Posts tagged gaming
Sony Offers Two Free PS3 Games to Every PSN User
4Not wanting to receive any more bad press, and seeing as PSN is still down after two weeks, Sony are offering two free games to every PSN user as well as the previously alluded to free months subscription to Playstation+.
The announcement came from Sony Europe spokesperson Nick Caplin who promised that all Playstation 3 users will receive two free games out of a choice of five, and PSP users will receive two free games from a choice of four. No word on what these games are at this time, but it’s a sure bet that they’ll be:
a) Titles published by Sony themeselves
b) Less than stellar titles that have been out for a while now
Still, it’s nothing to be sniffed at, it’s certainly more than any Xbox360 user has ever received as a result of a system outage.
Mr. Caplin spoke to assure users that Sony was “working around the clock” to resolve the issues with PSN, including implementing new security policies which should prevent a repeat of the attack that shared 77 million PSN users personal information with the attackers.
Caplin also eluded to the prospect of identify theft protection for affected users, but noted that due to the complexity of financial laws in different countries it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find an overall solution in Europe:
“As I have explained previously, creating a similar offering for the many countries within the SCEE region is a very complicated process. Each country has a different way of handling identity theft; some offer relatively sophisticated services whilst others are much more modest.
“We are currently in the process of identifying how we manage this situation and once the programme is ready to launch, we will provide details of exactly which services are available in each country and explain how to sign up. We hope to do this early next week.”
Whatever the end result, it’s a fair bet that most PSN users will be cancelling their credit cards and changing all of their passwords at the earliest opportunity.
UPDATE:- Sony have now named the five title that PS3 users can choose from, the list is available here
Record PC Gaming Footage With Fraps
0We’ve all been there; trying to explain to a friend how to unlock that achievement on Portal or how to find that hidden cave in Fallout: New Vegas. Thing is, it can be incredibly hard to explain to someone exactly where to go on a map, or what buttons to press to open that hidden door.
The problem is, ordinary screen shots or screen capture software won’t work with most games. At best you’ll just get a white or black image or video. This is because games use the DirectX suite to produce graphics, and ordinary screen capture tools can’t make head nor tail of it. This is where Fraps comes in.
Fraps is able to “see” the DirectX environment properly and thus can create still images, and even video files, of your gaming experiences. It can also record audio, either from the game itself or from a microphone, or both.
To use Fraps follow this link to download the free version. This will allow you to record up to 30 second of video, which will be watermarked with the Fraps logo, and capture still images of your games. If all you’re looking to do is give your friends a quick guide as to where to find something, then 30 seconds might well be enough. If not then you’ll have to shell out for the full version at $37, which allows unlimited recording (with no watermark) and features free updates.
Once installed, you just need to run Fraps at the same time as your game (you can run it minimised), by default the video hotkey (toggle on/off) is F9, but you can change this in the settings:
You can also change the path where videos are stored, the video size and frame rate and what audio source is recorded. There are two things to consider when changing these options:
- Recording at “Full-Size” will produce a video of the same resolution as your display, which is probably going to be over-kill for what you need. Most of the time you’ll be perfectly happy with a “Half-size” video recorded at 30FPS. Recording at Full-size at 60FPS will take up a whole lot of system resources and will likely cause performance issues on your PC.
- The video files created by Fraps are not compressed at all (there just isn’t the time to compress them on-the-fly) so the file sizes will be huge. A video no longer than a minute or so will end up being over 1GB in size, so if you want to record a sequence more than a couple of minutes you’ll need some serious hard disk space. Recording at Half-size and at a lower frame rate will help with this.
Once you’ve got your footage, you’ll be able to find it in the location specified in your settings (see above). By default it will be a large file, so you may want to consider using something like Windows Live Movie Maker to shrink it down to a file that you can transport around easier (or upload to Facebook or YouTube should you wish).
Portal 2 Release Date Put In Hands Of Gamers
0In a move only befitting Valve, the Portal 2 release date has been put solely in the hands of ordinary PC gamers.
Visitors to the Aperture Science website are presented with a countdown giving the release time of Portal 2 – we would suggest for those who have pre-loaded it on Steam, not those hoping to buy it in stores.
Visitors are invited to play (read: buy and then play) a set of 13 mini-games released by Valve via Steam, with the number of completed levels increasing the speed of the countdown, the more people commit, the faster the games come out.
At time of writing there is still 77 hours left on the clock, which would see Portal 2 released on Wednesday at around 1PM, presumably we can assume that it will be playable either then, or slightly before.
Duke Nukem Forever Gets UK Demo at Gadget Show Live
0Hail to the King baby.
Duke Nukem Forever has had it’s first UK playable demo at this years Gadget Show Live. We had a go on the Xbox360 version and although it’s nothing grounbreaking in terms of graphics, it’s Duke at his finest and definitely one that we’ll be running out to buy on June 10th, the official UK release date.
The playable demo starts off with Duke spending some time at a urinal in a football stadium while the bombs drop, on finishing up and progressing out to a conference room you’re greeted with bodies laying left right and center. From there you get the chance to draw up a plan on a nearby white board, with humerous responses from a nearby officer:
“Wow, that’s just…. Wow…. I don’t really understand any of it, but if I did I’m sure that guy would still have his arms, and at least one of his balls”.
Neat!
Next you progress through some hallways and onto the playing field where you get to take out a massive bad-ass of a cyclops, culminating in punting his eye for a field goal.
