Zarhym has recently posted on the Cataclysm forums that a new 5 man dungeon will soon be announced.

Police in South Korea are investigating allegations of match fixing by professional players of sci-fi-themed strategy game StarCraft.

The game, made by World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, is enormously popular in South Korea.

Leagues of professional players compete in televised tournaments and receive coaching and sponsorship.

However, some players and officials are alleged to have accepted bribes from gambling websites to rig the games.

There has been little coverage of the event in the country’s mainstream media but the Korea Times website claims that the Korea e-Sports Association filed charges against individual players and coaches in March 2010.

According to the newspaper StarCraft accounts for 70% of so-called “e-sports” activities in South Korea.

A spokesperson from the Korean Embassy in the UK told the BBC that there had been no official statement from the Ministry of Culture but did confirm that an incident had been reported to the police.

“The Blizzard Pet Store has just been updated with a couple of fun new choices that you can get for your characters. Continuing in the theme of cute, miniaturized bosses, we have Lil’ XT, and the CelestialSteed is the first-ever mount to be
available through the service.” It was anounced yesterday. Opinions are now flying all around Azeroth about the Celestial Steeds flying all around Northrend.

Much of the talk in the trade chat around the servers, much of the grumbling I saw on othersites and on Facebook, complained about the commercialization of ingame items. ‘They’re destroying the game for profit,’ or ‘I can’t believe they’re just letting people buy their way through the game,’ others complain. The heated debate has been raging for hours now, and there’s not hint at it stopping any time
soon. Maybe it will peter off when the 50,000 person queues in the Blizzard store lessen.


What do I think about the whole shabang?

The playerbase has been paying for additional content /fluff pretty much since video games began. Remember buying that Special/Collectors Edition with the extra gun/armor/map (whatever) or DLC (Downloadable Content) . Ultimately ‘what can I get for my extra $10?’ is a personal choice.

In today’s society people generally strive to be different, stand out from the crowd an individual. Whether this is driven from a basic psychological need or not is up for guys like Dr. Phil to decide :) Driven by the need for bragging rights or individuality, this addition revenue stream is nothing new and will always be a part of gaming. How else is Blizzard supposed to compete with the likes of Farmville!

At the end of the day I have to agree with one quote I saw on a blog “It probably doesn’t matter beyond me just saying “Eh, I think it’s too expensive” and then I move on and forget about this tomorrow.”

Personally, I feel sorry for the poor Lil’ XT no-one seems to give a hoot about him. Which ever way you feel about this, one thing is for sure: Blizzard must be
laughing all the way to the bank with all this ruckus!

A very clever yet geeky idea for jazzing up your pad. The innovative guys at rationalcraft.com introduce ‘Windscape’. Real windows are interactive - unlike a painting on the wall.  When you move your head in relation to a window, the view outside shifts up/down/left/right.  If you want to see something in the window’s right periphery, you can move your head left to bring it into view.

Winscape features include:

1. • Custom Winscape software with configurable screen parameters
2. • Two HD plasma displays for great contrast and wide viewing angles
3. • Video playback resolution of 1920x1080 with sound
4. • Still-image resolution of 4096x4096
5. • Fully embedded in the wall for aesthetics and silent operation
6. • Tracking of one person in the room for proper perspective presentation
7. • Scheduled on/off
8. • iPhone and web control of sleep/wake/scene selection

“Ok so how much?” I hear you cry. Price-wise, they are targeting $2500 to $3000. Hell if you can pay $25 for a virtual horse then this is a bargain!

They have lots of scenes to choose from or if you are really creative you can make your own (with the right equipment of course). What would I choose? Hmm maybe they can get some scenes of Minas Tirith or Rivendell? Or maybe a trip to the London Dungeon for a more scarey scene. The possibilities are endless.

What scene would you choose?

Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon University Professor, takes game-life integration to the extreme, describing a world chock-full of sensors, where you could earn experience points from a toothpaste company for brushing your teeth, or tax deduction points from taking public transport to work instead of driving. Companies
and even the government could have a vested financial interest in engaging consumers and citizens through game-like elements.

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Though the X-Com series is well-regarded for its tactical, turn-based strategy gameplay, 2K Games Australia has decided to go in a completely different direction with the latest entry in the franchise. Developed by 2K Marin, the team behind BioShock2, the new X-Com will be a first-person shooter.

X-Com, the classic 90’s turn-based strategy game pitting mankind against alien invaders, is set to make a comeback as a first-person shooter, courtesy of the 2K
studios behind BioShock 2.

“With BioShock 2, the team at 2K Marin proved themselves as masters of first-person, suspenseful storytelling, and with XCOM they will re-imagine and expand the rich lore of this revered franchise,” 2K president Christoph Hartmann said. “Players will explore the world of XCOM from an immersive new perspective and
experience firsthand the fear and tension of this gripping narrative ride.”

