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E3 2008: Left4Dead Interview. New Graphics, Weapons, and Steam Achievement Details

Norman Chan — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Face it, pirates and ninjas are out and zombies are in. And we have no doubt that one of our most high-anticipated games of this year is Left4Dead, Valve’s post-apocalyptic survival horror shooter. Our initial playtest sent chills down our spine when we first saw it at last year’s Showdown LAN, and the game looked much more refined and polished when we played it at this year’s E3. A revamped visual style and new character designs suit the cinematic direction -- the levels looked grittier and the zombies were definitely more terrifying (if that’s even possible). We spoke with Michael Booth, the designer of Left4Dead, to find out what other changes have been made to the game since Valve bought up his development team.

Maximum PC: Tell us a little about Left4Dead, assuming we've never played it before.

Michael Booth, Designer: So the main thing with Left4Dead is, in a nut shell, it’s you and your friends surviving the zombie apocalypse. But the key thing that we’re pushing for with this game that differentiates it from any other game like this is the level of cooperation that’s required. This is really a cooperative game. With other cooperative games you may be able to play the same game together [with friends], but you kind of do your own thing. In this game you have to stay together, work together, and watch each other’s back. Because if you run off by yourself, you’re going to die.

MPC: So we just spent some time playing the game and we noticed a couple of things right off the bat: zombies running up to people, us punching them off, people getting knocked down, zombies are piling on them and then we have to punch them off and then help our teammates back up. Stuff like that -- healing other people sharing ammo.

MB: Right. At the most fundamental level, there are just too many zombies that you can’t handle them yourself right. But then beyond that we have explicit attacks like the Hunter’s pounce. If he pounces on you, you are helpless -- you’re done and will die unless a friend comes and saves you. The Smoker’s tongue is the same way. He pulls you way out of position but once he gets you he’s going to squeeze you until you die.

MPC: This is the thing that comes and grabs you from above and sucks you up into the air.

MB: Exactly. And with the Boomer you know if he hits you with his vomit then you’re tagged. All the zombies will be coming after you so your friends need to help. The Tank is another good example where if everyone stays calm and focuses fire on it you’ll probably be ok. But if the team panics and someone breaks and runs, the team spreads apart you’re in big trouble. And then of course there’s reviving people when their health reaches zero. I can guarantee you that if you don’t do those things the team is not going to make it.

MPC: So one of the things that Left4Dead does that is really kind of unique is the really dynamic difficulty system. Can you explain a little bit about that?

MB: Dynamic difficulty isn’t exactly the right term. It’s a dynamic drama pacing system so it doesn’t nerf the game to bring it down to someone’s level so much as it really makes sure that you have an exciting experience. It’ss very easy for us in this game to give you a very intense experience.

MPC: You just keep throwing zombies non stop and…

MB: Right. So what the “AI Director” is doing in that case is it’s watching for cases where the team is just getting pounded on and then it’ll ramp things down a bit, to make sure there’s a gap a pacing.
MPC: So you watch statistics like health, the number of zombies the survivors have killed, and how much ammo they have, and then make decisions?

MB: Exactly.

MPC: What are the exact variables that the Director monitors?

MB: Well I can’t give you a full set of them. But it’s things like you just mentioned. It’s things like whether you’ve been hit recently, how often have you been hit, how many zombies do you see, how many zombies are running at you, and how many zombies you’ve killed recently.

MPC: All the way down to your level of accuracy or not so much?

MB: Not so much accuracy. It checks to see when you killed that zombie if he was way out in the distance wandering and not so much a threat or if he was in your face and hitting you -- that’s a little more intense. So its metrics like that. The Director’s doing that to make sure that there’s high peaks and valleys because if they’re all valleys you quit because it’s boring and if it’s all peaks you get stressed out and you quit anyway. So we want you to have the same kind of excitement as a rollercoaster ride. And of course the Director makes sure everything is procedural so you can never predict when or where the zombies are coming from.

MPC: Cool. What’s this we hear about the game having two modes?

