cotapebpawe622's Space http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com Most recent posts at cotapebpawe622's Space posterous.com Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:05:00 -0700 Return To Bad Company: What Dice's Forgotten Shooter Showed Me About Life http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/return-to-bad-company-what-dices-forgotten-sh http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/return-to-bad-company-what-dices-forgotten-sh http://farm9.static.flickr.com/8159/7313154012_62e265e0e7.jpg" align="right" style="padding: 10px;" width="244" />

"Go see what's cooking in Battlefield: Bad Company 2," said the Voice in the Sky. "It could make for an interesting retrospective in the next issue. Have a nose round the multiplayer in particular. Work out once and for all whether Battlefield 3's really the quantum leap DICE told us it was."

So I dutifully laced up my boots, shouldered my kitbag and retraced my steps across the wilderness. The sounds of civilization - the ra-ta-tat of pop-up notifications, sweary asides through the headset - faded into the distance. A deep, stagnant calm set in. My Battlefield 3 Errors: Use The Famas And You Can Lose Progress's drive seemed unnaturally loud. What would I find, way out here in the badlands? Did anything still live among the dunes?

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I found three things, in the end: sorrow, evil and fellowship. Sorrow because there's nothing sadder than an abandoned multiplayer map, and especially a Battlefield map, built to accommodate wars rather than the meagre skirmishes which pass for multiplayer in other games. The cinematic trappings fizzle on, in a bizarre parody of rigor mortis: flaming car hulks and swaying trees, distant artillery reports. It's like boarding a Haunted House ride all by yourself. Only if something bothers you, you can always blow it to pieces.


Alongside the PC-swallowing Battlefield 3, Bad Company 2's maps feel decidedly cramped. I managed to get a match going on just two - Heavy Metal, where I spent an instructive 10 minutes trying to flip a tank onto its back, and the dusky smear of hillside and dockyard that is Arica Harbour. Nobody was around when I visited the latter. I captured all three Conquest points, bounced up some stairs and toggled the scoreboards.
Nothing doing. I unloaded a magazine skyward in a paramilitary's salute and scurried off into the rocks. Another poke at the boards. OXM ETboy is your current score leader.

Evidently, I was going to have to make my own entertainment, calling on the game's out-dated yet robust array of map dynamics. I began a technological experiment, firing RPGs at buildings to see how many I could level before DICE's first Frostbite engine refused to put out. Great contributions to knowledge were made: I learned, for instance, that mud huts in Battlefield disintegrate with the sound of wrenching iron girders, and that bullet holes are actually little pictures of bullet holes. Serious science was conducted, using bombs. And then, the Other Player arrived.

Battlefield 3 Issues: Utilise The Famas And You May Lose Progress

I know not his Gamertag. (Well, I do know his Gamertag but I'm not going to publish it, for reasons of ethics and drama.) He was a mere second ranker, armed with starting gear and a bad attitude. I've speculated at length about his identity, over the ensuing days and nights. Perhaps he was a child from a poor family, too hard up to afford a contemporary multiplayer experience - some victim of society, scraping together pennies for third or fourth-hand copies of blunted-edge shooters. Perhaps he was a journalist like me, on a mission to waste his and everybody else's time.


Whatever his private face, I came to know him by his distinctive combination of ineptitude and persistence. There he stood on the skyline towards the map's northern end, blinking at the equatorial sunlight and the unfamiliar weight of his light machinegun. I levelled my sniper rifle. Boom. OXM ETboy is your current score leader.

Isolation had made me vengeful, and unlike the Greenhorn I had a sizeable range of toys to call on. I hunched down among the boulders and waited. There - a head hesitantly bobbing in one of the lookout towers along the Russian perimeter. The poor fool was trying to Do A Stalingrad. So I dropped an airstrike on him - stabbing arcs of smoke and shrapnel which powderised his cubby hole and punched his limp body into the yard below. He respawned... and tried it again. Sorry old bean, but there's more where that came from. Bang, bang, bang. I was beginning to enjoy myself.

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Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:01:00 -0700 Epic: Disc-Free Xbox 720 Could Have A "Extraordinary Benefit" http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/epic-disc-free-xbox-720-could-have-a-extraord http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/epic-disc-free-xbox-720-could-have-a-extraord When rumours broke last week that the next generation Xbox would dump the disc drive, many scoffed. Among those who didn't is Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, custodian of the industry-leading Unreal Engine business. Sweeney feels an Xbox 720 that exclusively utilises solid state game storage would roundly trounce an Xbox 720 that sticks to discs - providing, that is, Microsoft can swallow the costs.

