RO2: State of the Game

by Alan Wilson on Friday, October 7, 2011, under News

NEWS UPDATE FROM HOMEFRONT

SUBMITTED BY KAOS CHEFS ON THU, 03/31/2011 - 1:13PM
As you’ve probably heard, the Xbox 360 Title Update just went live this morning which we expect to address all ‘Profile Freeze’ issues. In the background, we’ve been hard at work on further improvements which should be following hot on the heels of this update. Details to follow.

We have a full-time team here at Kaos Studios dedicated to ongoing support on the technical side, as well as development of a wide range of exciting DLC that we’re not quite ready to talk about just yet, but hope to unveil to you in the very near future.

INTRODUCING HOMEFRONT
The year is 2027. Her infrastructure shattered and military in disarray, America has fallen to a savage occupation by the nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic. Abandoned by her former allies, the United States is a bleak landscape of walled towns and abandoned suburbs. This is a police state where high school stadiums have become detention centers, and shopping malls shelter armored attack vehicles. Join the Resistance, stand united and fight for freedom against an overwhelming military force In Homefront’s gripping, cinematic single player campaign, and experience epic, ground breaking multiplayer action all set in a terrifyingly plausible near-future world.

Homefront

© THQ
Release Date: Mar 15, 2011
Genre: Action, First Person Shooter
Theme: Sci-Fi
Rating: M for Mature
Game Modes: Single player, multiplayer
Homefront is a sci-fi first person shooter set in the year 2027 in which after economic collapse in the United States, the USA is invaded by the Korean People's Army. The game will include both a single player campaign and multiplayer game modes. The PC version of Homefront is planned to have exclusive content unique to the platform and dedicated servers for multiplayer games.

Features & Gameplay

Homefront tells the story of a bleak future for the United States, one that is unable to defend itself against an invasion from North Korea. Homefront contains a single player campaign, multiplayer game modes, drivable vehicles and more. The PC version will also contain additional content not included in the console versions.
Single Player Campaign - In the Homefront single player campaign, players control a member of the American Civilian Resistance which has been set up to use guerrilla warfare in hopes of defeating the North Koreans.
Multiplayer - The multiplayer portion of Homefront is said to focus on vehicular combat and includes a leveling and points system that allows players to purchase weapons, upgrades and vehicles. The PC version will also include include dedicated servers and support for up to 32 players in 16 vs 16 matches.
Release Dates

North America: Mar 15, 2011
Australia: Mar 17, 2011
Europe: Mar 18, 2011

Battlefield 3 - What We Know So Far (Release, Beta, Maps, Squads, Classes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw92-xvxMMc&hd=1

Crysis 2 Multiplayer Demo

The time has come for PC gamers to take their best shot in Crysis 2 multiplayer. Available for download at http://crysis.ea.com and other partner sites on March 1, the Crysis 2 multiplayer demo includes two stunning maps, two adrenaline-filled modes, and hours of multiplayer action. In the demo, PC gamers will master the game’s signature Nanosuit, which allows them to be strong, be invisible, be fast and become the ultimate weapon.

Players will compete in six vs. six matches set against a war-torn Manhattan in two maps: “Skyline”, set on top of the rooftops and interiors of skyscrapers, and “Pier 17”, an open environment with limited cover. The demo also features two modes: “Team Instant Action” pits two teams against each other as they kill as many opponents as possible to win the round and “Crash Site,” where players will battle for control of alien drop pods, earning points by guarding their pods and keeping enemies at bay.

For more information on the two maps included in the demo, you can check out MyCrysis.com's "Map Focus" feature on Pier 17 and Skyline.

Call of Duty: Black Ops has received a tremendous critical reception from journalists around the globe, garnering numerous perfect scores. Check out the reviews:

“A Masterpiece”
- New York Post

“5 Out of 5 Stars"
- GamePro

“10 Out of 10"
- The Telegraph

“The Gold Standard”
- OXM

“10 out of 10”
- PlayStation The Official Magazine

“A Stunner”
- Gametrailers.com

If you haven’t played Black Ops yet, make sure to pick up your copy here.

You may not sweat under heavy fire, but a lot of recruits have been freezing up under the gaze of the undead. It's time we shake the panic from your head with some valuable advice every soldier should know before encountering the waves of brain-eating zombies.

