Portal 2 System Specifications February 14, 2011
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Valve has announced on their preorders page that the system specs for the PC and Mac Version of the highly anticipated game Portal 2 have been posted, and here’s what they are.
You can preorder the game through the usual channels such as Amazon to get $5 off, Gamestop where you can get exclusive skins, or if you prefer to not deal with a physical copy of the game at all, you can preorder the game through Steam and have it immediately accessible upon release and 10% off.
WINDOWS SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
- OS: Windows 7 / Vista / XP / 2000
- Processor: 3.0 GHz P4, Dual Core 2.0 (or higher) or AMD64X2 (or higher)
- Memory: 1GB XP / 2GB Vista
- Hard Disk Space: At least 7.6 GB of Space
- Video: Video card must be 128 MB or more and should be a DirectX 9-compatible with support for Pixel Shader 2.0b (ATI Radeon X800 or higher / NVIDIA GeForce 7600 or higher / Intel HD Graphics 2000 or higher).
- Audio: DirectX 9.0c compatible
MAC SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
- OS: MAC OS X 10.6.6 or higher
- Processor: Intel Core Duo Processor (2GHz or better)
- Memory: 2GB
- Hard Disk Space: At least 7.6 GB of Space
- Video: ATI Radeon 2400 or higher / NVIDIA 8600M or higher
Portal 2 is coming April 21st, 2011 for the PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PS3.
Part 2 of Duke4.net’s Duke Nukem Preview (With Video) February 13, 2011
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Yatta of duke4.net has posted up the second part of his preview of Duke Nukem Forever, brought from his experiences at the previously mentioned “Duke Nukem’s Titty City” event in Las Vegas, NV. You can check it out here.
Here’s his video from the event.
Yatta promises a third part of the preview is coming, which will feature a community Q&A.
E3 Preparations February 12, 2011
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We at gameXcess.net are putting a lot into our first E3. I thought I’d share this picture with you guys of just what the Unknown Cameraman is planning to bring just to get our videos shot.
This will likely be the closest thing to a picture you’ll ever see of them online on this site.
So, we’re ready E3, is E3 ready for us?
Duke Nukem Forever Balls of Steel Edition Announced February 11, 2011
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The Duke Nukem Forever: Balls of Steel Edition has been announced today. This Collector’s Edition of the highly anticipated Duke Nukem Forever game will include:
| – Collectible bust of the greatest alien ass-kicker of all-time – Numbered, limited-edition certificate of authenticity – 100-page hardcover book: The History, Legacy & Legend: Duke Nukem Forever Art from the Vault – Duke Nukem Forever postcard series – Duke Nukem Forever radioactive emblem sticker – Duke Nukem Forever collectible comic book – Duke Nukem Forever foldable paper craft – Duke Nukem Forever poker chips – Duke Nukem Forever mini-card deck – Duke Nukem Forever radioactive emblem dice |
The Balls of Steel Edition has been promised for all versions of the game.
Duke Nukem Forever will release May 3rd, 2011 for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. According to the actual developers in a recent interview, this is the same day Hell is expected to freeze over and pigs will fly.
My Ode to Palm February 11, 2011
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HP has announced their first set of devices that will use the software engineered by Palm before HP bought them out. With HP giving no credit to the company they have apparently completely absorbed, this looks like the end of Palm as we know it. Now say what you will about the Palm Pre or the Palm Pixi (it’s already been said before, and there’s nothing at all I can contribute further about either device) but I have plenty about the company that I wish to say.
All this recent talk about hint books, guides and E3 got me to thinking about just how our society has evolved in just the last ten years, and just how powerful the computers in our pockets which call themselves phones have become. I’d like to think that Palm is partially to thank for that, especially since a lot of what my iPhone can do is what my old Palm Pilot could do almost ten years before the iPhone hit a single shelf.
In 2000 I got a PALM VII as my first ever PDA. In the years before I had a cell phone, this thing was a serious precursor to the latest smart phones such as the Droid or iPhone. It had tons of useful programs you could write notes with, or if you preferred you could use an optional keyboard attachment to type files up. But its main draw was the wireless palm.net service you could pay fifteen dollars a month to access, and you could get e-mail or make use of free internet connected applications (apps!).
Now you’re probably going to tell me if you want to look up a phone number nowadays you just simply can download the White Pages app to your iPhone, run the program, and look up the address and phone number of whoever you’d like, what the Palm VII could do was certainly no different and nothing special. Well, let me stress I was using this hardware across the country in 2001, this was easily 6 years before the release of the iPhone and 7 years before smart phones started to be used by the masses.
