Thursday, November 20, 2008

FM 2009 “has a chance” at Christmas No.1

Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson reckons Football Manager 2009 is in with a shot at the UK Christmas number one slot after entering the UK All-Formats list at three this week behind record-breaker and festive rival World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ): Wrath of the Lich King.
“We’re very happy with the sales of Football Manager 2009 for the first weekend,” Jacobson told Eurogamer.
“We’ve had a very friendly rivalry with World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) sales-records-wise over many years, and as soon as I got the figures through I congratulated the people I know over there at Activision Blizzard.
“Whilst not a player of the game myself, I have lots of friends who are who constantly tell me how great it is, so they deserve their success,” he said.
Jacobson said that Football Manager 2008 had spent 22 weeks as the number one full-priced PC game before spending a further 12 weeks on top of the PC budget list.
He expects a similar performance from Football Manager 2009, but says chart positions are far less important than fan feedback, which has already been “pretty damn positive”.
“I expect for Football Manager 2009 to be in the PC top 10 until we either go to budget price, or release our next PC game,” said Jacobson.
“As for Christmas number one, who knows? We’ve certainly got a chance, as long as word of mouth continues to be positive for the game. I don’t really set targets like that, but it would be lovely if it did happen, as it would make our mothers very proud!”
Football Manager 2009 performed well in a chart littered with disappointment this week, thanks in part to a well-placed advertising campaign and a recognised brand.
The same wasn’t true for many other key releases; Wii Music entered at 16, LittleBigPlanet slipped down to 19, Mirror’s Edge arrived at 20, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts failed to make the top 40.
“Releasing new IP at this time of year is always a difficult thing to do, as people only have a certain amount of money to spend,” reasoned Jacobson.
“I haven’t played Wii Music yet, but both Mirror’s Edge and LittleBigPlanet are superb games, and I believe they’ll do really well in the long run - although LBP’s sales are already pretty good in my opinion.”
That’s exactly the same opinion held by Sony UK, would you believe.
Football Manager 2009 is out now on PC and PSP. The desktop version features, among other things, a 3D match engine for the first time in the series.
Bend your run behind our Football Manager 2009 review to find out what we thought.
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What to do if pirates attack

Ship captains are being instructed online how to deal with pirates in the face of escalating attacks on the high seas.
The International Chamber of Commerce has created an online map of piracy incidents that have occurred throughout 2008. It has also published guidelines on how to respond to piracy attacks.
According to its Commercial Crime Services website, ship captains are advised to increase their boat’s speed and use evasive manoeuvres if pirates attempt to board.
The wave from the ship’s bow and wash from the stern can be used to force away the small boats typically used to transport pirates, the guidelines say.
The “mother vessel” also needs to be identified and avoided.
If pirates do successfully board a ship, crew are advised to follow their demands and avoid any physical confrontations.
The ship’s master should attempt to remain in charge of the vessel’s navigation controls so as to prevent colliding into other vessels or landmarks.
The body of water between
Yemen and Somalia known as the Gulf of Aden has been identified as the most dangerous piracy hot spot in the world, with more than 70 attacks reported this year.
In the past 12 days alone seven ships have been hijacked from the area, including a massive Saudi super tanker carrying oil worth more than $100 million.
“[The pirates are] very good at what they do,” US military officer Admiral Michael Mullen said on Monday. “They’re very well armed. Tactically, they are very good.”
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How to put the ‘e’ in D&D

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is the mother of all role-playing games.
Before World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ), Everquest, Meridian 59, Zork and pretty much every other multi-user dungeon or text adventure was D&D.
Since its publication in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, D&D has been relentlessly old-school and most of those that play it do so with paper, pencil and polyhedral dice.
But this year Wizards of the Coast, D&D’s current owner, is adding electronic elements to the game to prepare it for an age in which most fantasy gamers play via computer if they play at all.
“If we want to recruit the next generation of gamers we have to be online, that’s clearly the platform where people have chosen to play,” said Randy Buehler, vice-president of digital gaming at Wizards of the Coast.
Game on
While many computer games such as Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights have appeared before that use a D&D setting and revolve around its rules none, said Mr Buehler, have captured what is special about the game.
As in many fantasy-based computer games, D&D is all about picking a role for a character to play, be that warrior, wizard or thief, and then sending that character on an adventure.
The crucial difference is that in D&D you do not thrust that character into a dungeon overseen by a computer - instead the overseer is another person. In D&D parlance they are known as a Dungeon
Master (DM).

