Lost Saga Client

OGPlanet has released a new game client of Lost Saga, an online fighting game where you can choose between four different battle modes, Escapee, Hidden Crown, Power-Stone, and Deathmatch, and fight in many different maps.

http://www.filefront.com/14864129/Lost-Saga-Client/

X Motor Racing Demo v1.21

X Motor Racing is an auto simulator with next generation physics model.

http://www.filefront.com/14864395/X-Motor-Racing-Demo-v1.21/

Close Combat The Longest Day Patch v5.50.07

This major update comes with dozens of bug fixes, map line of sight tweaks, data file changes for increased historical accuracy of equipment performance, and much more.

http://www.filefront.com/14864447/Close-Combat-The-Longest-Day-Patch-v5.50.07/

Wanna make your very own game? Well, here’s your chance!

Epic Games has released the Unreal Development Kit. Wondering just what the UDK is? Says Epic:

The Unreal Development Kit is the free version of the award-winning Unreal Engine 3, the software development framework used to create computer and video games, 3D simulations, TV shows, films and more

Anyone can download UDK and work with the same game development tools used to create blockbuster games, architectural walkthroughs and digital movies. UDK ships with the latest version of the Unreal Editor, with its unrivaled content creation toolset and rapid prototyping functionality.

UDK is free for noncommercial and educational use. Licensing terms are available to those who wish to sell UDK-powered games or to create commercial products or services for business use at www.udk.com/licensing.

You can grab your very own copy of the Unreal Development Kit, as well as trailers for the kit and sample games built using the kit, over on FileFront. So, go get your game making on!

Grab it here: http://www.filefront.com/listing/pub2/Unreal-Development-Kit

Darkest of Days Instant Action Patch v1.05

Download it at FileFront!

Darkest of Days Toolset

Download it at FileFront!

One of my all-time favorite blogs to read is Tobold’s. It’s a great place to get a fresh take on everything that’s happening in the MMORPG world. As I was perusing his site over the weekend, I ran across this article.

In short, he refers to the recent rumors that Blizzard’s Chinese World of Warcraft servers aren’t going to be coming back up anytime soon. For those of you who aren’t aware, Blizzard recently transferred their license to operate WoW in China to NetEase, away from The9.

The9 filed several lawsuits in an attempt to stop this transfer, and the Chinese government accordingly refused to give NetEase a license to operate WoW, saying that “in order to protect the interests of domestic gaming enterprises,” they would “suspend review of all games belonging to foreign companies in the event of lawsuits or arbitration between foreign companies and Chinese companies.”

The Chinese servers have already been down for a month or so, and there’s still no word on when they might return. This really doesn’t hurt Blizzard as much financially as you might think, as they received little revenue from the Chinese players, who pay as little as 6 cents an hour to play.

But how does this get Blizzard down to 5 million subscribers?

Read the full article »

Today EA LA officially announced the conclusion to the Tiberium series, Command and Conquer 4. Players will finally witness Kane’s master plan come together or fail utterly as the bitter rivals Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod race to save mankind from destruction.

“Command & Conquer is a powerful franchise with an amazing 15-year legacy. We are thrilled to bring the dramatic Tiberium saga to a conclusion in Command & Conquer 4. This game is designed to give fans all the answers they’ve been looking for,” said Mike Glosecki, Lead Producer of Command & Conquer 4 at EA Los Angeles. “With its objective-based multiplayer mode, persistent player progression and all-in-one mobile base, players will experience Command & Conquer like never before.”

Much of the information on C&C4 is being kept under wraps and doled out as exclusive content. For more details on Command & Conquer 4 make sure to catch BattleCast PrimeTime on the July 24th episode. They’ll be revealing exclusive information C&C4. The first glimpse of the game will be the premier cinematic trailer aired exclusively on the July 23rd episode of Gametrailers TV on SPIKE TV. The ETA for Command & Conquer 4 is sometime in 2010. Read the full article »

John Harris, a writer over on the industry news site/blog Gamasutra,  writes a regular series of articles entitled Game Design Essentials. These long and exhaustively researched story discusses his position on many topics important to modern game design and the lessons learned along the way.