I took the VII everywhere, in 2001 the Delta Application had all my airport information ready for me when I flew out to Florida. I took it to California, Nevada, and Massachusetts. It worked everywhere and never had bad reception. I could check my e-mail for the first time without needing to fire up my Personal Computer. I could get the address of any business I needed on the go as well as their phone numbers, and I could even find out what meal I was getting on my flight before I even got to the terminal.
One of my favorite Palm programs at the time was an app that allowed me to download the headlines from gamasutra.com and read them on the go every time I synced my Palm to my computer. However, when GDC was about to happen for that year, they included something special along with their headlines. By tapping a new GDC specific option in the program, I could access a whole new area. The new area provided the whole GDC schedule, and it was now on my Palm! If I chose to attend, I would know exactly where everything was all at the tap of a stylus. The entire schedule, a map of the show and a bunch of interesting interactive tidbits was at my fingertips. This was my first exposure to what technology would eventually be capable of.
The downside was that it couldn’t make phone calls and it couldn’t play games, music or videos. The processing power and the fact that it was a monochrome screen didn’t make me feel all that bad about it. I was trading off that for the ability to have mobile internet functionality for the first time in my life. Also, cell phones had not yet taken off in the States yet. My mom’s was still very big and bulky with a large antenna, and the LCD display could only display what a simple pocket calculator could, numbers and that was all.
Palm would eventually start ushering in a new series of smart phones (the Treo) which offered Palm’s software along with phone capability. They were manufactured by a company that would later be bought by Palm, but they would use Palm’s Operating System. However they would eventually be competing with more than just the Blackberry. By 2007, phones had become an enormous business. Everyone had one, and even though the US was slower to adopt more advanced phones than the rest of the world (the cell phone companies held us back pretty good) a new company was ready to give the consumer the future, and it was Apple, who would eventually release a heavily functional cell phone with a consumer price in mind.
Being the first affordable major consumer device to market REALLY helped out Apple a lot. Unlike PDAs or MP3 players, people are only going to want to have one cell phone. The Pre released some time after the massive popularity of the iPhone 3G release, where many iPhone owners were unable to change their phones and cell plans without bringing about massive fines. Their customers were people who were willing to wait for Palm. By the time the Pre came out, they did in many ways have a superior phone to the iPhone (built in keyboard and OS level multitasking), but they also really shot themselves in the foot by making themselves exclusive with just one provider. They also got a TON of bad press among many groups for the way they went around iTunes syncing, by falsely getting iTunes to identify it as an Apple product. They solved most of these problems with the Pixi by the time of its release but it was too late, and the company was too far in debt.
With the purchase of Palm has come its end. Its software will continue to live on through HP, who will be using it to power their new handheld devices. Rest in peace, Palm, knowing you were the catalysts to ushering in the future.
Duke Nukem Forever Preview From Vegas Event February 9, 2011
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The press embargo on the Duke Nukem Forever Vegas Event (dubbed “Titty City”) has just lifted and previews can finally be posted up of the game.
Yatta of Duke4.net was one of the first people to be invited to the Duke Nukem Forever preview. I can think of no better preview to link you guys than his entire writeup of the event, as well as his preview of Duke Nukem Forever’s first six levels.
Be warned. There will be game spoilers. The preview was for the first six levels of the game. However, only the second half of the preview contains spoilers and it is properly spoiler tagged. If you are just interested in what the event was like, it’s still a great read.
There were a few great tidbits he had mentioned however. The game was running at 720p on the Xbox 360 demo units they provided. According to the developers, the final version of the game is looking to be fifteen hours long. It took 90 minutes for him to complete the demo. The game is mostly done, as it’s just in bug fixing mode right now, as Gearbox tries to fix the current 4000 bugs left in the game.
Video of the event can’t be posted until Friday, the first video will likely be televised on Spike TV’s GTTV.com show which is listed to air at 1:10am Friday and will focus on Duke Nukem Forever, and promises new, never before seen footage. Here’s a teaser of the episode.
Duke Nukem Forever will release on May 3rd, 2011 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3.
Maniac Gets a Friend to try Bawls February 9, 2011
Posted by Maniac in Site Videos.1 comment so far
In what might become a regular series on gameXcess.net, Maniac gets one of his long time buddies, the El Train, to try Bawls. El Train has never drank the soda before, but enjoyed it very much.
We also talk a bit about the interesting design of the bottle, and just how superior it is to use glass over plastic to contain something carbonated. We also talk about how difficult it is to recycle the bottles, and how if it was just simply kept stocked in store refrigerators, it would probably sell pretty well based on looks alone.
