Legal Mumbo Jumbo

The legal mumbo jumbo currently being held over my head with posting newsworthy items is still there. The stuff I deem necessary to share I cannot share with you at this time. I could post some news but some of it could bore you to death. I strive to provide the best news possible for you all and once this legal turmoil is gone I will share what I am prevented from posting on this blog.


What I can share is that Blizzcon Tickets sold out very fast over the weekend. Round 2 will go on sale May 30th, 2009.

Terminator: Salvation Releases to movie theaters nationwide 5/21/09 along with the movie tie-in games.

For those who don't already know... Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles has got the axe. An inside source cites reasons of episodes costing way too much to produce and given the current economy crisis it did not seam feasible to continue. For now it's cancelled I am led to believe but later was told it could be resurrected pending an evaluation.

This all I can post for right now. If anything changes I will report back later.

Update Coming Monday

A lengthy update will be coming on Monday not today as planned. My hands are tied. Lets say a lid has been put on me until tomorrow regarding the 3D Realms closure stuff.

There will be one long post tomorrow broken up into topics within the post. News slow regarding DRM News so I'll focus on what is important on the gaming fronts.

I have also been busy with RL stuff. Nobody wants a yard with long grass do they?

What I've been up to since my last update:
I have been catching up on some games that I got for christmas and haven't had a chance to play yet. I have gone to the movies to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Star Trek. I did some yard work and ran network cables down into the basement. Got e-mail flooded with 3D Realms closure and DNF leaks. SecuROM had a great conversation with me last week. Lot's of doctor's appointments have filled up my schedule too.

So there it is. I have not ditched this blog and a new poll will pop up soon.

Have a great weekend!

Future Blog Posts.

Due to circumstances beyond my control this blog will be updated weekly not daily.

I'm going over all the news that has been submitted in my e-mail and will post what I think is newsworthy.


3DRealms closure stuff that is circulating I will be holding off on posting until I confirm it. I know www.3drealms.com has a Goodbye but there is quite a few contradictions I'm awaiting explanations.

Bioware says "NO" to SecuROM for Dragon Age: Origins

A reported here : http://daforums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=677056&forum=135

Dragon Age: Origins will use a basic disc check copy protection and will not require any of the online authentication mumbo jumbo some of us love to hate.

"Bioware: We have chosen not to use SecuROM in any version of Dragon Age that is distributed by EA or BioWare."

This will surely make some people happy.

Hardware Failure...UGH!!

I had a hardware failure so I'm updating this through my PSP... Updates will return as soon as my new RAM comes in. Both sticks 2GB each decided to die on me...shucks..

Slow News.

Todat was a slow news day. Nothing new and exciting worth sharing and last weekends news was also dead.

On Friday May 1st 2009 you should see the new Xbox 360 ELITE GOTY Bundles start to show up in stores. The Bundle includes Halo 3 and Fable 2.

Stardock continues to solve Demigod connectivity issues.

Other than that it's been slow.....

Internet Downed..

So this weekend is almost over and really not much to talk about other than to say TWC picked a bad time to bring the Internet/phone service down in my area for 12 hours straight.

Tomorrow I will play catch up on the news and so on.


SEGA sent me a copy of Stormrise for PS3 and PC. Sadly it's not worth playing and I sent the review discs back.. ugh. I couldn't find myself to continue playing with all the pathfinding issues and AI getting stuck everywhere. Avoid Stormrise like the plague.

Update Issues

I apologise for lack of updates. Spring is here and well I had to get into the cleaning before it was too late.


Nothing fancy this week with news but I'm keeping my eyes open for anything worth posting on this blog.

I know the poll is done and a new poll will be up ASAP.

Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor Review

" Relic's delivers an impressive but overpriced expansion"

This is relic's first attempt at offering an episodic feel to Company of Heroes. Sadly this Tales of Valor expansion offers 3 campaigns with only 3 missions per campaign. In other words the campaigns are over way too quickly then you have the new additions in multiplayer.
Those of you playing COH for it's multiplayer will be pleased with this expansion and enjoy the new game modes offered. Still even with all that is offered here this expansion pack feels like a light weight overpriced expansion. Overall your getting good quality stuff in a episodic type of feel. If you enjoyed the previous COH titles then give this a look, Otherwise wait til Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor hits the $19.99 price point.

Rating: 2.9/5.0

Pro: Great storytelling in the 3 campaigns, New Direct Fire mode, New multiplayer modes.
Cons: Feels too short and overpriced for a full expansion pack. Some nagging issues still remain from the previous games.

