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Captain's Log: Preparing for launch (and farewells)
Hello, computer (and players)! As we are all now aware, the development team at Star Trek Online is busy making its preparations to re-launch the game with a hybrid, free-to-play model. Currently, the Tribble test server has been taken down as a beta build is being prepared for testing. In the meantime, Red Shirt, originally a Closed Beta test sever, has been opened up to current subscribers to continue testing new releases that will occur between now and the F2P launch. While there is still no date set for when this will be happening, many signs point to an October or November launch period. To add to the craziness that must be going on at Cryptic's headquarters in Northern California, on Tuesday, Dan Stahl, Executive Producer of STO, publicly announced that he would be vacating the Captain's Chair as he moves on to a new endeavor in his career. Effective immediately, Stephen D'Angelo, Cryptic's CTO, will be taking temporary command as the search for a new EP begins. While this came as a shock to many and was completely unexpected even by me, it may not be the "end of the world" as some players are calling it. Let's explore more. Ensign, warp 10! Set sensors to maximum range as we explore a little bit more about this change...
Sword and Sworcery LP coming out April 5, iPhone version in a few weeks
Sword & Sworcery is an unqualified hit for the iPad -- as I said when it released, we've been following this one for a while, and it's great to see such a solid indie effort recognized by critics and consumers alike. While the game is out for iPad, the property is far from over. A full LP based on the music of the game, written by musician Jim Guthrie, has been announced for release on April 5, next Tuesday. "The Ballad of the Space Babies" will be available as a vinyl record, or online as a digital download in iTunes or Bandcamp. There's also an iPhone version of the game on the way -- I talked to Nathan Vella of Capy about it, and he told me that work continues apace. The plan all along has been to release it around a month after the iPad release, and Capy is still on that schedule, so we should see an iPhone version (optimized for the smaller platform, of course) about three weeks from now.
Mushkin gets cozy with SandForce again, launches 6Gb/s EP Series SSDs for Enterprises
285MB/s read speeds from the Callisto series? Phsaw. We need at least twice that to get us out of bed in the morning, and Mushkin has our wake up call. Its announcing the EP Series of SSD drives, based on SandForce SF-2000-series processors, pledging 6Gb/s burst speeds. That sounds mighty impressive, but if you capitalize that B it turns into a somewhat less stunning figure of 768MB/s. Sequential read and write speeds are 500MB/s, while each can sustain a rate of 60,000 operations per second. That's a lot of I/O, and it's coming to gilded racks sometime in the first quarter of 2011.
GDC 2010: Hands-on with Superbrothers' Sword and Sorcery
"Superbrothers" is the alias of Craig Adams, a Toronto-based artist who specializes in pixel-based artwork and cinema. He's a big fan of musician Jim Guthrie, and after the two met a while ago (and discovered they were actually fans of each other), he was inspired to create a few music videos of the songs that he heard. Then, a little while back, Adams ran into a few guys from Capy, a game developer (they've made some great puzzle titles like Clash of Heroes for the DS and Critter Crunch for PSN) also from Toronto, and he decided to team up with them to make his first game, and release it on the iPhone. I got to play the game for the first time at GDC, and what I found was an interesting mix of art, music, and gameplay that shows just how amazing a platform like the iPhone can be, both for independent developers and for artists who just want to express themselves (or music they like) in an interactive format. Read on to find out what the game is like, and how it uses the iPhone's assets and Superbrothers' creativity to create a singular experience.