Perhaps at some point I might try to get more people to try the soda out, but unfortunately I’m now out and the stuff is pretty hard to come by. If you want me to make more Bawls related videos, consider hitting up my Amazon Wish List and ordering me some.
The Darkness II Announced February 8, 2011
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If there was one game that defined my Summer 2007 it was The Darkness. Here was a highly polished game which came out of nowhere released during a time which usually was devoid of major game releases (games usually either came out in March or November, and they only come out in March because they miss November) and just blew myself and everyone else away. Here was a little known comic franchise brought to life in a realistic setting. The game was highly polished and had a great script I enjoyed tremendously. It was developed by Starbreeze, who made the famous Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay game. In the same summer I first bought a PS3, I must’ve played this game as late as I possibly could every weekend to try to get as far as I could in it before I’d have to go back to work.
2K Games has officially announced today that The Darkness II is coming out this Fall. It’s being developed by Digital Extremes and promises to pick up exactly where the first game left off. The main character of the first game and the comic, Jackie, is now the boss of his mafia family, and he has to deal with running his mob, as well as the curse it is to wield The Darkness, a supernatural force he recieved on his 21st birthday which gives him incredible power.
The Darkness II will come out for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 Fall 2011.
UPDATE: There was an announcement today that The Darkness II will use cel-shaded graphics in order to mirror the look of the original graphic novels. I don’t know how I feel about this. The first game was able to have an emotional impact on me due to its realism. The fact that they were keeping this supernatural force grounded in a realistic setting with a recognisable look made it all the more interesting for me. However, I really did like the graphics shown in the initial screenshot, and couldn’t actually tell at the time it was in fact cel-shaded.
Reflections on Hellgate London February 8, 2011
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Gamasutra has a facinating inteview up with former Flagship and Blizzard developer Bill Roper on Flagship Studio’s only release, Hellgate: London.
Hellgate: London had a ton of promise. The company was formed of former Blizzard developers who worked on Diablo, a staple of PC gaming. It was one of the first PC-Exclusive titles to embrace the early Games for Windows Inititive and offer DirectX 10.0 support in an industry where consumers were just refusing to upgrade from Windows XP. It had a full Single Player campaign, and a full MMORPG component that would have support for both paid and free subscribers. Within months of release, the single game release had spawned at least three books and a manga, and a main character was given a nude spread in magazines. The game’s collectors edition DVD had one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen detailing the start of a Triple-A company working together in a guy’s house!
But the game was simply not sustainable. By many accounts the game was rushed to release and came out at a timeframe that was flooded by a lot of ambitious new projects and major sequel releases. The game could not bring in the players it needed to be sustainable and it shut down.
Bill Roper talks about all this in the first part of an interview with Gamasutra. It’s a facinating read, espessially for those interested in the financing and investments that make games possible, and what it takes to make a big game a success.
What Has Happened With PC Game Installers? February 7, 2011
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I read a comment on a forum where a guy was lamenting over the loss of the highly detailed game installers that were popular during the early CD-ROM era of PC gaming. It made me realize just how great these classic game installers were and how long it’s been since I’ve seen a modern game have one.
Back in the DOS days companies had to build their own installers. As games got more complex the installers had to do more than a simple copy/paste and be able to detect things like sound cards and joysticks. They would need to be calibrated and tested, and if done wrong you might not be able to hear sound, or worse, not be able to play at all. Installing a game was a long and boring process to someone who wants to just play a game.
To make all this feel like less than a chore and a bit more fun, (these are GAMES we’re talking about here of course) the developers would make these installers unique, and a lot of the time they would fill in the player to the background of the game, feature audio or music clips during the install, or just show pretty game art. They really knew how to draw a player in during the early days of multimedia PCs (between 1995-98).
I don’t really know who to blame here for their fall. It all pretty much ended when the Internet took the place of the CD-ROM encyclopedia. By Win XP the Windows Installer was pretty much used in everything. It is included as part of all copies of Windows and is one of the programs that Windows will automatically update. My guess is MS must make it’s tools available to developers and I figure developers nowadays don’t see the need to fix what isn’t broken. Even back in the day, To save time, developers would frequently reuse their installers and just re-appropriate them game to game. Game development is a lot more expensive now than it used to be, and time spent on anything costs more money. Of course, in some cases people are no longer installing games, but instead purchasing them online through services like Steam, which skip the installation process altogether.
There is something positive at the end of the tunnel. The Playstation 3 has the ability to install games that are designed for it, and many Playstation 3 games have some classic installers that harken back to these earlier days where the installer pumped up the player for what was to come (Metal Gear Solid 4 anyone?)
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