EA just announced a new free to play game based on the Battlefield series, crappily named Battlefield Play4Free. It will be a PC based shooter that will use maps from Battlefield 2 and weapons from Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
It’s being developed by EA’s Easy Studio, which made the other free-to-play shooter Battlefield Heroes.
It will be a micro-transaction supported game, players can progress and learn new skills and earn in-game currency by playing, we will have to wait and see if the weapons that can be bought with real monies (if different) will have the free players complaining about un-fair advantage.
Interplay announce release dates for Fallout Online, which is a MMORPG based around the Fallout series. I state “based on” as the legal squabbles between Bethesda and Interplay over the rights to the MMO, are hampering the details of the game, as reported in a Euro Gamer interview with Interplay’s president Eric Caen.
Although this seems a bit early for beta sign-ups, as they report they wont start the beta till early 2012, with game launch in the second half of 2012. I could guess they want to grab some of the attention around the release of Fallout: New Vegas.
Valve has announced an “extensive update” for its mulitplayer shooter, Counter-Strike: Source, and is now in limited beta.
“The update includes a host of new features and functionality developed in collaboration with Hidden Path Studios,” explained Valve. “This beta will run for a limited time, and once complete, the update will be deployed to all Counter-Strike: Source owners for free.”
Among that “host of new features and functionality” you’ll find the following:
144 achievements added
New lifetime player stats and summary screens
New match player stats and summary screens
New end of round display with MVP and interesting fact about a player
Updated scoreboard with new icons, visual style, MVP stars, and avatar pictures
New cinematic death camera
New domination and revenge system
Added avatar icons to voice chat, scoreboard, and end of round display
Incorporated many source engine updates
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the PC is a mess, the shipped product had issues that were pointed out in the Beta, but alas…
Update: I think the only item that needs to be removed to fix the spinning and not being able to move left right, is the mouse look right, left and look up, down. It appears that there is a conflict with the mouse action and the shared joystick command.
My focus here is about removing the Joystick input from game options. I had originally dug through the files in the beta trying enable the throttle and trigger for my Logitek 2.4 wireless joystick, since there is apparently no way to remove (or add some joystick buttons) from the in-game option, I started digging through the input files to add or remove unwanted lines. The problem seems to be caused by the controls being designed for console game pads.
The OnLive gaming system is a cloud-based service that will enable off-site rendering of PC games. Which they claim will give gamers the opportunity to play GPU intensive games with something as low-powered as a netbook. OnLive says that with their modem and controller, gamers can expect to play a game such as Crysis on any laptop at 720p at 60 frames per second, with minimal lag, over a cable connection. (We will see how that goes in the real world.)
This post should really be called Dumb and Dumber, (the solution to windows 7 black screen is to disconnect other devices from the video card) but this is how my adventure went:
I had installed the beta Windows 7 to dual boot with XP, during the first round of availability, then didn’t mess with the setup and configuration most importantly I didn’t enter the key and validate it. Well I had left the boot order of Windows 7 as default as I thought it would encourage me to spend time with the OS, but I got busy at work and six weeks went by and I had some time so I thought I would spend it with the beta, but alas my month to verify had expired and the version had shown a black screen with the OS version number and the invalid copy text. I just thought it had no functionality since it flagged it as bad. I reset the date in the bios trying to get around it, and the invalid message was gone but still the black screen and version text was there. So I put off messing with it, but started getting annoyed that I couldn’t change the boot order, which was about the time the release candidate 7 was available so after downloading and burning a disk, I tried to install the new version and after many attempts to install and have a working version, I was still met with a black screen and legible text. I thought for some reason it was during installation that it would reboot and then go into the previous version of Windows 7, instead of completing the install. I hadn’t noticed it doing that as I was doing unattended installation. So I was going to show it who was boss, I went in on the XP side and blanked the partition (thinking that would get it to go to the new install) but it had other ideas. This time though during the install I sat in front of the machine and waited for the boot screen to come up and made sure it went to the complete install choice (which it did by default, doh). It went through the install process and ta-da still black screen and legible text.
Another note was that I had reset the bios back to the correct time and it saw the invalid version, even after formatting the install drive from XP. So does that mean the authentication is now saved in the boot record? Switching the bios back to an earlier month removed the invalid warning.
So I did what I should have done a month before, I Google “windows 7 black screen,” some of the thoughts were that it was driver issues, the real solution suggested removing any device attached to the video card, and friking, viola after disconnecting the DVI out to my TV the black screen went away (during the previous install I had the DVI connector running to the receiver and not the TV, which is why I was able to finish the install the first time). It finished the install and I was able to verify and change the boot order. I will update the drivers and then try to reconnect the DVI to see if it really is a driver issue, which I’m not counting on since during the install I had it get the latest drivers and updates.
