Shacknews recently caught up with the voice of Valve, Doug Lombardi. In this first half of a two part interview Doug talks about the PC Gaming Alliance, the future of PC gaming and system requirements in current PC games. This is an extremely interesting interview and you can read a little bit of it now:

Shack: Does the responsibility lie somewhat with the hardware manufacturers to market their products in a reasonable way, or is it up to the developers to set sane requirements?

Doug Lombardi: Oh I think it’s totally the fault of the developers. Totally the fault of the developers. I mean the graphics guys, their job to keep pushing the envelope, and as they push the envelope, move the lower-end cards down to a nice price point, so that there’s always this evolution that’s happening. If you’re a hot rod type of guy, and you want to spend $400 on the latest thing, you want to have a smoking machine, and when Left 4 Dead comes out you want to run it at its highest resolution with killer framerates, and call your buddies over for a beer and make them all drool over your system, awesome. But if you’re just a guy who wants a decent PC for less than a thousand bucks, and wants to be able to run games on it, there should be a card out there that runs games at a decent famerate and decent fluidity. Then it’s on us to write for both of those guys.

Go read the rest of it here.

I conducted an interview with City of Heroes Lead Designer Matt Miller before the recent announcement about City of Heroes Issue 12 going live and I have only just noticed the interview is live on 411 Mania!

The full interview can be found here and we share some thoughts such as these:

Q: How do you see the MMO, or as I like to call it, the MOG (Multiplayer Online Game) scene today. Do you think it is getting ever better, or are there too many World of Warcraft clones?

MM: I think there are a lot of WoW clones because everyone wants a piece of WoW, not surprisingly. A lot of publishers the last couple years have looked at backing MMOs to compete for WoW’s users.

The fact is, though, we don’t need the kind of numbers that WoW reports to make a game that is fun and profitable, and the sooner the industry remembers this the better. Our game is a perfect example. Sure, you always want more people in. But you don’t have to have a customer reach that, say, Lineage and WoW have worldwide to be a success. Let’s just make some really fun and unique games.

Q: Do you think that MOGs are the future of the PC? Will we ever see MOGs become successful on the consoles?

MM: I think that we’ll see MMOs on the consoles, but they will be/feel different than PC MMOs. It’s like RPGs, PC RPGs and Console RPGs are both RPGs, but they can play and feel radically different from one another.

So head over to 411 to read the full thing.

The latest ‘Issue’ of City of Heroes has been released. The expansion pack that is free to all subscribers brings in a massive amount of new content to the game.

NCSoft have recently celebrated the Fourth Anniversary of City of Heroes and Issue 12: Midnight Hour is the perfect way for the team to cap off the celebrations.

New features are a plenty in Midnight Hour. The Midnight Squad has been brought from the game lore into the online world and by helping them you will be able to travel to a new Greek and Roman inspired zone.

Also present in Midnight Hour are new Villain Archetypes and a Powerset Proliferation which greatly increases the range of character creation options. As a result all current subscribers receive two new character slots.

The full press release follows.

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Spore’s Gameplay Producer Matt Powers (awesome name!) talks us through the Cell Phase of Spore.

Spore lands September 7th so keep your eyes out for even more news over the coming months!

The Codemasters FAQ for Race Driver: GRID has been put online and provides an interesting insight into the balance between the Arcade and Simulation aspects of the game.

Some big things come out in this FAQ and that is that this is much more of an Arcadey game than previous Codemasters racing games have been.

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Thanks to a helpful Half-Life 2.net forumite I was pointed in the direction of this webpage which allows you to apply to become a Battlefield Heroes Beta Tester.

After agreeing to a Non Disclosure Agreement you then must go forth and provide some information about yourself including any previous Beta testing experience and a reason for why you should be in the Battlefield Heroes Beta.

I now find myself waiting eagerly for an e-mail which I hope will provide me with further Beta information…why don’t you try?

According to James Salt that is in this latest Battlefield Heroes video!

While he doesn’t reveal anything much new, well apart from the fact that an Olympic Cycling dispute is the premise for war, this trailer shows off some lovely in-game footage.

I notice a trend for two’s and three’s in this game, two maps and two sides, three vehicle and three unit types. Interesting no?

Everyone praises Steam and its ilk nowadays, digital distribution is the big hot topic amongst developers, publishers and anyone else associated with gaming. Almost everyone is praising digital distribution as if it were the second coming. The voices of discontent are minimal, but there are issues to be considered. Digital distribution, is it really all that great?

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Cactus is surely one of the best indie/casual game developers out there, I don’t know how many games he makes a minute but he makes loads of them, and they are great!

His latest work is Precision which involves some precisely timed jumping to reach some bottles and the end of the level. With only seven levels to play you should rip through this in a matter of moment. Unless your me and fail to get past the second level.

Mystery PI - The Vegas Heist is the latest game from SpinTop games and published by PopCap Games. The Vegas Heist is a sequel to last years Mystery PI - The Lottery Ticket and this time throws you in a Las Vegas themed story.

The Vegas Heist challenges players to solve the crime of the century by exploring dozens of “crime scenes” and other locations for hidden “clues.”

“There’s no better place than Las Vegas to solve a multibillion-dollar theft via hidden object puzzles – from deep inside a casino’s vault, to the Vegas Strip, hotels, limousines and exclusive country clubs, the locations were all created to transport players to this amazing city,” stated Duncan Magee, co-director and co-founder of SpinTop. “Our entire team rallied behind bringing the visual excitement of Vegas to a casual game. In addition to creating more than two dozen intriguing locations, we focused our efforts on making Mystery PI Vegas a game for all those arm chair detectives out there – players must spot clues and solve riddles to find the money!”

The Press Release follows and you can either purchase or try out the game here.

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