MB: We tried for a long time to sort of have this holistic mode that did everything. You could play as a survivor or you can play as the infected and it all just worked. But we basically found that we were reaching diminishing returns and we could serve the game better by splitting it into two modes. It’s essentially PVP and PVE. There’s pure co-op mode where we could focus on the survivor’s experience against the AI controlled infected to make sure that they have the best dramatic experience that they can have. And then we have the Versus mode which is survivors versus four player-controlled zombies and you can take over the Tank, Boomer, Hunter and Smoker. So the basic thing is that when you join Versus mode you’re signing up for a tough experience.

MPC: You know what’s coming.

MB: Yeah. If I’m going to play Versus mode I know it’s going to be rough but I also know and its going to be awesome. As opposed to if I just want to play a co-op game with my friends and kill zombies and you know you’ll be able to avoid jerks.

MPC: So it’s purely a user preference and difficulty expectations or is the Director algorithm any different?

MB: The biggest thing is user expectation so you know what you’re signing up for. At the same time we’re able to relax some of the really tough constraints like Boss Infected spawn times and things like that that were really difficult before.

MPC: When we join a Versus server and two of our friends sign up, are we playing as a group or does it keep shuffling people around? Is there some sort of mechanism to control how often I’m a zombie and how often I’m a survivor?

MB: Some of that is still in flux but we are spending a lot of effort on matchmaking so it’s really easy to find and connect with your friends. The way that we’ve been doing the Versus mode is that the four zombies win by eating the four survivors., who win by escaping. After each round, the teams just swap and either you play again on that campaign or you go to the next campaign. It’s a total revenge thing.

MPC: So its attack versus defend.

MB: Yeah.

MPC: In your playtests do you find that one side wins more frequently?

MB: That’s where it gets interesting. I’m confident that we’ve got the game mechanics reasonably well-balanced so it comes down to the skills of the players. Just like in Counter-Strike, if you have a clan playing on the T’s and a bunch of random people from the net playing on CT’s, they’re going to get owned.

MPC: What’s the kind of play time to get through a level. I know it varies wildly depending on skill levels but are we looking at something like 30 minutes or an hour? Is it more like a WoW raid or is it like a pickup game of TF2?

MB: I would say more a WoW raid. If the team knows what they’re doing they can get through a campaign in about 45 min but that varies wildly. I mean we’ve had like company-wide play tests where some people took 2.5 to 3 hours, because if the survivors all die they roll back in time to the safe house checkpoint and at the (health and ammo) state they were at too. Some people had to retry sections of the map, especially the finale, since it can take some folks a few times to get through.

But that said, we also have AI controlled survivor bots as well so you can play alone and the rest of your teammates will be controlled by the AI. The nice thing about that is friends can drop in or out at any time and be replaced by a bot (or replace one).

MPC: Will the game run on dedicated servers or will it be an Xbox style local host? What do we need to have set up to get the best experience for us and 3 to 7 of our friends?

MB: All I can say right now is we’re investigating some really cool stuff with servers and hosting. Making it easy is a primary focus. Making it clear for you to jump in and play with the optimal experience right out of the box.

MPC: Because we might not necessarily be playing a pick-up game TF2 where you can jump into any server and have fun by ourselves. We want to play with our friends and not necessarily want to pay 10 bucks or 20 bucks a month for an 8-person server.

MB: Yes definitely. You should not have to pay 8 or 10 bucks a month to play on a server to have a good experience.

MPC: We saw at the end of a mission there are rankings and you get feedback from the game. Can you talk about that and maybe a little bit about the Steam achievements?

MB: Yeah well we’re going to have a full set of achievements for both the PC and the Xbox 360. If you look at what TF2 is doing with their achievements you’ll have a pretty good idea at the kind of things we’re going to do for Left4Dead.

MPC: Any hints as to what the achievements might award?

MB: Well I will say that we are definitely going to focus more on altruistic and teamwork sort of achievements so you’d be recognized for the kinds of things we want you to be doing in the game. But there’s also going to be some other ones that are tough to do. I can guarantee you there’s going to be an achievement of starting and escaping a scenario without getting hit by an infected.

