1. 1 day ago 

   So I went in to my local videogame store at lunch today, to see how much they were flogging Starcraft 2 for. After about 4 laps of the store, I finally found the sliver of floorspace now dedicated for PC games: there was a single set of shelves holding a small array of games.

   Now this is all very expected, with PC gaming mostly shifting to downloads. But, this apparent death of PC gaming is not the case everywhere…

   Over in Germany, PC games take up more than half a typical shop. Likewise, looking at the magazines on the shelves, most of them are PC-related.

   I’d heard that Germans were, like Koreans, far more enthused about PC gaming over console gaming, but I really didn’t appreciate the difference until I saw it for myself.

   One other thing: in an electronics store in Postdamer Platz, they had a display of “The Sims” games that took up more space than the entire PC section of my local shop. O_o

2. 1 week ago 

   Medal of Honor MP Beta

   One thing I liked about the multi-player in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow was that it didn’t care about the single-player game. Each part was essentially a standalone game. This worked.

   Medal of Honor is doing the same thing, with the multi-player game eschewing the atrocities of the Unreal engine for DICE’s Frostbite.

   The multi-player experience immediately reminds me of Modern Warfare with small, tight tunnels of gameplay carved from a vacant middle-eastern city.

   The Battlefield lineage peeks through now and then with a few sweeping vistas, and satisfying, punchy weapons, but the general experience is closer to Day of Defeat. Narrow levels with few flanking opportunities invariably leads to sniping corridors and grenade-spammed choke-points. The player levelling system takes more cues from CoD:MW2 than it does BFBC2, but the reward schedule lacks the feel of either.

   It will be interesting to see how things develop. Right now it does feel a bit like an unloved work-for-hire project. But, the core of the game has a nice solidity to it, and with a bucket of panache splashed over it, Medal of Honor should at least become a greater success than the war on which it’s based.

3. 2 weeks ago 
   

   Ladies and gentlemen: the future of videogame retail.

    
4. 2 weeks ago 
   

   Mario takes a quiet moment to reflect.

    
5. 3 weeks ago 
   Real names required on Blizzard forums

   Real ID is essentially Blizzard’s incarnation of a gamertag. The big difference here is that, like Facebook, your real name is required.

   I can see two reasons for them doing this:

   1. Real people = stronger networks. This is why Facebook won over Myspace.
   2. Anonymity encourages fucktardary. Shielded behind pseudonyms, angry internet people can, and do cause all sorts of unnecessary hell for other people.

   While I’m a big advocate of having anonymity online, it doesn’t mean that we need to have it everywhere. And if it forces a certain degree of accountability, then I’m all for it on Battle.net.

6. 3 weeks ago 
   

   A good day for the mortar team. Not so much for the MG42.

    

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