Dark Forces, Rogue Leaders and Goodwill

LucasArts recently re-released their long-running, beloved Jedi Knight series digitally on Steam to a rather ecstatic response to boot; only, a major wrench got thrown in the gears when the parties responsible failed to appropriately revise the games for the most current generation of operating systems. As a result, the three earliest releases – Dark Forces, Jedi Knight and its expansion disc, Mysteries of the Sith – suffer from instability, incompatibility, crashes, bugs and other lesser issues.

Steam Ad for Jedi Knight Collection
Steam Ad for Jedi Knight Collection

This is a rather shocking turn of events after a wildly successful reintroduction of the classic LucasArts back catalogue to audiences old and new, and indeed strikingly qualitatively different from the previous batch of releases, especially so when taking into account that fixes to some of the aforementioned issues are in fact readily available! For instance, players who already own the games on CD can simply extract the original wave audio for their background music to work (thanks Richard!).

It is only natural, however, to find the company trying to think up ways to maintain the newfound revenue flow and subsequently benefit from the excitement caused by these re-releases. Therefore, it’s also all the more disappointing that oversights such as the aforementioned might considerably affect the public perception of the company’s current endeavours.

(more…)

Read More

Eskil Steenberg’s Love

LoveWhat you see here are not watercolour paintings, but screenshots. The vibrant and beautiful images depict not static, empty scenes but living vistas soon to be inhabited by thousands of people. Love is an upcoming MMO, to feature a huge dynamically alterable world and innovative interrelated gameplay systems. It is the work of a single person, Eskil Steenberg.

The game’s stunning visuals are thanks to clever procedural programming, which dictates much of Love’s underlying design as well. One-man-band Steenberg utilizes intelligent techniques in order to reduce the workload and create vast amounts of content; he has created his own tools to aid his development process, which are even available for anyone to try.

Love Alpha Client Love Love

The game surfaced early last year during GDC 1)http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/02/20/for-the-love/, immediately drawing attention with its impressionistic imagery. It was at this year’s GDC, though, that substantial information was finally revealed, detailing the fundamental world-building mechanics, resources and communications system 2)http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/10/23/rps-interview-love/. Steenberg initially released a haunting first trailer, embedded after the jump, and later a full gameplay demonstration in which he gives a walkthrough of the basic mechanics. And last week he released an alpha client to the public, so that people could finally witness the game running realtime in full glory.

(more…)

References   [ + ]

Read More

The Screw PC Crew

Beyond an excellent pre-emptive counter-example in Piranha Bytes’ forthcoming, PC-first Risen (thanks Richard), this year has been a veritable desert of simultaneous, cross-platform launches – what begun in 2008 in the form of GTAIV and Mass Effect continues full steam ahead this year; for instance, over the past few weeks, we’ve learned of PC delays for Borderlands and Assassin’s Creed II. Below, you can find a list of PC games delayed and/or intentionally scheduled after their console counterparts (with EU market launch dates for consoles and the PC, respectively):

Crimes Against Humanity

  • Alan Wake
    • Spring 2010 – TBA?
  • Battlefield 1943
    • July 8, 2009 – Q1 2010
  • Braid
    • August 6, 2008 – April 10, 2009
  • The Force Unleashed
    • September 19, 2008 – Q4 2009
  • Resident Evil 5
    • March 13, 2009 – September 18, 2009

Major Offences

  • Assassin’s Creed II
    • 20th November, 2009 – Q1 2010
  • Colin McRae: Dirt 2
    • 10 September 2009 – December 2009
  • Mirror’s Edge
    • November 14, 2008 – January 16, 2009
  • Red Faction: Guerrilla
    • June 5, 2009 – September 18, 2009
  • Street Fighter IV
    • February 20, 2009 – July 3, 2009

Technical Oversights

  • Batman: Arkham Asylum
    • August 28, 2009 – September 18, 2009
  • Borderlands
    • October 23, 2009 – October 30, 2009
  • Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X
    • March 6, 2009 – March 17, 2009

Have you gotten used to the idea of the PC version always arriving late?

Read More

Slowdown Showdown: RSS Versus Twitter

RSS 96x96If you expected highbrow SEO analysis, you may very well be in the wrong place: I can’t say I’m nearly hip enough to discuss the pluses and minuses of each platform – instead, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you of the facilities of this blog: Firstly, our RSS feed is updated with each post made here, large or small, so if you want to keep in touch with everything, that would be the way to go.

However, if you would only prefer to be notified when we post original content – reviews, interviews, analyses and other major articles – then you could simply track us on N4G, where we try to get our original content submitted. You can actually help us out with that, as well as Diggs, by pressing the “Digg This!” or “Tips N4G” links below the post excerpts.

Twitter 96x96With our Twitter account, then, Nabeel especially attempts to keep on track of major announcements, more general industry-related news, various sales and discounts as well as other interesting things (such as Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation!). I do tweet too, if less so – more about adventures and the sorts – so you will be seeing a tweet from me too every now and then.

As far as our Twitter mark-up goes, we have chosen to codify each our personal posts: Following three separate twitter accounts, after all, is far too much to ask from you at this point. Therefore, when Nabeel posts, he uses the prefix [NB]. I’m tagged [MZ] and Richard is [RS], respectively. It doesn’t make a world of difference, but just so you know in case you want to talk to us separately via Twitter.

Finally, if you want to contact us separately for whatever reason, each of us has a firstnamelastname@ e-mail address; Check out the about page for the rest.

This is all just so you know!

P.S.

We got Plurk too. Just in case you dig that.

Read More