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Killzone 2 Online Multiplayer: 'Fast Action! Lots of Explosions!'
Posted by Maggie Greene at 3:20 AM on July 18, 2008
After a slight delay due to internet issues in the prior presentation, a pack of media people shuffled into a little room to hear all about Killzone 2. Guerilla Games' managing director, Hermen Hulst, looked slightly horrified that the horde of journalists had left the two women in the room to sit on the floor ('Someone please get her a chair!'), but Kotaku writers getting stuck on the floor be damned, the show will go on! Eric Boltjes — senior online game developer — launched into a presentation and explanation of Killzone 2 online multiplayer's unique features and mechanics. After, of course, a nice video showing ... fast action, and lots of explosions! Boltjes underscored the fact that everything we watched was shot in real time on the PS3, and everything still looked nice even with 32 players in a game. We got a long laundry list of features and mechanics, which all seemed to come back to one word, 'customised.' For more from the presentation, hit the jump.
Imagine a world where online gaming was multi-platform. Truly multi-platform. There was no XBLA or PSN or whatever. Just the internet and your game console or PC and one handle that jives with everything. Sounds pretty great! Says Adam Boyes, development director for Capcom USA:
The online competition heats up today as Nintendo introduces the first in a series of worldwide Mario Kart Wii tournaments. Every few weeks a new special tournament challenge will appear on the Mario Kart Channel, allowing players to attempt them as many times as they'd like for the duration of said challenge, with the best times sent to the worldwide rankings to see how they stack up to the competition. Challenges can range from simply getting the best times with a certain character to using specific control setups or collecting the most coins. The first tournament should be up today, challenging gamers to get the fastest time on the Mario Circuit...with a twist. This is a pretty nifty way to keep fans coming back to the game, allowing them to prove their Mario Kart prowess without 
You may have already played your first multiplayer game in Grand Theft Auto IV now that the game is widely available. But if you haven't, choosing to spend your "sick day" or all-nighter grinding away at the single player campaign, you might feel overwhelmed by the variety of multiplayer options that await you. Even if you've only dabbled in Deathmatch, you may want to check out our impressions, based on many, many hours of online hands-on time to see what you should play next and what you should skip.
City Life creator Monte Christo have just unveiled the next generation of their city-building franchise, Cities XL, which takes the city-building concept to a whole new level. Players will be able to develop their cities using a variety of architecture styles alone, but they'll also be able to create cities on persistent online planets populated with other players. You'll be able to team with others to create sprawling metropolises, visit and attend events in other players creations, or simply wander around exploring. It's a social online city building sim. It sounds absolutely glorious, and doesn't look too shabby either. This is the route SimCity should have taken, rather then releasing the ill-received SimCity Societies. Cities XL is scheduled for release in on the PC in 2009, but you can join the community at 
Sony aren't a charity, folks. They're not going to go paying for online support for a bunch of old games that none of you play anymore. So they've announced that on June 30, they'll be killing off the American servers for a range of older titles on both the PS2 and PSP. Most notable are probably Twisted Metal: Black Online and Amplitude, while if any of you say that shutting down World Tour Soccer 2's PSP servers affects you you've gotta stop talking so much shit.
The homophobes, racists and straight-up assholes you often run into on Xbox Live or other online gaming setups aren't just ruining your game, they're holding back the entire industry. So says former Microsoft game user research head Bill Fulton, speaking with Gamasutra:
It takes a ton of people playing online to consistently outperform Microsoft's Halo 3 on the Xbox 360, but just how many people is a ton? According to Infinity Ward's Mark Rubin, between 1.2 and 1.3 million players go play COD4 online every single day, Monday through Sunday, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. 
