Archive for May 13th, 2008
« Previous EntriesThe EA Drinks: From The Cachaca Left 4 Dead to the Mass Effect Lotus Vodka [Ea Games Spring Break 08]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
When Electronic Arts takes over a bar, they don't just throw up a bunch of gaming kiosks and a couple of Communist slogan-themed logos, they also come up with their very own list of game-themed drinks.
Here's the breakdown:
Battlefield: Bad Company: Herradura silver tequila, cointreau and fresh squeezed lime served on the rocks.
Battlefield: Heroes: Hendrick's gin, fresh rasberry, cucumber, shaken and strained, served up with a splash of kumquat dry soda.
Left 4 Dead: Fresh muddled lime wedges, mango puree, cachaca, shaken and poured over rocks.
Warhammer Online: Oronoco rum, freshly squeezed lime, simple syrup and muddled cucumbers, shaken hard poured over ice.
Dead Space: Maker's Mark, carpano antica sweet vermouth, disaronno amaretto, served up with a cherry.
Rock Band: Drink like a rockstar, Skyy citrus, fresh lemon and lime, served sparkling in a tall glass.
Skate It: Jameson, fresh lemon, ginger beer, a touch of blood orange bitters and pomegranate.
Mass Effect: Fresh basil, Lotus vodka and fresh lime juice served straight up.
Modder creates Dreamcast portable from mom’s plastic jewelry box
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008Filed under: Gaming
Continue reading Modder creates Dreamcast portable from mom's plastic jewelry box
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsEA’s Riccitiello Talks “Holographic” Madden Interface, No Need For Take-Two [EA Talks Take-Two]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
On Electronic Arts' call to investors, CEO John Riccitiello promised "a great year" to come for EA Sports — and referred to a "new holographic interface" for Madden's 20th anniversary incarnation.
Holographic... interface?
Riccitiello also promised that the next NBA Live would take "a huge step up," with new features set to be unveiled at E3.
EA seems enthusiastic about its sports franchises, and Riccitiello says he expects EA Sports will help drive the company to an additional $1 billion in revenue and an 100 percent increase in operating income. Riccitiello was optimistic about the company's studio structure in general, also listing big things ahead for the Sims Studio: Two sequels for MySims, a new SimAnimals title, and the launch of The Sims 3.
"Our fiscal 09 operating plan keeps us on track to achieve our fiscal year target - even without Take Two," Riccitiello said.
During the same call, EA Games label president Frank Gibeau also expressed positive sentiments about EA's "city-state" label structure. "We have restructured... from a top-down and centralized model to a federation of highly creative teams, each with our own culture and vision," he said, noting a broad range of studios and properties from EA Mythic's Warhammer to Battlefield and Mirror's Edge at DICE.
Riccitiello was largely unable to comment on the specific state of the Take-Two acquisition, however. "We're obviously contained pretty clearly in what we're allowed to talk about," he said. "Our offer currently stands at $25.74 a share, or $2 billion dollars, and our valuation took fully into account the success of GTA... we'd anticipated a result much like what happened in the market."
"It's a spectacular game - I'm enjoying playing it - and offer enormous congratulations to the Rockstar team."
Best RSS Newsreader? [Hive Five Call For Contenders]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
If you spend any amount of time on the web, you're doing yourself a disservice if you haven't found a decent RSS newsreader to keep on top of your favorite web sites. If you aren't using one, it's time you start; if you are, the question remains: Are you using the best newsreader for your needs (and feeds)? So for this week's Hive Five, we want you to tell us all about your favorite RSS newsreader. Hit the jump for more details and to nominate your favorite newsreader—be it web- or desktop-based—in the comments.
The first round of the Hive Five voting takes place in the comments, where you nominate your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: Newsreader Goes Here. If you don't follow this format, your vote may not be counted. After you've made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.