MPC: So that’s an achievement you might have to farm.

MB: It’s going to be tough, especially since we also have dynamic levels which are kind of unique for a multiplayer game. We’re figuring that out how this is going to play into the achievement system.

MB: The feedback system we originally had was this really deep system of awards and merits and all this other stuff. There was a lot of data there but through play testing we found that people just didn’t care about that data. It was kind of information overload, and more importantly, it was kind of obscuring the salient things we really wanted people to notice.

MPC: Like if you shot friend in the face 20 times.

MB: Yeah so we want to highlight the good things and we want to encourage teamplay. But, for example, instead of a friendly fire demerit the game will mention things like least damage to friends and that’ll be a ranking. So you can look at yourself and if you’re at the bottom of the list, that’s bad.

MPC: Yeah we wouldn’t want you on our team again.

MB: Right and it rotates through those rankings. It tries to pick a handful of the most interesting things that happened to show you. Like most headshots.

MPC: Kind of like at the end of a Rock Band round.

MB: Exactly. In fact, the game does rate your team with 5 stars as well. In essence what we’re trying to do is give the team valuable feedback and we try to boil it down to “you did really well,” “you did ok,” or “you should try different tactics next time.”

MPC: Where does the difficulty kind of cap out? If we sit down with our mom and grandmother then obviously it’s going come in pretty easy. What happens when I sit down with guys who are at the top of the world? Are we just going to get infinite spawn of zombies?

MB: The fundamental thing that’s going to drive that in the coop mode is the difficulty setting you choose. There is sort of a bottom difficulty, and the director can only compensate so much. But on the top end so we have Normal, which is basically the introductory experience. We have Hard which is just a good solid experience for seasoned players. There’s also Expert difficulty which is for pretty hardcore folks.

And then we have Impossible difficulty because it never fails. I remember Counter-Strike bots in particular. It didn’t matter how hard I made those bots I kept getting emails saying “dude they’re too easy.” So Impossible is the mode for bragging rights. And what basically changes between those modes is how much damage you take from the various attacks. So the mobs don’t necessarily get bigger.

MPC: How much more damage they deal as well?

MB: How much damage they deal to you fundamentally. Some of them do change, like the tank. The tank gets tougher. He can absorb more damage. But at the same time he can deal more damage. Like on Impossible he hits you once and you know you’re done.

MPC: Like in a real-world zombie scenario, when they have their arms on you that’s not going to end well.

MB: No, you know if I reached across the table and clocked you as hard as I could that would hurt a lot

MPC: Definitely. You’re much bigger than we are. We don’t want any of that.

MPC: How about the new weapons that you’re showing off today?

MB: So the biggest tweak is the pipe bomb. The pipe bomb before was very realistic, so it exploded like a real pipe bomb would. But in terms of gameplay mechanics, especially with this game, it wasn’t actually very functional. There are so many zombies that are coming at you from all directions that having one even fairly big explosion didn’t help in a lot of cases. So what we did is we McGuyvered it a bit. Now, there’s like a labeled battery strap on the bomb with a beeper and the beeper sound just drives the zombies nuts. They have to chase the sound. So you can pull out the pipe bomb and set it off and it starts beeping faster and faster and all the zombies in the area chase down the pipe bomb like a dog chasing a bone. They kick it around and after about six seconds the beeper keeps getting faster until it explodes. But of course it’s completely surrounded by zombies at that point. So it becomes very tactically interesting. You can use it to get out of trouble. Like if one guy is dead and two are incapacitated and you’re going over to heal them, there’s probably a huge hoard coming at you. But if you have a pipe bomb you can use it and throw it far away and it’ll just basically absorb that hoard and you get a “Get out of jail free” card.

MPC: Can one of the player-controlled Boss infected kick the bomb back at you to send the hoard in your direction?

MB: We’re still experimenting with exactly how the Boss infected can react to the pipe bomb.

MPC: And then the other big change we’ve seen today is the look. All of the characters have been redesigned and the game has new post-processing effects. Can you talk about that?

