Rebel Meets Rebel Preview

Day in Rock reports: Wanna hear what Rebel Meets Rebel (the project feature Vinnie
Paul, Dimebag, Rex Brown, Country writer David Allen Coe) sounds like? You can now
hear snippets from the album before it hits stores in May. Head on over to the full
story link to check out some of the songs that will cruch the worlds of metal and
country together.

Full Story

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Preview

Gamespy has a preview of the upcoming shooterfest, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. This wasnt a hands on play test, but rather ID showing off a few of the classes, vehicles and lighting elements.

From the article:

From what we saw, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars could be best described as a collision between worlds: the class-based, objective-driven combat of Enemy Territory; the sprawling, vehicle-laden outdoor maps of the Battlefield games; the futuristic feel of the Quake universe, pitting the Earths Global Defense Force (GDF) against an incoming Strogg invasion. In some ways, you could think of it as “Battlefield 2152.”

They claim this is a screenshot of the interior. I hope they are telling the truth because Ive seen screenshots before games come out that look incredible, then the game actually looks nothing like the early screenshots. Ahem! BF2….

I hate to give away the end of the article, but if what they say is true, I cant wait to play this game.

…as fans of both Enemy Territory and the Battlefield series, we cant wait to see more…

This Preview Article is short, but deffinately worth reading.

EAs Euro Booster Pack Blunder

I just received the EA newsletter in my email. It included the following statement:

Take the powerful Euro Force into action with a full arsenal of the
latest technical weaponry. 7 new weapons, 4 new vehicles, and 3 new
Asian maps, including the Great Wall of China. Download Euro Force
direct from EA to your PC and begin playing immediately.

Ummmmm…. Did somebody in marketing not get the memo that said this was delayed? Oops…. Of course, we would expect nothing less than this from our buddies at Electronic Arts Marketing Department….

Battlefield 2 1.2 Patch: Good News and Bad News

An update regarding the forthcoming 1.2 Patch for Battlefield 2 was provided in the EAUK Forums today. Sentience(who is AJ Marini the EA Community Coordinator for Battlefield 2) posted a topic that contains both good and bad news. From that post:

First, I’ll start with the bad news to get it out of the way. We have held onto the 1.2 patch a little longer than we had initially planned. We really felt that it was important to delay the patch and take care of some of the issues that have had the community concerned. This means that it will be released sometime in the next two or three weeks. This, unfortunately, means that the Euro Force Booster Pack will be delayed as well since it relies on the patch. Look for Euro Force to be released in the latter half of February now.

Also, another bit of bad news is that the new feature that allows player to pick up deployed mines with the G key is being held back. In the end, we felt it just wasn’t complete enough for public consumption. We at DICE apologize to all of you who were eagerly awaiting this feature.

I hope that the reasons for the delays are seen as positive by you, the community, and therefore I list these reasons as the good news portion of this update.

The following issues were addressed:

– Being able to pass through walls using a spinning tank turret has been fixed. It has also been addressed on all rotating vehicle positions just to be safe.
– The disappearance of tank projectiles and grenade launcher projectiles during online play has been improved and should occur less frequently
– The distance for throwing hand grenades, ammo packs, and health packs has been increased.

And finally…

– The Red/Blue nametag bug has been addressed

Regarding the last point, what we have done is make the code more secure to try and prevent any cases where this bug may occur. Since the fix has been in place, we have had no reproduction of the bug in testing.

As for me, Ill trade a couple of weeks in patch development for a smooth transition into a better game. Getting rid of the Red/Blue tag will go a long way towards making this game more enjoyable. Add this to getting rid of the bunnies, dolphins and noobtubers, and the other tweaks to game play and I am getting downright excited!

