Lee Packham

There’s been a few debates about Digital Game Distribution lately.

However this week I’ve come across two cases of where it’s a complete pain.

• Call of Duty 5
• Unreal Tournament 3

This week saw a major patches for both of these games. That was Wednesday. This is Saturday. Are the Steam versions of these games patches yet? No. Thankfully I also have the retail version of UT3, so I can play it outside of Steam. However no such luck with COD5. There is an unofficial way to get the 1.3 patch installed. However, you lose some functionality (in this case, Single Player mode).

This now sees an end to me buying any games on Steam that might actually need patches. Sorry Valve, but you need to sort your game distribution system out. You might claim it’s the best way to combat piracy and distribute patches promptly – but it just doesn’t work, does it? It’s simply not acceptable to lag so far behind the physical distribution patch. I don’t care if it’s not Valve’s fault, I paid money to Valve (well, STEAMGAMES.COM LONDON apparently) so I expect service.

Rant over

Today we are pleased to announce the beta launch of Amazon Video Games Trade-In, www.amazon.com/tradeingames. Amazon Video Games Trade-In is a new service that enables you to trade in your games for an Amazon.com Gift Card.

Pretty interesting. Appears they are using a, yet unamed, 3rd Party for this. Whether it’ll take off will be seen in the coming months.

Amazon Game Room’s Blog: Amazon.com’s Trade-In Store Launches with 1,500+ Eligible Titles

This weekend I picked up a copy of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith for the Playstation 3. Ok, so the game is a bit short (only took a couple of hours to complete "Medium"). It’s also way too easy, and only actually has ONE guitar battle!

Those issues aren’t my major gripe, however.

After you complete the game you get to unlock a number of tracks in "The Vault". Excellent. Ok, so then I decide to unlock a favourite of mine called "Pink". One of the lines goes "Makes me as high as a kite". In the game, they removed the word "high" as if it was a swear word.

Seriously, what’s gone wrong in the world? Why are we censoring the word High in relation to the colour Pink?

I love these videos – so here’s another

After a brief delay, Valve has opened up the beta for The Steam Community, its online Steam-integrated social and gaming service.To take part in the beta, go to the Settings screen from the File menu while logged into Steam, and click the “Change…” button in the “Beta participation” area. Restarting Steam will enable the new Community tab, from which you may manage your profile, friends list, events, and groups. My current Steam Rating is “0 – Teh Suck.”

Viewing friends’ profiles or group profiles allows you to monitor the gaming activity of friends or group members, as well as participate in text and voice chat rooms. Non-Steam games can be added to the Steam list from the Games menu. If a friend is playing a game, you can launch that game through a context-sensitive menu or, apparently, join that friend’s game if applicable.

The Steam Community Now Live – Shacknews

Online gaming service devotii team up with pro-clan fnatic to offer ‘Game Idol‘ tournament. The tournament offers Call of Duty 2 clans the opportunity to fight it out on devotii.com for a chance to represent fnatic at the WSVG.

read more | digg story

Very VERY good news in the World of Vanguard:

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

Link to SOE and Vanguard

From F13.net.

The axe finally fell. It was only a matter of time, I suppose. And while many of you may try to spin this to make SOE look bad, apparently this wasn’t really their doing. You see, SOE doesn’t own Sigil. It doesn’t own Sigil now and they won’t own them tomorrow. But they do own Vanguard. What fate awaits that game? I don’t know. Don’t particularly care either.

But I do know that at approximately 4:30PM today, Sigil employees were told to meet outside. At which point they were terminated. On the spot. By whom? Doesn’t seem to have been Brad McQuaid, if it was, nobody is talking. But that doesn’t seem like something he’d do. But I suppose the executioner is irrelevant since most folks secretly want it to be SOE and it wasn’t. As it stands, people were told to come back tomorrow to do their paperwork and some may get hired by SOE.

I contacted SOE since I’m not in the business of burning bridges or spinning news and they had this to say:

“…an announcement is forthcoming tomorrow.”

Interestingly, the Exec. Producer of Vanguard, Brad “Aradune” McQuaid has posted on the offical Vanguard support forums with details of what’s happeninga at Sigil.

SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad.  Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what’s best for Vanguard and its community.  We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future.  The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind.

This is interesing as there are stacks of rumours going around the Internet at the moment about the future of Vanguard.

In my opinion, it’s a really good game. I’ve been playing it over the last week. The servers have taken a hit from the Lord of the Rings effect. But that’s fine. They’ll all come back when they realise what little end game there is. But, that’s another story!

Link to Update on the future of Sigil and Vanguard

The patch notes for today’s Lord of the Rings Online patch were more than a little amusing:

The NPC Nási (which when translated was Nazi in French) is now named Morór.

Amazing the amount of QA that went into that then

Link to Codemasters : The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ : Patch notes