PC: Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth
Check out the screenshot on the first page and tell me you don’t have any interest in playing this!
And in our ‘awkward sentence of the week’ award category, we get:
Once you have become accustomed to the way the game handles, the gameplay is where the game begins to shine.
🙂
Xbox: Xbox 2 – Everything we know!
This is an old-ish (June 29th) article from Gamespy, but I’m a bit behind in my email reading. 🙂
ESPN football takes a new approach to beat EA’s Madden
I didn’t realize ESPN NFL 2K5 released at a $20 price point. I might pick it up.
LinuxDevCenter.com: Stratagus: Open Source Strategy Games
This is about the open source game once known at FreeCraft before Blizzard’s legal department went after them.
Tech Biz: EA takes it slow and steady
I have to admit, I’d love to see EA get a bloody nose this year. EA is the Evil Empire of Gaming.
CNN.com – Blockbuster vows to go after Netflix
This should be a good thing. Competition can only help the consumer.
I used to despise Netflix with every fiber of my being due to their aggressive and intrusive online ads. Then I stopped using IE and started blocking pop-ups and gradually my hatred faded enough to give the service a try.
And now I’m a huge fan. One thing that Netflix offers that Blockbuster doesn’t, at least in their brick & mortar stores, is a huge selection of non-mainstream DVDs: anime, foreign films, tv series on DVD (though I suppose the latter is fairly mainstream these days).
Blockbuster has its work cut out for them, but another intriguing factor is the idea of renting games and DVD’s from the same source. If I could get the same quality of service that I get from Netflix and Gamefly via one account with Blockbuster, I might be convinced to switch.
Blog von Brummbar has an excellent post about games from past platforms: Retro Lament
Sony says next PlayStation to be on display at E3
So next year at E3 we’ll see new machines from all 3 console makers, or so it would seem. That’ll be some show!
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > When Life Is a Roll of the Dice
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I had to chuckle at this piece, which is about a woman’s ‘addiction’ to online backgammon. It all reads so good naturedly, and she makes it sound so nice.
Now if instead the times ran a piece on someone who playing Everquest compulsively, it’d be all about how harmful the game is, and how geeky and dysfunctional the players are.
*sigh*
Well, I’ll look at it from a glass-half-full perspective. It is nice to read a generally positive article on online gaming in the mainstream press.
Gamespy has a preview of the new CoN sequel: PlayStation 2: Champions: Return to Arms
One of the biggest and buggiest problems to interfere with CoN was the online play. This was in part to the poorly designed lobby and game creation interface that SOE chose to deploy with the final product. Having learned a lesson the hard way, RtA promises to fix all those annoying issues and potential gameplay exploits by taking the step of storing all data on its own servers.
Sounds good to me. Champions of Norrath was a great game hampered by a terrible lobby and game creation UI. Hopefully getting into an online game will be much easier this time around.