Trigger Finger

Perhaps three or four years ago, Steam was a swear word in my world. It was some buggy piece of bloatware that I was forced to use for some of my favourite games.

But for the last 2 years or so, I can only applaude valve for what they have done. Steam to me, is now THE model of what the future of desktop gaming should be modelled on. A great and very stable client that is a one stop shop for digital distribution of games. For the last 18 months to 2 years (is that when Team Fortress 2 came out?), whenever I want to buy a game for the PC I always check to see if it is available on Steam first.

Sure they are not always the cheapest (though if you are patient they often have great sales), but I can buy the game online in a few clicks, it starts downloading straight away and usually at a very decent speed. Then with the game downloaded, updates are delivered automatically pretty much for the lifetime of the game. The community integration and friends list makes it the ‘Xbox Live for the PC world.’ The best part of all is that after a format of my computer, I can just install Steam and instantly redownload the latest version of all my games without worrying about activation or other DRM nightmares.

Now, the Valve gods have truly pulled a masterstroke in announcing a Mac client to be released in April along with Mac versions of all their big titles such as Team Fortress, Half-Life, and Left for Dead series. Not only will they be native versions of games (no emulation yay!) they are fully cross compatibile with the PC versions meaning I can play in the same servers as my PC using buddies.

This is a great day for Mac gaming, and giant step for the future development of Mac as a gaming platform. I suspect they are the only big company out there with the balls to try and become the defacto ‘appstore for games’ before Apple does it. Having this kind of distribution and tools already developed for simultaneously developing mac and PC versions of games (OpenGL and DirectX versions are built simultaneously when devs checkin code) should not only mean a bright future for fans of Valve’s games, but their engine can then be used by other developers to bring cross platform goodness to all us Mac users.

And if you are still not convinced by Valve’s good intentions then read this:

“They are also adding a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge”

I would have happily rebought some of my favourite games for a mac version, but I don’t need to! As I own the games on the PC, I automatically own them on the Mac (this only applies to Valve’s games as far as I can tell).

My Mac Pro is licking its lips with anticipation for April already! Bravo Valve… Bravo!

In summary, an MMOFPS, on Xbox360 and Playstation 3, based in the Eve Online universe, and linked to the Eve Online MMORPG universe on the PC. Those playing Dust 514 fight for control of the planets within Eve, whilst those playing Eve Online continue battling over space.

The best bit…. the two games are linked to each other so Eve Online players can hire Dust 514 players to take planets for them to profit from within the Eve Online world.

Sheer frickin genius!

Sometimes you still get pleasant surprises when fishing around for a game to play like I did this week. I was firing up Steam to play Arma2 (heavily flawed genius just like Operation Flashpoint was I am sad to say) when a Steam promotion popped up offering Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2 for half-price. I ummmed and arrrred and then clicked buy.

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The Mac Pro is ‘Out for Delivery’ according to the TNT tracking page so that means, with luck, it should be in my sweaty anticipatory palms by this evening. In between refreshing the tracking status every five minutes I will start off this article which will cover many things. continue reading »

If there is one thing that has gotten this site more hits than any other topic, it is the billing problem described here when moving from one country to another with an XBox Live subscription. After two years of inaction from Microsoft, it’s time to take it the top! continue reading »

Is that there is no reason for the DRM to even exist in the first place.

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Well that was unexpected!

A year where the console dominated my playing time rather than the PC! I never thought I would see the day and to be honest, I didn’t even realised I had seen the day until I thought about offering up my thoughts for Game of the Year!

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For anyone who has never visited GamersWithJobs , do so now. It’s quite possibly the best kept secret of the internet for gamers who are older than… well school age! Listening to their latest Conference Call (podcast) they opened this good old can of worms and it spurred me to write something (yeah I know the first time in a while! jobs… weddings… moving…. blah blah!).

I have touched on this before on this site here and here. Like someone in the CC said, my heritage is in PC gaming. If it wasnt for the likes of Quake, TFC, Tribes 2, AO, Eve Online, Planetside, Delta Force, and more…. I probably wouldn’t have my IT knowledge (gained mostly from building PC’s and screwing about with drivers and operating systems trying to get these games running at a good framerate!) and thus even my current job!

