I’ve posted about Watchdogs in the past, but a new trailer done in the style of a official report on the protagonist gives us a little more insight into what the game will be like.
Check it:
Yep, still looks wicked cool.
It’s every video game character’s worst nightmare: The Glitch.
It’s the digital equivalent to the Mayan apocalypse.
Here’s another title I’ve posted about more than once, but every time they reveal a little bit more of how the game plays my enthusiasm for it spikes. In this video they show how you can have multiple cities that work together or have your friends build cities near yours to work together. I wasn’t sure how you’d do multiplayer in this sort of game, but this looks awesome.
Check it:
Another title that won’t be out until next year, dammit!
I’ve blogged about this title previously, but every glimpse I get at a new trailer reminds me of just how amazing this game looks like it’s going to be.
Here’s the latest trailer which introduces some of the story behind the game:
It won’t be out until May 7th of next year, but it looks like it’ll be worth the wait.
The next in the BioShock series of video games is looking pretty amazing:
I say that I’m looking forward to it, but there’s a chance I may never play it. I was really looking forward to the original game, but then it came out with one of the worst Digital Rights Management solutions available so I ended up not buying it. The DRM was so strict that it would prevent the game from running if certain applications, many of them legitimate apps, were installed on the PC. I believe these days the DRM on the original game has been reduced greatly and so I may eventually pick it up the next time it’s on sale on Steam. I’ll only be playing it some five years after it was released, but at least the DRM won’t be quite so restrictive.
There’s been no word yet on what DRM, if any, BioShock Infinite will have and I’m hoping it’s not as insane as what they put on the original game. If it is then it may be another five years before I get around to playing it.
I can remember when the original SimCity came out all the way back in October of 1989. I played the hell out of it on my Amiga computers and loved every minute of it. I also played the inevitable sequels up until SimCity 4 where things got so detailed that not only did you need to lay out power lines, but water and sewage lines among other things. It was the first of the games I found to be overly difficult and as a result I didn’t play it as much as the previous versions. SimCity 4 was released in January of 2003 and — other than an expansion pack (Rush Hour) in 2004 and SimCity DS and SimCity Societies in 2007 — was the last of the official SimCity games.
Well the folks at EA/Maxis have decided it’s time to dig up the long dead corpse of SimCity and reboot it. And it’s looking pretty fucking great. The simulation itself will be as detailed as any that has come before, but it looks like they’ve solved a number of the complexity issues that plagued SimCIty 4 with the clever usage of roads.
Check out the following SimCity strategy video just posted to YouTube to see what I mean:
The folks at Maxis have been putting out a series of YouTube videos that detail just how complex the engine running the new game will be and how much of it is handled through the placement of roads. The new engine is called GlassBox and the depth of the simulation it’s capable of is amazing. You can watch all of the developer previews by clicking here.
The new game isn’t due out until February of next year and I am seriously looking forward to it.
I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since it launched back in 2004. It quickly grew to be the 800 lb gorilla of MMORPGs and it has maintained that position by constantly evolving over time. There have been three expansions to the game since then that tweaked the formula with changes both major and minor. The next expansion, Mists of Pandaria, looks set to continue that trend when it arrives. Today, Blizzard released the new cinematic for the expansion and it shows why people keep coming back for more:
Check it:
Some have decried the new expansion as being Kung-fu Panda Warcraft, but having played in the beta I can say that it’s way more than that. I’m definitely looking forward to playing the final release.
I’m a long-time CoD fan and I loved Treyarch’s previous Black Ops outing so it’s probably no surprise that the multiplayer reveal trailer that just came out today for [amazon_link id="B007XVTR12" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Call of Duty: Black Ops II[/amazon_link] has me anticipating the followup:
Set in 2025 there will be all kinds of futuristic toys to play with like the quadrotor drones in the above video. We only get a small taste of what killstreaks and gadgets we can look forward to, but it’s enough to whet the appetite. The engine is looking pretty good considering its age and rumor has it they’re putting in place a proprietary anti-cheat system for the PC version. Not mentioned as of yet is whether or not dedicated servers will be the standard system for multiplayer, but I’m betting that it will be.
There’s still we a lot we don’t know about BO II multiplayer, but you can be sure we’ll get more details in the days to come. In the meantime that trailer looks hella nice in fullscreen HD.
