Got a few minutes? Try this out when you get a chance. It requires the Unity Web Player. Definitely worth trying out if for nothing but the intro. You'll see what I mean.

http://www.datatragedy.com/wipmoabd/

As a video game nerd over 30, I'm kind of ashamed that I've never played this. It would be like being a drama geek and never having read hamlet.

The public beta begins tomorrow and it looks like something worth checking out. It seems to be the answer to the question "What would happen if you let a bunch of huge Diablo 2 fans make Diablo 3." Oh, and its Free-to-Play... so why not try it?

I've tooled around with Blender before, but I've left it alone for about 6 months now.

Enter Cycles

Cycles is Blender's new renderer and I must say that it is a thing of beauty. It's fast, it's practical, and, most of all, it makes lighting and materials make sense, something that has been a major hurdle in my modeling hobby. Oh, and the near real time renders (for small resolutions) help tremendously.

The image I've attached took about 20 minutes to model (and I'm really bad), but the real key is that the lighting and materials took about 2min.

For someone who actually knows what they're doing see: http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/introduction-to-cycles/

I've done really well at not buying any impulse games this year. GoG almost got me with Witcher2, but I stayed strong. How are you guys doing?

Sick an tired of those Terran Republic overlords, wearing red and telling us what to do? Think the the Vanu Sovereignty is just a bunch of guys in purple pajamas? Well then the place for you is the New Conglomerate, or, as some have dubbed it, Space 'Merica. We spend our days shootin', cussin', shootin' some more, all while drinking Space PBR and making some dough.

Come and join me on the Jaeger server. You have no excuse, its free-to-play.

Anyone else pick this one up?

First impressions: It's really good, except that I'm probably going to be tense for the next month and half. The first time some alien just pops out of no where and kills one of the soldiers you've put so much time into... it just make you want to throw your computer across the room.

Let me know if you want to play MP. You'll probably beat up on me pretty good.

If any of you have the gear, want to farm some key wardens some time? I've run the act II key warden about 20 times on mp2 and have only gotten 1 key.

More than anything, I'm just bored with the run.

Origin.com

Yes, you have to use their app.

Pick from a game on this list below and use the coupon code: OS3874XVC
Dragon Age Origins
Dragon Age 2
Mass Effect 1 or 2 Battlefield 2142
Crysis Warhead
Dead Space 1 or 2
Medal of Honor
Darksport
Fifa 12
Sim City 4
Need for Speed: Pro Street
Medal of Honor: Airborn
Battlefield 2
Spore
Crysis
Bulletstorm
Burnout Paradise
Battlefield Bad Company 2
Sims 2 Double Deluxe
Mercenaries 2
The Saboteur
Mirrors Edge

I'm sure there are a few others

FREE!!!

1 free game per account (so I made 3 accounts :) )

Beta key anyone? PS-3 only. I only have one.

Um... duh...

Why don't they make a DotA mode for Diablo3? It would take about 2 seconds of coding, and about 3 months of balancing, but it could easily be done, and I'm sure it would be fun. Blizzard kind of invented DotA, I'm surprised they haven't done it yet.

The kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation ended yesterday, and it was a huge success: They raised over $2,200,000 with a goal of only $900,000 dollars. The best part is that they announced everything that they will do with the extra money. There are new planet types, a full orchestral score, a making of documentary...

My personal favorite is that they're adding a Galaxy Meta-Game where each match you play has some effect on a giant war going on in a galaxy. Their vision is having clans battle it out over territory using individual matched games. It looks very fun.

This is my first kickstarter anything, but I hope to be sucked in like this again. It's fun feeling like you're in on the ground floor on something and you can watch it develop. I probably won't get my game until July of next year, but I'll be following its progress the whole time, waiting.

It's also nice getting a game made that the devs admit would never be published by a normal company. Kickstarter has enabled us gamers to get outside of the CoD-WoW-Halo-Skyrim Box (not that I didn't love those games, it's just that everything seems like a derivative of those these days).

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/03/valve-confirms-hardware-development

Sony vs. Microsoft vs. Nintendo vs. VALVE

When was the last time we had a 4th box? Jaguar? Rooting for Valve, but history says someone is going to lose here.

MWAHAHAHAHA! I WILL DESTROY YOUR PATHETIC PLANETS!!!


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts

Should have posted this a while back because it's probably been two months since I played it. I ran through this game this Summer and had a great time doing it.

In a lot of ways, this is the anti-GTA of the RockStar world: It's (very) closed world mayhem where you never drive a vehicle or get any down time. No sandbox here, this is straight story action story action rinse repeat.

If fatigue didn't set in, you could easily play the game straight through. There is never a loading screen, no signal to stop playing except for mid-chapter inserts that are usually so captivating that they keep you playing. More than once, I realized I was playing more for the story than for the action. I love a game where you actually care about the characters, and this one really pays off. Shoot there's this one time where ***SPOILER DELETED*** and you are like WTF! I literally shouted at the screen, and promptly blew some poor guys virtual head off.

If you like combat in other RockStar games, you'll love this. That said, to me it feels a bit loose, and the bullet time takes a while to really get down. Headshots in slow-mo are fun, though, and this game get's pretty brutal. Definitely not one to play with someone else in the room if you mind them seeing you commit horrible acts of bloody carnage.

Graphics are pretty awesome: the game sports some pretty awesome lighting, filters and animation (and I'd love to see some hi-res PC shots some time, the XBOX just can't do those things right), and the Euphoria engine (the thing that makes people move like... you know... people) leads to some interesting stuff. Bad guys grab at their wounds, try to hang on to railings, and generally move more like thinking human beings than rag-dolls. It actually seems like canned animations until some small bug throws off the vibe, but they're few and far between.

It's music keeps with the RockStar tradition of late: awesome and responsive to the action. The song that plays through the last level is awesome (maybe not "Far Away" in RedDead awesome, but pretty good none the less), and I've taken to playing the soundtrack while farming in Diablo.

It's a good game. Maybe not a must buy (never really played the MP, but if that's good I'd go for it) but certainly rent/GameFly/borrow/demo/SteamSale worthy. Try it out.