First off, the point of Zombies is to stay alive as long as possible. You're not getting out alive, so the goal's to go down fighting, and fighting hard. In order to do that, you need better weapons. Weapons cost points, and you accumulate points by killing zombies and fixing barriers. Not too difficult, right?

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 The zombies come in waves, with a short breather between rounds. There are four possible zombie entrances in the first area of both Kino der Toten and “Five”, as well as two possible weapon pickups - a single shot rifle or double-barreled shotgun. To purchase one, approach the weapon's wall mural and pay up 500 points.

In a co-op game, each person should cover an entryway, and communicate at all times! Let your teammates know if you start getting overwhelmed. You never know which way they'll come from, so one person might get swarmed while the others are just waiting around. Once the zombies are clear, go up to the barrier and repair. This earns you points and holds back the next set of approaching zombies, in turn giving you more time to shoot and stab.

Every hit rewards you 10 points, but the reward earned for the killing blow depends on how it's delivered:

Body - 50 points
Headshot - 100 points
Knife - 130 points
Grenade - 50 points

Knife kills clearly earn you the most points, so take advantage of the zombies' low health in the starting rounds to knife them down. Just don't try to keep it up for long - they can take more damage every round. As for grenades, while they net you the lowest number of points, they can be a lifesaver when a mass of zombies is headed your way. Use them freely. You get 2 every round and a full load with Max Ammo.

And that brings us to drops. Every time you kill a zombie, there's a chance that a pickup will appear:

Insta-Kill - Just like it sounds. One hit, one kill. Lasts 30 seconds.
Bomb - Pick up this bad boy to instantly incinerate all the zombies around you.
Double Points - All point rewards are doubled. Lasts 30 seconds.
Max Ammo - Completely refill all of your ammunition, including grenades - except for your current clip, so make sure everyone reloads before activating it.
Hammer - Instantly repair all barriers.

Eventually, you'll want to move from your starting location. We'll get into more details with that later, including perks, upgraded weapons, and route choice. For now, concentrate on the basics. Communicate with your teammates, rack up kills, and don't go down without one hell of a fight.

Robbers in Maryland stole more than 100 copies of 'Call of Duty: Black Ops,' which is expected to sell millions when it goes on sale at midnight tonight.


Call of Duty: Black Ops hits store shelves at midnight tonight and gamers everywhere are already lining up. Unable to wait, some fans have already taken matters into their own hands. The Hartford County Sheriff’s Office reports that at least two men robbed a Baltimore, Maryland GameStop when it was about to close on Saturday night. Armed with guns, the duo stole four crates, or more than 100 copies of the game, along with cash and other video game systems.

The men were armed with semi-automatic handguns when they burst into the store. The robbers forced two unlucky customers into a storage area. Luckily, no one was harmed. Police arrived at 9:20 p.m. Witnesses claim that the men fled in a white minivan or possibly a Dodge Caravan.

“Call of Duty: Black Ops isn’t out there ’til Tuesday, so anybody that has it today or tomorrow shouldn’t have it,” said Monica Worrell, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, on Sunday. Worrell asked residents to call the sheriff’s office if anyone tries to sell copies of the game before the release date.

A big night for Black Ops

When Black Ops goes on sale, it will become one of the best-selling games of the year, likely grossing millions in its first night alone. The video game is currently ranked number one on nearly every most-anticipated chart. Pre-orders for the game have even outpaced Modern Warfare 2, which made a huge splash when it debuted around this time last year, grossing $1 billion by January.

To learn more about the shooter, check out the Campaign mode trailer and the launch trailer–complete with “Gimme Shelter,” a classic Rolling Stones song. Multiplayer details can be found here. Call of Duty: Black Ops is developed by Treyarch, the team behind CoD: Big Red One, Call of Duty 3, several Spider-Man games, and CoD: World at War.

Now it's official =).


Call of Duty: Black Ops PC Minimum System Requirements:

OS: Windows® Vista / XP / 7
Processor: Intel® Core™2 Duo E6600 or AMD Phenom™ X3 8750 or better
Memory: 12 GB free hard drive space / 2GB RAM
Video Card: Shader 3.0 or better 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600GT / ATI Radeon® X1950Pro or better

 

I read this on the Nova wbsite. Now I know why DF:X will not play.

Important Notice! NovaWorld is undergoing a planned move today. On-line play and NovaWorld Community is down right now. Services are expected to begin returning soon.

Maybe they will be back, maybe they won't. Time will tell.

