Gamasutra’s postmortems are excellent opportunities to look back at certain games, and hear with unabashed honesty what went right and wrong throughout the course of development. Such is the case with developer Freeverse’s postmortem on their enhanced port of Bungie’s classic Marathon 2: Durandal for Xbox Live Arcade.
Freeverse employee Mark Levin goes into insane levels of detail describing the arduous task of bringing Marathon 2 — originally a Macintosh title — over to the Xbox 360. He discusses the team’s decision to re-work the graphics for HD, and the difficulty of bug-testing very old code, but somehow neglects to discuss the game’s propensity for causing upset stomachs.
Regardless, it’s a great and honest read, with some real insight into the treacherous task of bringing old games to new consoles.
The EU community MVP Schwick is really great at compiling lots of good info. In the past, he’s done compilations on issues raised by the community for Hunters, Priests, and Rogues, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
Now he’s come up with the first draft of his compilation on Druids. He asked forum-goers what their main problems with the Druid class are, sifted through all the responses, and put them together in a very readable format for the Blizzard devs (and other players) to have a look at.
It seemed to me that most of the Druid issues had to do with items and abilities not scaling so well in endgame raids after Karazhan. There were some points that addressed other general issues, as well as arena PvP, but overall casual druids seemed pretty content. There wasn’t even any mention of the graphical updates to the shapeshifted forms that many druids have been asking for. Keep checking the thread to see what additional thoughts the players had, and to see future drafts of the compiled suggestions.
Sick of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw trashing your favorite games each week on Zero Punctuation? Well, you might have an opportunity to level the playing field a little. In addition to being a snarky British journalist, Yahtzee is also a snarky British game designer. His site hosts a number of adventure games he’s created over the years, but his latest creation — TRILBY: Art of Theft — has been published over at The Escapist.
Unlike Yahtzee’s other titles, Art of Theft is actually a platforming game, where players must perform a number of stealthy heists by infiltrating facilities and looting them without tripping alarms. For those interested in playing, we fully encourage critical reviews through the medium of YouTube, using clever illustrations, sharp wit, big words, and funny accents.
It’s Saturday again — and you know what that means! Yep, it’s time for another episode of the WoW Insider Show! Coming to you live at 3:30 PM EST from WoW Radio, this week your hosts Elizabeth and Turpster will be chatting about patch 2.3.2 on the PTRs, patch 2.5 (or lack thereof), recent changes to summoning, Dell’s new WoW-themed laptop, Winter’s Veil, and whatever else might strike their fancy. Join us for an entertaining discussion of the past week’s news by pointing your browser to WoW Radio at 3:30 PM EST (that’s just half an hour away!)!
You’re also welcome to add your voice to the conversation by joining us in IRC on irc.wowirc.com in channel #wowradio. And if you have something to say — but can’t make the live show, feel free to e-mail your comments or questions to theshow@wowinsider.com!
You knew it would happen. Secretly, when no one was around, you’ve probably even contemplated attempting it yourself, in the hidden recesses of your imagination: The one-person Rock Band. The game’s been officially released for less that 12 hours, and we already have our first video of someone attempting to challenge the rockolossus: MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John.
And the results? Well, they’re pretty demoralizing, actually. Though she puts up a valiant effort, it takes less than a minute for her to become undone. But take heart, Tracey: Though others may someday do it better, you were there first. Like a feminine, shorter Don Quixote, you were willing to dream the impossible dream while others stood idle. And that still counts for something.
[Sadly, MTV videos still don’t work for users in the U.K. and Canada. We have no idea why.]
All the World’s a Stage is a roleplaying column for thoughtful minds, published on Sunday evenings.
“David and his ilk are the last of a dying species!” cry out the Scrooges of WoW, “soon the creature ‘Homo Sapiens Theatricalus,’ more commonly known as a ‘WoW Roleplayer’ will go the way of the dodo, only to be spoken of in the annals of gaming history! Roleplaying is dead! Long live cynicism!”
Thus you may have heard — but fear not: these rumors of roleplaying’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. They’re just reflections of a negative attitude on the part of people who don’t really know what roleplaying is all about. Yet many roleplayers still get genuinely frustrated these days. “Things used to be so much better,” they can be heard to say, “Back in the day, RP servers were just full of people roleplaying with everyone else… but now… … it’s just not the same.” Indeed, Blizzard originally set up special realms specifically for roleplaying with their own special rules of conduct, and in the beginning these same roleplayers used to stand up for themselves when they saw others ignoring the rules that made their environment so special.
But then the WoW population doubled, tripled, and again quadrupled. It’s been good for Blizzard’s business, but not so good for the RP community, who thrived on their tight-knit system of knowledge and interaction. Nowadays, some players who might hope to give roleplaying a try start a character on an RP server only to find that no one seems to be roleplaying there. “Where did all the roleplayers go?” they ask. “What ever happened to those roleplaying rules? And how can I find people to roleplay with now?”
We hope this doesn’t make us negative people, but we had basically written MMOFPS Huxley off after not hearing much about it for more than a year. Now though, it’s made its (semi) triumphant return from the grave with a new video captured in the Korean-developed game’s closed beta accompanied by a truly, almost epically excruciating techno soundtrack.
What we see so far is a pretty, frenetic shooter in the vein of a Painkiller or Unreal, that seems just a tad bit uninspired. That said, we don’t know how the MMO elements are playing into it, as what we have here is straight-up action. What say you? Has your interest been piqued? Or have the last, dying embers of your desire for Huxley been fully doused?
In news that’s somewhat of a shocker (ha ha!), Rebellion studios announced plans to jump from their PSP developing pedigree over to next-gen waters with their first project being a sequel to Shellshock. Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley confirmed with GamesIndustry.biz that Shellshock 2 will eventually release to both the PS3 and Xbox 360 with development already underway. “It’s [Shellshock 2] troubling - deliberately so - it’s meant to be challenging the nature of war, the horror and why people do these horrific things to each other”. Sounds fun.
It’ll be interesting to see if Rebellion’s first next-gen attempt will work out and if they can bring something new to the war genre. Our fingers are crossed.
After a mountain of legal paperwork and a background check that went back to the War of 1812, we have verified the eligibility of our randomly chosen winner of the WoW Insider Dell XPS giveaway. Everyone congratulate reader Alkalye. He has chosen the Horde edition of the M1730 World of Warcraft gaming laptop.
Thanks everyone for participating with your 37,000+ entries!
In the gaming world, a good rule of thumb is that when a game is delayed once, chances are it could be delayed again. See as examples recently announced “follow-up” delays for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Haze and Age of Conan, to name but a few. Now, after being delayed once to a Feb. 8 target, it seems EA’s Mercenaries 2: World in Flames might be looking at a secondary push back to an August release date.
While EA hasn’t said anything official yet, the circumstantial evidence is mounting. Exhibit A: A Eurogamer article citing an EA spokesperson as saying we’ll see nothing of the game “within the next few months.” Exhibit 2: An Aug. 25 release date for the game as listed on Amazon and Gamestop’s web sites. Exhibit D: A decided lack of advertising, hype, or review code for a major game that’s supposedly roughly two weeks from release.
The verdict? It seems pretty damning, but it’s all still inconclusive until we hear something official from EA. We’re following up with them and will let you know what we hear.