It’s funny, for years, people kept repeating the same rumour, that 2K Boston and Ken Levine would be making a new X-Com game. Don’t think anyone expected it to come from 2K’s other BioShock studio. Actually, I don’t know if anyone honestly expected this at all.

MMOChampion have added the Class preview for the Paladin

 Cataclysm Class Preview: Paladin

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Experience the many thrills coming with the next city of Heroes® content update before it hits the live servers. Crank up the graphics with Ultra Mode, experience brand new story arcs, revisit your characters thanks to even more costume options, and more!

To check out the Open Beta, all you need to do is log into the North American or European Training Room! If you are not familiar with the process to access the test server, please read this post for our North American players or this one for our European players.

Also please keep in mind that this is a beta version, which means you might encounter bugs or other gameplay issues. We strongly encourage you to report them using the /bug command ingame, and we’ll be happy to collect any comments you might want to share with us on our official boards. Your feedback is as always very valuable to us!

To report your feedback, please make use of the following forums:

Issue17 Dark Mirror Open Beta: Chatter & Discussion

Issue 17
Dark Mirror Open Beta: Feedback

Issue 17
Dark Mirror Open Beta: Bugs

Have fun!

Gears of War 3, dubbed by the publisher to be the “biggest blockbuster game of 2011,” will be the “explosive finale to the landmark Gears of War trilogy” and will be available exclusively on the Xbox 360 in April 2011.

Epic Games will once again be handling development duties on Gears of War 3, which “plunges players into a harrowing tale of hope, survival and brotherhood” to complete the current story arc for the series. The last human city has been destroyed and the last remaining survivors are stranded, leaving Marcus and his comrades in a race against the clock to save the human race from extinction.

The new game has playable female soldiers in it! Don’t worry, it’s still jam-packed with men who look like refrigerators, and mellow music like the famous Gears of War trailer which used the song ‘Mad World’ the sound track from the movie ‘Donnie Darko’  (in this case, Sun Kil Moon’s “Heron Blue”.)

Watch the first trailer and ogle at the first screenshots for Gears of War 3 below. Titled ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ the trailer was created in Unreal Engine 3 by the same team behind the Gears of War video spots and captures a three-way battle between Delta Squad, the Locust Horde and the new Lambent.

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Ex-Ensemble Studios staffer and current Windstorm Studios founder and president Dusty Monk has told IncGamers about the Halo MMO that was in development at Ensemble prior to the studio’s closure.

Monk revealed to IncGamers that, from 2004 to 2007, he spent all of his timeworking on a project codenamed Titan, which you might know better as the cancelled MMO set in the Halo universe.

“It was going to be the Halo MMO, and it was absolutely going to compete against WoW,” reminisced Monk.

“You have to remember that Ensemble came from a standpoint of being really good at competing against Blizzard Entertainment,” he noted, drawing comparisons between the success of the Warcraft series and the success of the Age of Empires series. “We had a pretty good history of knowing the types of stuff that Blizzard put into their games to make them really successful, and the kinds of things we’d need to put into an MMO to compete against Blizzard.”

“Just to give you a couple of examples,” Monk elaborated, “we were using a heroic stylised artform. This heroic stylised artform is exactly the artform that you see being used in Star Wars: The Old Republic right now. It’s timeless. It doesn’t age itself like a game that’s built with a strictly realistic artform does.”

“We were developing a cover system. This cover system is in Star Wars: The Old Republic. We had the idea of quests - and like I said, this was between 2004 and 2007, before Warhamer Online had been released - but we had this idea of quests
where you could participate and pull them together without having to be on the same team. This would be a public quest that everyone in a particular area could work on. That idea went into Warhammer Online.”

Monkalso notes that, since Ensemble’s closure, a number of Ensemble staffers have since moved to Blizzard - not least of all Greg Street, known to World of Warcraft fans as Ghostcrawler.

  “We had all this incredible talent, we had the right people, the right passion, we had a phenomenally successful IP- the Halo IP. We were going back in time for the Halo franchise to broaden the story a little bit, in the exact same way that Star Wars has gone back in time so they can tell a more broad story, and we had a company that had our back when we started and the funding to put together that type of project.”

So what happened to the Halo MMO? “There was a bit of a changing of the guard at Microsoft at this time,” explains Monk. “Microsoft, from its gaming division, was really changingdirections. They were looking really hard at the Nintendo Wii and they
were really excited by the numbers that the Wii was turning. This was about the time that Microsoft decided that its Xbox platform and XBLA really needed to go more in the direction of appealing to a more casual, broader audience.”

“So part of this changing of the guard at Microsoft came along with the changing of the attitude to this very expensive, very long and very protacted $90 million USD project we were working on, which was Titan. To cut a long story short, Titan was closed down.”

Today, though, Monk is still optimistic about the chances the MMO would’ve had. “Even though a lot of people talk about how you just can’t build a WoW killer, I absolutely believe that we could have built an MMO, if Microsoft had maintained their commitment, that if it hadn’t been a WoW killer it certainly would’ve competed.”

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