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PC Games (Games)

Blizzard Boss Says Restrictive DRM Is a Waste of Time 563

Posted by Soulskill from the what-about-lan-play dept.
Stoobalou writes "Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle. His company — which is responsible for one of the biggest video games of all time, the addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft — is to release StarCraft 2 on July 27, and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won't be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes that have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late. StarCraft 2 will require a single online activation using the company's Battle.net servers, after which players will be allowed to play the single-player game to their hearts' content, without being forced to have a persistent Internet connection."

Comment Re:Whatever (Score 1) 138

by xxuserxx (#32246072) Attached to: AMD Multi-Display Tech Has Problems, Potential
You obviously have not played a racing simulator in tripple screen. There are tricks to reducing bezel size and multiple monitor vendors are reducing bezel size as they are cathing on to tripple head. The bezels tend to not be noticable with you are immersed in a game. Some guys who are hard core just remove the monitor casing to get them even thinner.

Comment Re:Gaps between monitors (Score 1) 138

by xxuserxx (#32245992) Attached to: AMD Multi-Display Tech Has Problems, Potential
The same way you can drive your real car with blind spots. With tripple head your resolution is not stretched it's increased. So you still see everything the same on the center screen but you get more now with the side monitors. There are tricks to reduce the bezel such as lining up the monitors to hide the bezel of the sides. Also once in the game the bezels tend to be ignored. I forget they are there.

Comment My problem with Apple. (Score 1) 944

by xxuserxx (#32032896) Attached to: Steve Jobs Publishes Some "Thoughts On Flash"
If Apple did not use the OSI model and developed their own proprietary protocols then I would not care about what they are doing. But I think its pretty crappy that Steve will use layers 1-4 like everyone else but then he locks down 5-7 on his OS's. He simply uses open standards only when they suit his own purposes.
Games

Why Are There No Popular Ultima Online-Like MMOs? 480

Posted by Soulskill from the risk-is-not-our-business dept.
eldavojohn writes "I have a slightly older friend who played through the glory days of Ultima Online. Yes, their servers are still up and running, but he often waxes nostalgic about certain gameplay functions of UO that he misses. I must say that these aspects make me smile and wonder what it would be like to play in such a world — things like housing, thieving and looting that you don't see in the most popular massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft. So, I've followed him through a few games, including Darkfall and now Mortal Online. And these (seemingly European developed) games are constantly fading into obscurity and never catching hold. We constantly move from one to the next. Does anyone know of a popular three-dimensional game that has UO-like rules and gameplay? Perhaps one that UO players gravitated to after leaving UO? If you think that the very things that have been removed (housing and thieving would be two good topics) caused WoW to become the most popular MMO, why is that? Do UO rules not translate well to a true 3D environment? Are people incapable of planning for corpse looting? Are players really that inept that developers don't want to leave us in control of risk analysis? I'm familiar with the Bartle Test but if anyone could point me to more resources as to why Killer-oriented games have faded out of popularity, I'd be interested."
Bug

Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files 126

Posted by timothy from the rodents-of-unusual-size dept.
Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."

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