting news for players from North America, Europe, Taiwan, Japan, South America and Turkey, as well as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam where the contracts are recently being held.
We all know of the mystery subscription plan regarding NCSoft's upcoming action mmog Blade and Soul. Following the launch of the western site for the game, in NCSoft's Q&A section, this was stated: How much will Blade & Soul cost? Will there be a subscription fee, or will Blade & Soul utilize the microtransaction business model?
