Posts by FrieChamp

  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Teaser

    Quote from Mazy

    I had a really uplifting experience with the multiplayer the other day. After a few rounds of just endless dying and my team clearly not being up for the challenge, mainly because one guy on the other team kept spamming choppers and AC130s. So I decided to try a completely different approach on one of my classes from what I usually did. I took the FAL, added ACOG scope and silencer (with the Bling perk), added the Cold Blooded perk so that I can't be seen on radars, by airsupport or thermal, and then lastly added the Ninja perk so I'm not showing up on heatbeat sensors. The result was pretty sweet, altho it took more time than your usual run n' gun then I went from a 1/3 K/D ratio the last round to a 2/1 against more or less the same players, and it just went to prove that the majority of players navigate with the mini map rather than actually looking around. Definitely makes me wanna play the game some more now, been having a pretty uneven experience with it otherwise, generally dying more than I was used to in COD4 or in shooters in general :G.

    Sounds similar to my favourite setup in MW1! Can't wait to climb up some more ranks to unlock all the goodies, I miss my claymores and the old g3! The FAL gets close but the firing rate is not quite the same, maybe it takes more practice...does ninja mode only hide you for heartbeat sensors or does it also silence your running sounds? Very handy for stabbing people

    How do we feel about the maps? Maybe it takes longer to get to know them, but I'm starting to get the idea that the MW1 MP levels were better...

  • EA lays off 1.500

    Quote

    ":1ncgvado]gonna post this here, OT but better than another thread.http://www.marketrap.com/article/view_a ... ears-later

    “with only eight months on the job as Chief Executive Officer, John Riccitello announced a buyout of Pandemic and Bioware studios from his former firm Elevation Partners, of which he was one of the founders. The purchase price looked astronomical for a developer: 840 million. To put that in perspective, Take Two (TTWO) Interactive, Inc. purchased Bioshock developer Irrational Games for 11 million and Civilization publisher Firaxis for 27 million in 2006.”

    Yea the whole Pandemic story, from EA's acquisition to its closing only 2 years later, is a mess Certainly doesn't make Riccitello shine in a good light.

  • Left4Dead 2

    Quote

    ":1ysw42u3]Mmm... i don't know man, I guess I'll skip on this one for now. It's just that, even with all the new cool stuff, it looks a little bit more of the same. Tofu tried to convince me to buy it, but I don't know... Kinda busy with MW2 MP now anyways.

    +1

  • EA lays off 1.500

    Quote from Zacker

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    I will eat first part of my comment again Certainly looks worse than I expected and also most certainly goes against traditional economic theory. Ohh well, this just means that the games industry is fucked in possible way then.

    Yes, Midway closed down because of the economic crisis. So did Factor 5 and Free Radical because they have all been so succesful lately. The "crisis" is also completely to blame for EA's poor performance and the layoffs don't tie in some bigger restructuring plan, they are a direct result. Excuse the sarcasm, but blaming a decline in HW and SW sales solely on the recession is about as clever as calling the games business "recession proof".

    I rather listen to Satoru Iwata explaining to me reasons for stalling Wii sales than listening to more bad excuses.

  • Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?

    Great article, well worth the read. I hadn't played "Passage" yet and checked it out right away but didn't find it all that spectacular..."Today I die" moved me a lot more.

    Also:

    Quote

    But among indie designers, there is a wide spectrum of commercial engagement, from Jenova Chen’s small shop under the banner of Sony to Jonatan Soderstrom, a 24-year-old designer who is content to transmit his bizarre output free to the world. “Yeah, the big publishers come around and want to talk to you,” said Soderstrom, who until a few weeks ago lived in his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house in Gothenburg, Sweden, and goes by the handle Cactus. Soderstrom, who has made more than 40 video games in the past five years, gave a talk in a filled-to-capacity Room 131: How To Make a Game in Four Hours. (“Games don’t need to be fun,” he said. “They can get intensely weird and freak you out.”)Now he and some friends were wandering down Haight Street holding a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon and drinking from paper bags. “I don’t care about money,” Soderstrom said. “I just want games to be something like art.” The indie scene was leading his medium in the right direction, he said, but “games are still not like great films or books that really affect a lot of people in a special way.”

    Last year, Soderstrom had a game in the Independent Games Festival that generated interest from the big publishers. “They all wanted to talk to me about my games,” he said, but he was too busy hanging out with his friends, drinking, staying up all night, playing and talking about video games. Several companies at the conference, he said, left their cards at his booth. He never called them.

    Give this man a cigar!

  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Teaser

    Less praise, more fist pumping. Here is something to be nervous about:

    http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/a ... -in-future

  • EA lays off 1.500

    Quote from Skjalg

    Games actually do quite well in a recession because people prefer to stay in buy entertainment that will last a relatively longer time. But yes, you’re right, but if everyone makes games for the lowest common denominator because it’s the only way to not haemorrhage money and get fired, it’s going to be pretty boring.

    I actually tried to make the same point when the economical crisis was hitting Europe the hardest, that surely studios like Grin would easily survive and thrive on the crisis.

    But PC games are expensive, in fact, so expensive that it's one of the first things people cut down on when they are running out of cash.

    Well one could argue that people have less money and thus buy only one Call of Duty game during the season instead of 3, but are games really that expensive? More expensive than a car? Going on holidays? What Taylor described is also called "cocooning effect" and I believe that games or the entertainment industry as a whole doesn't suffer nearly as much as other industries. I haven't heard any TV manufacturers complain for instance. With advertisement dependent business models it's a different story...

  • Company leaks game on purpose for pirating

    Interesting angle on steam vs retail in terms of convenience Defrag! To me it's just the other way round really. I cannot be arsed to go to the store. I've got a credit card (why don't you get one mate? You'll be happy you got it once you travel abroad!) and the game is just 2-3 clicks away. Download times aren't really any issue either when you got a fast internet connection like me (yes ladies let me tell you...it is very fast ) plus you can preload. About the price: of course I paid a premium for convenience as far as MW2 is concerned. In hindsight it was maybe a bit stupid, but as far as other games I've purchased on Steam go, I think all of them had some special discount.

  • EA lays off 1.500

    Quote from Steppenwolf

    Some of these decissions make no sense to me. Why Maxis? Didn't Spore get good scores and a lot of sales? And why don't they sell a studio instead of more or less closing it? To avoidd competition? This company still seems to lack a social awareness towards their employees.

    Spore's production was insanely long and expensive. Vgchartz lacks sales numbers but apart from the fact that it broke the 1 million sales barrier quickly I'm not so sure that it met EA's expectations for lifetime sales. Also keep in mind that the brain of Maxis Will Wright has left EA.

    On EA's recent cuts and transformation process as a whole I think they made some tough but good calls. When you compare how their strongest brands and new IP have been performing against competitors over the past 2 years, it makes sense to shrink but also to take a leap forward (keyword: social gaming). In a negative light this looks like EA is getting pushed out of their core market (maybe that's why EA stocks dropped after the announcement). For gamers this means that only the least risky titles to develop will see the light of day...