Thanks to the recent Steam Summer Sale I picked up a copy of Hitman: Blood Money which I never got around to playing back when it came out in, holy crap, 2006. I’d played the original Hitman: Codename 47 when it came out in 2000 along with its sequel Hitman: Silent Assassin in 2002. I bought Hitman: Contracts when that came out in 2004, but never finished it because I was disappointed that it largely consisted of remakes of levels from the original game presented as flashbacks as Agent 47 lay near death in a motel room. Well, I can’t say that I never finished it because I reinstalled it just a week or so ago so I could finish it before playing Blood Money, which I am just about to start.
The reason for all of this renewed interest in the Hitman series is because they’re finally producing a proper sequel that’s due this fall and it looks amazing. This was driven home by playing Contracts again after so much time and realizing just how limited it was in terms of what you could do. I haven’t played BM yet so I don’t know if it’s any better, but in Contracts Agent 47 can’t do basic things like jump or climb anything that isn’t a ladder. Here’s a small snippet of game play from Contracts to give you an idea:
Considering the age of the game it doesn’t look too bad and it even had a physics engine that allowed curtains to billow in the wind and victims to ragdoll realistically when shot or dragged. The physics tended to be a bit touchy at times such that opening the door to a room would make the curtains act like a gale force wind had blown in and every now and then when you shot someone they’d bounce off the wall at high speed and be flung halfway across the level, but that was half the fun. Still, environments were pretty basic and the cut scenes where grainy as hell.
Now compare that to the E3 game play footage from Absolution:
It looks like Hitman: Absolution is joining the ranks of ultra-cinematic titles along with the Uncharted series, The Last of Us, and the last couple of Batman games. Not only can he jump, but he can scale ledges and he’s got a nifty new “intuition” ability similar to Batman’s “detective vision.” The shear amount of dialog that’s reactive to the context of where Agent 47 is in that scene is also damned impressive. It’s also pretty cool that he can pick up random items and use them as weapons too. When he first enters the library he doesn’t have any weapons at all. As he goes along he fashions a garrote out of an old power cord laying around and a nearby bit of art becomes a handy bludgeon at one point. And the physics engine! Holy shit!
With as much as I enjoyed the previous games despite their limitations it pretty much goes without saying that I’m eagerly looking forward to this new iteration. My only point of concern is that they didn’t hire the voice actors who played Agent 47 and his handler Diana in the previous games. Still, if it lives up to the promise shown in this demo then I think I can live with that omission.
It seems that the desire to cheat is an inevitable part of human nature. There’s just something about getting an unfair advantage that appeals to us so much that we cheat in school, on our taxes, and on each other. Naturally this rule applies to video games and the more popular a game is the greater the number of people cheating at it.
The Call of Duty series is very, very popular and it’s no surprise that cheating is rampant. In my reviews of both Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3 I decried their usage of a peer-to-peer networking system for several reasons not the least of which was that it didn’t provide any way for players to deal with cheaters in a game. This is primarily a problem on the PC where you can run programs in the background that will allow you to, among other things, see players hidden behind objects (wall hacks) and auto-aim and fire your gun (aimbots).
To get an idea of why this is so frustrating, here is an aimbot in action using the MW3 Chaos hack. You'll note that it pretty much ruins the game for anyone who's not cheating.
With dedicated servers there’s someone who administers the server who will have the ability to identify and ban cheaters from playing on that server. The P2P system used in MW2 and 3, however, randomly picks one of the players to be the host and there are no provisions for banning cheaters or even voting to kick them from the game. The only real anti-cheating system in place on the PC version of the game is the VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) system provided through the Steam client that Activision uses with that version of CoD. There are two problems with this system: First, it can take weeks for someone who has been flagged as cheating to be banned from multiplayer, though it does ban them from playing it altogether (as opposed to just a single server). Second, it creates an arms race between the folks who maintain VAC and the folks who write the aimbots and wall hacks for the games. Every time VAC is updated to detect the latest round of cheating programs the folks who make said programs simply update their code to hide it from detection for another few weeks.
