The PC Centric Extravaganza 7.15.08
Posted by Chris Evans on 07.15.2008
With a whole heap of news and more on fanboys, read on for this weeks PC Centric Extravaganza!
The PC Centric Extravaganza 15th July 2008
Hello and welcome to another issue of the PC Centric Extravaganza! This is E3 week, but alas there won't be any news from the first day of the conference right now, you see I am writing this on Saturday. Why so early you ask? Well as I mentioned last week I am going to PC Zone for a weeks internship starting what will be yesterday (Monday).
Got more thoughts on fanboys at the end of the column, a continuation of some comments that arose last week.
Read on my friends!
Episode 3 – First Concept Art
That is the first piece of concept art that has emerged for Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and it will be part of the Into The Pixel exhibit for the E for All Expo later this year. The piece appears to show a Combine Advisor floating above a figure which is most likely Gordon Freeman in the possible ruins of the Citadel from City 17.
Valve have already stated that Episode 3 won't be present at E3, will we see more of it at the E for All Expo in September though, who knows?
We all love the Team Fortress 2 'Meet The' videos, they are all different kinds of awesomeness. Wouldn't we all love to see something similar for Left 4 Dead? Well we may just get to! The guys over from Left 4 Dead 411 have had a little chat with Left 4 Dead head-honcho and Turtle Rock founder; Mike Booth. The question and answer at hand? Read on!
Do you plan on having trailers exploring the four survivors similar to Team Fortress 2's "Meet the Team" advertisements?
L4D media is in production. We hope to have the first of it online for folks to check out in the coming weeks.
With Valve preparing to show off Left 4 Dead at E3 next week I think there is a good chance that we will get to see some interesting stuff from the Left 4 Dead crew.
You can find all the questions posed to Mike Booth and all the answers he gave right here.
Codies go Simulating
I have enjoyed the past two racing games from Codemasters, I found DiRT and GRID two highly enjoyable racing games. However on word earlier this year about the team acquiring the F1 license I became quite nervous about what direction Codies would take the new game. I feared that a continuation of the arcade stylings of their previous two games would have a negative impact on the F1 game, however word has reached me (via Kotaku) that Codies are intent on creating a game totally different to DiRT and GRID.
GRID and DiRT are aimed at an arcade audience and they do that very well. F1 has different requirements and will get a completely different treatment from our in-house team, including full on sim options, physics, rules and regs etc. We will also have arcade requirements catered for as well. How this will be split we do not know yet, but split it will be
Which is certainly good news for all of us die-hard F1 fans who are looking forward to some good ole F1 action!
Far Cry 2 – Night Time
This latest video/interview for Far Cry 2 is one of the best I have seen for the game recently. While I have been keeping my eyes on Far Cry 2 for a while now, this video shows off some great new gameplay footage and the Creative Director, Clint Hocking talks us through the day/night cycle of the game.
Having watched this I now know how I will play Far Cry 2. I will wait til it is night, sneak into enemy camps, do the necessary deeds then sneak out. Of course that probably won't happen and I will spectacularly fail whenever I do try and do that. Ah well!
Wolfenstein Info
Word reaches me from Kotaku that a NeoGAF forumite has gleaned the first information of the new Wolfenstein game from the newest issue of Game Informer.
As should be expected you take control of BJ Blaskowitz who has some new fangled super-natural powers while fighting the Nazi's in World War Two. The game will be based in a city which opens up as you complete various missions and there will be an AI resistance force that will help you as you fight. Finally the Nazi's have created 'The Shroud' which is an alternate dimension they are drawing power from.
Watch and wait, I think we can expect to see more of this game during E3! I love how the TV is still working, just seems so right for a Fallout trailer.
Dawn of War 2 Trailer
This new Pre-E3 trailer for Dawn of War 2 does something great, and something just average. The great thing is the combat it shows off, vicious and brutal this game is looking damn good. The average thing? The revelation of the new race to go alongside the Space Marines and Orks (or Orcs...I'm not sure which!) is distinctly average. We want Tyranids damn it!
Commander in Chief
Being a student of politics I take an interest in any game that claims to be a 'Geo-political Simulator'. What do you know, Command in Chief is a game which does just that! Commander in Chief tasks you with taking control of a nation, you can take charge of around 170 real-world nations. You will have to manage your nation and its relationship with other nations around the world while dealing with natural disasters and various international organisations. Spiffing!
Mirror's Edge
Two new videos for DICE's Mirror's Edge, the first one in an interview whereby we learn some more about the game mechanics, though see little new gameplay footage. The second is a story-based trailer. This is really shaping up to be an exciting and innovative game.
Good Old Games
Good Old Games or GOG.com is the new venture from CD Projekt, the team behind The Witcher. Good Old Games is the latest entrant into the world of Digital Games Distribution and already has several key features that will set it aside from the competition when it launches in September.
Good Old Games will be a platform which allows gamers to purchase classic PC games from the 80s, 90s and even the 00ss at great low prices without any DRM at all. There will be no need to be online to play these games and every game they will sell will be tweaked to ensure compatability with the latest PC hardware and software.
The Fallout games, Operation Flashpoint and TOCA Race Driver 3 are among some of the games that are being touted as being key titles for Good Old Games when it launches. If you head over to GOG.com you can sign up for a possible place in a closed beta coming August!
