Valve’s Take on Piracy
by Stephen Spring on January 19th, 2009 at 11:22 am EDT - 527 views
Valve, creators of such games as Half Life, Counter Strike, and more recently Left 4 Dead, have come forward today at a Game Business Law summit at Southern Methodist University. At the summit Valve stated that the piracy problems were largely the fault of the marketers and not the consumers.
We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia. The reason people pirated things in Russia is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television. They say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond ‘you can play that game in six months…maybe.’
Holtman then stated that whenever their Valve products were readily available in Russia, piracy of said game dropped dramatically. Holtman took aim at the marketers again saying that the majority of pirates were simply “Underserved” customers. (That’s UNDER-SERVED)
This comes as a suprise to many as Valve, the creator of Steam, currently is one of two dominating powers in the video game sales industry and for a company whos livelyhood is creating and selling games to take a defensive stand point strikes us as a little odd.
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0 CommentsCan you RUN it?
by Taylor Flatt on December 24th, 2008 at 4:41 pm EDT - 569 views
Can I run it? All gamers and computer users have always asked this question when posed with a new game. For awhile now, a business called Husdawg has a browser based program that sniffs your computer (not a trojan or anything) and checks your computer out and sees if your computer is good enough to play any number of games. This is a great tool to use if you have a question about a friend or family and not sure if they can run that game. You can simply choose a game from the list (which has hundreds of games) and it will run a system check and tell you what is minimum and recommended and where your system stands.
Here is an example of what it looks like after it is done analyizing. Although it will very, there is more information above and below this picture. However, this is on my laptop and this is showing the recommended system requirements when comparing with The Sims 2 a fairly common game.
If you wish to use this tool, you may visit SRTest. I highly recommend this program. It gives detailed information and gives you accurate information as to if you can play a game sucessfully or not. If you are having any problems or suggestions, go ahead and comment them.
SINS of a Solar Empire
by Andrew Kao on December 23rd, 2008 at 2:11 am EDT - 194 views
There are many rts strategy games out, but very few comes to my mind related to space. Starcraft franchise not included. When I usually think of space I usually think of wonderful views of the stars, spaceships the size of moons, and old memories of Jabba the Hutt. Yes all exciting to me. Sins of a Solar Empire is all that minus Jabba the Hutt, and minus the exciting part. Sins of a Solar empire combines a mix of galactic conquest, Homeworld, and something from Zim the space invaders.
Don’t get me wrong, from a graphics point of view Sins of a Solar Empire is top notch, and one can easily spend watching a gas planet for hours. Though you’d have be something short of a psychotic to actually enjoy doing that for that long. The graphics are amazing, stunning. The maneuvering around the entire game map is almost as smooth as ice. The battles are also enjoyable to watch, and the warm fuzzy feeling of watching explosions off the face of planets is evident. The camera allowing you zoom in and out of galaxies and fleets is probably the smoothest thing the game.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
by Andrew Kao on December 23rd, 2008 at 2:06 am EDT - 208 views
Oblivion having been named game of the year for PC, must be some type of perfect game with no absolute flaws, right? Before I would begin I would have to say that whoever named Oblivion as a top PC game must have been absolutely correct, since all the other games that game out that same year, were either trash, handicapped, or brought memories of political fanaticism. Oblivion is by my terms relatively subpar. That’s right I said it. Oblivion is subpar.
The game starts out with you in jail, for some crime that is not named. Eventually the emperor during some escape and after a brief tutorial dungeon of some sorts, you are thrown out into a beautiful painting. Soon you embark on a storyline which at times doesn’t make any logical sense, like for example, the heir of the throne telling me to get some strange stone, that is of utter importance, while the rest of the guards just sit at home waiting for some enemy that never comes. This is probably due to my pickiness.