GeForce GTX 480 review
PC Gamer | Hardware Reviews | Tech | 10/06/2010 21:18pm 5 Comments

Nvidia’s DirectX 11-capable graphics processors, codenamed Fermi, have finally arrived. The Fermi core, also known as GF100, at last pushes Nvidia beyond the first unified shader design it used with the 8800 series almost four years ago.

Fermi is Nvidia's first DirectX 11 card.
Individual processing units now come in groups of 32, each of which has four texturing units along with ‘Polymorph Engine’ logic support for DX11’s cool new tessellation effects. Beyond that there’s a massive 48 ROP (raster operation) units for post-processing and anti-aliasing.
In comparison to the current top-end GeForce GTX 285, the GTX 480 has twice the number of unified shader processors (480) and over three billion transistors, compared to 14,000 for the GTX285.
http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2010/06/PCG215.test_.zotac_.jpg
It’s a massive step up in performance. The GTX 480 is the fastest single GPU card available today, and despite what you may have heard about power consumption, we had no problems running it in the current PC Gamer rig with its 600W PSU. It does require both an eight pin and a six pin molex, though.
Is it worth the money? If you’re putting together a multi-monitor rig and want a single card that will play at obscene resolutions, then it may be your best choice. If you’re using one screen, it’s hard to argue that the performance is worth the £100 premium over an AMD rival.

There’s a stronger case for the GTX480 if you’re looking at the latest DirectX 11 scores. On the evidence of these benchmarks (most notably the Unigene Heaven test) the gap between Nvidia and the current Radeon cards grows when new effects like tessellation are turned on.

Whether or not you need the power the GTX480 can produce is questionable, but the fact that this is the first card to appear in a long while with a 20% performance lead over its closest competitor is something you have to credit Nvidia for. Even if you buy its cheaper cousin, the GTX470, which we’ll review next month.

(CNN) -- Stuxnet is viewed as potentially the most dangerous piece of computer malware discovered. It's been developed on an unprecedented scale and has the ability to target and control specified industrial machinery.
Trying to explain how this works is a bit like trying to trace the origin of this nasty little piece of work. It's a bit all over the place so bear with me on this one.
It's an attack that goes straight after the PLC (programmable logic control) software of an industrial machine, which is effectively the brain of the unit. It uses four zero-day exploits in one package, with a zero-day exploit being an undiscovered flaw in a piece of software; it's the time between the hackers finding a hole in the system and when the developers patch it. And in this case there are four of these exploits, meaning that they've already exponentially increased the chances of finding a way into the system in case any of the holes happened to already be plugged.
Once the malware infects the system it can spread to other computers on the local intranet. It is not an internet-based piece of malware; it can spread through indirect internet usage, but that's not how it sets about its business.
Its main course of action is to look for a specific type of machinery, then report back to a central control server located hundreds of miles away, from where the commands will again be relayed off into the maze of servers set up to make tracing near impossible.
And it is through the trail of servers around the world that the data generated by the PLC software is manipulated and the changes in the running of the machines are made. So theoretically, a group of people located on one side of the planet could control a machine in a nuclear power plant on the other. Scary stuff.
When I spoke to Liam O'Murchu, manager of security response operations for Symantec North America, he didn't want to speculate about what kind of physical results we could expect from the malware in an industrial setting. He commented that Symantec's people are more concerned with the technical side of the bug and concentrate on their analysis on it.

Source : CVG - http://www.computerandvideogames.com/

"Treyarch is a 100 per cent Call of Duty studio" explains Mark Lamia, head of Treyarch - the devs tackling Black Ops.

Before World At War, they were very much seen as the second-tier Call of Duty operatives, but following its success, Treyarch have finally been awarded the same perks as their sister Infinity Ward studio: two years of development time, their own choice of setting, and a dedicated multi-player team.

The subsequent leap in quality between Black Ops and their previous work is more of an eye-opener than a live grenade in your camo-trousers. Treyarch chose their setting well. According to Treyarch Community Manager Josh Olin, the studio plumped for a Cold War setting because it was a 'fertile' breeding ground of gameplay ideas, but it's their decision to focus on the War's underbelly that enables Black Ops to take even a series as well-travelled as Call Of Duty to places it has never been before.

 

"To take it one step further we decided not to do the conventional wars - the things at the surface - but we went below the surface to Black Ops," explains Lamia. "What that means is you do the operations that couldn't be talked about, that countries had to deny knowledge of."

