Gaming: May 2007 Archives

In case you've missed it, the premise for Stuntman: Ignition is that you are a Hollywood stuntman performing vehicle stunts for various movies, commercials, etc.  There are several "movies" in the game and so far, THQ has released 3 movies to the press prior to our launch late summer 2007.  The latest movie we're showing off is Strike Force Omega.  It's set in an outlander/desert type environment with quite an obvious similarity to an 80's cult classic.  Each movie has its own musical score, and I think this one is probably the best.  Here is a gameplay video with commentary.

By the way, THQ is an acronym for Toy Headquarters.

The first trailer has been on on the XBox 360 Marketplace for a while now, but the Heavy Weapon trailer was just released.  This really looks to be a fun game.  Heavy Weapon's facial animations are great, his mouth is keyframed to his words just right.  I wonder if this is also done during gameplay.

• Trailer 1
• Trailer 2 - Heavy Weapon

I've played the demo and it looks pretty good.  I'm very impressed with the amount of functionality they've been able to cram into the controller.  I wonder if the game would support even more control with the IM keyboard mentioned eariler.  It's surprizingly only $49.99 at Fry's for a limited time, one more day actually.  Now that beta is finally here for us at Paradigm, maybe I can get stuff done around the house and enjoy some downtime with Supreme Commander or Company of Heroes on the PC.

You here so much about it, multiple Apple commercials have targeted its problems, but Vista's negatives are finally starting to outweigh its positives for me.  First it was our soundcard, Creative Audigy 2 ZS, that doesn't output though its center channel properly.  Then, the network driver, Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx doesn't keep its settings after reboot which causes performance issues with our Xbox 360 extender.  But this last issue is probably going to cause me to remove Vista for good.  Forget about Ubuntu or OSX, now that I know what the problem is with our extender, I'll put XP back on it. 

Last night, Karen told me that she had to start recording House manually 3 times on Media Center within Vista Ultimate.  I looked around in the log files and found that the TV stream evidently had a flag that Vista's Media Center uses to block recordings.  Here is the error in the Media Center log:

Recording of House began as scheduled on 05/08/2007 19:58:02 and was stopped because the recording was of Copy Never content.

Tivo has been struggling with this for sometime while we've been immune on our ReplayTV and MCE 2005.  I found this article describing the exact solution, but I can't allow the broadcasters to have so much power on our DVR.  How in the world can they get away with this???

Should I bite the bullet and reinstall XP when there is nothing stopping Microsoft from shoving an update on top of MCE 2005 to do the same thing?  Should I contact our local stations everytime this happens???

I just emailed our local Fox station, if they can't fix the problem then it's goodbye Vista, sad to see you go.  Really...

THQ has just announced that Big Huge Games is going to create a RPG game for the XBox 360, PS3, and PC in 2009.  It appears that BHG is still a Microsoft Game Studio, but just creating an RPG for THQ.  I guess Microsoft didn't want to pony up for the development costs for their first foray into the RPG market.  Ken Rolston of Elder Scrolls fame will take on the lead designer role for BHG.

THQ has just announced that Big Huge Games is going to create a RPG game for the XBox 360, PS3, and PC in 2009.  It appears that BHG is still a Microsoft Game Studio, but just creating an RPG for THQ.  I guess Microsoft didn't want to pony up for the development costs for their first foray into the RPG market.  Ken Rolston of Elder Scrolls fame will take on the lead designer role for BHG.

One of the best PC games ever may be getting a 360 port...I still have my original Speedball 2 box.

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=75931