MB: As you know at the first of the year valve acquired Turtle Rock studios so now we’re Valve South and the biggest thing that the acquisition brought is just a ton of new resources. A lot of our game design assumptions changed. Before this time there were basically 12 of us building this game and we were leveraging as much as we realistically could using props that we had built for Counter-Strike. But now we have all this additional talent with Valve as a whole. Everyone sat back and said ‘This game is really fun. People really dig this game. Lets give this game its own look.’

What happened was a re-evaluation of our development and a whole bunch of effort going into giving the game its own unique art style. We are able to do things that we couldn’t do before like changing the low-level Source Engine assets because we had our hands full in just making the game itself. But now, we’re Valve! So now we have much more interesting shadows and flash lights and we have the vignette-style post-processing and the color correction.

MPC: So what is the “look” that you’re going for?

MB: What we’re trying to do is make you feel like you’re in a horror movie. It’s a very cinematic feeling. Something that we’ve noticed just with the game in general is that people tend to like just to watch; they like to be spectators. Because it’s kind of like watching that horror movie where you want to shout ‘No, don’t, No! don’t go in there!’ We’ve really pushed for that in the vocalization – the way survivors talk to each other. We also wanted to make it look as filmic looking as possible.

It’s a challenge because there’s this single-player narrative element and structure, but it’s also a multiplayer game that is meant to be played over and over again.

MPC: Any details about the actual story behind the zombie infection? Is that something that will be revealed through the acts?

MB: We’re trying some experimental things with the story but we’re keeping it vague right now. The idea is as you play the game more and more the kind of things the survivors say will give you little hints and tidbits of the story. So you may have played the game for a long time and then Bill says something off hand that you’ve never heard before. We have plans in the future to continue to add to this world a lot.

MPC: Will the game be moddable?

MB: That will be interesting to see how that works out. In some ways the game is really moddable in that you can make a map and you won’t have to populate it because the director does that for you. You basically generate what we call a navigation mesh and you decorate a few areas indicating where the players start, where the safe room is located, and where the finale will take place. The Director will go through and populate it all for you. And the director is there and available to be messed with but of course all it knows is how to make a zombie game so it’s not a completely malleable piece of AI that could say make My Pretty Pony or something.

MPC: My Pretty Pony would be pretty weird.

Legally Bound PC Gamer Finds Loophole in Contract to Play PlayStation 3

Norman Chan — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:24:27 -0500

Back when the PlayStation 3 launched in November of 2006, PC Gamer magazine tempted the gamers waiting in front of the Sony Metreon in San Francisco (the official PS3 North American launch headquarters) with a Faustian bargain (look it up). Our sister publication offered to give away a $7,500 Falcon Northwest gaming PC to one of the campers if they willingly relinquished their place in line. The catch: the unfaithful console fanboy who accepted the PC would also have to sign a legally binding contract preventing him from owning a PlayStation 3 for three years – an eternity in game industry time.

The (in our opinion) lucky gamer who volunteered to defect to PC gaming was one Neal Chung-Lee, a local student had at that point been waiting in line for several days to be the one of the first people to own a PS3. But after selling his console-loving soul to PC gaming (and making the front page of Digg), Neal fell off of our radar. That is, until we bumped into him this past week. And you’ll never guess where.

Our first meeting at E3 was with 2K Games, the publisher of the upcoming PC titles Borderlands, Civilization: Colonization, and Champions Online. 2K Games is also the publisher of Bioshock, and gave a presentation of the planned Bioshock PlayStation 3 port. Halfway though the presentation, we noticed that the 2K Games employee “driving” the demo looked a little familiar. After checking his nametag and doing a quick Google search on our phones, we confirmed our suspicions: it was Neal!

We caught up with Neal after the game demonstration to see what he had been up to since signing the contract. He found a job working at 2K as a game analyst, playtesting upcoming games to provide feedback to developers. The Falcon PC is still at his house, and he’s used it as his primary gaming system for multi-platform games like Bioshock. And when asked whether he or his housemates currently own a PlayStation 3, Neal responded “No” without any hesitation. However, he was also quick to add “But I have two of them on my desk at work.”

