Posted 02/02/09 at 08:00:00 PM by Shaun Rykiss

In our opinion, no artistic medium offers a better opportunity to express a PC gamer’s individuality and inappropriate sense of humor like a personal decal “spray” projected on your enemy’s spawn room wall during a multiplayer match. While Valve has made it a mostly painless process to import spray images into their Source engine-based games, the difficulty still lies in creating an original image you can be proud to vandalize next to an enemies corpse. And since no game offers more opportunities to grief friends and enemies than Left 4 Dead, we’re going to show you a flawless technique for creating your own ‘writing on the wall’, pun absolutely intended.

Read More

Posted 12/19/08 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

Remember Myst Online? You shouldn't. GameTap shut the servers for the fumbling MMO in the beginning of this year, leaving plenty of fans of massively multiplayer online puzzle-solving out in the cold. Until the rights were returned to Cyan Worlds, which promptly promised to resurrect the MMO under the clever acronym of MORE -- the Myst Online Resurrection Experiment. Which was all fine, until funding difficulties killed the project once again. Which has since been resurrected again (surpassing Jean Gray's record), this time as a result of Cyan Worlds turning the entire Myst Online platform over to the open source community.

Strangely, this is the first big announcement from any of the "larger" MMOs that involves open source in any fashion. When an MMO dies, it usually dies for good, regardless of how persistent the fan base is toward resurrecting the fallen title into a working project.

Click the link and come into the strange, shifting world of open-source MMOs!

Read More

Posted 07/21/08 at 11:00:00 AM by Norman Chan

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. 

Click on to read our full interview!

Read More

Posted 04/11/08 at 01:04:41 PM by Norman Chan

With the price of oil surpassing $100 a barrel, the apocalypse imagined in Frontlines: Fuel of War may not be so far away. In this vision of the future, the world’s remaining superpowers—split between two factions—clash in a winner-take-all war for Earth’s last oil reserves. Lucky for us, this makes a great backdrop for some intense multiplayer skirmishes.

Click Read More for more. 

Read More

Posted 02/22/08 at 02:35:42 PM by Norman Chan

Since the last Unreal Tournament game was released four years ago, no worthy contender has managed to dethrone the now-classic shooter as the best game for online deathmatches. With the much-delayed Unreal Tournament 3, we get the uneasy feeling that Epic Games has grown a bit complacent with its multiplayer crown. The game’s brand-new graphics engine and glut of maps mask some very familiar weapons and gameplay mechanics. And while we appreciate that the developers haven’t broken from a proven design formula, we’re disappointed by the lack of innovation in this long-awaited sequel.

Click Read More for more. 

Read More

Posted 02/05/08 at 03:22:49 PM by David Murphy

All right, newblet. You’ve eaten your dog food in Wolfenstein 3D, done your spirit quest in Prey, and even managed to set up a bomb or two in Counter-Strike. If first-person shooters were massively multiplayer role-playing games, that might qualify you to step out of the kindergarten zone. Maybe. The big leagues of head shots, m-m-m-monster kills, and first-person-shooter fragfests have no room for subpar playing performance.

Click Read More for more. 

Read More

Posted 01/30/08 at 03:46:04 PM by Norman Chan

When we think of Quake games, we think of fast-paced deathmatches in their purest no-nonsense form. In Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the latest iteration of the shooter franchise, that visceral run-and-gun experience still makes up the foundation of gameplay, but the integration of deep teamplay tactics and mission objectives makes this a whole new multiplayer animal. The meld of cooperative squadplay and frenzied firefighting makes for compelling matches, but both deathmatch and tactical purists may find themselves in slightly unfamiliar territory.

Click Read More for more. 

Read More

Posted 11/12/07 at 07:55:24 PM by Norman Chan

Just call it the anti-Crysis. If Crytek’s immersive next-gen messiah is suppose to usher in a revolutionary era of open-ended shooters, Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4 shows us why linear missions and wholly scripted gameplay aren’t ready to be replaced yet. The shift in this series’ setting to modern day brings more high-tension gunplay and explosive ambiance than any game in recent memory. From furious firefights in Arab towns to nail-biting infiltration missions under the dark of Russian night, we were absorbed in more grandiose military heroics than any Michael Bay blockbuster. And since the game’s goal is to take you along for an unabashed joy ride, that’s actually a good thing.

Click Read More for more. 

Read More