After looking at the trailer I was convinced that this game was running on CryEngine2. The vegetation and hills/mountains, hell even the village looked very Crysis-ish. After doing some more research I found out that this game was actually NOT running on CryEngine2 but on the relatively new Chrome Engine 4.0.

If you look at the trailer you should recognize a  couple of things. Even the bad guy in the chopper with his glasses reminds me of the Crysis:Warhead trailer. Now why is there another game engine out there that actually looks really good and not many people have heard about? I did some research. The Chrome engine 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 were mostly used as game engines for racing games. That kinda explains!

In Chrome Engine 1.0 we had 2 shooters, Chrome and its sequel Chrome:Spec Force. The 230 version was only used for racing games and the 2.0 had a couple of shooters but none ever created a real stir in the gaming community. Games such as the Terrorist Takedown’s  or Battlestrike: Force of Resistance never got any decent ratings.

After those it looks like they upped the stakes in the 4.0 version and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood hit the shelves. Most of the gamers out there should have at least heard of this game. Now later this year they’ll be releasing the new Sniper game which should supposedly become a great game. After watching the trailer I couldn’t agree more, I just can’t wait to get my hands on that sniper rifle!

You can pre-order the game for PC or 360 at amazon.co.uk:

A deep rumbling noise was constant disturbing me, the bass seemed to have got a +50% gain, radio interference and sometimes even a high pitches sound was annoying the *** out of me. The speakers are about 4 years old so I knew they were out of guarantee, but one can still try right? On Tuesday I sent a support request using the Logitech online ticket system. On Wednesday they replied, short summary:

If your speakers are less than 2 years old, contact your reseller and he will help you.

If your speakers are over 2 years old, please provide us with the following details (name, adres, phone number, proof of purchase) so we might be able to help you.

So I replied with the requested details and waited. Less than 1 hour later I got another email saying they will send a replacement, free of charge!

Wait… so my out of guarantee speakers brake down and Logitech is sending me new speakers (without asking the old ones back), completely free of charge? Epic!

And indeed, day after I get an email from UPS telling me that the package is on the way.

On Friday however, the surprise was even bigger. My shiny new x-530 speakers arrived!

So let’s summarize this: 4 year old, out of guarantee, speakers brake down, I contact Logitech support, they reply with the message they are sending me new speakers, free of charge, I receive my new speakers and all in less than 4 days!! That’s some seriously nice customer service and I would now recommend Logitech over any other company. Hats off.

It was probably released quite a while ago but I only just started using it now. The new user interface is quite impressive.

The whole colour palette has been made couple of tints darker and apart from that, pretty much everything changed. There are no more actual tabs to be seen but instead just 4 main categories.

You get the good old “Store” tab with next to it the new “Library” tab. Once you open the last one you get access to 4 additional sub tabs. These tabs are labeled “Games”, “Media”, “Tools” and “Downloads”. The 3 first sub tabs are known from the old Steam user interface and the fourth is new. It simply lists all current downloads with detailed statistics. These stats include speed, size and remaining time.

The other 2 remaining tabs are very simple. The community tab is the same as in the old user interface and the news tab is simply a blog-like page with all the latest news.

I very much like the new games tab. Instead of just listing all your games  it will now give you a selection list with all games. Once you select one you’ll get more information about that game (I didn’t know I played Modern Warfare 2 for 161 hours o.O)

You can try this yourself, which I do recommend, by simply going to your settings page and opt in for the UI beta. Have fun!

Unity is a free game engine. Yes, free! Apart from that it also works on multiple platforms:

• PC
• MAC
• Web browser (needs unity web player installed)

Additionally you can pay a reasonably small price for 2 additional platforms:

• iPhone
• Wii

They offer a couple of licenses (such as $300 for the iPhone license or $1200 for the total package) to suit your needs.

The engine also features a WYSIWYP (What you see is what you play) editor including a debug system similar to the one we have in the Crysis Sandbox2 editor. Just hit the play button and test your game directly in the editor!

Once you finish your game you can simply package is for whatever platform you want, there is no hassle included.

Unity also offers fully dynamic, real time lighting (unlike the Source or Unreal engines). You can try a small test application with a couple of rooms and lights where you can then drag furniture around to see how the shadows react.

This test application is available for play in your web browser or download, both here. A lot more applications are available there, including a couple shooters.

I haven’t actually tried it yet and I don’t really like copy pasting their website over here but you can check all their features over here.

Let me know what you guys think of it

Somehow Crysis 2 will be taking place in New York fighting against an uknown enemy. In the first screenshot you can see who Nomad (is it Nomad? Maybe not raptor but another team…) is shooting at. The design of the vehicle and the suits looks very US to me, so maybe some crazy general wants to take over the US? But where did the aliens go then?

If you guys want to speculate with me, join me in the comments

This is a pretty old article I am referring to. It was written by -dc- back in 2006 and was posted on the CGSociety forums. He launched a pretty big and for some people shocking Q&A about how getting a job in the industry really works. I feel like I have to repost this because this is one of the things that has really given me a boost in morale, aside from being really interesting as well. I strongly advise people who have ambition to get a job at a game studio to read this! It might just be what you need to get your foot in the door

Here’s a small example:

You can read the full article on the CGSociety wiki here.

The bug started wrecking ps3’s when it changed from February to March just this morning. Somehow this reset the calendar to December 1999 or January 2000.

This change of dates has caused many consoles to corrupt their savegames upon starting their game. Also logging into the PSN network doesn’t seem to work and displays an error.

So in short people, DO NOT PLAY YOUR OLD PS3! The new slim ps3 seems to be unaffected by this bug (maybe Sony wants us all to buy a new slim version).  Starting a game will eventually corrupt your savegames or trophies, so just hang on while they work on a patch.

The patch can be released pretty much any moment, just keep an eye on the PS3 blog and twitter:

PS3 Blog
PS3 Twitter

The sites are a bit overloaded at the moment but you should be able to get through eventually.

Good luck!

A DRM (Digital Rights Management) is programming included also in games to prevent people from pirating the software. Piracy is a huge problem on the PC platform and game studios are actually turning to consoles just for this (such as Crytek announcing that Crysis 2 will also come on PS3 and 360). Sadly these tools always seem to mostly annoy the people who legally buy the game. The pirated versions of the software have been modified by hackers to remove all traces of the DRM and the pirates won’t have any troubles with it.

In the past there have been a couple of new DRM systems that stirred the community. For example when EA announced that Spore for PC could only be installed 3 times and that’s it. If your pc crashes 3 times you’re screwed!

Now Ubisoft has introduced a new DRM which will be shipped with Asassins Creed 2 and Settlers III and probably all other games released by Ubisoft in the future.

This system requires the user to constantly be connected to the Ubisoft servers, once this connection breaks (which happens all the time) your game session will be terminated. You have to check your internet connection, get it back up and then you can reboot the game and load your last autosave (yes, all other things are lost).

Ubisoft has also included the option of uploading your gamesaves to their servers so it can be kept save forever. The uploading of your save game only happens when shutting down the game tho, so you won’t be save from losing progress.

At first it was thought that Ubisoft would scale it back but this hasn’t happened. When CVG got the game for review they were disappointed to see that the DRM is in place.

You can read more at the CVG website here (Source) here.