"You see that spinning optical media has about 250 milliseconds of latency," he told GamesIndustry International at GDC. "If you want to get some bits from somewhere else on the disc, you have to wait a quarter of a second for the little mechanical elements to move the head around so they can read it.

"A hard-disc is about 20 times faster than that, and a solid state drive is tens of thousands of times faster. It's basically the speed of electrons that limits the solid state drive."
Lower latency allows game engines to handle larger environments more elegantly. "One of the major things a game needs to do in a world with a large environment and lots of graphical resources is continually go out and pull new textures and sounds and 3D models from different places in the storage media. So solid state drives have a really dramatic advantage from that point of view.

"It would certainly be desirable for the working storage to be solid state or some other extremely fast medium," he concluded. "But that's a completely separate question from distribution media. Solid state drive costs are fairly expensive."

A solid state machine would need to accompany a robust downloadable gaming service, as shipping games on solid state drives would be "terribly prohibitive economically". Microsoft might also retain discs but enforce installs to an internal solid state drive.

"There are lots of ways to get a game onto optimal media for playing the game," Sweeney explained. "If you look at decoupling the distribution media, whether it's internet or storage from the streaming medium (which is used during gameplay), you see far more flexibility than just in current console games. If all you have is a spinning drive, you just have to go out, load a resource, and wait for a drive to go out and do its mechanical work."

Wondering where you've heard the name "Sweeney" before? Well, there's this opera about a barber and some pies. Also, Sweeney thinks Xbox 720 needs to be at least three times as powerful as Battlefield 3 Issues: Utilise The Famas And You Can Lose Progress. For more (yet more!) in that vein, check out our feature on what Epic wants from Microsoft's next console.

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Fri, 01 Jun 2012 01:58:00 -0700 Microsoft Uncovers Next Gears Of War http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/microsoft-uncovers-next-gears-of-war http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/microsoft-uncovers-next-gears-of-war Microsoft has unveiled the next chapter in the Gears of War series.

Teaser art over at Game Informer suggests that the game is set before the events of Gears of War 3, with Locust Reavers clearly visible in the background.

In the foreground: a chap in glowing blue handcuffs, flanked by COG soldiers. All very mysterious. Expect more details at Microsoft's E3 conference next week.

oping its a prequel to the whole series, showcasing The Battle of Aspho Fields...which leads up to the imprisonment of Marcus Fenix, would would explain why there is a COG in handcuffs/shackles

Not surprised to see another GoW game, MS would not want to lose one of its biggest exclusive franchises, especially with HALO now getting its reboot and the real prospect of the next Microsoft Microsoft Xbox 360 Battles To Integrate Skype coming sooner rather then later

If anything, I sense its a launch title for the next Xbox, something that alongside all the game delays to 2013, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite for example, could well be used as a launch line up for the next Xbox.

Pretty much this... I've nothing against Gears and quite enjoy it, but with shooters at saturation point and the fact #3 was only out recently why don't they focus on some of the other franchises in their catalogue that have gone missing - new Crackdown/Viva Pinata anyone? Maybe they could do with Gears what they did with Halo Wars too, also a good alternative. Will wait and see what else is announced but like the Halo reboot i find i meet this news with more apathy than excitement...

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Fri, 01 Jun 2012 01:49:00 -0700 Battlefield 3 Errors: Utilise The Famas And You May Lose Progress http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/battlefield-3-errors-utilise-the-famas-and-yo http://cotapebpawe622.posterous.com/battlefield-3-errors-utilise-the-famas-and-yo Judgement has finally been served upon the FAMAS assault rifle, at whose hands I've died more times than there are pixels in Battlefield 3. Seems the weapon is afflicted by a bug which sometimes cancels out in-game stats and experience. Take that, tactical advantage!

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This is the same FAMAS they've been fiddling around with all winter, so you know. Said fiddlings don't seem to have made a difference to my abysmal K/D score.

"We are aware that some players are experiencing a problem where their in-game stats and experience are not being recognized towards their progression on Battlelog or in-game," DICE wrote on its Facebook page last night. "While we are working to resolve this issue we have also identified what can cause this problem to occur.

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Gaze upon its menacing aspect. "This issue only affects games in which a player uses the FAMAS weapon. In any game where the FAMAS is used there is a chance that player stats and experience will not be recognized after the game. We are temporarily recommending that players avoid using the FAMAS and spread the word to fellow players to avoid the problems this error can cause when playing the game on the Microsoft Microsoft Xbox 360 Battles To Integrate Skype console.

"This advisory and problem are temporary and we expect to have them soon. Thank you for your patience."

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