The DM is the kind or cruel god who controls the monsters found in the dungeon, plays every character you meet on the way to the lost tombs and makes the whole experience a frustration and a delight.
“Without that human element you are limited to what’s been programmed in by the designer,” said Mr Buehler.
“What’s missing is the imagination and improvisation. If we can capture that we win.”
The electronic extras for D&D are collectively known as D&D Insider and give players a variety of digital tools to aid and abet that formerly paper-based play.
“The idea is that you can play it as 100% table-top experience, or 100% electronic or somewhere in between,” said Mr Buehler.
The most ambitious part of D&D Insider is the game table - a virtual space where players can join and in which they can play out an adventure overseen by a human DM.
Other elements include online character generators that take novices and veterans through the bewildering array of choices that confront anyone creating a D&D character and taking it on several different adventures.
Also available is a character visualiser, access to all the D&D rulebooks ever printed and a few online tools to help get characters going.
Player power
But, said Charles Ryan, a veteran D&D player and spokesman for games firm Esdevium, there’s no guarantee that E-D&D will catch on.
While putting lots of reference works in one place and producing tools to help people generate characters would undoubtedly be welcome, will that drive people to play D&D online?
“It’s an open question,” said Mr Ryan. “With the older-style guys, it’s going to vary.”
Despite this, said Mr Ryan, there was real appeal in having a virtual space around which D&D players who would not otherwise meet could gather.
“The older you get, it gets harder to get that group together,” he said. “You are looking at your diaries to see if you can play, if you can get babysitters and so on.”
“I can go back and play D&D now and play just an hour a night,” he said.
For some regular D&D players the chance to go online and play is not so tempting.
“It’s like watching a concert on TV; you just do not get the atmosphere,” said Alexander Simkin, organiser of the D&D group on the Meetup website.
“I’ve been to the Last Night of the Proms and seen it on telly and it’s a completely different experience,” he said.
“I think you can simulate some aspects by playing it online but I don’t think you can capture all of it,” he added.
His comments were echoed by Mark Brown, a player who only took up D&D in October 2007 and is keen convert to playing it face-to-face.
“I think it’s much better to get together with a group of friends and use your imagination,” Mr Brown said. “When you do it on a computer you don’t have that.”
But, he said, he could understand Wizards of the Coast’s strategy of launching it to tempt youngsters who were more familiar with World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ).
Also, he added, it could prove useful for those who cannot find a D&D group nearby.
“If you cannot play it any other way, if there’s an online version that could really help,” he said. Tags: wow gold，world of warcraft gold

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Sony sets the stage for launch of its Home virtual world