E3 2008: The John Carmack Interview. Rage, id Tech 6, Doom 4 Details, and More!

Will Smith — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:00:35 -0500

We had an opportunity to speak with id co-founder John Carmack after the big EA press conference yesterday (where id surprisingly announced a partnership with EA to publish Rage). We grilled the legendary game developer (and part-time rocket scientist) about id's post-apocalyptic shooter, the state of gaming graphics, and what his plans are after id Tech 5. Rage looks be a drastic departure from the traditional id FPS, not only in gameplay style (open worlds with vehicles vs. claustrophobic indoor environments) but also in the way Carmack has designed the code-base. id has already announced that Doom 4 is in development (no publisher has yet been annonced), and Carmack confirmed that it'll run at 30Hz and run with several times the graphics power as Rage, a 60Hz game.

MPC: Can you lead off by telling us a little bit about Rage and id Tech 5?

John Carmack: id Tech 5 is the next major technology generation after the Doom 3 [engine]. Doom 3 was targeted at high-end PCs and the original Xbox. It’s been one of our big learning experiences working with our partner companies about just how miserable the porting process is. Doing a game, then delivering for the PC, the Xbox 360, the PS3, the Mac or whatever. It’s just something horrible that we suffered through with Enemy Territory, or rather one of our partners did.

The target that we had, we knew when we were starting this generation of technology that the consoles were taking over the preeminence for the types of games we’d been making—the AAA media-rich blockbusters were on the consoles. We needed a solution that would be portable across 360, PS3, PC, and OS X, but we didn’t want to abandon our PC roots. And we have enough Apple boosters internally that the Mac remains a platform that we have some fondness for.

On a technical level, we had to make design decisions that would let us target all of these platforms, very importantly, from a single source-base, and developed [that] internally. We didn’t want to have to go out to any other companies to produce these games. We wanted to say OK, here’s the build and run the same build on the PC, the 360, and the PS3. We still have to go through one extra step to build it on the Mac. But it really does work that way on the other [console] platforms. Right now, you check the stuff in, the next day you get the build reports, which says, “here it is [ready to go] on these three platforms.” So that’s one of the core technical aspects.

MPC: So one team is developing for four platforms at the same time (PC, 360, PS3, and OS X)? That’s really cool!

JC: This is the first time we’ve done this at id, and we think we’ve done it better than many other companies. This is one source tree and one environment, you build it and it works well on all these. Different platforms have had different amounts of elbow grease on them. Certain things are easier on the 360 than the PS3, but you put the extra effort in where it’s required. You don’t want to minimum common denominator it, and just do what’s easy on the different platforms. The intersection of that is not so great.

Tim Willits, id's Lead Designer: One of the great things about the new id Tech 5 engine is that as a developer, you use the same set of assets on all of the platforms. You can immediately see what your game looks like on all the different platforms. For us, that’s a great way of looking at development of games.

JC: Our history as a PC developer lead us to a lot of development technologies that console developers generally didn’t do. Through the Doom 3 generation we had all of this live update stuff, where a modeler could save out a model or save out an image. You could just hit one key in game, and it refreshes everything in the game around you. While we went through the Doom 3 porting process to the Xbox, our designers were appalled at how painful the process was. “Ew, this takes hours to just make tiny changes there”. We’ve brought all of the goodness of PC development there to console developers.

During the development process [now], you can do the exact same thing: save this thing out, hit a key, and it magically pops up in the world around you. With a stamping on the Megatexture stuff, you’ve got even cooler demos, where you can be doing graffiti on the texture on the PC, and a guy walks around the corner on the PS3, and it’s magically there.

TW: So Rage, the other part of your question. Rage is a new franchise built on a first-person shooter foundation. But yet, it expands on that with more exploration, more action, and more adventure with some driving and vehicle combat.

JC: It’s explicitly not the corridor shooter that people have come to expect from id. It was a very conscious decision that this won’t just be the next revision of the same game that id’s made before.