Top 13 Tracks As Of January 28, 2006

# Artist Song Title Album
1 Disturbed Down With The Sickness The Sickness
2 Rammstein Sonne Mutter
3 Pantera Walk Vulgar Display Of Power
4 Disturbed Voices The Sickness
5 Disturbed Awaken Believe
6 Rammstein Links Mutter
7 Mudvayne Happy Lost And Found
8 Korn Thoughtless Untouchables
9 Korn Here To Stay Untouchables
10 Disturbed Liberate Believe
11 System of a Down Spiders System of a Down
12 Korn Did My Time Take A Look In The Mirror
13 Drowning Pool Bodies Sinner

This list is generated weekly from a ranking based on your votes in the Live365 playlist window.

Star Wars: Empire At War Demo Available

I have never been a big fan of RTS games. I enjoyed Warcraft II and III, but C&C, Starcraft and Total Annihilation never turned me on. There was one RTS that caught my attention outside the RPG genre. It was Star Wars: Battlegrounds. It was fairly balanced and sucked this big geek into the giant world of Star Wars.

Recently, I heard there was another Star Wars RTS in development. After SW:Battlegrounds, I have been anxiously awaiting the new Star Wars RTS. It may not be out yet, but you can check out a single map demo available for download from FileCloud.

Top 13 Tracks As Of January 21, 2006

# Artist Song Title Album
1 White Zombie More Human than Human ASTRO-CREEP:2000 Songs of Love
2 Slipknot Duality 9.0: Live [Disc 2]
3 Pantera Walk Vulgar Display Of Power
4 Disturbed Liberate Believe
5 Disturbed Down With The Sickness The Sickness
6 Rammstein Sonne Mutter
7 Mudvayne Happy Lost And Found
8 Korn Here To Stay Untouchables
9 Drowning Pool Bodies Sinner
10 Disturbed Voices The Sickness
11 Disturbed The Game The Sickness
12 System of a Down Spiders System of a Down
13 Slipknot Wait and Bleed Slipknot

This list is generated weekly from a ranking based on your votes in the Live365 playlist window.

Guild Wars: Factions Free-For-All PvP Weekend

The Guild Wars Team would like to invite gamers everywhere to join us on the weekend of January 20th for a Guild Wars: Factions Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend Event! This event will take place on the Battle Isles, the new PvP continent. Players can visit this new area of the world to to try out a brand new arena, to visit the new combat training zones, or to experience the PvP explorable areas. Join us to get an early look at how PvP will evolve with the coming of Guild Wars: Factions!

The Event Schedule
Start of Event: January 20th: Midnight Pacific Time; 8:00 a.m. GMT; 5:00 p.m. Seoul
Closing Time: January 22nd/23rd: 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time January 22nd; 7:59 a.m. GMT January 23rd; 4:50 p.m. Seoul January 23rd

Your Key to PvP*

American Players:
888D9-H27PG-NM72D-PLHJ1-2HG11

European Players:
66DG9-C4RHB-9FKD6-287BJ-LRGCJ

Feel free to share this key with your friends, guild mates and gaming partners!

*If you are an existing Guild Wars player, you do not need to acquire an access key for your Guild Wars account; you will automatically receive access to all Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend content when the event begins.

Download The Guildwars: Factions Free Client

ATI Radeon 6.1 Drivers Released – Omega Drivers Too

ATI released their first driver set for the year today. The 6.1 drivers have no major changes from the 5.13 set released in December, but several game related issues have been resolved including:

BattleField 2 Special Forces: A blooming or ghosting effect is no longer noticed when playing the game in night vision mode.

Beyond Good and Evil: Flickering artifacts are no longer noticed on the game characters after approximately 15 minutes of game play.

Dark Age of Camelot: The game no longer exits to the desktop immediately after launching, or after playing for up to 15 minutes.

Everquest II, The Fall, and World of Warcraft: A VPU Recover event or the operating system failing to respond no longer occur when playing the game.

Half-Life2: Enabling Catalyst AI no longer results in the outer edges of the water appear dark or black in color.

