X Rebirth Review – I’m Done With Pre-orders

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When X Rebirth was announced a couple of years ago, I was very excited. I love the X games. They were sometimes a buggy, overly complicated mess but by the time you get to X3: Terran Conflict or Albion Prelude, what you get is quite a polished, complex and involving space simulator where you can build up an entire empire of stations and fleets of ships to defend or expand with. Its even better with some of the awesome mods that the community has created for it. So I was understandably very happy about a new X game rebuilt from the ground up. I pre-ordered it without much thought at the expensive price of £40. Oh my, what a mistake that was.

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Paul McGann reprises role as Eighth Doctor for 50th Who Celebrations

So Doctor Who fans got a very nice surprise treat this morning when almost without warning this little gem became available on the BBC iPlayer, representing the buildup to the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who. None other than Eighth Doctor Paul McGann reprises his role in this 7 minute prequel showing the fate of the Eighth Doctor.

It certainly confirms what many of us suspected about where John Hurts Doctor fits into the big picture. With this little surprise I wonder what else may be in store for us in the run up to the 50th anniversary episode!

A Look at GeForce ShadowPlay

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How often have you had a moment of pure awesome during a game that you wish you could’ve recorded for posterity? It’s not practical to simply constantly record what you’re doing like Fraps because of the big performance drop which can have an adverse effect on gameplay and the massive amount of data that Fraps has to write. You’d soon be out of disk space if you just kept recording everything you did! Enter ShadowPlay. Though it can record manually like Fraps, the key feature of ShadowPlay is hinted at in the title. Released as part of the GeForce Experience software, it’s currently in beta and has some work ahead of it, but so far I’m very impressed with its capabilities.

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Bear with

So we are running a wee bit behind schedule, to say the least – and this is not the final theme (it’s a bit of a butchery of the surprisingly nice WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme actually.)

So bear with while we get the old articles up and running. I’ll be posting sporadic updates as we get more things online – and eventually we will have the full and proper lovely theme but that might not be for some time yet! :)

And yes all the images are broken. And some colours are wrong :D Exciting isn’t it!

EA vs BI – How To Treat Your Customers

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By now all of you should be aware of the still-unfolding disaster that is EA’s SimCity. And if not, what rock have you been hiding under? Its yet another example of EA screwing their customers, attempting to completely control every aspect of what you do, primarily so they can make as much money from you as possible. It could be this time EA have finally gone too far, but we’ll have to wait and see how this saga will unfold over the next few days. In any case, I feel like this is an excellent opportunity to compare how games should be developed and how you actually should engage with your customer base if you want ensured success and longevity for your product. For this I shall be looking at Bohemia Interactive (BI) and their upcoming title Arma 3.

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Homeworld IP To Be Auctioned

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Ahhh Homeworld, possibly my favourite game of all time next to Half-Life. It was a very unique RTS when it came out and for some reason remains a very unique RTS even today because to my knowledge, no-one has done anything quite like it since. Homeworld first appeared in September 1999 and spawned two more games, Cataclysm and the sequel Homeworld 2. All three were lauded for their design, storytelling, music and overall production. Homeworld 2 was released in 2003 and since then… nothing. Homeworld has essentially been sat on by the various companies that have owned its IP over the past 10 years. Homeworld 3 is something many space/RTS lovers want but has been nothing but a pipe dream and the franchise looked to be long dead and buried. But now there is hope where once there was none as the now bankrupt THQ starts selling off its various IPs including Homeworld…

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