MPC: It seems like you’ve taken inspiration for Rage from Mad Max and everything else that’s post apocalyptic and awesome. What would you say that you’re juiced about and pulling on to make Rage?

TW: For us, it’s all about fun and making the game experience as enjoyable as possible. During development, whenever we hit a crossroads between realism and fun, we take the fun path. We would love for game players, after they finish Rage to say, “that game was fun. I had a great time.”

JC: And that actually, there are some technical points that we tie in there. I was very proud of the Doom 3 generation, where I unified all these things: static and dynamic lighting, static and dynamic geometry. It was technically elegant and wonderful, and was this thing that I was quite proud of as a setup. We’re making completely different decisions on Rage. I’m not trying at all to be perfectly uniform or elegant in whatever way. We’re doing a lot more of the traditional gaming hacks in the technology, because we’re a 60Hz game. We’re totally blazing fast because Rage is a 60Hz game. We want to be responsive for the driving side of things, and that carries over into a silky-smooth sense of play even with all the other first-person sides of things.

That also plays into our grand strategic plan with all this generation of technology. We’re ramping up to do another Doom game, built on id Tech 5. But it’s going to be a 30Hz game. Even though we’re not changing the engine, we get to throw three times as much horsepower at it, so it’s going to look like a totally new game engine on there, even though it’s going to be built on the four years of effort that we spent developing this generation of technology.

MPC: So, you said Rage is a 60Hz game. Is it an OpenGL or DirectX game?

JC: It’s still OpenGL, although we obviously use a D3D-ish API [on the Xbox 360], and CG on the PS3. It’s interesting how little of the technology cares what API you’re using and what generation of the technology you’re on. You’ve got a small handful of files that care about what API they’re on, and millions of lines of code that are agnostic to the platform that they’re on.

John Carmack conjures up graphics magic for Rage

MPC: Are you using DirectX 9 equivalent? For Doom 4 as well?

JC: Yes to both. It’s one of those things I get asked a lot. What’s big and exciting for DirectX 10 or DirectX 11? There’s not a whole lot of… really not a whole lot. The big touted geometry shaders were in many ways, a mistaken belief that people desperately wanted to create stencil shadow volume.

There’s a tough thing with that. You get a bunch of people who make APIs, and they think “it’s my job to make APIs. I make new APIs every year.” There’s a reality of approaching a functionality curve, and the DX9 level gives us a whole lot of stuff where it’s not like before, even at the DX7 functionality level. Graphics programmers have tried every possible configuration, and they’ve tried every state and know what happens when. But, as soon as you get programmability in there (as happened with DX9) you’re writing code now. The code is limited, but we’re so far from exhausting the possibilities.

Sure, when DX10 hardware is ubiquitous and that’s our baseline platform, we’ll find something useful to do with all that extra hardware. It’s not like we’re saying “no, we won’t use this”.

MPC: Do you think we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns with regard to graphics?

JC: There’re interesting things to talk about in that direction, [for example] with Quake Live. We’re taking this ancient graphics technology, it’s nine years old, but we’re wrapping it in this other way to innovate, with the website interface for all of that. It’s clear that there are certain types of games that we’re past the curve for the benefit. For the highly competitive games, competitors would crank the detail all the way down, sometimes going too far. It’s cool that we’re running those games now at 60Hz on 2 million-pixel monitors.

There’s still value to be gained at the high end with graphics. We’ve got some wonderful looking stuff with Rage where we can do things with the environments that people have never seen before. Rage and id tech 5 will make a lot of games start to look plain. We’ve seen that phenomenon with previous games, where people don’t know exactly what they’re missing until they’re shown it, but it makes some of the other things look shabby in comparison.

I still think there’s one more generation to be had where we virtualize geometry with id Tech 6 and do some things that are truly revolutionary.

MPC: How long will we see games based on id Tech 5?

JC: Through this console generation at least, I am beginning some of the preliminary research work on what we’re going to follow this up with on the following console generation. Lots of questions are unanswered about that, depending on how all the players choose their technology—whether it ends up being a Larrabee based, CUDA hybrid, or Fusion-based, there’re lots of unanswered questions. I know we can deliver a next-gen kick, if we can virtualize the geometry like we virtualized the textures; we can do things that no one’s ever seen in games before. It’s worth doing a new generation for.

