Wednesday 25 April 2012

3DS receives free wifi in EU

And soon... THE WORLD! (Maybe, I dunno)

As of the last week, 3DS owners can connect wirelessly through over 25,000 Wi-fi zones all over the EU.
In this unprecedented action, there's no really no excuse not to connect online and kick your friend's butts on games such as Mario Kart 7 or Pokemon Rumble Blast!

Granted, you still need to locate your nearest hotspot in order to do so, which is possible through
the Nintendo Hotspot Finder, Nintendo has endeavoured to place the majority of these hotspots in airports, coffee shops, fast food outlets and various other places of business.

Although there have been complaints online about the latency experienced on these new hotspots, it's early days yet. So hopefully we can expect lower latencies with subsequent firmware updates and growing router support for the 3DS' WiFi.

Ubisoft Announce Anno 2070 Expansion Pack - Deep Ocean


On Monday Ubisoft announced a new expansion pack for their 2011 Real-Time-Strategy game Anno 2070. The expansion is titled "Deep Ocean" which aims to expand the underwater construction features of the main game much deeper (place your Inception memes here).

Some of the more notable features include being able to acquire territory without using military force, underwater globalthermal nuclear power plants and a new "Tsunami" disaster. If you want to read about the rest of the features you can head on over to the German Ubisoft forums.

The release for the Deep Ocean expansion pack is set for Autumn, 2012.

Crysis 3: Gameplay Trailer & DirectX11 Support



EA, publishers of Crytek's futuristic shooter Crysis, yesterday released the first gameplay trailer for the latest instalment to join the Crysis series. The trailer shows the beauty of the game's new engine, Cry Engine 3. Fans of the Crysis series will be happy to know that the super soldier shooter is looking as beautiful as ever.

The game is set to continue with the storyline of the last game taking part in New York City which has considerably changed since the last game with plants and wildlife absorbing the streets of the city. The city itself has been encased inside a "Nano Dome" created by one of the game's antagonists, the Cell Corporation. Not much else is known about the game's mechanics apart from the induction of a new weapon, the composite bow. No doubt that there will be other features to explore with the Nano suit and alien technology taking centre stage in the game's previous iterations.

After the outcry from PC Gamers over the "substandard" graphics that appeared in Crysis 2 the development team wanted to ensure that they didn't upset their primary fan base a second time. In an interview with the website Joystiq, the director of  creative development Rasmus Hojengaard announced that the game would be shipping with support for DirectX11 graphics cards. And admitted that "We’d be pretty stupid not to capitalize on the technology we did for that and utilizing that from the get-go."

Hopefully this will keep fans of the series safe in the knowledge that Crytek are not going to make the same mistake twice.

Crysis 3 is due to be released in 2013.

Server load cripples Diablo 3 beta weekend


So, how many people managed to get into the Diablo 3 beta?

I downloaded the beta client over the course of the weekend and my every attempt to log in were met with the disheartening phrase 'Sorry, the servers are busy.'

This is to be expected, of course. But not once did I manage to get in, to be able to pass an opinion on the game itself. I personally, was left very disappointed. Still, this was but a stress-test for Blizzard to indicate the demand the servers shall have to face come May 15th, so we'll just have to wait and see if things have improved on the day.

This seems to echo how poorly handled other Blizzard beta's have been (such as Starcraft 2), with dismally low server allocations, poor communication from official sources and incredibly bugged matchmaking systems.


Tuesday 3 April 2012

GAME acquired then requests de-list from the stock exchange


On Sunday a deal was struck to buy what was left of GAME's 333 UK stores and Gamestation outlets. Out of the three names said to be interested in the buy Baker Acquisitions Limited, an entity advised by private investment company OpCapita, has picked up GAME's UK assets.

The group confirmed that there would be no more closures of stores, but has inherited GAME's 85 million debt owed to GAME Group's syndicate of lenders, led by The Royal Bank of Scotland, after paying what has been reported the sum of £1 for the company


April Fooled

Sunday marked the first of April, which as we all know is April Fools Day, which for gamers and news outlets is normally hell in trying to figure out what is real is what isn't.

Here is just two samples of this years chaos.
Assassin's Creed Kinect almost was convincing enough to be a sales pitch on an idea that could become very real in the future expect showing us the downside of not having a large living room in the first place with some epic fails near the end - plus the 'Creed Wii' girl is definitely part of the bloodline with some very handy customised 'hidden blade' Wii remotes.

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