About the Hive Five: Our new feature series, the Hive Five, asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get—"Which tool is the best?" Once a week we'll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favorite tools to get a job done. Every Thursday, we'll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For an example, check out last week's Best Online File Sharing Services.
Battlefield Heroes: Hands-On Impressions [Ea Games Spring Break 08]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Before the whole shebang took off last night and Electronic Arts kicked off their Spring Break Games Day, I managed to sneak my way onto a computer loaded up with Battlefield Heroes to check out a bit of gameplay and mess around with the game's interesting customization settings.
DICE's free-to-play upcoming shooter features Team Fortress 2-like graphics and a definite Battlefield Lite feel, but what really captured my interest was the game's use of customization.
To create your character you have to first choose between a soldier, gunner and commando. Once you've selected the basic type of character you are playing you can go in and customize his look by adding objects to the ten provided slots. Like in many role-playing games, each slot changes a specific part of a character's look.
For instance with my character, a long mustachioed gunner, I gave him skull make up on his face, a dragon tattoo on his back, a bandolero of ammo slung from a shoulder, black pants and a peg leg. Yes, a peg leg. Really, I could have stopped playing at this point because any World War II -themed shooter that features a cartoon like art-style and the ability to slap peg legs on anyone is going to have a hard time convincing me not to play it.
But there is more. Besides customizing the look of your characters, you can also customize the way they play. By playing the game you unlock abilities which you can then bind to hotkeys, like you would in a massively multiplayer or role-playing game. The first few are typically reserved for weapons, but then you can use the rest for rechargeable powers like the ability to heal yourself, run, toughen your skin for a short time.
I didn't have tons of time to actually play the game, what with the time I spent marveling over the peg legs, but from what I saw it looks like it's going to be quite a bit of fun: A shooter that in many ways looks and feels like an RPG.
galleryPost('bh513', 3, '');
Skate It Wii Hands-On Impressions [Ea Games Spring Break 08]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Standing on the tiny white stage set up in front of the back bar of Supperclub last night, a drink sloshing nearly out of its glass in one hand, Skate It executive producer Scott Blackwood promised not to use the phrase "built from the ground up" while explaining his game.
Boo me off the stage, he insisted, if I do... and then he proceeded to use the phrase.
"If it's not built from the ground up, is it a port? Not really."
Blackwood explained that before Black Box started their work on the Wii and DS versions of Skate, they had to figure out if the controls would work.
"It we couldn't get that great flick it feel, we weren't going to do it," he said.
Later on, while trying out the Wii version of the game for myself, I was told the team spent three to four months working on getting those controls right and for the most part, it felt like they succeeded.
To play the Wii version, you hold the remote flat, facing it toward the screen and then move it around as if it is the board you are standing on. The A button makes your skater push with his foot, and the B makes him hold the board. The rest is done with motion. You turn by tilting the remote side to side, manual and nose manual by tilting the remote forward or back and do tricks by snapping the remote up, to the side or in tight circles.
I was able to do quite a few tricks with the remote, including a new Kung-Fu move requires jumping up in the air and pushing both buttons at the same time, after just a few minutes with the controller. There was a slight lag between the motion and a jump, but it felt like it was something built into the game on purpose rather than a design flaw. The turning was tight and responsive and for the most part if felt like a Skate game.
One very noticeable difference is that in Skate it on the Wii there are no pedestrians. The developers explain this away by saying a series of disasters have struck the city, leaving you with a playground of upturned asphalt, broken signs and bent rails to skate in, but I suspect that some of that decision was also driven by the necessity of developing an Xbox 360, PS3 game for the Wii.
While the game will also make use of the Wii Balance Board, allowing you to steer and do manuals with it by shifting your weight, we weren't allowed to test that out at last night's event.
The game will have you leaving the city and traveling to real cities around the world to compete in skate events, the developers told me.
While the graphics certainly take a hit, the slick feel of the controls, I suspect, will more than make up for that.