Some of the real-life covert missions that have been dramatised within the game were so secretive that they actually had to be declassified by the US government before the paperwork for Treyarch's could be released. "We must have tripped every government red flag in existence", laughed Olin. "I'm sure they have a file on us somewhere".

UNLIMITED RESOURCES
Money was no object to the original Black Ops soldiers - they told the government what weaponry they wanted for their next mission, and they coughed up whatever the price - and since these elite soldiers had unparalleled experience in more or less every field of combat imaginable, you'll never know what skill you'll be forced to call upon next. "Once you're given your mission you're then given permission to go to the armoury and outfit you and your team with whatever you need," Lamia tells us, talking about the real life Black Ops crew. "It's not a huge army of people, it's you and your team. When you hear about this you can't help but be in awe of it. But as game designers we think about it and we're like, 'awesome'." It's given Treyarch ample opportunity to push in-game realism to its limits, without compromising the subject matter. You're a badass in the game because you're based on genuine, real-life badasses. It's perfect.

 

Playable segments of the game we've seen so far have taken us from cold to sweltering (abseiling down a Soviet mountain range one moment, storming through the Vietnamese jungle the next) and from high to low (commanding ground troops from the air in a section which play almost like a strategy game one moment, crawling through an underground catacomb filled with rats and assassins with only a torch for company the next). There certainly isn't much time to stop and moralise or wonder what's for dinner.

CHANGE OF PACE
"We're always thinking about where, psychologically, we want you to be" enthuses Lamia, as a knife enters our torch's cone of vision and exits through the back of a squad mate's skull. "We're not just talking about differences between levels. We want players to feel the change of pace from 'beat-to-beat' - to always wonder what's around the next corner". And with that, we emerge from the underground tunnels and immediately set about attempting to steal a chopper. "You're not going to have to go through a five minute training session to fly that helicopter - that's not what Call Of Duty is about," says Lamia. "The best way I can explain it is much like a weapon. You 'feel' it. Regardless of what weapon you pick up in Call Of Duty it doesn't take you long to get the feel of it - the same will be true of the helicopter. In seconds you're flying it and it is a weapon of massive destruction".

It's classic Call Of Duty, true to the script Infinity Ward originally wrote back in 2003. But Treyarch are now confident with it, able to slot in their own unique flourishes and really make the game their own. "Every single time we get an opportunity to make a game in the Call Of Duty franchise... that's a huge opportunity for the studio" says Lamia. Judging by what we've seen so far, this certainly won't be their last.
 

[center][/center][br][br]After the absurd success of Modern Warfare 2, it's hard to believe that anything could possibly match the online shooter for sheer numbers sold, not to mention cultural impact. Despite criticisms of its campaign and plot, the game set the bar for military shooters in a modern setting so high that the sub-genre is practically in decline- some have even said (well, I said it, at least) that the new Medal of Honor appears to suffer from a severe case of been there, done that.

If there is one game that's set to give MW2 a run for its money, though, it's Call of Duty: Black Ops. Word has it that retailers have already received more preorders than the last Modern Warfare game had in total. It shouldn't come as a surprise, either. Black Ops had an extremely strong E3 showing, fully controllable helicopter and all, and the gaming landscape is practically aching for a shooter set outside the tired landscapes of World War 2 and the Middle East.

Hell, most gamers would have even settled simply for taking the fight to some of the many WW2 locales that have been largely ignored in video games so far, as everyone is sick of playing Normandy over and over. Black Ops takes it further, though, allowing players to participate in one of the most controversial wars in recent history: Vietnam. [br][br]
[center][/center][br][br]That prospect alone has likely succeeded in attracting a lot of gamers who had given up on the franchise, and there are millions more Call of Duty fans who couldn't care less where the game is set, so long as it has good online multiplayer, which Black Ops surely will.

Will its preorder momentum be enough to propel its success past MW2's, though? It depends who you ask. CVG reports that Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson believes "competition, weaker marketing, and the Infinity Ward situation" will dampen Black Ops's early lead, while Treyarch's own Josh Olin predictably claims the game will "exceed expectations."

While many see Call of Duty as an Infinity Ward franchise, that studio is basically defunct at this point. Treyarch has already proved that they can handle the series, and 2008's World at War, despite retreading familiar ground, was one of the most solid Call of Duty games yet.

Now, who's looking forward to some Viet Cong Zombie slaying? (Note: that's not confirmed, or even rumored, but we hope it's in there; Nazi Zombies is the best.)