Runescape is back to those who remember

This post doesn’t really have anything to do with Playstation, but seeing the news got me really excited for days gone by.

 

A month or so ago, Jagex, the creators of the hit MMORPG Runescape, brought out a poll for all the players. The poll was whether players would like to see the old Runescape come back to life. They ended up actually short of their voting goals of 500k and 750k and ended with 450k+ votes. But the awesome, incredibly nice developers at Jagex decided that even though their goals weren’t met, they would be bringing about 40 servers online 100% dedicated to the pre-2007 update to Runescape. This is just a trial run for now and it is free with your Runescape subscription if you are interested.

To be honest I probably won’t end up playing the game again. But the 2007 update to Runescape was the main reason I stopped playing the game in the first place. Hearing the news just makes me remember the sweet bliss of playing this game for the first time, back in 2003 when it still wasn’t very popular yet.

Hearing this news will you end up going back to playing just for the way the game originally was?

PS4 price leak

There have been some leaked rumors of the price for the PS4. PlayStation is saying they want to keep the price under $500. Murad Ahmed, a Technology Reporter from The Times, has claimed he has internal sources at Sony and has been told that the PS4 will released at about £300, more than £100 cheaper than the starting cost of its predecessor, the PlayStation 3. £300 translates to about $465.63 if you live in America, which is significantly less expensive than the $600 price tag that was originally attached to the PlayStation 3. However, $465.63 isn’t a very photogenic number, so we’ll probably see Sony knock the price down to $450.00 for advertising purposes.

Earlier this month, though, a Japanese newspaper called Asahi Shimbun placed the PS4’s purchase price at 40,000 yen, which is about $430. At the moment, there’s no way to tell which number is more accurate. So, just to be safe, you should probably plan on $465.63.

This has definitely got me excited. I remember I saved up my money for a year and a half for the first PS3 when it released. The total cost of my PS3 with a game was about $655 and that was just for the most basic model. It was another $100 added onto the higher memory consoles. The fact that Sony is purposely keeping the price under $500 says a lot about their views on why electronics are too expensive. If the next generation Xbox and Wii consoles are going to stay in competition with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will have to follow suit.

Question: Considering these prices are not confirmed by Sony, what are your thoughts on what the price should be?

 

Playstation 4 – nerdgasim

Today, PlayStation unveiled their most prized secret… the PlayStation 4.

They started the conference off with a montage of all the Sony systems. Two decades worth of gaming leading up to this incredible moment. The President and CEO of Sony was the host of the event. He explained that Sony engineers wanted to re-conceptualize how the gamer plays. Sony also worked closely with big game developers to design the new platform.

They broke it down into five points:

1. Simple

Consumer oriented on ease of use.

2. Immediate

The ability to suspend and resume content, a secondary custom chip for background processing and being able to play downloaded games while they are still downloading.

3. Social

The ability to capture, upload and share media from your games without ever leaving the game. As well as being able to stream and chat with friends and fans while playing your content.

4. Integrated

Not just visible gaming on the system but mobile, tablets and internet browsers will be able to have access to the content on your console.

5. Personalization

Greater increasing the way your social experience feels.

Mark Cerny, Lead architect and creator of Sonic, came out and gave all the information on the PS4 specs. The PlayStation 4 will have a Super Charged PC Architecture, an X86 CPU chip, and Enhanced PC GPU, 8gb of high-speed unified memory and local HDD (Hard Disk Drive) storage. The PS4 will have up to 2 teraflops of CPU computing power, as well as a GDDR5 graphics card capable of up to 165gb of use. To put that in perspective, an average PC game uses from 2-4gb of ram and even that will still crash your computer. This will enable developers to be able to go all out in the development of their games with out worrying about crashing systems.

The controller looks absolutely gorgeous. This is the controller to be released for the PlayStation 4. Sony is upgrading the Dual Shock 3 system to the newly developed Dual Shock 4 system. The Dual Shock 4 system will add a tighter sense of control and decrease the latency between the in-game actions and the rumble features in the controller. That rectangle in the center is a touch pad for ease of access in-game. The blue bar at the top of the controller is an LED bar used for 3D tracking of the controller. Should add for some incredible gaming experiences.

Mark Cerny ended with this statement:

“Deeply satisfying, developer focused, and easy access to content.”

What followed next my brain still cannot comprehend. There are a ton of PS4 exclusives set to release when the PS4 launches. Among them are Killzone: Shadow Zone, Drive Club, Infamous: Second Son, Deep Down and a new untitled game coming from the creators of the Final Fantasy series, Square Enix. One of the bigger announcements was a partnership between Blizzard Entertainment and Sony. Blizzard will be bring the ever popular, Diablo 3, to the Playstation 3 and Playstation 4 systems. Demos for Diablo 3 should be releasing in the following months. Bungee will also be making history by releasing Destiny, a free-roam, RPG, First Person Shooter with exclusive content only being released to the PS4.