Skip back to the pre-xbox years and I laughed openly in the face of anyone who tried to argue a console was superior in any way. Then Xbox and Live came along, and brought a lot of the things the PC had a monopoly on to my living room and the big comfortable sofa. Internet multiplayer, voice comms, community, and so on.

Now I would say probably I spend 50% of my time playing on my Xbox 360, and the other 50% on the PC: The huge differentiating factor between the platforms now is complexity. Forza 2 for all of its depth and simulation finesse (I love it!), is still a very simple interface that suits a controller as opposed to a keyboard. But you will never get a game (and yes I did say NEVER) with the complexity and mechanical depth of Eve Online on a console and that is where the PC’s core market is now. MMORPG’s and complex RTS games like Supreme Commander or even MTW2 are just a nightmare for a developer to turn into a console interface without losing key chunks of the games core and thus soul. Some games simply demand that you have the flexible input mechanics of the old mouse and keyboard, whereas I would equally say that Forza would just not be the same hunched over a monitor at my desk.

The other thing (which really surprises me) about console gaming is that they remain so restricted in terms of how many players you can have in an online game. Battlefield is a game built on the chaotic carnage that only 64-128 players on a map can create. It gives the game it’s gameplay through sheer numbers, yet what is the most players ever in the consoles’ versions? 24? It’s just not the same game. I’ll go all out and say another NEVER. I will NEVER, on a console game, stand at the top of a valley on a map measured in 10’s of kilometres and look down on several hundred players duking it out over a single bridge like I did on Planetside. Whole platoons of tanks on either side, players and bullets flying around like hornets around a nest, a squad of choppers swooping through the valley on a strafing run only to be met with a load of AA fire, all within one grand landscape in an instant of time. Then checking behind me whilst summoning the courage to go down and join the melee, see an even bigger battle raging a couple of clicks away. This was what? 2001? The PC could manage that then, and no next-gen console looks close to creating such scene, and this was a persistent universe too where the battles meant something!

So now I accept it, my PC will always be the innovative proving ground for the truly adventurous games, but at the same time there a multitude of genres that are far superior on the console such as racing and hectic small scale FPS games such as GOW and Halo.

Well the demo of Forza 2 landed and joy was mixed with outrage for many of those who have sampled it.

Joy that the wait was over, joy that the game plays as smooth as butter, outrage that the game fails to live up to the screenshots graphically. Of course I am using the words of others when I use the term ‘outrage.’ There are many more important things in life than the graphic quality of a racing game. Wars are outrageous, poverty is outrageous, refereeing decisions in favour of Manchester United are generally outrageous. But dissapointing is a term I might use for the graphics on display in the demo.

Generally speaking… the game looks great. unfortunately (in the demo at least) they seem to have removed all traces of AA and AF on the cars (of all things!). Lets face it, the focus of your attention in such a game is the cars. The environment generally shoots past in a blur, but we spend hours admiring our beautiful beasts and to skimp on processing power there seems daft to say the least. I suspect that this is a Demo-Only problem.

I have seen it before with MotoGP 06, and TDU only to find that once you get the full game the full rendering engine is effect and things look great again. I guess they wanted to keep download sizes down, and even if it was released looking like the demo it is still on a par with most competing licenses and it wouldn’t stop me buying it on release. But I am sure I have seen the marketing material (admittedly not the most of reliable sources usually!) boasting that upto 4xx FSAA would be in use so lets wait and see. And as for the important bit (the racing!) its fantastic!

So, literally any minute now, petrol heads, racing enthusiasts and general fans of all things car-like across the world will see the demo of Forza 2 drop onto Xbox Live.

You have witnessed my obsession with a game I haven’t even played on these very pages, it seems to be contagious as people who I didn’t even know were gamers have been talking about it today at work. The post on the www.forzamotorsport.net forums that announced the demo release was coming got around 200,000 views within a couple of hours! Here’s hoping the demo whets the appetite rather than dissapoints!

Now to try and talk the girlfriend through downloading it for me whilst I am at work!