MPC: So this isn’t your last engine?

JC: No. It’s interesting though, that a couple of years ago, I’d thought that maybe we were approaching something that would be a regular tool, that the performance is a driving factor. You could write something really general, but the performance is hard, even for a 30Hz game.

In some ways, our big advances are in tools. Our innovations are beyond the offline renderers. We’re doing stuff that even the offline renderers don’t.

E3 2008: Microsoft Expects Xbox 360 to Remain Ahead of PS3

Pulkit Chandna — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:32:37 -0500

After Microsoft had tantalized attendees with a few breathtaking glimpses of Gears of War 2 gameplay at its E3 2008 press conference, Microsoft devices division VP Don Mattrick took to the stage for the mandatory chest-thumping talk. He pompously announced that he expects Xbox 360 to trounce PS3 over the entire course of the current console cycle.

Then he triumphantly stated that Xbox Live had generated more than $1 billion in sales and dispersed 500 million pieces of content. Microsoft also announced that it has partnered with NBC and Universal who will now make their content available through the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Interestingly, Microsoft never made any statements regarding how it plans to wrest the no.1 spot from Nintendo. Has it relinquished all such hopes and desires? Have your say.

Image Credit: TechPics

E3 2008:Rock Band 2 Tracklist Announced

Pulkit Chandna — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:08:02 -0500

With gamers increasingly voicing their concerns about the Guitar Hero series becoming monotonous, all eyes are now on the second installment of the Rock Band series. Harmonix and MTV Games gave away the full Rock Band 2 track list at the ongoing E3. The game’s disc will come with 84 tracks and 20 songs will be released as downloadable content or dlc. Additionally, gamers will be able to import their on-disc and downloaded Rock Band 1 tracks to Rock Band 2. Tracks from the who’s who of the rockosphere populate the list.

