New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
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High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle Oh, hey, Disaster: Day of Crisis. Man, it’s been awhile. We thought you were dead. Fortunately, the Monolith Soft developed action game for the Wii just got an M rating in Australia, so we know it’s alive and… well, alive. The Classification Board lists the game as potentially objectionable for its “Violence, themes and infrequent coarse language”. Nowhere is tardiness mentioned.
Keep in mind that the Classification Board rating applies only to Australia and that we have no idea when it will be released — or if the rating is an indication it will be released any time soon. Perhaps we’ll see it at Games Convention next week? Nah, doubt it.
Disaster: Day of Crisis [Classification Board via Vooks]
The Heavy’s second unlockable weapon has been announced — and it’s another girl! Natascha the Level 5 Minigun will act as a replacement for Sasha, the Heavy’s default primary weapon in next Tuesday’s Team Fortress 2 update. This little lady won’t dole out as much damage as the original, but it will slow enemies down, guaranteed. It’s perfect for leveling the playing field against those speedy Scouts, but won’t go shot for shot with a Heavy wielding a Sasha gun.
Natascha [Steam]
Codemasters are to release a sequel to their 2007 minion-wrangling game Overlord that will pit the player-controlled title character and his chaotic army against an uptight, by-the-book Empire.
The original game challenged you to be either evil or really evil. This, apparently, was just not flippin’ evil enough to satisfy developers Triumph.
Game director Lennart Sas told Eurogamer, “Now the choices are between lawful evil and chaotic evil, which usually translates to either enslaving the population or all-out scorched earth”.
Major changes to the game include minions with proper names and personalities as opposed to just random flunkys. This will establish “relationships between master and underling” which frankly sounds a bit pervy. And evil. Definitely evil.
Codemasters unveils Overlord II [Eurogamer]
Legendary has been in development now for more than three years by a team at Spark Unlimited (not the same ones who did Turning Point). With a little more than a month left before the Sept. 30 ship date for the Playstation and Xbox 360 (the game hits PC on Nov. 4) I’m posting this look at all three Legendary Behind the Scenes videos.
Accessibility is the keyword for the Battlefield Heroes dev team and I’ve never been happier to hear it. I like my WWII shooters just fine, but they do start to feel a little stale after the fourth or fifth version; and it gets really hard to get into a series once the established fan base is dead-set on going after the blood of noobs in multiplayer. And now that Battlefield has gone back in time and to the future, where else can the series really go?
To Toon Town, it looks like. And that’s not a bad move if the idea is to net the casual crowd and attract people who aren’t into any of the other Battlefields. Heroes aims to be for everyone with its charming, cartoon-y look, basic gameplay mechanics, and extensive online community support. Like Team Fortress 2, Battlefield Heroes will feature special abilities depending on what class of soldier you play (invisibility for snipers, whoo-hoo!) – but the similarities stop there. For one thing (and this is most important), it’s free to play. You’d think that’d count against the game in terms of depth and detail, but Heroes is actually way deeper than it’s cartoonish looks and $US 0 price tag lead people to believe.
I made a name for myself in video games by savaging Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on DS. It was the most awful, most painful, most broken game I’ve ever endured and it’s my tendency to sneer at most movie-based video games anyway.
So what did I expect from Half-Blood Prince on the Wii? Certainly not all the fun I had.
The events demoed at EA’s Showcase were Potions class, Quidditch and Duelling. Before we got to try the game ourselves, we got to watch two cute EA kids go at it in Duelling. They shook the Remotes and mashed the A buttons and bobbed and weaved their heads in time with the motions on screen. Harry dodges Malfoy’s Stupify, Malfoy gets off a freezing spell that knocks Harry off his feet. Back and forth went the magic spells until Malfoy ran out of health icons and the Duel ended with Harry winning best two out of three.
Slate is running a story covering the debate about whether pilots of drone aircraft (which feels rather like playing a video game) suffer the same stress as pilots in actual combat.
We’ve all felt a bit stressed when playing a video game – whether its the tension of creeping around a Doom map that you know contains a Cyberdemon or just the feeling of panic as the Tetris blocks creep inexorably up the screen – if you game you know that it can take a real mental toll.
Of course, there is a big difference between BFGing some demons and guiding an actual missile that you know will kill actual human beings. Could it be that the reverse is true & that the video game nature of drone piloting gives a sense of distance that insulates people from killing?
As an aside, current recruitment ads for the British Army show someone piloting a recon aircraft using an Xbox 360 controller. Make of that what you will.
Ghosts in the Machine [Slate]
I had only so much time to spend ogling iPhone games at EA’s Showcase – but really, what’s the point of a mobile game if you can’t experience it on the fly? So, in one whirlwind tour, I took in Spore, Scrabble Bonjour, Sudoku and Tetris and now I’m regurgitating for you everything I can remember from the brief blitz.
The most amazing iPhone game at the EA Showcase was Spore Origins – even if it hadn’t been up against such visually uninteresting things as Scrabble and Sudoku.
Set to release at the same time as the PC version of Spore, it might be a while before we see the final product. But this primordial version looks mighty good and I had a fun time tilting the iPhone this way and that to guide my single-celled organism through a sea of sperm-shaped DNA thingies. Eating these things filled up my DNA meter and when I was at full, the level ended and I could spend the DNA points on upgrading my microbe. While not as detailed as the Creature Creator, it’s just as addictive on the iPhone to pinch and stretch your creature’s spine into different shapes while adding multicoloured coats of paint (er, skin).
Nvidia have produced a proof-of-concept demo that shows how standard (albeit powerful and heavily tweaked) graphics processors can be used to render raytraced scenes in real time.
The demo showed animation running 30 frames per second at 1,920 x 1,080. Nvidia cranked the demo up to 2,560 x 1,600 but would not reveal the frame rate. This could have huge implications for in-game graphics, although as the system currently requires 4 parallel Quadro GPUs with 1GB memory apiece, costing around $US 10,000 a pop it may be a couple of years before this hits even the most hardcore PC gamer’s desktop.
Quoth Nvidia, “the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application”. Which certainly sounds impressive. What this appears to mean is “Look! A shiny car that we can move around real quick!” and, you know, that may well be enough.
Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 [CustomPC]
Lamar Roberts, one of the two teenagers implicated in the death of seven year old Zoe Garcia, entered a plea of “not guilty” today, according to Colourado’s 9 News. Roberts, who told police that Garcia’s death was the result of him and Heather Trujillo recreating moments from Mortal Kombat and claimed to be drunk at the time, is charged with child abuse resulting in death.
Trujillo was sentenced in July and will not face time in prison. Roberts’ trial date was set for January 12 of next year.
Sorry, but this likely won’t be the last time you’ll hear from these two little monsters.
Teen charged in ‘Mortal Kombat’ death pleads not guilty [9 News]
