StarCraft II – Ghosts of the Past Trailer

Another first-rate trailer from Blizzard.

Freakin’ awesome! This comes out a day after my B’day. Presents ideas anyone? ;D

Starcraft 2 Tauren Marine Confirmed!

Recalling Blizzard’s April Fool’s joke, many were saddened that the Tauren Marine would be a no-show. Howerver, most of us were quite happy with the decision because the thought of a Tauren Marine in Starcraft 2 is just plain ridiculous.

But all is not lost, for I have a reliable insider source who has confirmed that Starcraft 2 will in fact feature the Tauren Marine!

Starcraft 2 will feature the Tauren Marine unit!

Yup, you heard right! But there’s one tiny caveat …

Square Enix: Order of War Demo Released – Available for Digital Download

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Order of War Demo

Good news old chaps!

Captain Xsistor reporting from the front! The much-awaited RTS (Real-Time Strategy) game, ‘Order of War’ has been released on Steam as a demo digital download. Yet another mediocre World War 2 strategy game? Hard to say. The two RTS games that I was looking forward to this year are Starcraft 2 and Order of War. Square Enix did ‘wow’ us a while back when they released their trailer showcasing some of the epic combat with large armies consisting of tanks, air support, artillery, infantry and the works. Brilliant visuals and awesome sound effects rounded off the trailer leaving every World War 2 and RTS  junkie curious, if not hungry for more .

The game is set to release in Sept ’09 but as Square Enix announces on their website, you can preorder right away if you find you like the demo or if you’re just perfectly confident that this game will deliver above and beyond what the Holy Trinity — World in Conflict, Company of Heroes, and Men of War — can currently manage.

Order of War - Available for preorder

The boxed version is available for pre-order on Amazon for £17.96 with free delivery thrown in– not bad. A good deal better than if you’re American, as you’ll be paying $39.99 for your copy.

Starcraft II Gameplay Footage, Unlimited Unit Grouping and a Fourth Race!

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Wings of Liberty

As many of you avid strategy gamers may already know Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first installment of the series, is just around the corner. Blizzard has given strong indication of a late 2009 release date. The original game, Starcraft, was released in 1998 and quickly became hugely popular with a huge player base. The game is also one of the most popular eSports and many fans are expecting the future of Starcraft 2 to be no different.

Starcraft II - The Zerg Faction

Unlimited Unit Grouping

Several members of the community have voiced concerns over the size of armies and unit grouping in the upcoming sequel to what is probably Blizzard’s most successful single strategy game. The original Starcraft had a 200 population limit but rather limited unit selection grouping. Blizzard has promised Starcraft 2 will continue to build on the model of massive armies with large number sof units battling it out in multiplayer games. Furthermore, it seems there will be no limitations in unit grouping either.

Insane Frame Rates on Low-End Hardware in Company of Heroes & Other Games

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Necessity and Desperation

If necessity is the mother of invention then desperation is its great grandmother. I remember my first computer very well: an 80386 DX @ 40 Mhz with a 170MB Hard Disk, 2MB of RAM and a whopping 1MB SVGA Trident graphics card. We didn’t know it at the time but ‘Prof Computers’, the retailer who sold us the system, had loaded up the PC with old unreliable parts. What a bunch of charlatans and thieves! So naturally that computer would constantly break down and we’d have to take it in for service regularly.

Insane FPS! This is on an 8600M GT with High Models, Quality and Textures

They barely kept the system running through its warranty and as soon as that was over the system just decided to quit for good. And so my brother and I would often joke about what we believed ought to be their motto – “Prof – We keep it running.” All things considered I loved that computer to bits. It had a 7-segment LED display on the front of the case  with a Turbo button. At the default setting the 7-segment display would read 40 in bright green, but pressing the turbo button would slow down the system to 20Mhz. There was a massive Power button marked 1 and 0, a hard reset button and, get this – a lock for a computer key. Yup, as many who’ve used old systems would rememeber, most of them came with a key that you could use to lock the system. Booting up with the system locked would lead to an error message during the POST.

Growing up, I wasn’t much for gaming. Most of my time was spent programming in BASIC, Pascal and running innovative MS DOS scripts. Some of my favourites were processing command-line parameters in the form of “%1″, “%2″, … “%n”, and of course the ultimate single line command which would typically read something like:

for %t in (file1.ex1 file2.ex2 file3.ex4 somefile.exe another.dat makeEmUp.bat gorilla.bas nibbles.bas autoexec.bat config.sys)  do if not exist a:\somedir\%t copy %t ..\