[pullquote] This is a warning to anyone who’s thinking of buying [MW2] for the PC: Don’t fucking bother. – Infinity Ward has fucked over “Call of Duty” fans who play on the PC.[/pullquote]The creation of these hacks also appears to be trivially easy as the first one for MW2 was released within hours of the game itself. I suspect that’s partially because the past several CoD games have run on basically the same game engine as the preceding one with some new bits bolted on. In fact, the wall hack part of these programs uses the game’s own internal systems to do its work. Certain kill streaks in the game (e.g. remote sentry) already allow you to see players approaching from behind obstacles when you use them. All the wall hack does is turn that system on all the time regardless of whether you’re using an appropriate kill streak or just your trusty rifle. The problem of cheaters using hacks was so rampant in MW2 that after one night of game after game being ruined by cheaters I wrote an angry blog post saying that you should not buy the game for the PC. OK, it was a very angry blog post, but my frustration level at the time was through the roof. It’s one thing to lose to genuinely better players and it’s another to lose to someone who’s skill consisted entirely of holding down a mouse button while a program insured every shot was a headshot.
When MW3 came out the hacks followed and it looked like the whole situation was set to repeat itself, but it did seem like it had improved somewhat. I said in my review that the number of obvious cheaters seemed a lot lower than they were during the first few weeks with MW2, but the problem did still persist and there still wasn’t any easy way to report them or vote to kick them from a game. As before, the hackers just laughed at the VAC system as ineffective and the engine was still fundamentally the same as before, so what was responsible for the lower number of cheaters?
The main screen of the reporting tool. Click to embiggen.
As it turns out, IW assigned someone to handle complaints of cheaters in MW3. Initially it was one person on Twitter named BanCandy who handled complaints for all platforms the game is on, but it should go without saying that she was quickly overwhelmed by the deluge. Now it’s a group of people under the collective name @IWEnforcers and they are some busy beavers. I’ve been following their tweets for quite awhile now and they are swinging the ban hammer as fast as you can manage. This has helped a great deal, but the reporting still wasn’t easy. They required that you be able to provide some evidence for the cheating such as a YouTube video and a link to the player’s Steam profile page. The Theater Mode in MW3 allows you play back a game and even render a YouTube clip so long as it’s smaller than 29 seconds which is barely enough to show one death with a killcam.
There had to be a better way and a clever fellow who goes by the alias Xifon came up with one. He created the MW3SA Reporting Tool which allows you browse through the demo files created by the game’s theater mode and lists off all of the players in each saved game. You find the game that had the hacker in it (it looks up each player’s Steam profile to make it easy) and then click on their name and hit Report. It opens a window and allows you to type in a description and then sends that along with the entire demo file off to IW where they can load it up and watch the playback from that player’s perspective to see exactly what happened in the game.
This tool has the hackers shitting bricks because there’s nothing that can be done to counter it. You can’t hide your Steam ID from the game and the files record exactly what happened during the course of a match. If you’re using a wall hack and repeatedly kill people you couldn’t see it’ll show up in the playback. Aimbotting becomes so glaringly obvious (see the previous YouTube video) that it’s pretty much a guaranteed ban.
The tool proved so popular that, once again, the surge of reports became overwhelming and suddenly it stopped working. Xifon posted an announcement that the queue wasn’t updating and it looked like it was to be a short-lived experiment, but the folks at IW got in contact with him and asked if they could work together to improve it. One of the problems it had was accountability for the person making the report. There wasn’t anything preventing you from submitting someone who just pissed you off by being a better player. So after a couple of weeks the new version was released that corrects that problem.
Now to use it you have to sign in with your Steam ID so any reports you make can be associated with your account. This provides a couple of benefits including the ability to see which reports you’ve submitted and whether they’ve been reviewed and what, if any, action was taken. It also has a scoring system that awards you points for every cheater banned and dings you points if your report wasn’t legit. This is to encourage you to be sure you’re submitting an actual cheater prior to dashing off a report.
These two solutions, the @IWEnforcer Twitter account and the MW3SA Reporting Tool, won’t eliminate the problem of cheaters in Call of Duty games any time soon, but they do help and Infinity Ward deserves a lot of credit for at least attempting to deal with the problem. The process is still slow as I have 3 reports in so far, the oldest dating back to June 9th, that still haven’t been reviewed, but at least they’re there and should get looked at eventually. With any luck, the tool will be a success and put a dent in the amount of cheating in CoD games. Either way, Infinity Ward deserves credit for trying to tackle the problem.