At the end of my last update from my job as manager of Thornhill F.C. I was struggling to find a new right back to cover for my injured youngster known as Nick Jackson. Unfortunately I failed to sign anyone before my next friendly, away to Hemel Hempstead. I don’t know what a team of the majesty of Thornhill F.C. is doing visiting this slum in a pre-season friendly, but what I do know is that my team can’t play football for shit.
I’ll be honest that I haven’t been covering Fallout 3 as much as I would’ve liked to have done here, but I have just pre-ordered my special edition and am starting to feel a bit of a buzz of excitement build for it. That excitement is slowly building thanks to a deluge of Fallout 3 shit that has emerged from the Penny Arcade Expo.
First off we have an interview that Shacknews did with Bethesda VP Pete Hines and Fallout 3 lead artist Istvan Pely. Talk focus on DLC which will be of the style of the Knights of the Nine DLC for Oblivion, talk about the atmosphere of the game and questing and most importantly about comparisons many people are making about Fallout 3 being Oblivion, just with guns. A really good interview that anyone interested in the game should check out.
If you aren’t interested in the game then watch this awesome collection of five videos from PAX showing off the early stages of the game.
Command and Conquer has now been around for 13 Years! Imagine that, little old Command and Conquer has finally entered its teenage years, though for a game that doesn’t count for as much as when a human enters their teens. Anyway to celebrate the 13th Anniversary of all things Command and Conquer-like EA are giving away the original Red Alert for absolutely nothing over on this website.
If you have never played the original…well where have you been all these years? I never got into the original as much as I did with Red Alert 2 but it is still a great game. All this is in lead up to Red Alert 3 remember.
You will need winzip or winrar to open the archived files, it will work on 95/98/XP fine, but you may need to do some tweaking for it to work on Vista.
Get it here.
This is a call out to all my constant readers. I want to know what you think of my blog, tell me what I do well and what I do bad. Are there topics you want me to write about, are there some topics you want me to write less about? If you have any thoughts then please, get in touch with me at contact at evo-gamer.com
Chris
The ever amazing Stardock have released a PC Gamer’s Bill of Rights which sets out ten key points which PC gamer’s can expect the company to uphold and which they hope other developers and publishers will adopt in time.
“As an industry, we need to begin setting some basic, common sense standards that reward PC gamers for purchasing our games,” stated Brad Wardell, president and CEO of Stardock Corporation. “The console market effectively already has something like this in that its games have to go through the platform maker such as Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony. But on the PC, publishers can release games that are scarcely completed, poorly supported, and full of intrusive copy protection and then be stuck on it.”
Wardell is entirely correct, we often get the short end of the stick when it comes to how we are treated by developers, publishers and even retailers. This is the kind of thing which should be adopted by many companies involved in PC games be it making them or selling them.
I picked up the new Slipknot album the other day from HMV for £10 and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. I have been a fan of Slipknot ever since I first heard ‘My Plague’ from the Iowa album. It is mad to think that Iowa is now seven years old and that it has been four years since volume 3: The Subliminal Verses. In the time since volume 3 frontman Corey Taylor has been involved in his side project, Stone Sour. While many people criticised volume 3 for the apparant influence of Stone Sour things have changed with All Hope Is Gone.
This is a heavy, thrashy and innovative album. There are tracks like Snuff which are reminiscent of the style of volume 3 and as such feels a bit out of place on an album loaded with such dark, heavy tunes. However while it may feel a bit out of place, it is a great track in its own right. To be honest after so much brutality from the first ten tracks you need this song to mellow down a bit before the punishing closer of All Hope Is Gone. Unlike the brooding epic that is Iowa and the chaos of Scissors tihs is a track that finishes of an amazing album in style.
This really sounds fresh, the album as a whole does. There are clean lyrics that are reminiscent of Stone Sour yet they are balanced out with the usual heavy growly stuff that Taylor is so great at.
The album opens with an awesome sub 2 minute intro .execute which leads in perfectly to Gematria (The Killing Name) which is an absolutely mind blowing opening to an album. This is followed by my favourite track on the album, Sulfur which kicks things up another notch of awesomeness. Sulfur has some awesome vocal work in it, I can’t get enough of the chorus. Psychosocial is another masterful track, it just shows that the band are currently in a great place for making music.
The rest of the tracks fit into place with crunching lyrics, softer lyrics with a great mix of guitar dueling held together by ever quality bass work. Joey seems to get better with every album when on the drums and the two percussionists have evolved to throw in some new shit.
This is one heavy, thrashy immense album. I would like to think that many ‘Heavy Metal’ purists would look past the band name on the fron of the album and actually listen to this, they will fall in love with it. This is a great album, people should really check it out.
After spending an hour or so in the Editor of Football Manager 2008 I have created a new team known as Thornhill F.C. (incidentally I live in an area of Cardiff called Thornhill. Shocking.) This will be the story of Thornhill, their highs and lows through the football season of 2007/2008. (I have to use FM08 for this as there isn’t any FM09 available at the moment.)
Thornhill are starting off in the Blue Square South division which is pretty much the last division before complete football nothingness and the lowest level league in the English system I can go. The game is being started with all the English leagues playable, the Scottish Premier League and First Division and the Welsh Premier League. With a ‘large’ database and a start date of July 2007 I get ready to take control of Thornhill.
According to this GI.biz interview with Yves Guillemot Europe is now a bigger territory than the US. Yves claims that turnover in Europe is more than 5% higher than turnover in the US.
Q: Europe as a market has developed a lot in the past five years - how do you assess the territory’s importance on the global stage now?
Yves Guillemot: First, our money - the pound or the euro - is very strong and because of that the turnover from those countries is heavier than they used to be. So for Ubisoft turnover Europe is actually more important than the US now, and by more than 5 per cent. It’s become a very strong market for us.I think there are lots of customers that want to play - because in Europe we love to play - the only problem we had was that the games were becoming more and more difficult to play. Now that there’s more accessibility, some accessories that are helping people to have fun, I think this market has no limit in the growth it can have if we can make sure that the people that are coming in are staying.
It makes me wonder then who is in charge of Ubisoft’s digital distribution efforts. Ubisoft titles on Steam are limited to North American customers, they are not available to any European gamers. I find it odd that they would declare that Europe is now a bigger market than the US, yet they still exclude it on Steam.
I think someone at Ubisoft has to go and sort things out, Steam may not be perfect, but if European sales are constantly on the up, then what better way to help drive this than to let people buy their products on Steam. Sort it out Ubi.
Cosmic Sunder Elements takes you back in time to an age when games like Space Invaders ruled the world, yet it combines this with a twist of modern Peggle styled delights. Cosmic Sunder takes you on a journey around a host of different worlds and areas and poses you a challenge on each level. The challenge may follow the same basic principle, which is to clear the screen of the various blocks and elements while making use of the plentiful array of power-ups.
Ok well give me FUEL at any rate, the latest racing game to be coming out of Codemasters, but this time it is being developed by Asobo studio from France. What then is so significant about FUEL? Well the fact that it will present you with 5,000 square miles of pure open world driving terrain. FUEL is set in a alternate-semi-apocalyptic world where racing junkies are battling it out against each other to win fuel supplies. This is because oil is over the top expensive, nothing like the real world at all then. Check out the video for some awesome in-game footage and more information about the game. It is due to land in 2009.