I didn't get a chance to check out the DS version, unfortunately, but in the demo they showed how you will perform stunts by tracing lines across a skateboard on the touch screen. Most moves looked like they were made by drawing angles lines or open shapes, like a rough J or U, though one trick required a odd-looking loopdeloop.
Battleforge Impressions [Ea Games Spring Break 08]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
At first blush Battleforge appears to be an amalgamation of Magic the Gather and Warcraft, a PC game that combines the strategy and pacing of a well put together real-time strategy game with the collectible nature and infrastructure-free feel of a trading card game.
During last night's EA event Richard Leinfellner, executive producer of the game and video president of developer Phenomic, walked the press through a quick co-op battle.
While Battleforge has single player and versus modes, it appears that it's really, at its heart, a cooperative game, supporting up to 12 players.
To play, players first build a deck from the cards they've collected by working through the campaign, which rewards gamers with new cards, trading online or buying booster packs.
Once the deck has been built, players use these cards to summon their armies, there are no production buildings or resource management, instead you fight to capture territories, which gives you the ability to summon larger and larger creatures.
In the demo we were shown one of the players used more of the aggressive, direct attack cards, while the other player used cards that were more about support and healing. While most of the cards we saw summoned creatures, which were then controlled like units in a typical real-time-strategy game, some of the cards were spells that did direct damage. The Inferno card, for instance, dropped comets onto an area.
Some of the game's creatures have specific abilities, for instance the Juggernaut, which is a massive creature that deals high levels of damage, also can charge it's way through enemy walls and fortifications.
The demo ended after the two players worked together to take down a sort of boss enemy. Once the enemy was defeated both players won his card, which they were then able to use in future battles. So winning a battle in campaign, gives you this permanent reward.
After the demo I tracked down Dirk Ringe, one of the development team members, to quiz him on some of the ins and outs of the game. Unfortunately, I couldn't check the game out because they were having some technical issues when I went by.
The game will support co-op up to 12 players and versus up to four. There will also be the ability to play through maps as a single player, but it doesn't sound like that's really the game's focus.
Ringe said the company plans to sell booster packs for the game starting with its launch, though you won't need to buy them if you don't want to. Essentially these packs will be a collection of random cards which might make deck building easier, but won't really give you a leg up on your competition. The game will include a robust system designed to allow gamers to permanently trade cards with one another, to bolster and fine-tune their decks. It won't support the ability to compete for cards, but players could always try the honor system.
From what I saw of the game it looks like it has quite a bit of potential, I like the idea of stripping away some of the resource management aspects of strategy gaming and making it a bit more about the combat.
galleryPost('bf513', 3, '');
Left 4 Dead Hands-On Impressions [Ea Games Spring Break 08]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Valve was on hand at last night's EA festivities to give attendees a chance to check out zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead. In the game you play as one of four characters co-oping through a city ravaged with a plague of zombies, trying to shoot, melee and run your way from safe room to safe room.
The game starts off with your and three other players on a roof top behind a locked door. A nearby table is stocked with a selection of weapons, ammo and health packs. In the map we played, the first room had molotov cocktails, submachine guns, pistols and shotguns. Each player can equip a health pack, molotov cocktail, handgun and primary weapon: I went with the submachine gun.
Staying true to the zombie formula, your ammo is very limited, so survival isn't as much about clearing a room as getting through it.
After stocking up we unlocked the door, made our way down a set of stairs and were immediately attacked by a dozen or so zombies. The zombies in the game are a nice mix of the ambling Dawn of the Dead variety and the liquid fast 28 Days Later breed. The dead tend to stand around, mill in corners or, at times, crouch in pockets of shadow. Initially when they spot you they seem slow, turning to track you, but most of them got fast once they lock on and either run at you or, on occasion, actually leap across a room at you.
While there's a nice mix of zombie animation it became clear early on that certain zombies behave certain ways. Some can be killed with a single shot, others take a full clip to knock down. Some hide, others mil, some bound around the map, others come straight at you.