Editor's Note: I realize this a short review but with all that is offered in Tales of Valor I could sum it up in a pretty short write up.

What will be the next Command & Conquer?

Many of you who purchased a copy of C&C Red Alert 3 Premier Edition received a code to register for a beta on an upcoming C&C game.

Rumors are running afoul with claims of C&C: Arena which given it's name would lead me to believe it's another Sole Survivor attempt or something completely online based. C&C 4 and General 2 are also being tossed as possibilities. I would love to add in on this speculation but in all it's wisdom I'd rather not. EA is very tight lipped about the next upcoming C&C that I'm sure we'll something soon. As it stands now these beta codes will be used in the summer sometime.

Personally we need another C&C similar to renegade. I enjoyed renegade for what it was despite its flaws in so many ways.

For now let the rumors run afoul until EA announces somethings Officially.

Left 4 Dead Survival pack Released!

Valve has finally released the promised DLC for Left 4 Dead. Boot up your steam client and it will auto update your copy of Left 4 Dead with the new Survival Pack released today.

Check your local retailers as valve also made an announcement for some price cuts to L4D as well.

Battlefield 1943 reaches Alpha Stage

As reported here: http://planetbattlefield.gamespy.com/fullstory.php?id=157850

Battlefield 1943 hit reached Alpha stage of the development cycle.



I sure enjoyed the BF1942/Vietnam games but disliked BF2 and BF2142 due many unfixed bugs.

Judge Says Summer Redstone treated Midway like a toy?

From the WTF Dept comes article from the embattled Midway games label currently in court over it's Bankruptcy crapola.

If you care then go here :http://www.joystiq.com/2009/04/21/judge-says-sumner-redstone-treated-midway-like-a-toy/


I feel Midway Games should just fail and go out of business. They had several good IP's but none of them seemed to be ground breaking enough to gain sales to keep the game developer/ publisher giant in business.

Microsoft Working on Windows 8?

Apparently Microsoft is already hard at work on Windows 8 claims this address: http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/20/microsoft.begins.windows.8/

I hope this a indication that we won't see huge gaps between new OS releases. XP to VISTA was just long enough for me.

Xbox 360 Elite GOTY Bundle Coming in May?

Spotted this listing on Amazon for a new Xbox 360 Elite bundle coming in May of this year(next month).

Have a look here: http://www.amazon.com/Xbox-360-Elite-Halo-Fable-Bundle/dp/B0026GQ8WA/ref=sr_tr_1?ie=UTF8&s=aps&qid=1240283139&sr=8-1

This new Xbox 360 Bundle includes GOTY HIts Halo 3 and Fable 2.

Oh boy this is one hell of a bundle indeed folks :)

Future News Postings Timeline

I would like to put out a notice to those of you who view this blog on a daily basis. News Postings will occur daily, however if there is a slow news day in which not much to post related to this blog then posts will happen in the evenings at latest.

I am being pretty stingy on what to post and what not to post. If it falls into the DRM and general gaming caetgory I have to pick and choose what to post as it is already.

I hope this clears some issues up that some have contacted me about already.


More to come later on today.

GameBizBlog.com Interviews Brad Wardell

Stardocks Brad Wardell sounds off with GameBizBlog.com in a lengthy interview. Demigod, Securom and others are covered. It's too long to post here so vist this address below.

GameBizBlog:http://www.gamebizblog.com/gamebizblog/2009/04/interview-brad-wardell.html



Nice interesting point of view from Brad Wardell on the publisher using Securom too. Mostly I took his comments in this way even though he didn't say it like that "Your morons for putting activations/ install limits on your games. "

He does make some good points on current and future DRM games relating to what if said developer/publisher goes out of business and you want to play said game and it can't the find activation server stuff. Go to the address above and read all about it.

Enjoy the Weekend!

Well folks it seems the common cold has hit me finally and I'm feeling a bit drained. It's Spring time so this was expected as I usually get hit hard during this time of year and then I'm cold free for a good 10 months.

Anywhoo, Not much news happening this weekend from what I saw. I would encourage you all who love Multiplayer based games try Demigod out. Make sure you play through the skirmishes and tournament single-player stuff so you get a feel for the game. I have found it quite fun and enjoyable in either online or offline modes.

Unless anything newsworthy shows tomorrow you won't see another update until Monday. Spread the word on this blog as well.