1. AC/DC “Let There Be Rock” 1970s
2. AFI “Girl’s Gone Grey” 2000’s
3. Alanis Morissette “You Oughta Know” 1990’s
4. Alice in Chains “Man in the Box” 1990’s
5. Allman Brothers “Ramblin’ Man” 1970’s
6. Avenged Sevenfold “Almost Easy” 2000’s
7. Bad Company “Shooting Star” 1970’s
8. Beastie Boys “So Whatcha Want” 1990’s
9. Beck “E-Pro” 2000’s
10. Bikini Kill “Rebel Girl” 1990’s
11. Billy Idol “White Wedding Pt. I” 1980’s
12. Blondie “One Way or Another” 1970’s
13. Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue” 1970’s
14. Bon Jovi “Livin’ on a Prayer” 1980’s
15. Cheap Trick “Hello There” 1970’s
16. Devo “Uncontrollable Urge” 1980’s
17. Dinosaur Jr. “Feel the Pain” 1990’s
18. Disturbed “Down with the Sickness” 2000’s
19. Dream Theater “Panic Attack” 2000’s
20. Duran Duran “Hungry Like the Wolf” 1980’s
21. Elvis Costello “Pump It Up” 1970’s
22. Fleetwood Mac “Go Your Own Way” 1970’s
23. Foo Fighters “Everlong” 1990’s
24. Guns N’ Roses “Shackler’s Revenge” 2000’s
25. Interpol “PDA” 2000’s
26. Jane’s Addiction “Mountain Song” 1980’s
27. Jethro Tull “Aqualung” 1970’s
28. Jimmy Eat World “The Middle” 2000’s
29. Joan Jett “Bad Reputation” 1980’s
30. Journey “Anyway You Want It” 1970’s
31. Judas Priest “Painkiller” 1990’s
32. Kansas “Carry On Wayward Son” 1970’s
33. L7 “Pretend We’re Dead” 1990’s
34. Lacuna Coil “Our Truth” 2000’s
35. Linkin Park “One Step Closer” 2000’s
36. Lit “My Own Worst Enemy” 1990’s
37. Lush “De-Luxe” 1990’s
38. Mastodon “Colony of Birchmen” 2000’s
39. Megadeth “Peace Sells” 1980’s
40. Metallica “Battery” 1980’s
41. Mighty Mighty Bosstones “Where’d You Go” 1990’s
42. Modest Mouse “Float On” 2000’s
43. Motorhead “Ace of Spades” 1980’s
44. Nirvana “Drain You” 1990’s
45. Norman Greenbaum “Spirit in the Sky” 1960’s
46. Panic at the Disco “Nine in the Afternoon” 2000’s
47. Paramore “That’s What You Get” 2000’s
48. Pearl Jam “Alive” 1990’s
49. Presidents of the USA “Lump” 1990’s
50. Rage Against the Machine “Testify” 1990’s
51. Ratt “Round & Round” 1980’s
52. Red Hot Chili Peppers “Give it Away” 1990’s
53. Rise Against “Give it All” 2000’s
54. Rush “The Trees” 1970’s
55. Silversun Pickups “Lazy Eye” 2000’s
56. Smashing Pumpkins “Today” 1990’s
57. Social Distortion “I Was Wrong” 1990’s
58. Sonic Youth “Teenage Riot” 1980’s
59. Soundgarden “Spoonman” 1990’s
60. Squeeze “Cool for Cats” 1970’s
61. Steely Dan “Bodhitsattva” 1970’s
62. Steve Miller Band “Rock’n Me” 1970’s
63. Survivor “Eye of the Tiger” 1980’s
64. System of a Down “Chop Suey” 2000’s
65. Talking Heads “Psycho Killer” 1970’s
66. Tenacious D “Master Exploder” 2000’s
67. Testament “Souls of Black” 1990’s
68. The Donnas “New Kid in School” 2000’s
69. The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” 1980’s
70. The Grateful Dead “Alabama Getaway” 1980’s
71. The Guess Who “American Woman” 1970’s
72. The Muffs “Kids in America” 1990’s
73. The Offspring “Come Out & Play (Keep ‘em Separated)” 1990’s
74. The Replacements “Alex Chilton” 1980’s
75. The Who “Pinball Wizard” 1960’s
Bonus Artist Bonus Song Title Decade
76. Abnormality “Visions” 2000’s
77. Anarchy Club “Get Clean” 2000’s
78. Bang Camaro “Night Lies” 2000’s
79. Breaking Wheel “Shoulder to the Plow” 2000’s
80. The Libyans “Neighborhood” 2000’s
81. The Main Drag “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter” 2000’s
82. Speck “Conventional Lover” 2000’s
83. The Sterns “Supreme Girl” 2000’s
84. That Handsome Devil “Rob the Prez-O-Dent” 2000’s

E3 2008: A Ton of New Screenshots From Left4Dead and Spore!

Norman Chan — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:59:40 -0500

Just for you, because you're awesome: new screenshots from two of our most highly-anticipated PC games of the year. Spore and Left4Dead look much more polished and graphically improved since we've last seen them. In the case of Left4Dead, all the character models have been revamped as well. The L4D screens don't actually show the new character design. For a peek at those, you'll have to hit up our liveblog of the EA press conferenc e.

Hit the next page for the Spore screens!

Make sure to check out our E3 2008 EA press conference liveblog for more game details and images.

Follow our E3 2008 coverage here!

E3 2008 Coverage Begins Today!

Norman Chan — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:47:55 -0500

For gamers reading the site (we know there are a lot of you), we wanted to let you know what Maximum PC will have some great E3 coverage this year. In fact, Will Smith and I are at the SFO airport right now, and our plane is boarding in next 10 minutes. We'll be down in LA for the whole week, blogging live from the various press conferences and posting hands-on reports for all of our scheduled game demos and appointments. Be sure to check back frequently for the latest updates. You can also click the E3 Coverage tablet link on the right side of the website to only filter our E3 reports.

Oh crap, the plane is boarding now!

(photo credit: Will Smith on his OLD iPhone)