His latest installment discusses 20 RPGs that all designers should be familiar with and why. The feature article is interesting from the perspective of someone who has studied game design and as someone who has been using RPGs for storytelling and  enjoyment over the years. Aspiring designers could do far worse than to dig through this fairly dense statement of information covering RPGs from the classic pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons through the evolution of Wizardry, Ultima, Wasteland and more contemporary games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy and the Elder Scrolls titles.

You can check out the entire article here.

One of the driving factors behind my early adoption of the PS3 was the fact that I could play all my PS2 games on it thanks to the Emotion Engine Chip that it had under the hood. In subsequent SKU’s, that hardware was removed, and Sony even said that they were focused on moving forward without it.

Well, that may be changing in the near future. According to Siliconera, Sony has secured a U.S. Patent for the technology that will apparently allow the Cell Processor in the PS3 to emulate the Emotion Engine of the PS2.

Couple this with the rumors of a price cut and the release of the PS3 Slim this fall, and you start to think that Sony may have a fundamental strategy shift under way.

Read the full article »

This week’s Rock Band 2 Music Store tracks update features Pearl Jam, Mission of Burma, Lacuna Coil and The Offspring. Wii owners can look forward to a wealth of tracks every week until the catalog catches up to the over 700 Rock Band tracks available for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Each original master recording is an even $2 or 200 points available for purchase at the Wii Shop.

(All tracks are original master recordings)

All the above tracks go online Tuesday, June 30th.

Freedom Force, the Silver and Gold age super hero game that broke the curse, didn’t feature a licensed universe with Superman or Captain America. Instead, it played like a tribute to the classic comic book story and while it never became a mainstream commercial success it remains an active and cherished game for its fans and their modification efforts.

This weekend, IGN uploaded an interview featuring 2k Boston’s( formerly Irrational Games) Ken Levine, who was executive producer on both games as well as writer, and some key members of the Irrational Games team regarding the past, present and future of the game series. Levine and his team discuss the rough ride the series experienced, their personal favorite characters in the Irrational universe and the passion it requires to get a self-published sequel out on the street.

Read the full article »

Last week we saw the id/Bethesda merger under parent company ZeniMax Media and there was much rejoicing, but what if Electronic Arts merged its two online game developers into one giant super developer wouldn’t that raise some eyebrows and be general cause for mass excitement?

Well that actually happened as the publishing giant reorganized a bit putting RPG mavens Bioware and long time MMO developers Mythic in the same division. While the two studios will remain mostly autonomous for the time being, they now both have a single reporting line up the chain to the big bosses and money men. That single leader? Bioware’s Dr. Ray Muzyka.

Dr. Muzyka’s ascencion to the head of the organization basically also points to the exit of Mythic’s longtime leader Mark Jacobs. According to Jacob’s blog the MMO pioneer is taking a sabatical for awhile and he leaves with a classy ‘I’m not going to dish on anything, I’m just going to thank folks and peacefully step aside’ sort of announcement – a classy response that we don’t get to see so often these days.

Regarding the future path of the now combined studio’s efforts, Dr. Muzyka indicated in an official response over on IGN that:

Anything’s possible. We can’t say it wouldn’t happen. There’s no active plans, currently to do that, but the teams at Mythic and BioWare I know from talking to all of them, they’re really excited about working together, so I think that fuels a lot of cool things.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning is still holding strong in the WoW dominated MMO market while Bioware’s first effort – the much anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic is still a ways off. Mythic has a lot of experience that could help the minds at Bioware pull off their vision of Star Wars and maybe even put a dent in the Warcraft numbers but only time will tell if this pairing will be all it seems.