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Stargate Worlds video interview shows off interface customizations
MMORPG.com's Managing Editor Jon Wood is definitely on a roll with providing Stargate Worlds fans with new video content. We already mentioned that he put together a hands-on Stargate Worlds combat video, but he's also done a video interview with Stargate Worlds Art Director Howard Lyons about the game's user interface. The UI is built to be completely customizable, both in terms of graphics and the layout, Lyons says. Players will be able to swap out button types and adjust the visual priorities of the various interface elements. Multiple UI profiles can be saved and then exported and shared with other players. Have a look at the video for a closer look at the Stargate Worlds user interface, but MMORPG.com does has one caveat -- what you see is pre-alpha footage.
Free Realms video preview shows quests in action
TenTonHamster has put together a whopping 13 minutes of Free Realms preview video footage from the Sony Online Entertainment Block Party, at the 2008 Comic-Con. Sony artist Sebastian Strzalkowski brings us on a tour of Free Realms, beginning with character creation and moving on to quests and minigames. Along the way, he notes that Free Realms characters are not locked onto a given server, and can easily move to other servers to meet up with friends. Strzalkowski also touches upon the system of point accrual and redemption for premium content in the game. Also, true to its name, Free Realms allows for a free-to-play experience, with an optional possibility of earning points through short ad views. He shows viewers a simple user interface, with an OS X-like dock at the bottom of the screen and an animated map.The video presentation focuses mostly on minigames and quests, with bite-sized play times linked to rewards. The idea is that it provides a sense of accomplishment without having to rack up hours of gameplay.
EverQuest II GU46 -- The Void Invasion
Mysterious dark clouds shot with some evil energy have appeared all over Norrath, in every zone. But they are more than they seem -- they are not storms at all, but portals into the endless realm of the Void itself. The Void Storms gather up the local creatures and implant creatures of blackest shadow within them, then hold them in thrall until the creature has complete control.In EverQuest II's Game Update 46, you will be tasked with uncovering the mystery of the Void Storms, and freeing the native creatures of Norrath from their baleful influence. Your dedication will not go unrewarded; full sets of appearance armor (and one set of ... non-appearance armor) are yours for your hard work. Unusual weapons, a cart-load of house items, and even a pet goblin are also waiting for you ... in our exclusive GU46 gallery, that takes you through the entire quest and the rewards offered for your continued dedication to Norrath's cleansing. Check out the complete quest and its rewards! %Gallery-24768%
Wii Fanboy hands-on: Deca Sports
Imagine our delight when we had a brown envelope from Hudson sitting on our doorstep Friday afternoon. As we opened the parcel up, we found the above items: a preview copy of Deca Sports and this sweet little wristband. Huzzah!But, woe was us for we would not be able to just play and selfishly enjoy the four available sports on the demo disc by our lonesome (or with some friends). Oh no, we have a job and have to let our readers know what we think. So that's what we did. But, we didn't just settle for playing the included sports and writing up a preview. No, instead we decided that we'd do a nice little video for you. And for all of you who enjoy reading things, we wrote up our opinions as well.So head on past the break for our hands-on look at Deca Sports for the Wii!%Gallery-7109%
MMO reviews guilty of the ol' bait and switch?
The indomitable Cameron Sorden over at Random Battle pondered the ramifications of a phenomenon earlier this week that has had a lot of bloggers of the MMO persuasion scratching their heads. Namely, what's to be done about the glaring discrepancy between optimistic preview write-ups for new MMOs and the inevitable critical panning post-release? Cameron argues that it's the consumer that ultimately gets screwed over by this system, as he faithfully follows the coverage of bloggers who insist that games in their beta state show considerable promise, or at least show enough potential to warrant over-looking a few minor quibbles that could be settled before launch. Shouldn't critics get tougher on games pre-release?Of course, if the issue were that simple, there'd be no need to blog about it. The counter-example is a game like Tabula Rasa, which received an utter panning by people who were able to play it in its pre-release state. Now that it's been out for a few months, the community is starting to realize that there's actually a really fun game there that only really congealed in the month prior to release. The game hasn't been able to escape those early impressions however, and though we really have no raw data on how well it's doing, it'd be hard to call it an unmitigated success. Make sure to check out Cameron's take on it, graph and all. It's interesting to think about.
