RPGs: Stop Making Bad First Impressions 
Is Hitman's Next Target Assassin's Creed? 
Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land After a run of over five years, Battlestar Galactica finished over the weekend, and there’s a hole in my heart. Probably one in yours, too. One that needs filling.
The Sci Fi Channel has given producers Granada America and World Cyber Games the green light to produce a new competitive gaming television series, tentatively titled GameQuest. The 8 episode series will bring together 12 gamers, who will compete in a variety of elimination events including both video games and game-themed physical challenges for the title of “best all-around gamer”, with a prize of $100,000 and trips to World Cyber Games events up for grabs. “With two out of every three American households playing video games, it’s clear that this mainstream phenomenon is a perfect arena for the channel’s agenda of broadening the brand while celebrating imagination,” Sci Fi channel president Dave Howe said.
You sitting down, sci-fi nerds? Halcyon – who now own the rights to the whole Terminator franchise – have secured the option to develop a number of films and games based on the works of Philip K Dick. At this stage, two games are planned. There’s no word on just which of Dick’s 44 novels and 120 short stories yet to be adapted (obviously people already own the rights to Total Recall, Minority Report, etc) will be picked up, so fans can go right ahead and start pencilling in their own personal top-fives while we wait for a fleshier announcement.
He’ll be back, several times – possibly [The Guardian]
Egosoft has quietly announced X3: Terran Conflict, a standalone expansion for its mega-confusing by extremely rewarding space trading sim X3.
The news arrived via a post on Egosoft’s official forums. Here’s a snippet:
X³: Terran Conflict is a brand new, stand-alone game set in the universe of X³. It is the culmination of the X trilogy, with a grand finale that takes us all the way back to Earth’s own solar system. Gamers can take on the roles of different characters in the X universe, or of a Terran military pilot, and experience a multitude of stories in the largest X universe ever featured – for X³: Terran Conflict will offer more missions than any other X game before.
Meanwhile, X³: Terran Conflict will pose questions such as: How has Earth changed in all these years? And how will relations between Earth and its counterparts in the X universe develop?
Egosoft has a page up on its site for the expansion, but it’s a little barren. From the sounds of things it may simply be a new campaign with a few gameplay tweaks. Though I’m hoping it’s not, because I adore X3. Yes, it had a learning curve steeper than Mt. Everest, but once you mounted that summit, the view was glorious. Erectile even.
What I’d like to see? An expansion that combines all the useful mods the community has created over the years into one, beautiful, sanctioned product.
NEWS: X³: Terran Conflict announced [Egosoft, via Blue's News]
Trinity, the latest content update for the sci-fi MMO EVE Online, is overwriting an important boot file required by Windows XP. As you can guess, the bug prevents affected systems from starting. Not only is this stopping people from playing the game, it’s making it rather hard for them to do much with their PCs at all.
There are three ways to update to Trinity – using a classic patch, classic to premium and full premium. It’s the second of these that’s causing the problem. The update comes with a file called “boot.ini”, which just so happens to be the exact same name for a critical file of Windows XP’s bootstrap. For some reason, the update overwrites this file, even though it resides in a completely different directory.
EVE Online developer CCP has confirmed that the bug exists and has posted various solutions on the game’s official forums. It’s my understanding that CCP is working on a fix.
Only Windows XP machines are affected, so Vista users and users of older versions of Microsoft’s operating system can sleep easy.
Boot.ini problems [EVE Online forums, via Atomic]
The official Star Trek Online forums were host to a visual treat for fans yesterday, as Perpetual Entertainment’s Mike Stemmle presented the first real screenshot of the MMO. The story lead explained, in detail, STO‘s Interaction System which “controls every non-combat, player-to-NPC interaction in the game.” Whether you’re negotiating with alien species, beaming from ship to shore or responding to distress calls, the Interaction System is where you’ll be pointing and clicking your mouse. That rather mundane stuff is hard to read when one’s picking about the minutiae of a screencap featuring an alien ambassador of (personally) unknown origin. Sure, it may look more Voyager than TOS, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have fun going where no MMO player has gone before.
An even bigger, better pic awaits you at the official forums.
STO DevLog 5.0 – “Interactions in Action” [Star Trek Online via Shacknews]
I have high hopes for EA’s Dead Space, because space-based horror films rock. I don’t know what happened to Luke as a child that he didn’t like Event Horizon, but it was an excellent example of how outer space and horror can be brilliantly mixed. Look at the Alien series. Look at…um. Hellraiser: Bloodline? Jason X? Leprechaun IV – Leprechaun In Space? There was this really great episode of Doctor Who from the first season of the new series where the Doctor faces Satan in outer space. That was pretty good. *drums fingers on the table, thinking* Okay, so making good space horror is hard, but EA seems to be off to a good start. As long as they can keep the music in check and highlight the silence and isolated feeling of being stranded in space, they could very well pull an Event Horizon out of their airlock. If not, then “As Shakespeare said, shit happens. “galleryPost('deadspace123', 3, '');
Some smart brilliant Nobel Prize candidate PR expert came up with what may be the cause of the biggest geekgasm in the history of the world. To promote Mass Effect, Microsoft has joined up with Sci Fi to bring the 2-hour Battlestar Galactica: Razor to movie theatres in major cities across the US on November 12th—two weeks before it debuts on television.
And it’s totally free. And it’s Battlestar. And it’s Mass Effect. And I have to change my pants. Now register quickly because my theatre is already booked full.
Register Here [scifi]
Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment has been industriously tooling away in their secret underground bunker to bring us an MMORPG based off of the hit television show Stargate: SG-1. Originally announced back in January 2006, MMO supersite TenTonHammer reports that the game is now scheduled for a fourth quarter 2008 release. From Kevin Balentine, Cheyenne’s senior marketing manager: “We’ve got a playable version of the game inside of our building. I’m not prepared to release our beta schedule yet, but I can say that we’re going to be releasing the game in the fourth quarter of next year. You can do the math and figure out when our beta program will be.”
But math is hard! Tell you what, you guys send us a press release when the beta program info is available, and we’ll go back to geeking out over the possibilities of an MMO with the potential to span an entire universe.
Stargate Worlds Set to Release Fourth Quarter 2008 [TenTonHammer via Blue's News]