I must include this great press release:
CD Projekt, best known in the Western world for its award-winning PC RPG, The Witcher, is proud to unveil its invention of time travel. The company sent several representatives to the past and they've returned with some amazing findings. Quick to capitalize on the incredible treasures of history, the company is pleased to reveal its newest project, GOG.com. The site, whose name is an acronym for Good Old Games, is a new games-on-demand platform that allows old fogies (and young fogies) to buy some of the best PC games of all time – many of which just can't be found in stores anymore – and play them on modern hardware, completely free of intrusive DRM. GOG.com is poised to become the center of the classic-games universe with a huge community section including forums, user reviews and ratings, as well as insightful commentary and editorials from some of the industry's most beloved writers. A closed public beta of the site is scheduled for launch on August 1st, and excited old-school gamers can sign up for more info and a chance to enter the beta by visiting GOG.com.
The site makes it tremendously easy for gamers to buy, download and install some of their all-time favorite PC games. The games will be sold for $5.99 or $9.99, are guaranteed to work on Windows Vista and Windows XP systems and are available to download as many times as needed. This is very nice, yes? The DRM-free games, low prices, the site's ease-of-use and the community are some of the main features that make Good Old Games something more than just another digital distribution outlet.
GOG.com has already lined up agreements with such publishers as Interplay and Codemasters to make their games available on the site. Among the titles those companies are bringing to the site are in-demand classics like Fallout, Freespace 2, Operation Flashpoint: Game of the Year Edition and TOCA Race Driver 3. Negotiations are in progress with several other publishers, with the ultimate goal of GOG.com offering a comprehensive collection of classic PC games from the 80s, 90s and 2000s.
"Our main goal is to create a user-friendly site with the best classic PC games for a price that might be considered impossible to achieve," said Adam Oldakowski, Managing Director of GOG.com. "The people behind GOG.com are gamers and we all know how difficult it is to find a lot of classic games. So we've started building a great games catalogue, gotten rid of the copy protection that gamers hate so much, optimized the games to work on modern operating systems, and made them cheap enough that piracy seems like a rip-off. It's so easy to buy, download and install a game and then get deeply involved in the community; we're very confident that gamers will absolutely love the site."
Okay, so that part about inventing time travel was a lie. Sorry.
The first comment that really caught my attention was this one by Snake211;
Oh no PC fanboys? you should check out NMA. To them Fallout 3 is an abomination, only Fallout 1 and 2 matters.
Posted By: Snake211 (Guest) on July 08, 2008 at 12:50 AM
I couldn't believe that I had ignored No Mutants Allowed a site dedicated to all things Fallout. The people at NMA have strong feelings regarding the Fallout universe, they can be seen to view anything which breaks away from the original two Fallout games with considerable unease.
It is the unwillingness of the NMA community to accept that their beloved franchise is changing direction that is most striking. Things such as the move into 3D, a first-person perspective and such like have caused much grief amongst NMA members.
A more recent example of fanboy'ism is this online petition by a group of Diablo fans calling for Blizzard to change the art direction of Diablo III.
I have also witnessed a great amount of fanboyism when I was deeply involved in the Command and Conquer community. The most striking thing about the fanboyism in the C&C community was the sheer number of strands of fanboyism that are present. You have the hard-core competitive gamers who love the construction style of the Generals games but fear going back to the classic Construction Yards of the Tiberian and Red Alert games while fans of the latter two games are dead-set against any moves by EA back to the Generals method.
Now I come back to the comments in The PC Centric Extravaganza from last week. A debate errupted about Bungie, Halo and games ripping off each other. This now is less of a fanboy rant, more of a general mass of words from me concering gamers.
First of all I don't have a clue how Bungie and Halo entered into the comments section, but we shall leave that for now. There were claims that Bungie ripped off Valve, that Halo stole everything it had from other FPS games, that Bungie aren't even great developers, that all console FPS games steal from PC games and that Bungie have no honour.
Those were the feelings that were emerging from a variety of people last week, and I would like to just talk about them. I'll first set my stance on how I view Halo, Bungie and console FPS games and console games in general.
I do not hate Halo, I do not hate Bungie, nor do I hate console FPS games or console games in general. I played Halo when it eventually came onto the PC, what has irked me most about the Halo franchise is the role Mircosoft have played in keeping it on the Xbox or 360 for so long at the expense of us PC gamers, and giving us shoddy ports that use Games for Windows Live (Halo 2 anyone?) Halo was, if I recall correctly a game that was originally planned to be a PC game, unfortunately it became a console game first and foremost and a PC game as a second thought.
However I do not see how Halo or Bungie stole/copied/ripped off (etc.) anything from Valve. The Half-Life and the Halo games are fundamentally different, they cannot be compared and any claims that Halo is a rip-off of Half-Life are totally unfounded. If you want to see a game that copies and steals from other games then just check out these Rock, Paper, Shotgun articles.
At the end of the day most FPS' are similar to each other, I have played numerous demos of mediocre games that all felt the same, at the end of the day it is only the great ones that stand above from the crap. Half-Life, Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, Call of Duty all spring immediately to mind as standing above everything else. While these games may have similarities to each other or even other games, well so what? As long as they aren't actively stealing from games (like Limbo of the Lost see link above) then people shouldn't go claiming that they are.
Console FPS games can be good too in their own right, but due to the inherant differences between how people play a console game and a PC game then they cannot really be compared. FPS' that appear both on the PC and on consoles have to be different from each other in some ways to make up for the differences in controls and input methods. A PC gamer can do things that a console gamer can't do as easily, the opposite can be seen with racing games..
I hope everyone enjoys the E3 week here on 411, there will be lots of great stuff appearing as the week goes on thanks to our embedded reporters.
I will enjoy my E3 week at PC Zone, wish me luck on that ;)
