This past weekend Steam offered users DOD:Source free to play for the weekend, and to purchase for $5 until Thursday.
If you spent a lot of time a few years ago playing Counter Strike and Counter Strike Source, then you might enjoy this game too. It certainly isn’t the best game ever (Team Fortress 2 is) but for $5 it has provided great fragging relief whilst calculating my taxes.
The Red Alert side of the Command and Conquer series has previously provided a naval game play aspect that other games in the series haven’t. RA3 promises to expand upon the naval aspect of the game as well as bring back favourite units including the Tesla troopers.
In the video we see that the traditional ore gathering method has been replaced with Ore nodes which harvesters simply dock with to gather ore and then return with it to the base. Many amphibious units and abilities have been added, including the Bullfrog amphibious troop transport and the ability to deploy the Soviet MCV either on land or in the water.
Red Alert 3 is due to be released later this year. Hopefully it will take advantage of multicore technology unlike Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars which would choke up during massive battles on a quad core machine with 4 gigs of ram and a 768mb gfx card.
Check out the video below or download the high resolution 400MB .mov version here (right click, save target as).
One of the projects that I am working on is centered around gaming. I thought that I would post this video of some Team Fortress 2 gameplay, just for fun.
The machine specs: Dell Dimension 9200, Quad Core 2.4ghz, 4gig ram, RAID 0 HDD, GeForce 8800 GTX 768mb, and a Dell 24" wide monitor running at 1920 * 1200.
Update 30th May 2008: Added another TF2 video, this time with me playing as Pyro. Low and high quality versions below.
A video for ‘Blackwatch Prototype’ by Canadian Radical Entertainment was shown at CES this month. The game promises to be the next best shooter with realistic graphics, interactions, environments, and a very in-depth storyline.
Blackwatch is a top secret special forces branch of the US military who were set-up specifically to deal with biological outbreaks, wiping out everything in their path for the greater good. The story begins with a viral outbreak in New York city and Blackwatch are brought in to clean up the mess.
Check out the video below.
Halo Wars going to be the latest in the Halo game series. Rather than being an FPS it is a real-time strategy game from Ensemble Studios, creators of the Age of Empires franchise.
The shift from FPS to RTS is not going to please everyone, but if you prefer games like Command and Conquer, Star Craft, etc to FPS games like Counter Strike then this looks promising. You will be able to command full armies, create buildings and vehicles, etc taking full control of the war.
The Halo Wars story takes place before the first Halo FPS game during UNSC’s initial deadly encounters with the Covenant.
Below is the cinematic trailer and an additional 10 minute video demonstrating the game play.
If you’re not a veteran of the Call of Duty series, like me, the online play can be a bit frustrating at first when you can’t figure out how to select other weapons such as the sniper rifle.
The single player mode is loaded with various scope enabled weapons, fully automatic rifles, etc. To access these in multiplayer you need to “level up” or gain “XP” points, which is achieved by gaining kills in the online game.
Once you’ve got a few kills under your belt the “sniper class” will be unlocked (press ESC in game to choose your class). After a few more kills, and resulting XP points, the “create class” will be unlocked which will allow you to create your own class with any of the weapons that you have unlocked. Gain more XP points to unlock more weapons.
higher quality 330mb WMV download link
The above video is game play footage from the Call of Duty 4 PC demo, which I downloaded today from GamersHell. I’ve not played any of the previous Call of Duty games so I can’t compare it with any of the prequels. The only similar game that I have played is Ghost Recon 2 on the XBOX 360 and it has to be said that Call of Duty 4 blows Ghost Recon 2 out of the water.
You play as a single person, not having to worry about commanding your squad (which I found tedious in Ghost Recon). The squad and enemy AI is great, with no stupid enemies running right at you shooting 10ft above your head. Rather, they make full use of available cover and the large array of weapons.
The graphics were beautiful with realistic smoke, explosion, and gun fire effects. The game also loaded quickly, with no noticeable lag at any time.
Highly recommended, check it out for yourself, I’ll be purchasing the full PC version (£10 cheaper than the XBOX 360 version) from the local shop tomorrow.
Test system specs:
Dell Dimension 9200, quad core 2.4ghz, 4gig ram, 768mb gfx, raid 0 hdd array
1900*1200 resolution on a 24″ wide monitor
