Valve looking to delve into the “DotA” genre?
- Image via Wikipedia
Valve has made a hire that should perk up the ears of the Warcraft III mod community, as “IceFrog,” the current developer of ultra popular Defense of the Ancients Allstars, has found gainful employment at the house of Half-Life.
via Valve Snaps Up Defense of the Ancients Dev – Valve – Kotaku.
Woah, somehow this piece of news slipped past my feed and nobody seems to be talking about it. The popularity of the Warcraft mod seem to have spawned its own genre with various game studios releasing their own versions of the game, namely Demigod, League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.
Is Valve venturing into entire an entirely new realm, away from FPS? IceFrog is apparently going to lead his own team, I guess we can only wait and see.
PS: I’m falling in love with Wordpress’ Press This bookmarklet, more on that later.
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- Valve + DOTA = ??? (rockpapershotgun.com)
LEGO retro video-games
- Image via Wikipedia
I know I’ve been bashing all the upcoming LEGO video games but this is different! Instead of video-games representing LEGO, which is bleh…, this is LEGO representing some classic video-games, the opposite which means it has to be cool! And if you watch it, you’d realise it is! Enjoy.
[Kotaku - LEGO Asteroids, LEGO Pac-Man & LEGO Frogger - Humor]
TF2 Soldier Air-rockets
Those of you who’ve played TF2 would learn that the soldier’s rockets are slow as hell (well, to be fair, probably not as slow as the original UT’s rockets). The last time I successfully air-rocket anyone decently was back in Q3; when we had slower rockets in UT2k3 onwards, nobody really bothered, then again rocket + LG + shock pri was a lot more efficient.
The following video is of a soldier’s air-rockets and DOUBLE air-rockets. Staged or not, they were very impressive and takes a lot of leading skills. I must say I’m impressed and inspired to go back to my rocket-shooting FPS roots; being the sneaky flaming pyro gets boring after a while. Enjoy.
Edit: here’s another:
Desktop and Spore Creatures
Well, I planned to troubleshoot the desktop and head down to SLS to buy replacement parts if need be. What followed was rather amusing. The computer was still in its weird display-freezing state when I tried to turn it on for the first time in ages. I proceeded to open the casing, pluck out the graphics card and removed all the dirt balls with a cotton bud. It has been working ever since.
So I finally manage to get the desktop up and can’t miss the chance to try out the Spore Creature Creator Trial. Even with the limited palette made available in this demo version, it was still tremendously fun. Here are some of the uglies I made:
Oh yes, I have a profile page too!
Instead of creating another post, I’m dumping the newest trailer here:
Spore is almost here…
Spore is due for release this September. While we wait…
Watch the interview with the legendary Will Wright,
Then download the trial creature creator here.
My “First” DS Game
After “demo”ing FFTA2 and clocked at least 20 hours, I decided to purchase a copy to support Square Enix’s continuous effort towards developing quality games.
More Naruto
You might recall from a previous post of how I commented the closing gap between games and anime. The entire stylised art direction kind of reminded me of Team Fortress 2. If TF2 was the representation of the western comics style, Naruto Utimate Ninja Storm personalifies the Japanese anime style. We can only wonder if all the Naruto fans can help the PS3 sales once this is released since MGS4 fans can’t seem to help boost its sales enough. [Kotaku]
Diablo III
Came back from camp and Diablo III is coming. Kotaku has some reports as well.
I just finished watching both official trailers and it brings back fond memories of the previous games. It has been 8 years since the last Diablo game and this one is reported at least 4 years in the making. It is hard to say what makes a Diablo game but all its clones had failed to shine in its shadow. Even its most popular clone, Titan Qust seem to pale in comparison to the gameplay shown in the trailer.
Some of the stuff I noticed are true 3D creatures, no longer 8 directional sprites; genders; interactive environment among others. I can’t wait… if Blizzard was trying to fool us that they are just a World of Warcraft company now, they’ve succeeded. Maybe WoW was just an elaborate decoy they’ve developed while they worked feverously on both Starcraft II and Diablo III.
Now to fix my desktop.. hrmph…
The Future of Combat in Games
This is a look at the combat in the upcoming Spider-Man game subtitled Web of Shadows. It looks pretty cool and they’re right at how they’ve mixed movement with fighting in 3D space. I believe the slight delay in action while the player is given time to make his decision is a decent trade-off for making Spidey fight how you imagine he would. This is pretty innovative with how all the games these days simply loop through animation cycles for combat. It may not perfect the whole flow but I surely want to see how games moving towards that direction.
Subby
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