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Comment Re:just not compelling enough (Score 1) 341

by eudas (#34281744) Attached to: Why Don't We Finish More Games?

Which mission? Eternal Grove?

That's the only one I can think of that might be difficult, because it requires splitting the party, and then only if you don't have heroes.
If you both have heroes you can just both bring a set and split easily to complete it.
Everything else, you should be able to steamroll.
Piracy

Sony Joins the Offensive Against Pre-Owned Games 461

Posted by Soulskill from the saddle-up dept.
BanjoTed writes "In a move to counter sales of pre-owned games, EA recently revealed DLC perks for those who buy new copies of Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Now, PlayStation platform holder Sony has jumped on the bandwagon with similar plans for the PSP's SOCOM: Fireteam Bravo 3. '[Players] will need to register their game online before they are able to access the multiplayer component of the title. UMD copies will use a redeemable code while the digital version will authenticate automatically in the background. Furthermore ... anyone buying a pre-owned copy of the game will be forced to cough up $20 to obtain a code to play online."
Google

Google Gets US Approval To Buy and Sell Energy 218

Posted by timothy from the smartest-guys-in-the-room dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday granted Google the authority to buy and sell energy on a wholesale basis. Google applied for the authorization last December through a wholly owned subsidiary called Google Energy. 'We made this filing so we can have more flexibility in procuring power for Google's own operations, including our data centers,' Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick said via e-mail. But the authorization also raises the prospect that Google may start to buy and sell energy as a business." Reader angry_tapir supplies a link to the approval document itself (PDF).
PC Games (Games)

Valve's Battle Against Cheaters 336

Posted by Soulskill from the busting-punks dept.
wjousts writes "IEEE Spectrum takes a look behind the scenes at Valve's on-going efforts to battle cheaters in online games: 'Cheating is a superserious threat,' says [Steam's lead engineer, John] Cook. 'Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.' The company combats this with its own Valve Anti-Cheat System, which a user consents to install in the Steam subscriber agreement. Cook says the software gets around anti-virus programs by handling all the operations that require administrator access to the user's machine. So, how important is preventing cheating? How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in the interests of a level playing field? 'Valve also looks for changes within the player's computer processor's memory, which might indicate that cheat code is running.'"
Games

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

Posted by Soulskill from the blame-it-on-the-torrents dept.
captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."
The Internet

What Do You Do With a Personal Domain? 286

Posted by timothy from the you-hope-someone-rich-and-famous-buys-it-out dept.
bmerr71 writes "I bought my own domain name to use as a self-promotion tool. I use a subdomain, 'profile.mydomain.com', which I selectively put on my email signatures to link to my linkedin profile. I also loaded up Google Apps to use for email. But when you go directly to my domain name, there is nothing there. I didn't want GoDaddy getting ad revenue off my name (and it doesn't look very professional), so I killed the ad page, but it seems like I should be able to put something up on my main page. But, I am not interesting in blogging, I do not want too much personal information up there, and I do not want to spend a lot of money (none, if possible). Are there any free apps that I can load up on my domain to fill the blank space? What do non-bloggers do with their personal domains?"
The Internet

Wikipedia Infiltrated by Intelligence Agents? 428

Posted by Zonk from the super-seekrit-spy-stuff dept.
An anonymous reader writes "International Humanitarian Law professor Ludwig Braeckeleer thinks so. In an article published yesterday in the Korean newspaper OhMyNews, he reveals a discovery he made while researching a story on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland. It turns out that a Wikipedia administrator named SlimVirgin is actually Linda Mack, a woman who as a young graduate in the 1980s was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger of ABC News to help with the investigation. Salinger later came to believe that Mack was actually working for Britain's MI5 on a mission to investigate the bombing and to infiltrate and monitor the news agency. Shortly after her Wikipedia identity was uncovered, many of her edits to articles related to the bombing were permanently removed from the database in an attempt to conceal her identity. This discovery comes only months after another Wikipedia admin was caught lying about his credentials to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?"
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - Has the internet killed game AI?

Submitted by
iansmith
iansmith writes: "After the amazing AI and scripted plot of Half-Life my friends and I were looking forward to what would be next. It seemed that great things were on the way.

But what came next was, nothing. We have better graphics and more objects are physics enabled, but the AI is still in the stone age.

Next year Half-Life will be 10 years old. So the question is, why is the AI in FPS shooters so terrible? Why did it peak 9 years ago? I've been using the same trick of hide JUST behind a corner and shoot some poor grunts elbow until they die since Doom.

I understand AI is hard, I mean *REALLY* hard. Expecting fast improvement is not realistic, but I am not kidding when I say I don't think current AI is any better than it was 9 years ago, and thats just sad. A top of the line game machine today is a 3GHz dual-core machine with a powerful GPU vs the 233MHz machine I used with no hardware acceleration, so you can't tell me it's lack of processing power.

A possible answer is that with the rise of the internet, game developers got an out. Single player has become almost a second priority to multi-player deathmatch. Why bother creating good AI when you can just have people play against actual human opponents? There is just no incentive to spend time and money on improving the AI when you can just dodge the whole idea of it.

So can anyone point me to a ray of hope, or is the future just limited more of the same old FPS we all love and hate?"

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