Later Gang!

Demigod Piracy Update

Stardock's Brad Wardell has dropped off some clarification on the piracy stuff Demigod was hit with and here's the whole bevy of information below.

"First of all, the 18,000 figure is the # of concurrent users at the peak – not sales.

On the Steam stats page, for instance, you can see the peak concurrent users on titles that talk to Steam:

Current Players - Peak Today - Game

• 81,543 - 90,824 - Counter-Strike: Source
• 57,343 - 68,662 - Counter-Strike
• 18,788 - 23,755 - Football Manager 2009
• 14,577 - 15,606 - Empire: Total War
• 14,394 - 16,430 - Left 4 Dead
• 11,860 - 14,030 - Team Fortress 2

So just above Empire Total War in terms of peak connections (game just launched so it's not a surprise).

The infrastructure was designed to handle up to 50,000 of these connections.

But on day 0, there were around 140,000 concurrent users of which 18,000 are validated.

Pirated users can't get updates or play multiplayer but they still touch the servers.

So over the first 24 hours, we had to essentially scrap together a doppleganger of the infrastructure dedicated to Demigod's multiplayer network needs, release an update to legitimate users to point them to it.

The result was that in the first day, day and a half, users couldn't connect to each other (the connection servers would time out) and even the in game experience was horrible getting through menus and such because even a simple HTTP keep alive call (something as simple as a http call to check for the latest version to inform users if there's a new version) would cause the in game UI to hang.

The consequence is two-fold: First, early customers got a TERRRIBLE experience. Second, the reviews (notably Gamespot) based their review on this terrible experience.

Now today, day 3, it's pretty much taken care of. Users are connecting in multiplayer, the servers are pretty responsive and we're adding more in preparation for the weekend.

If there's any IT people here, they can probably better explain than I can what we've had to do essentially. It's not like we keep a room full of unused servers so the challenge of putting together a duplicate series of servers in 24 hours PLUS Stardock and GPG having to produce an update to the game to point to those servers was quite an undertaking."

I just got my boxed copy of Demigod today and so far I find it addicting as hell. Demigod will receive a fair review whenever it gets written up and posted.

Demigod Servers pounded by Pirates

Stardock's Brad Wardell has sounded off in his blog on the Demigod Server issues which have plagued it since launch. Here is the poop below :)

"Today

The system works pretty well if you have a few thousand people online at once. The system works…less well if there are tens of thousands of people online at once. And if there are over 100,000 people, well, you get horrific results such as the game being incredibly unresponsive due to simple web service calls that were considered pretty benign during the beta that suddenly start to bring down firewalls and such due to the sheer massive number of calls that are being made.

Sadly, most of the ~120,000 connections are not customers but via warez. About 18,000 are legitimate. So anyway, we spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users (it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there’d be no friendly “ha ha pirate” message which would result in people just saying the game is buggy). Mind you, the game makes relatively few server calls, it’s just the sheer number of people.

Our stress tests had counted on having maybe 50,000 people playing at once at peak and that wouldn’t be reached for a few weeks by which time we would have slowly seen things becoming problematic. With Sins of a Solar Empire, the game was incredibly successful but its user base grew slowly and steadily over time. Sometimes on a peak time the server would start to get slow and we would adjust so that it would be better next time.

But here, when you’re getting that many connections at once, you’re no longer talking about dealing with the basics like having a good SAN and lots of redundant servers. You instead fall into all kinds of weird secondary issues that start to pop up like yesterday’s case where an older network card couldn’t handle all the packets (not bandwidth limited but # of tiny packets being sent out at once).

So during the day today, people couldn’t even logon and in some cases, the Demigod forums, which use one of the affected databases for some piddly thing were even down. Even getting the game running was a pain today because a simple HTTP call to see what the latest version would get hung leaving people looking at a black screen. Stuff of nightmares.

Before the game shipped, I wrote a scary email to our team saying how disastrous things would be and predicted doom for us and GPG if there were problems with multiplayer. At the time, my worry was about things like disconnects and CVP. It didn’t occur to me that we’d have near MMO user connections to throw in."

My Opinion:
I applaud Stardock for not putting DRM on Demigod but this was certainly unavoidable. CD-Key verifications pounding a server continously can bring any server to it's knees if the load is large enough. I feel for the legit customers who were trying to enjoy playing the multiplayer game part but hopefully the folks at Stardock & GPG can get this all sorted out soon. Another Patch will be released soon as well.