PS3 Orange Box: the slideshow version
It appears that, for some reason or another, the PS3 offering of Half-Life 2: Orange Box might not be up to par with that of its PC and Xbox 360 counterparts, according to 1UP. After previewing the near final build of the game, they were met with framerate inconsistencies during the Half-Life series that made the game look more like a "slideshow" and thusly rendered it nearly unplayable.However, Portal perfectly played fine, but they weren't able to play much of Team Fortress 2 because of server connection issues.At this point, you're probably wondering what the deal is and why can't such a great development company like Valve get one of their shining jewels up to snuff, right? Well, one reason is probably because Valve isn't behind the PS3 port like it was for the other versions. Yeah, we're being serious. An unspecified internal EA development team is responsible for the PS3 version. With a Dec. 11 release date, we suppose there is still time for this issue to be rectified, but how many time have we, as gamers, told ourselves that in hope of getting a decent game? Probably way too many.[Thanks for the tip, Conor!]
Warhammer Online hands-on
The beta may be closed now, but we were lucky enough to get our mitts on Warhammer Online at EA's booth at E for All recently. We were only able to access lowbie characters and starting area content, so unfortunately weren't able to experience some of the juicier RvR content that awaits characters later in the game -- but a few hours' worth of exploring several zones and spending some time with a handful of Warhammer's 24 careers left us pretty excited to see what else is in store when this launches. Initial impression: the game looks gorgeous. The environments are lush, detailed, compelling, immersive. The art style is unique -- not as "cartoonish" as WoW but not photo-realistic either... unique. The combat animations are dynamic and diverse for characters and NPCs alike. The several zones we saw were populated with a diverse assortment of nasties to beat on, interesting landmarks and scenery, and a general feeling that there's a lot of action going on around you -- there's a huge war on, and Warhammer manages to convey a sense of generalized anxiety and excitement that makes it difficult to forget that you're in this world with one primary duty: to smash faces.%Gallery-9466%
Canon EOS 40D's early review roundup
It takes a while to put a camera like Canon's EOS 40D fully through its paces, but a few brave souls have blazed through the feature set, menus, ISOs and megapixels afforded to them by the new camera in time to get reviews up mere weeks after launch. Of course, the flashiest feature here is Live View, but the 40D is no one trick pony: unlike the minimal 20D to 30D upgrade, the 40D is all-new and packed with enhancements. Who knows if this'll be enough for Canon to get Nikon of its turf, but we'll let you read the mountains of text, peep the comparison shots and draw your own conclusions.Read - CNET Asia ("The Canon EOS 40D is a leap forward in improvement over its predecessors..." 8 / 10)Read - Cameralabs ("If the 40D's price and feature-set suits your requirements, you'll have few if any complaints.")Read - Bob Atkins ("It's a very good camera and I can recommend it.")Read - The World According to Roland ("A nice feature upgrade over the 20D and 30D and at an attractive price.")Read - DP Review (Preview)
Winter's Veil CCG cards previewed
A little while back, we heard from Upper Deck that there would be a new set of holiday cards coming out for the Feast of Winter Veil ingame holiday, and now reader Dave C has spotted a preview for the cards in the aptly named Previews magazine. If I recall correctly from my comic collecting days, Previews is a magazine for retailers published by a distributor so they can know what's coming in the next few months and how many of each product to order.At any rate, what's important is that they have a short preview of the upcoming holiday set, and while specifics are still unclear, we're told that each set will have ten exclusive game cards, two Pet mini-cards, three booster packs, and a special "Feast of Winter's Veil" box in it. Unfortunately for the MMO players, none of these cards will be ingame loot cards, but as we said when we first heard about this set, it might be a nice gift for someone who plays the card game itself.Dave also says the Previews issue has a three page preview of the WoW comic book, and obviously WoW shows up on the cover as well. So expect a lot of WoW-related goodies hitting your local comic book store this holiday season.