Overall, these announcements have me very excited. This all sort of came out of no where and my brain is still trying to grasp all the mind-blowing information we’ve received today. So I bet you are reading this getting just as excited as I am, but your asking yourself, “Do I have to wait 2 or 3 years just to get it?” Don’t worry baby birds, I’ll feed you. The release date for the PlayStation 4 is set for this Holiday season 2013. If it is anything like the release of the PS3, I’d recommend saving your money now and getting a conceal and carry licence just in case. Needless to say, you do not want to miss this!

Question for the readers – What feature are you most excited about?

The Last of Us or new beginnings

The Last of Us is a 3rd-person, survival horror, action-adventure releasing May 7th, 2013 exclusively for the PlayStation 3. You control Joel, the older male, who is protecting your friend Ellie, who is controlled by the AI. You fight former humans, who have been infected, and other survivors trying to stay alive. Naughty Dog’s new gameplay mechanic is a feature the developers call “dynamic stealth”, meaning that there are many different types of strategies and techniques that the player can use at any given time as they approach a new situation, to which enemies will react differently. Though situations can have a different outcome, it all mainly depends on the player’s preference of play.

The plot is as follows: The story is set two decades after a Cordyceps-type fungus has killed millions, with nature gradually retaking the abandoned cities and towns. The survivors are hemmed inside quarantine zones, completely under the heel of the United States military, with order and screening for any Infected being viciously maintained under martial law. Joel, a hardened black-marketeer within one of the quarantine zones, goes through an event which makes him promise an old friend that he will get a young girl, Ellie, away from the harsh regime. They begin a journey through the USA, avoiding the Infected, humanoid creatures whose sole aim has become spreading the fungal infection, and scavengers that survive outside the quarantine zones who see Joel and Ellie as their latest prey. But, added to their problems, the military are determined to find Ellie and bring her back under their power.

This gameplay footage was teased at the E3 2012 conference. This was shown when there wasn’t much known about the game except for its name. The cool thing about the game I noticed just from this teaser gameplay, is that everything you do can affect your gameplay experience. If you have alcohol and some cloths, you can save them for medicine and bandages but if there are hordes of enemies in your way, a well tossed Malatov Cocktail could be a good option when you have no ammo. By using that bomb, you won’t be able to heal yourself in a time of need.

In an interview with Naughty Dog’s creators after this teaser was shown, he explained that there were about 10 different ways that you could have gone through that area of the game. It’s pretty incredible that developers are finally putting complete control of your character’s destiny into the player’s hands. All I know is this is going to be an incredible game, and I cannot wait for it to be released May 7th, 2013.

Games to me

This is my first official post. I just wanted to start out by explaining why I am so passionate about video games.

It all started when I was 3 years old. My sister was teaching me how to play “Pong” on the Atari 2600. It was so fun, but I remember being terrible at it. Long story short, I started on the Atari 2600, moved up to the Nintendo Entertainment System playing Super Mario, to playing the PlayStation 1, then the GameCube, and finally to the PlayStation 3. Video games have just always been there for me.

People say that video games are terrible and do nothing but rot your brain. To them, I say nay. I am a personal success story of video games. There was an online PC game I played throughout my middle school years called Runescape. It is a massive world full of players from all over the world. I was an anti-social person, terrible reader and was awful at math; Runescape changed all that. Playing a game with millions of players forces you to talk to people or help them out. The mini-quests in the game had lots of pages of reading to do so that you could complete your quests. I hated reading, but Runescape intrigued me with their incredible world. The game had its own economy, and math was a big part of the game, not to mention buying and selling items based on the rise in costs of the items.

Next there came the FPS (First-Person Shooters). FPS games really made me critically think about every move I made. If you take one corner wrong, there is a guy ready to shoot you. I had to quickly adapt to every situation and think outside the box on how to accomplish my objective.

There are tons of other games that have had a drastic impact on my life, but all the games had one thing in common… you could not die. I have a nonmalignant brain tumor that produces bad hormones and stops the production of good hormones. Because of the brain tumor, I have had constant migraine headaches for the past six going on seven years. Video games provide me with an escape from this pain-filled life, into a beautiful, pain-free world where you can forget about your troubles and live in this fictional world. If you get hurt in a video game, it doesn’t actually hurt you and you can just take a health potion of some kind to heal you.

Video games are beautiful and have changed so much in the last 20 years; here is a video I made a few years ago showing just how far we have come

If you would like to know more about the positive effects of videos games, check out this link

http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/03/video-games-are-good-for-you-the-positive-effects-of-video-games/