MAG - the next generation shooter

Sony revealed MAG, the next Playstation 3 game from Zipper Interactive, now in pre-order phase. Although the release date has not yet been announced, this game promises a lot of great action and above all, a really massive action game. The 256 players online the developers aimed to achieve create a realistic battle scene of a futuristic war.

"If you're talking sheer chaos, in terms of, if you drop 256 players into a village square like an arena, that's going to be unmitigated," says creative director Ed Byrne. "So what we wanted to do is build that intensity and use that flow to direct players from small encounters to larger, and to basically make sure that squads link up actually more like a realistic military operation."

Orchestrating battles on this scale involves a light touch, he explains. You need to direct the fight through careful level design, but also leave players freedom to spread out. "It's through level design and through the flow from beginning to end of the map as you go through the objectives that we mitigate the chaos. The other [method] is simply allowing players to have some freedom on where to go, so if a player is basically overwhelmed by the amount of combat that he's seeing, he can not only retreat backwards but he can go laterally and join the areas that are happening on either side of him."

For more information and a preview of the game you can visit the website at www.mag.com.

Sony and Microsoft talk about a Blu-Ray XBox

After Toshiba announced that they will drop the HD DVD format, a lot of changes took place in the industry. And all of them are in favor of Sony and the Blu-Ray format. One of the new changes that might happen soon influences the fans of Microsoft's Xbox console.

Microsoft used to sell an external HD DVD player as an add-on for theyr console, but since that is no longer a viable solution, they need to change to a different format. Hence the negotiations with Sony's representatives for the use of a Blu-Ray device. Since the demand for high definition is so ... well, high, Microsoft needs to provide a solution to this problem fast. The PlayStation 3 has a built in Blu-Ray player already, so it's possible that Sony's terms might not be to pleasant, seeing as the two companies are rivals in this industry.

As an alternative, Microsoft could focus instead on offering high-definition downloads through its Xbox Live online content service, which already has around 10 million members. But as they already said, and many of us agree, it's the games that make the consoles a success, not the movies. That would be just a small bonus. That the PlayStation already has.

I guess Microsoft and Sony have been a little busy the last month or so, seeing the amount of news that pops up about them. And now it turns out that they are on different sides of the barricade in at least one area. But we all know by now that competition brings out the best in companies (oh, and people too).

Civilization: Revolutions for consoles

Ahh, I can still remember the good old days when I first saw and played Civilization. That was the first game that managed to keep me up all night in the continuous attempt to conquer the world. The real strategy game in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I love StarCraft and WarCraft as much as any other guy, but the idea of crashing a nuclear powered and defended city and the possibility of causing the end of the world through a rain of nuclear missiles has something special to it. And let's not forget that you could defeat all sort of tanks with a large number of spearmen or swordsmen by shear number itself. Those were the good old days.


Civilization 4 has brought a lot of improvements in my opinion, but I can't help being a little bit disappointed that it didn't run well on my PC. And now I still can't enjoy the new release 2K Games bring to the gaming environment. The main reason for that is that it's for consoles and I'm not really into all that stuff. I'm a PC kind of guy all the way. Or at least until I can put some money aside to purchase a console.

The concept of the game stays the same: start from the beginning of human civilization as we know it and advance into the future, defeating all the enemies on the way. Take control of the world and become the strongest civilization the world has ever seen. But several things have been changed. Unlike the PC version, it is not the leaders that have various attributes. Rather the civilizations themselves have superpowers, one for each age and another overall one. And they all seem like game winners, which makes choosing a civilization a hard thing to do. Also each tile produces only one of the resources (food, commerce or production) so players will need to manage cities closely. Ruin structures have been introduced on the strategic map, and they are designed to grant bonuses to the civilization that discovers them, if they can overcome the barbarian defenders. The first civilization to discover each technology also gets a nice bonus. The victory conditions have also been modified a bit and there are now more incentives to go for research, diplomatic and economic victories, rather than stamp your enemies relying on sheer military power.

The game seems to stand by its heritage and will prove once again what a real strategy game should be like. Developed by Firaxis, the release date is announced to be June 3rd, 2008 and the platforms will be Xbox 360, Nintendo DS and PlayStation 3. I hope all you console guys out there enjoy it.

Official Homepage: CivilizationRevolution.com
Screenshots of Civilization:Revolutions at IGN