World of Warcraft: Rotating or zooming within the Blackwing Lair or Seering George level of the game no longer results in a VPR Recover occurring after approximately a few minutes of game play.

You can get the 6.1 Drivers at the ATI Support Site. If you do some digging into their support pages, you can get them without the Catalyst Control Center (which requires Microsofts .Net to run) as well.

On the same day, the Omega Drivers based on the Catalyst 6.1 were released. If you dont know what the Omegas are, they are generally acknoledged as an excellent alternative to the official ATI Catalyst drivers and allow for more "tweaking" and customized settings. If you are interested, they can be downloaded from the Omega Drivers website.

Thanks to DriverHeaven.net for the info.

EA Battlefield 2 Patch and Booster Pack Update

Feeling lazy tonight so A quick cut n paste job on this one. EA updated the community on the upcoming patch today and alleviated some confusion about how the booster packs fit into the Battlefield 2 series of games. Here is the community update in all its glory:

Community Update – 1/18/06

Listen up Soldiers!

By now, you have all seen the list of fixes in the next update (1.2). We are still trying to nail down a few final items and put the final touches in place.

Heres a list of additional items to look for in version 1.2:

* UAVs are now visible in the world so if you are being scanned, you can know about it and take action against it.
* Rank progression is no longer limited to the enlisted ranks. All officer ranks are now available.
* Bug that allowed players in vehicles to contest a flag from outside the flag radius is now fixed.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to clarify some confusion stemming from our updates.

The first item is on the topic of grenades. Players will still be able to toss grenades while jumping. Although the ability to fire while jumping has been removed, players will still be able to initiate a grenade toss prior to jumping and follow through with the toss, thereby gaining themselves some extra distance. We understand that there will be some adjustment in tactics required when the patch comes out but we are confident that the community will quickly come to grips with the new tactics.

The second item is on the topic of the booster packs. We have not created the maps as a separate expansion pack requiring a separate server. The booster packs will increase the content of the base game and thereby may be run on a server in regular rotation with the original maps.

Hope that clears up some of questions you’ve all been asking.

[EA]Mike and the rest of the Battlefield Team

EA Community Update for 1/18/06

Free DDO: Stormreach Preview

Anyone Interested in previewing the new Dungeon & Dragons: Stormreach should drop by FilePlanet for a chance to play.

It should be noted there are two clients available, the Standard Client and the High Res Client. I grabbed the High Res to put my new GeForce 6600GT through the paces.


http://www.fileplanet.com/promotions/ddo_stormreach/preview/

A FilePlanet account is required to sign up. The good news is it worked with my Free Account. Better hurry!

Play Times and Dates

* We will begin taking signups on a first come first served basis – January 13th
* Tuesday January 17th at 5:00pm – 7:00pm PST/ 8:00pm – 10:00pm EST registration will begin
* Thursday January 19th at 7:00am PST/10:00am EST gameplay servers will go live
* Saturday January 21st at 11:59pm PST/ Sunday January 22nd at 2:59am EST gameplay servers will close

Top 13 Tracks As Of January 14, 2006

# Artist Song Title Album
1 Slipknot Wait And Bleed 9.0: Live [Disc 2]
2 Slipknot Duality 9.0: Live [Disc 2]
3 Mudvayne Happy Lost And Found
4 Drowning Pool Bodies Sinner
5 Killswitch Engage The End Of Heartache The End Of Heartache
6 Slipknot Vermilion Vol 3 (Subliminal Verses)
7 Slipknot Duality Vol 3 (Subliminal Verses)
8 Mudvayne World So Cold The End of All Things to Come
9 Korn A.D.I.D.A.S. Life Is Peachy
10 Disturbed The Game The Sickness
11 White Zombie More Human than Human ASTRO-CREEP:2000 Songs of Love
12 Tool Parabola Lateralus
13 Slipknot The Nameless Vol 3 (Subliminal Verses)

This list is generated weekly from a ranking based on your votes in the Live365 playlist window.