In any case, we love it, it’s Duke at his finest, we can’t wait for the final version in June.
Crysis 2 Released – Huge Bugs Found
0Today marks the official release of Crysis 2 on PC, XBOX360 and PS3, and some pretty big bugs have already been found.
Many people have been concerned with the decision to make Crysis 2 a cross platform release rather than sticking to PC as the original did.
Chief amongst the concerns were fears that the level of graphical options available to PC players would be restricted, that the controls would be dumbed down for console control pads and that any cross platform game is likely to suffer more from bugs due to having to run on multiple architectures.
Unfortunately for Crysis 2, all three concerns seem to have been realised.
Many people are already setting gaming forums ablaze complaining that they’re not able to easily make any sort of changes to the graphics settings on the PC version, other than to select the pre-defined standards which differ greatly in terms of features.
Added to this, the game seems to have some pretty big graphical bugs when it comes to multi-core GPU’s or SLI based systems, check out the video below:
Skip to 4.00 to see the type of problem lots of users are experiencing.
That Crysis 2 could be released in this state is unbelievable, how any game could have such a huge bug effecting it at release is just bizarre.
Hopefully EA Games will get a patch at much sooner than the anticipated DX11 patch in order to fix these issues.
Have you bought Crysis 2? Have you experienced any of the bugs? Let us know by leaving a comment below…
How To Play Old NES Games In Windows
0Even though gaming technology has come on leaps and bounds over the years, there are those of us who long to play the console games of our youth, be they Master System, NES, Megadrive, SNES, Amiga, Commodore 64 or any other console from the 80′s and early 90′s.
Unfortunately, as time goes on the chances of owning a working console and games from that era are decreasing rapdily, one of the only options is to find a way to play these games on other devices such as your PC or smart phone. In this guide I’ll be showing you how to play NES games on a Windows PC using a software package known as an Emulator.
Before I begin, it’s important to point out that the method for doing this is a legal gray area. There’s no law against developing or running applications that can run old console software, but downloading and running copies of games of any sort is illegal, even though we’re talking about games from 20 years ago which haven’t been commercially available for almost as long. For that reason, I won’t be explaining how to obtain console game files (known as “ROM’s”), but there are plenty of websites online that explain where to get these files.
NEStopia For Windows
There are a number of different NES emulators available for Windows, but one of the better ones is NEStopia which I’ll be using in this guide. The first step is to download NEStopia from here.
Once downloaded, open the Zip file and copy all of the files to a folder on your hard disk (anywhere is fine, providing you remember where).
You should end up with a folder with the following files in it:
To run NEStopia, double click the Application file (shown 5th from the bottom here). You should end up with a window like this:
At this point, you’ll probably want to create a shortcut for NEStopia so that you can run it quickly and easily, to do this right-click the NEStopia file and either pin-it to the Start Menu or Taskbar, or click “Create Shortcut” to add a shortcut to the desktop. Now that NEStopia is installed, lets look at configuring it for use.
Configuring NEStopia.
One of the first things you’ll want to do is configure your controls for playing your NES games. To do this, click Options and then Input, you should see the window below:
From here you can setup your controls to either use your computers keyboard or a USB controller attached to your system. Once you’ve got your controls setup just right, click “OK”. Next you’ll want to configure your graphics settings. To do this click Options and then Video, you should see the window below:
From here you’ll want to change your screen resolution, if you want to play your games full screen then you’ll want to select the same resolution as your desktop, but if you want to run your games in a window then you’ll need to choose a resolution lower than your screen resolution. Once you’ve gotten your settings how you’d like them, click “OK”.
Playing NES Games
Now that NEStopia is configured, you’ll need to download some game files, or ROM’s, which you can run through the app. As I said before, I can’t provide you with the file’s that you’ll need directly, but check out this website as a place to start.
Once you’ve downloaded your ROM’s, simply open NEStopia, click “File”, then “Open” and then select the file you downloaded. It should then open in the window (providing the ROM you downloaded is compatible with NEStopia).
If the game opens in a window, rather than fullscreen, press alt+enter on your keyboard to enter fullscreen mode. You should now be able to play your games fullscreen using the key combinations or controller that you specified.
Nintendo 3DS Console Goes on Sale on March 25th
0After what seems like a lifetime of publicity and public demonstrations, Nintendo will finally release the next version of its portable games console in Europe this coming Friday, the 25th of March.
The latest version of the DS features a 3D screen which requires no glasses or accessories to use. Those who have had a go on one seem to be mostly blown away by the 3D graphics, though there have been some concerns that the type of 3D screen used can damage younger users eyes.
Nintendo themselves have gone on record saying that parents of users under the age of 6 should not allow their children to use the 3DS in 3D mode, instead opting to display graphics in “normal” 2D. They’ve also said that even adult readers should not play for more than 30 minutes at a time if they want to avoid any side effects or damage to their eyes. You try telling that to a gamer though.
Check out the links below to pre-order your 3DS now.
Crysis 2 Multiplayer Demo Released
0Fans of the eagerly awaitied first person shooter sequal Crysis 2 can now experience what the trailers have been promising for months.
A free demo is available for both PC and Xbox360 owners via this link and the Xbox dashboard respectively.
The demo gives you free access to two multiplayer levels as well as three classification of playable charecter.
Having played the demo, Crysis 2 does seem to have better graphics, controls and most importantly, performance than the original, could this be the best game of 2011? I think possibly.
Check out the gameplay video below to see why it could be: