New Medal of Honor Trailer

Over this weekend Electronic Arts debuted its new Medal of Honor trailer during the Spike TV Video Game Awards. Being an old school Medal of Honor player myself, I was deeply intrigued seeing a fresh new look on it.

Their last 2 titles MOH: Pacific Assault and MOH: Airborne were complete failures in both sales and reviews. However, for this game EA is switching things up. Previously, all Medal of Honor titles have been based in the World War II timeframe; with this game, though, it will be based in modern day Afghanistan.

What we’ve learned or can speculate from the trailer:

• Small-unit based gameplay.
• Modern day Special Operator characters…not regular army
• Up-to-date weaponry
• One of the main settings is in the Middle East (MoH appears to be in Afghanistan)
• Four-wheel ATV’s are the snowmobiles of MoH
• Air vehicles are used (F15′s, Cobra helicopters and what appears to be an AC130)

Let’s hope this game revitalizes the MOH series. There are many gamers waiting and hoping for some game to usurp Call of Duties rank as #1 infantry based First Person Shooter. I, myself, am one of the gamers.

Check out the trailer here.

Teamspeak 3 Features

Hello! Here are the new features that Teamspeak 3 promises to deliver upon:

• Improved Voice Quality and Latency
• Raising the Bar
• Stunning 3D Sound Effects
• Powerful Permissions System
• Improved Security and Privacy
• Friends and Foes
• Firewall Friendly File Transfer
• Improved Licensing System
• Fully Customizable User Interface
• Custom Sound Packs
• Extensibility via Plugins
• Improved Scripting and Automation

And of course as always, the program is FREE! That is right; there is no cost for the program. Please note that you can buy servers to host Teamspeak for a small price.

Check out these YouTube podcasts to get more information about the new program.

http://www.youtube.com/user/teamspeakpodcasts

Teamspeak 3 announces beta!

YAY! All I can say is FINALLY! What is with all of the hubbub about, you say? Well, let’s see…. Teamspeak 3 beta was announced, silly!

Back in the day when I was a young(er) squirt, I used to play a game called Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. While playing this game my teammates would use a voice chatting program to organize our play style and use this program to chit-chat out of the game as well. This program was Teamspeak 2.

I loved this program. I still do. Nostalgia!

An open beta of the program will be available DEC 19^th. I can’t wait to try it out.

More information about it’s features will be coming

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 / BF 1943 PC Specs Released

We’ve been waiting to here PC news on this game for some time. I think this is the start of the leaking of information. I believe they will slowly start revealing more game footage and specific info over the next several months. The tidbit of info we got yesterday was the PC min / recommended specs. From the official BF blog, here are the specs:

Minimum Frostbite PC Specifications for BFBC2 & BF1943
Processor: Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz
Main memory: 2GB
Graphics card: GeForce 7800 GT  / ATI X1900
Graphics memory: 256MB
OS: Windows XP
Free HDD space: 15GB for Digital Version, 10GB for Disc Version (BFBC2)
10GB for Digital Version, 4GB for Disc Version (BF1943)
Recommended Frostbite PC Specifications for BFBC2 & BF1943
Processor: Quadcore
Main memory: 2GB
Graphics card: GeForce GTX 260
Graphics memory: 512MB
OS: Windows Vista or Windows 7
Free HDD space:15GB for Digital Version, 10GB for Disc Version (BFBC2)
10GB for Digital Version, 4GB for Disc Version (BF1943)

Well with the disaster of MW2 on the PC, there is a strong following anticipating the next big gaming title. The game everyone seems to be waiting for these days is Battlefield: BC2. This game would have been a big hit regardless of Modern Warfare2 being a flop, however because MW2 was full of failures, a lot of the Call of Duty community members are keeping a close eye on DICE’s new BF game. And from what we’ve seen so far, we are eager to start playing as soon as possible.

Playstation 3 > anything else?

According to Gizmodo, The Department of Defense bought 2,200 Playstation 3 gaming consoles. Console gaming platforms pack a lot of fast technology in a relatively small price. So much so in fact the DoD will likely be connecting these “computers” together to form a super-computer. I wonder what exactly they will be using with them but i suppose we will never know.

Google’s Chrome OS Preview

So I took a look at Google’s new OS. Well, I didn’t actually USE it; however I did see this neat little preview video. This is a revolutionary new software program that COULD change how the internet is used.

For most people in the world if they want to write a letter, essay or jot down some notes they will open their favorite word processor and just start typing away. Your computer powers the program, it saves it on your desktop and unless you purposely email it, save it to a flash drive or other portable storage device you will only be able to access it on that computer. Google wants to improve on that issue….

With their Operating System, almost anything you do will be stored on their machines, even the majority of the processing will be all on their computers. So instead of downloading a file, editing it, then re-uploading it… It will ALWAYS be on their backend, in your cloud.

I do not think this is intended to compete directly with Microsoft and Apple; however I do think its creating a market of its own that slowly steals people away from their current setups.

Why it could succeed:

1. It will be cheaper (cheaper OS, less hardware to buy for computer, no software to buy)
2. It can run on almost anything you will need (desktop, laptop, or Netbook)
3. Cloud Computing is awesome (having files available all the time on any computer is awesome)

As long as Google doesn’t try to market this to typical internet and home computer users, it should succeed very well! There are several limiting factors preventing them from getting “Joe ‘Internet’ User”.

Why it could fail:

1. The internet isn’t fast or reliable enough (yet)
2. It is too new and too much of a change for the average user. Overtime this technology will filter down to Microsoft and Apple products and THEN we will embrace it as a common technology.
3. Not everything is in Cloud computing. You can’t use Photoshop. That is just an example but as of today you can’t do everything from a web-based App. Until then, there will always be home machines powering these programs.

The world is planned to end in 2012!!

WOW, I never wanted to believe it but the facts were there. The Mayans predicted it. Crazy people agreed with them. I just scoffed at the idea, until I came across a piece of literature that changed my life. Read This. The next Windows OS release will cause the world to end! No, I’m just kidding. The world won’t end in 2012, which is just ridiculous. However, there is still an important question that remains…. “Will it be a Vista-fail? Or, a Win7-win?”

5 neat little things in Windows 7 (coming from XP)

Recently my Windows XP got corrupted, severely blocking all network traffic. After spending several hours trying to fix it with no promising results I decided to finally install my Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s a big change going from XP to Win7. At first I was frustrated with all my shortcut techniques, buttons and useful features being gone. I later learned a day or 2 later that they just moved or have been improved on.
Here is a list of the 1st 5 changes that I noticed:

1. Horizontal taskbar programs are now neat little squares saving space. Also if you have multiple windows open up for that program you can get a preview of each.



2. The icon notification area, by default hides most programs. You have to hover over the triangle to see what is there. For programs you need to access frequently via its icon, you can display it 24/7 so you don’t need to hover and find it every time.



3. The ‘show desktop’ button that used to be in the lower left was one of my most used features because sometimes I just need to get to my desktop quickly and get back quickly. It was very annoying for that 1st day of Win7 when I had to minimize each program to reach the desktop. I discovered it is neatly “hidden” in the bottom right. You can even hover over it to get a preview of the desktop.



4. Your installed programs are now in a vertical list instead of the screen enveloping list that we are used to seeing.



5. Window snapping! This neat little feature allows you to maximize a window by dragging it to the top and you can quickly compare 2 documents side by side just by bringing them to the sides.

Well, that is my quick list of things to know about windows7 if you are migrating from XP.

COD: Modern Warfare News….. no dedicated servers?

So apparently, this Saturday October 17th 2009, IW’s Community Manager FourZeroTwo released a bit of crucial PC-related, Modern Warfare 2 news. He was able to mention that there will be NO DEDICATED SERVERS for the new Call of Duty.

A dedicated server is a consistent play environment that people set up for video games to allow friends and like-minded people to play together.

What? “How can this be”? You say?
Well I’ll tell you…. Oh wait, no I won’t. BECAUSE THIS DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL!

Evidently, IW has been quietly working on a new social gaming system called IWNET. This, “IWNET”, is supposed to help the average gamer get on a server and playing with much more accessibility then to the previous game-finding method; the method that has been around for over 15 year; the method where the entire gaming community understands. The simple game browser is apparently too complicated for some folk. I guess some of us, likely to include IW’s FourZeroTwo, have a tough time performing the complex task of joining a dedicated server.

Steps in joining a typical online First Person Shooter (FPS):

1. clicking ‘browse games’
2. picking the game that suits your liking
3. clicking `join`

This action by IW fundamentally changes the way we play video games on the PC.

Without dedicated servers we will no longer have the ability to:

• Form a community
• Retain any community we currently have
• Have a clan
• Have a consistent play area
• Form any competitive environment
• Make custom maps
• create custom MODS

aka….. Everything we’ve been able to do for the last 15 years.

Just because you make something easier to pick up and play… doesn’t make it any more fun. In fact it usually means taking away complexity and then therefore removing the thrill of doing something. Why spend some much time doing something if it is watered down and isn’t exciting?

Without dedicated servers and modding capability, the PC community isn’t the PC community. It isn’t even a community.

What is your Windows 7 personality?

Microsoft released a neat little marketing tool to help find your Windows 7 Personality. I’m not sure what good will come from this quiz considering you don’t learn much.

Apparently I am an Independent user because I like to fix my own computer problems. The quiz determined that from 1 question. I’m just curious to the other questions they asked about computer use habits and what I own. There wasn’t any explanation of the questions or your final results. Since the final question was asking my age, I think the main 2 points for creating this quiz was to market Windows 7 and to find out some information of possible Windows 7 OS users. Other than that it’s just a 5 minute time waster. So if you have 5 minutes to waste somewhere, you can complete the survey yourself.

Check it out here.