After pushing our way through that first home and onto the streets we wandered around the nearly empty city looking for our way out. In the game, the object is to make it from safe room to safe room, taking the time to replenish ammo and health, on your way to an evacuation point.
In my first run through with the game, I made it to the streets before my firs-person shooter habits got the best of me and I made the mistake of separating from my team to see if we left any of the undead, not dead. After taking out a straggler or two I realized I was on my own and started to hot-foot it back to the team. Too late. Within minutes the once empty city was crawling with zombies and my last moments were spent standing in the bed of a pick-up truck trying desperately to shoot down the sea of zombies surrounding me with a quickly diminishing supply of ammo.
Take-two went much better, knowing that we had to stick together and not dally, we managed to make it to the second safe room with almost now losses, though one of our party was taken down in the room itself before I managed to close the steel door and drop a metal bar across it.
After replenishing we made our way into a warehouse where the doors and windows blew open and zombies began to pour in. The seemingly insurmountable odds were evened a bit when one of the other gamers noticed a room blocked off by a wall of sand bags and a mounted machine gun. The three of us stayed in the room fighting off the zombies as the flooded the warehouse. At one point I found a gas can and threw it on the other side of the sand bags. Shooting it, created a wall of flames which slowed the zombie attack, but didn't stop it.
Finally we were picked off until it was just me, once more cornered and desperately trying to put off the inevitable death at the undead hands of countless zombies.
The game's graphics were amazing, pushing the Source Engine to it's limits and delivering plenty of startling moments. The one off-putting thing I noticed was the gallons of blood that pour from you after an attack, it looked like, at times, that characters had a hose attached to their head or stomach, so much blood was pouring out.
There are an interesting mix of zombies in the game including a slow, fat thing that projectile vomits blood on you and explodes in a geyser of gore when you shoot them.
The balance of the game perfectly matches the feel of most zombie movies and we tended to die when we strayed from the unspoken rules of a zombie flick. Never separate, never slow down, and conserve your ammo.
galleryPost('l4d0513', 3, '');
Easily Geotag Your Digital Photos [Geotags]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
If Google Maps' integration of geotagged photos piqued your interest, Wired blogger Charlie Sorrel focuses his lens on geotagging photos, the practice of adding location to a photo's metadata that will tell you where a photo was taken. He highlights several options for the budding geotagger, from for-a-price solutions, like the new Eye-Fi Explore SD card and GPS cameras, to no-cost solutions, like Flickr's integrated geotagging tools. We've also covered a couple of no-cost geotagging options in the past that might do the trick, but for the not-that-high price of $130, the Eye-Fi Explore is an excellent upgrade to my beloved Eye-Fi memory card.
Electronic Arts Gets “Back to Basics” with Gamer’s Day [Ea Games Spring Break 08]
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Last night Electronic Arts took over the trendy San Francisco Supperclub to show off a slew of new games coming from their different labels and partners including Phenomic's Magic the Gathering meets Warcraft title Battleforge, Dead Space and Left for Dead.
Mike Quigley, EA Games Label vice president of global marketing, kicked off the event by walking the gathered press through the the games label were and reminding folks that it now includes folks like Pandemic and BioWare and partners like Valve and Harmonix.
Quigley said that EA Labels was a reminder that "sometimes you have to get back to basics" and make things all about the games again.
After showing off a three-minute montage video, Quigley called Bioware GM Ray Muzyka to the stage to talk up the PC adaptation of Mass Effect, which Muzyka called BioWare's "best game to date."
While the event didn't include Dragon Age, Muzyka said that it was "looking really sweet."
NVidia's Roy Taylor hit the stage to remind press that PC gaming was still important and pointed out that five of the games being shown off that night were computer games.
The event wrapped up with Battleforge and Skate It demos. The night gave us a chance to get hands on with a number of games including Dead Space, Battlefield Heroes, Battleforge, Skate It, Mass Effect PC and Left 4 Dead. Check back in a few minutes for all of our hands-o