Create iPhone ringtones from iTunes previews
Today's iPhone hack-du-jour uses iTunes preview files for ringtones. As you probably know, iTunes freely offers short audio samples of its entire library. You can easily download these samples from iTunes and install them onto your iPhone as custom ringtones. Since your iPhone is authorized to your account, you'll be able to play back these otherwise protected audio snippets as ringtones. Here are the steps to take to make this work for you: 1. Create a new playlist. Drag unpurchased songs from the iTunes store into your playlist. The songs will retain their "Add Song" buttons and their price within the playlist. 2. Export your playlist. Select the playlist in the sources column. Control-click/Right-click the playlist name and choose Export Song List from the pop-up menu. 3. Save the playlist as plain text. Select Plain Text from the Format pop-up and save the playlist file to your desktop. 4. Open the playlist file. It is a tab-delimited file of columns, so you can open it up in Excel (my preference, make sure to option-drag the text file onto the Excel icon) or a text editor like TextEdit. 5. Locate the file URLs. Each file URL appears in the final Location column for each line. Copy the URL. 6. Download the files. In Safari 3.0, open the Downloads window (Windows->Downloads). Paste the URL into the Download window and allow the file to transfer. Your computer must be authorized to your iTunes account. You may want to try playing back the file in QuickTime Player just to be sure it downloaded correctly. If you're not a Safari 3.0 user, use your favorite alternate such as curl, wget, or so forth. 7. Rename. Give the file a more meaningful name than, for example, "mzi.rwgtaash.aac.p.m4p". Retain the .m4p extension. 8. Upload to the iPhone. Use your favorite method (iphoneinterface, sshfs, sftp, whatever) to copy the file to /Library/Ringtones on your iPhone. 9. Select the ringtone. On the iPhone, navigate to Settings -> Sound > Ringtone and select the new file. The ringtone will play back as you select it. Please note that some newer releases (including Nicole Scherzinger's Whatever U Like--thanks Drunk Dwarf) do not work as ringtones. I'm not sure why. Congratulations, not only have you added a new 30-second custom ringtone to your iPhone, but iTunes usually picks the best 30 seconds of any song for its preview. Enjoy. GeekNote: If you've got curl installed on your iPhone, you can curl the URLs directly to /Library/Ringtones.
Mac 101: Preview Media with Column View
Finder's column view doesn't seem to be a big favorite among switchers, which is a shame. Switchers tend to prefer using icon views or lists but column view offers a huge win over these other when working with media, allowing you to preview your media directly in Finder. To switch to column view, choose View -> as Columns or just press Command-3. Finder changes over to this view which shows a tree-like structure of your disk. Not only do you see the contents of your current folder, but you can see other folders higher up the directory tree. And here's the good part: when you select an image, audio or video file, you can preview its contents directly in the Finder window. Select any media file and Finder shows you its name, kind, size and other file information. It shows you the contents of the file as well. If it's a picture, you see a small version of the image. If it's sound or video, a QuickTime-style player appears and you can play it back directly in Finder. Got a lot of pictures or other media to sort through? Use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through your files. Finder will update the preview to reflect your current selection until you find the file you were looking for.
PTR notes: Massive 2.1 roundup at MMO-Champion
The internets have generally been going crazy over 2.1 information every since the PTRs went live, with us being no exception. So if you've lost track of all the new information that's come out, I don't blame you. Fortunately, MMO-Champion has come to the rescue again, with this massive infodump full of pretty much everything we know about 2.1 so far. There's not very much new information, but here's what he has that I hadn't seen before: New loading screens Black Temple screenshots (lots) A couple gear pieces filed under Northrend New gems This as well as T6 graphics for all classes (like the Warlock set pictured above, which is in this blogger's opinion the greatest tier set ever, graphics-wise), new engineering stuff, rep rewards, and pretty much everything else that you're probably curious about, so go look it over. Do you think the wings on the Warlock set are functional? And kudos, Boubouille, I know how much work these things can be to put together.
TGS 06: Every PSP game previewed
There are way too many PSP games at this year's Tokyo Game Show. Because not all of us have time to read all the impressions and previews of all the games coming out, PSP Fanboy has created this nifty guide for all the games that were previewed. You'll get a thumbs up or a thumbs down from the major video game news sites. If a game looks like it might be a real winner, we'll award it "The Official PSP Fanboy Entranced Korean Award." These are the games that'll end up in Korea on giant PSPs, luring people to their eventual doom. And, that's pretty cool. Read on to see all the previews!
