Forget the booth babes that once decorated games industry cons and expos. Charisma+2 is offering a much more attractive alternative in the pleasing form of models that are gamers. id Software has already commissioned Charisma 2, lead by president Yvonne Lynn, for QuakeCon 2008. The ladies featured include L337Lauren, winner of the Miss Video Game Tournament 2007 held in Montreal at Arcadia and Kelly “Tipperqueen” of Team Pandemic , who’s earned the title of “World’s Best Guitar Heroine.” Gamers can play with these girls at the con.

Competition Details:
What: Charisma+2’s Head-to-Head Competition with any challenger at QuakeCon
Date: Thursday, July31st, Friday August 1, Saturday August 2nd
Time: varied: check Charisma+2 booth for details
Location: The “Charisma+2 presents QuakeCon Girls After Hours” Booth

Gamers who’s egos are easily bruised should be content to just watch. These ladies have an average of 13 years of gaming experience across different genres and platforms. For more on Charisma+2 read the full article on PRWeb.

Right off the bat, I was in a sour mood entering EA’s press conference. This was mostly due to the fact that they held it in the Orpheum Theater, which was several annoying blocks away from the main convention hall (whereas every other sane developer has chosen to hold their events near the main hall or at least provide shuttle service to their events). I warmed up a bit though after I got seated and was treated to some surprisingly good-looking games, along with a few duds. After an opening video running through most of their upcoming games, John Riccitello, the president of EA, kicked things off by pretty much getting on stage and saying that he was going to leave it to the developers to talk about their projects. From there, it was basically one impressive showing after another (with a few mind-numbingly dull ones just to remind us that it was a press conference). Read the full article »

They might not be as big as Activision or Vivendi, but the list of companies that have left the Entertainment Software Association. GamePolitics broke the news yesterday of the fifth publisher to leave the ESA this year. Crave is best known for some lesser known games such as the World Championship Poker games and that terrible Bad Boys game.

While they originally obtained the information from a source, GP has since confirmed the news with the ESA. Senior VP Rich Taylor issued the following statement regarding Crave:

We can confirm that Crave has decided not to renew its membership in the ESA. We value each member of our association, but respect their decision. In conversations with Crave, representatives stated that they value their longstanding membership with the ESA and remain committed to the values and goals of the association.

Clearly, the ESA needs to act, and act fast. If they don’t, they aren’t going to have any members left to cater to.

At a recent event, Intel demonstrated Enemy Territory: Quake Wars with ray-tracing. ETQW reportedly ran at 14-29 frames per second in 1280×720 on a 16-core (4 socket, 4 core) Tigerton system running at 2.93 GHz on a 64-bit Linux operating system.

Trendwatch reports seeing physically-correct refractions of water as well as incredibly detailed glass reflections. Intel supports ray-tracing on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Linux and Windows operating systems.

Check out TGDaily for a gallery of exclusive screenshots from ET: Quake Wars.

Finally, we get a chance to check out the new Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on the Xbox 360. Um, if you missed the retail release the other week, that is…or the PS3 version…or the PC version that came out eight months ago. But that’s not important. The point is: free stuff. Everyone loves free stuff, even if it’s late free stuff that probably should have been released a long time ago. Anyway, the demo for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is available on Xbox Live for the four of you that haven’t seen the game yet. Enjoy.

Via Major Nelson

Washington Post Reporter Mike Musgrove has delved into a number of game companies abandoning the Entertainment Software Association like rats from a sinking ship. reasons given for the defections from the ESA include the high cost of membership fees, the scaling down of E3 and CEO Michael Gallagher not taking an aggressive role for games industry interests unlike his predecessor.

Gallagher’s] been kind of quiet since that [September WaPo profile]… After a Fox News show featured an uninformed pundit going off about the allegedly sexually explicit nature of… Mass Effect, some gamers complained that the ESA did not step in to defend the game industry…

While top-ranking game industry executives were quick to get on the phone or respond to my e-mail queries about Gallagher last year, they weren’t as chatty this year… Last year, Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s game division, got on the phone to sing Gallagher’s praises. This year, Microsoft sent me a statement: “We’re as committed as ever to the ESA, and we look forward to participating in E3 this summer.” Nintendo released a shorter, nine-word statement along the same lines.

In other words your asking more for less… what have you done for me lately.

via GamePolitics

File-N-Forget returns this week with a discussion of the changing face of gaming. Our topic: Cooperative gameplay and its evolution over the last few generations of consoles. Additionally Shawn raves about the good part of the the Xbox Live! Arcade game delisting and Ron gets wishy washy with praise and damnation for Funcom’s Age of Conan.

This weeks show is available by direct download here.

As always, you can get past episodes from our podcast page at http://podcast.filefront.com, and you can send your comments, questions, suggestions, or snarky comments to podcast@filefront.com.

File-N-Forget is also available on the iTunes Music Store.

PC gaming is dead!

We’ve all heard it over and over recently from many pessimistic sources in the games industry. They cite software piracy as a major culprit, claiming an incredible percentage of games are stolen. We’ve heard how PCs are so much more expensive to upgrade than consoles and with the seemingly infinite combinations of hardware, software and drivers is it any wonder consoles look so promising to developers? With each successive generation of systems, consoles have become more sophisticated and now rival the performance capabilities of midline PCs.

PCs are hard to write games for. Again and again, developers complain about the time and money involved in creating games for systems that have no standard specifications and have a wide range of performance capabilities. Consoles represent a base configuration, sure they may or may not hare a hard drive and even when they do the size might vary but its nothing like PCs and its use of different hardware, OS and drivers. There’s no guarantee that a game will work for every build out there even if the machine meets the minimum system specifications.

All these are legitimate complaints, but I think there is one very important reason why the cries of PC game death are false. PC games have an appeal that is uncommon among the proprietary game consoles by offering a training ground for future developers. Gamers modify PC games adding increased value for other players while granting the titles a longer life span if the mod scene takes off after release. Developers even plan for and encourage game owners to create new content and change existing code. What console offers this sort of tool? Some games come with tool sets packaged with the game, while others are free to download. Its become common for development teams to challenge amateur game makers to enhance or create new game content through contests, some – like the Make something Unreal contest, offer substantial prizes to the winners.

Read the full article »

You can add id Software to the list of Activision, Vivendi and LucasArts as companies would have left the Entertainment Software Association in recently weeks. GamePolitics has confirmed the departure with both a rep from id and the ESA itself, with senior VP Rich Taylor issuing the following statement:

We can confirm that id Software has decided not to renew its membership in the ESA.   We admire their creativity and innovation.  We also respect their decision.

The ESA continues to lead the thriving video and computer game industry.  We are dedicated to protecting intellectual property, preserving First Amendment rights and fostering a beneficial environment for the entire entertainment software industry.

id might not be as big a blow as Activision or Vivendi, but the latest departure isn’t going to promote confidence in the ESA among its remaining members.

It’s always a little strange to see a new trailer for a game released long after the game as hit store shelves. So it looks like whoever was given this task at id decided to spice things up a bit. Thus, there are three new trailers for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, delivered in an infomercial style format. The one above addresses the dangers of “projectile dysfunction,” while the other two advertise a “human juicer” and the game itself as if it were a monster truck rally. You can check out the other two trailers after the break.

Read the full article »