Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Oh dear. Cunning gentlethings found a way to hack/mod the Battlefield 3 open beta’s map – Operation Metro – to enable support for up to 128 shooting men. Officially, it only allows up to 32 shooting men, though the full release version may well raise the headcount. That’s not what I’m actually oh dearing about, though. It’s DICE/EA’s response to this that is troubling. In an official statement on the forum – which now appears to have been pulled, but we have a screenshot of it as-was below – they claimed that playing on the hacked servers “can cause your account to become compromised, stats to be altered or other issues to arise which may lead to having your account to be banned by EA.” In addition, horrifyingly, “if your account does get banned it means any other EA game you have on your account would also be unavailable.”
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As Rab mentioned between Manifestoing last time, he’s away on holiday at the mo. Now, I could have done a post about my attempt to paint and assemble 70-odd Mantic Elves via industrial dipping techniques, except that’d i) take away time which I’d rather use to paint and assemble the 70-odd elves and ii) it’s a lot of work, and I’m retired, don’t you know. Instead, let’s the board-game coverage a-coverage-ing by linking to the latest Quinns & Paul’s Shut Up And Sit Down, which you’ll find below. They cover Dominion, 7 Wonders and Nightfall. Hurrah!
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Sundays are for nervously reading the Sunday Papers, and thinking about what might appear in them. Oh well, worse things happen at sea. Let’s have a look at all the things that can only happen in videogames.

• It’s a big one to start: Eurogamer ask the question “How Bad is PC Piracy Really?” The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that no-one really knows. Here’s Capcom’s Christian Svensson: “We looked at quantifying what the real losses are,” says Christian Svensson of the PC Gaming Alliance and Capcom, “and it’s incredibly hard to do, because you end up having to do a set of cascading assumptions that you have no real ability to validate in any meaningful away.” More insightfully, there are a lot of good points made about how and why companies choose to use DRM, but I think it’s Guillaume Rambourg from GoG who sums my feels up best: “”Piracy is some kind of ghost enemy, and chasing a ghost enemy is a pure waste of time and resources. The only way really is to make the whole gaming experience easy, convenient and rewarding for the users – this is the only way to fight against piracy.”

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I’m a little late in posting this Bargain Bucket today. It’s actually Ed McMillen’s fault, I was up past my bedtime last night, playing none other than The Binding of Isaac (as featured in this week’s Bargain Bucket). I might sneak some more in now, actually. There’s plenty of other games on offer this weekend, you won’t want to miss some of these deals. You can always find even more cheap games, on all formats, over at SavyGamer.co.uk. Here’s this week’s download roundup: Read the rest of this entry »

I do so love maps, and just one of the maps I have been taking a look at this morning is this one from Star Wars: The Old Republic. As if there were any doubt about the amount of content Bioware are churning out for this MMO, this Unity-powered map details every planet that features in the game, across five sectors of space, and even details a number of the spacecraft that will feature in the game. I think it’s a bit of a shame they didn’t opt for a “zoom” sort of navigation of the maps, but it’s fun to see the game laid out in this way.

Anyone have any other map-related news?

This was shown in private at E3 earlier in the year, but the eleven-minute presentation has just turned up on SEGA blog. It shows off a bunch of game footage and is narrated by Randy Pitchford. He claims that the aim of the game is to creating the Aliens movie in videogame form. It’s not looking like a bad attempt that, either.

Watch it below.
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