Motorola Capri, a.k.a. the RAZR slider, previewed
The guys over at PhoneScoop have sure made the site live up to its name today: not only did they get some serious hands-on time with Motorola's upcoming RAZR slider -- codenamed Capri -- they also got to preview the next version of Moto's much-maligned Synergy UI that will show up in such models as the Canary and the SCPL. At least on paper, the Capri seems to offer a very compelling feature set that will probably attract anyone into the RAZR lifestyle- you're getting a model only slightly thicker and heavier than its clamshell counterpart, but which sports a 2.0 megapixel camera, A2DP-capable Bluetooth, and what sounds like a greatly improved user interface. Especially noteworthy in the overhauled Synergy is an address book that seems to work much more intuitively than past iterations (remember the one on the StarTAC?), allowing you to organize entries by name and search for contacts using multiple letters. Although Phone Scoop was only testing a pre-production model, they have identified some potential problems to watch out for on the final version, such as the unusually crappy quality of what should be a decent camera, and most importantly, a spring-assisted slider that's difficult to activate due to the raised antenna bulge so familiar to RAZR owners. Click on if you want to peep a few more snaps, but you're really doing yourself a disservice if you don't head over to PhoneScoop for the full gallery and a very thorough write-up...
PC impressions: Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising
Games like Rome have gained some following, so a Roman-themed MMO doesn't seem too surprising a concept. Marking a departure from the elves-and-orcs staple of so many MMOs, Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising takes place in a stylised Roman setting of approximately 300BC.The game's setting assumes that Roman mythology was more-or-less fact, so players can attain favour with various gods and battle a range of mythological creatures. The focus of play is a cross between hack-and-slash combat and squad-based strategy -- execute combo moves and fight hand-to hand, or deploy a squad of soldiers to do your dirty work for you.
Hands on with Juiced Eliminator
PSP owners aren't really hard pressed for another racing game, so Juiced Eliminator has that much more to prove coming right out of the gate. This isn't necessarily a mediocre game, the developers just have to step it up and make it shine in the midsts of other racing titles. The demo level I tried out allowed me to set up all of the environmental conditions from the beginning. Rain, morning, night, sunshine and blue skies: the versatility here was a nice feature, but not uncommon to the genre. The controls were done well enough to keep your attention span, and the nitro boost added an extra level of speed. If only there was a way to get some back after using it all up. Overall, Juiced Eliminator is slightly above average, but hardcore racing fans might want to look elsewhere.The real question is: Do PSP fans really want another racing game?
Joystiq says Grand Theft Ping Pong is no joke
Don't miss Joystiq's hands-on preview of Rockstar Presents Table Tennis:If you're a ping pong addict, this is another opportunity for you to deepen your involvement with a hobby you already love. This game will satisfy you because -- at least to this ping pong amateur and the two legit ping pong players I brought along with me -- it feels authentic....About four hours after the event started, the three folks I had dragged along with me were still eager to continue to play, and none of them consider themselves gamers; none of them own an Xbox 360 or any prior-generation console. If this admittedly small sample size has any predictive power, Rockstar's got a hit on their hands.Vlad's sentiments seem to echo the IGN hands-on we saw last week. This game already looks like a Gump-like smash with ping pong addicts, however many exist, and apathetic wives. Now what about the hardcore gamers who haven't played an "authentic" game of table tennis since 1993 and can barely feel their own pulse if a game doesn't involve sex or violence?
GameTap now $9.95/month; GameTap TV announced
PC subscription gaming service GameTap has dropped its monthly fee from $14.95 to $9.95 and announced a GameTap TV expansion that will offer "a new broadband video streaming network" for games- and non-games-related programming.The GameTap TV feature will include separate channels dedicated to music videos, network game previews, GT TV-exclusive content, and "even an animation channel set to go live this spring that will feature an original series of animated shorts."We don't know where Space Ghost fits into all these broadband network plans, but we're sure that it can't be good. The cost-cutting measure by the TBS-owned venture are important in light of all the digital-download announcements made by the big console manufacturers recently, but it's hard to tell whether the $5 drop in monthly fees will greatly increase the number of current PC subscribers. Anyone gonna jump in on this?See also: What is GameTap? [Official page where the inset image was found] GameTap to offer previews, trailers GameTap: Turner's games-on-demand site is live