Sony has started setting the stage for the launch of its Home virtual world. The company has been running beta tests with thousands of users for weeks now, and the formal launch is still expected to be this fall on the PlayStation Network.
About 18 months in the making, Home is Sony’s “Hail Mary” play in the
console battle with Nintendo and Microsoft. It will test whether gamers really want a layer of social networking served on top of the games they play on the PlayStation 3 game console. By contrast, Microsoft and Nintendo believe that gamers might talk to each other via cute little characters. But Sony has built a full-blown virtual online space. The graphics of the characters look good. But they don’t really move their lips or express themselves physically; that’s something that will change over time.
Susan Panico, senior director of the PlayStation Network at Sony’s
U.S. game division in Foster City, Calif., said that Sony isn’t the first to market, but it has a big opportunity with Home because consumers already trust the Sony name. While Home could have been many things, Sony decided to focus the content around playing games and the culture around them, said Jack Buser, director of Home for the U.S. game division.
“It’s really a 3-D social network for gamers,” he said.
While it’s not exactly a world like “World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold )” or Linden Labs’ “Second Life,” Home is the most ambitious push by any console maker into creating a virtual world for gamers. It will live or die on whether it’s simple, fun, and deep enough for gamers who have plenty of other things they want to do — like play games. And the price is right: free for those who have a PS 3.
The PlayStation Network — which has 13 million PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable registered users — is tightly integrated with Home. The PSN is the network that gamers use to play each other in online matches. They can also use it to download games or videos to the hard drives of their consoles. It has the records of a player’s achievements (trophies) in games, such as the number of victories in an online game.
The architecture of Home is different from Second Life and World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ). Both dedicate a considerable amount of computer and storage firepower to maintaining a continuous world with geographic parameters. That is, if you buy a house on the corner, it will always be on that corner, next to something else.
But Home isn’t really a world. It’s more like a series of virtual spaces. If you want to visit your own personal apartment, where no one can visit without your permission, then you teleport there. If you want to go to the central plaza, you teleport there. Same goes for the bowling alley or the bar from the game Uncharted. You’re free to decorate your home as you wish. If you want to listen to music, you can walk up to a jukebox.
If you arrive at a bar and it’s too crowded with people, no problem. Sony will generate a new “instance” of the room. This borrows a trick from other worlds that have popular places. Sony creates a new version of the bar and lets in all of the overflow people. It does that until there are enough bars to accommodate everyone. The only problem is that friends who are stuck in one version of the bar may not be able to talk to your avatar in another version of the bar.
You communicate with other avatars by moving next to them and typing words. It’s not so easy doing that with a game controller. But you can plug a universal serial bus keyboard into a PS 3, and you can also use any Bluetooth head set to talk as well. At some point, you will be able to walk up to a group of friends and spawn a multiplayer game.
The bowling alley has a number of social games: bowling of course, arcade machines, and pool. The pool game even has accurate physics. The arcade machines are basically emulators of your old favorites. When you click on a machine to play a game, the game itself fills your whole screen.
In the movie theater, you can go into a room and see what’s playing. You can actually watch that movie with your avatar in a social setting, making comments about it that others in the theater can see. That turns movie-watching into an online social experience. The closed beta is restricted to those 18 years and older now, while the open beta will allow anyone 13 and older. There is a profanity filter, and Home will be compliant with the PS 3’s own parental controls.
The version the Sony folks showed me was still incomplete. Sony hasn’t mentioned a release date yet, but Panico says an open beta will start soon. There aren’t many people around in it now. I imagine it will be fun once there are millions of people, all creatively expressing themselves through wacky avatars. But I expect it will be rather lonely and boring at the outset. It will also grow more interesting when partners like Electronic Arts start building out features such as an EA Sports fan space. Publishers, brand owners and media companies are all creating their own spaces inside Home, Buser said.
He said that Home will constantly change, with some things disappearing if they become less popular, and new spaces appearing as they are built. He said Sony will listen carefully to community feedback as it expands the service.
“Home is a living, breathing space,” he said.
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World of Warcraft: Achievements (PC)

Want to be an overachiever? We dig inside the new World of Warcraft Achievements system released along Wrath of the Lich King.

It could be argued that the biggest impact the Xbox 360 has had on videogames to date hasn’t been any single game or technical advancement, but the Xbox Live achievements system built into every game released on the platform. The idea of special or hidden objectives for a game is hardly new, but tying them into a global account score has created an overwhelmingly popular addiction for many Xbox 360 gamers.While a few games have fiddled with smaller-scale achievement systems of their own (such as Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4), they often feel small in comparison and not as compelling. That’s definitely not the case with the new achievements system recently introduced in World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) alongside the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. In many ways, it improves on the concept we’ve come to expect on the 360, adding a wealth of stats and other features that are great to fiddle through even if you never pick up a single achievement.The main achievements screen is bound by default to the “Y” key, and brings up a list of categories, and overall score and recent achievements. Here’s the main screen for the death knight I started last week — as you can see, there are categories for everything from quests and dungeons to professions and PvP:

Probably the easiest achievements to get will be in the Exploration category, especially if you have level 70 characters. All that’s required is exploring an entire zone, and you’ll get the achievement for it. What’s cool is that if you don’t have the achievement for a zone, you can expand the listing to see a list of areas that you have or have not unlocked:

While most of the achievements are worth 10 points, there are some bigger achievements you can get for completing an entire category. For instance, in the Exploration category, I received 25-point achievements for fully exploring all of both the
Eastern Kingdoms and Outland:

Another cool aspect of the achievements system can be found in the Quests category. As with Exploration, achievements are mostly broken down by zone, rewarding you for completing a set number of quests (usually every quest in the zone, minus one or two). Here, if you click on a zone, you can see exactly how many quests you’ve completed so far, which is pretty useful info as you’re questing through a new area:

Quest achievements are broken down by “Classic” “The Burning Crusade” and “Wrath of the Lich King.” The “Classic” quests aren’t listed by zone, but simply require a set number of quests completed in either the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor. “The Burning Crusade” category offers achievements for each zone, and then “Wrath of the Lich King” offers achievements not just for each zone, but for completing special quest chains or dailies. In other words, there’s far more to be gained focusing on newer content than going back to Kalimdor for 10 points.
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