The Old Republic: All I Want is the Cutscenes

The Old Republic: All I Want is the Cutscenes

Posted on 13th Jun 2011 at 07:29 by Clive Webster with 22 comments

The latest trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic has been released and it?s freaking awesome. This follows previous cut-scene and video releases that have been similarly impressive, engaging and enjoyable. However, with the game looking a bit duff, I?m wondering if Electronic Arts, Bioware and LucasArts could be persuaded into releasing a cut-scene-only version? I?d happily pay to watch a short film made from them.



If you?re not sure what I?m on about, have a look at the Star Wars: The Old Republic intro cinematic (watch it in fullscreen mode) above, then the other trailers (not the gameplay videos) and come back.

See what I mean? They?re much more reminiscent of the original trilogy than the rubbish prequel films. There?s a focus on people that you readily recognise and empathise with overcoming obstacles; the classic setup for injecting drama and interest into a scene or story. Furthermore, there?s absolutely no mention of trade disputes, midi-sodding-chlorians or annoying lizard-rabbits.

In fact, some of the intros' cinematic characters are really close to those of Episodes IV to VI. There?s a dependable droid that happily receives rushed instructions, and it?s on a ship with dingy, circular corridors and laser-cannon pods. Then there?s the pilot of this ship ? he?s instantly introduced as a likeable yet roguish smuggler, and his attire hardly suggests otherwise. He even seems to steal Han?s dialogue: his is the fastest ship in the fleet, even though it might not look like much. All we need is a co-pilot with a shaving phobia and we?re done.

But who cares if Bioware is borrowing heavily from the source material to produce something this fun? Arguably, the mistake that George Lucas made with his prequels was refusing to follow his own conventions. We wanted a bit more of the same please, not some confused reinterpretation of the Universe we?d spent the last however many years discussing in detail.

So when the ?trader? ship blasts through the Imperial turbo laser, rushes through its guts, and then hits its hyperdrive, we?re cheering on the crew. When the Jedi master Force-pulls the second lightsaber to him, we?re given a moment to consider the great duel that?s about to ensue.

Even the cutting and pacing between the personal fight between Jedi and Sith and the action on the not-Millenium Falcon is so reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back that it can?t fail to make Star Wars fans happy. The trailer even conveys emotion brilliantly ? Malcus exudes rage as he stalks towards the Jedi master and bats away his defence, while you can read the thoughts of his Padawan perfectly well after his death.

So please, can we just have the cinematics to watch, and leave the MMO to WoW deserters? Please?

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Blast from the past: Apogee launches online store

When I saw this news, I experienced a huge feeling of nostalgia; I just knew I had to write it up. It's crazy how many times I saw the logo you now see on the side. Apogee has announced the launch of its new online store over at http://store.digitalriver.com/store/apogee.

Gamers can now buy some of Apogee's favorite legacy titles, including Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, and the Apogee Legacy Pack. The $20 Legacy Pack is a collection of classic Apogee games including, Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, Rise of the Triad: Dark War, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, and Blake Stone: Planet Strike.

This weekend, you can get $5.00 off the price by typing in the Coupon Code "Father" ? the Father's Day special expires on Monday, June 20, 2011. Additionally, as a bonus for ordering the Legacy Pack, you will receive at no additional cost Extreme Rise of the Triad and the soundtrack to Duke Nukem: Critical Mass with 10 "ego-pumping" songs (Apogee's words, not mine).

Apogee was a pioneer in digital distribution 25 years ago, before the rise of the console. Commander Keen, one of the company's classics, is one of the reasons why I am a die-hard PC gamer, and always will be, rather than a console gamer.

"Apogee fostered young development teams creating a global audience through its digital distribution platform," Terry Nagy, Apogee's Chief Creative Officer, said in a statement. "Apogee will continue its tradition by providing a platform for new developers to access a global market...our online store being the first step in this direction."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44310-blast-from-the-past-apogee-launches-online-store.html

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Blast from the past: Apogee launches online store

When I saw this news, I experienced a huge feeling of nostalgia; I just knew I had to write it up. It's crazy how many times I saw the logo you now see on the side. Apogee has announced the launch of its new online store over at http://store.digitalriver.com/store/apogee.

Gamers can now buy some of Apogee's favorite legacy titles, including Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, and the Apogee Legacy Pack. The $20 Legacy Pack is a collection of classic Apogee games including, Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, Rise of the Triad: Dark War, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, and Blake Stone: Planet Strike.

This weekend, you can get $5.00 off the price by typing in the Coupon Code "Father" ? the Father's Day special expires on Monday, June 20, 2011. Additionally, as a bonus for ordering the Legacy Pack, you will receive at no additional cost Extreme Rise of the Triad and the soundtrack to Duke Nukem: Critical Mass with 10 "ego-pumping" songs (Apogee's words, not mine).

Apogee was a pioneer in digital distribution 25 years ago, before the rise of the console. Commander Keen, one of the company's classics, is one of the reasons why I am a die-hard PC gamer, and always will be, rather than a console gamer.

"Apogee fostered young development teams creating a global audience through its digital distribution platform," Terry Nagy, Apogee's Chief Creative Officer, said in a statement. "Apogee will continue its tradition by providing a platform for new developers to access a global market...our online store being the first step in this direction."

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44310-blast-from-the-past-apogee-launches-online-store.html

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Weekend Open Forum: Your last meal

Adventures and Adventuring

Three of my five weapons were offline and leaving small ion trails in space, my cargo hold was full of rare and expensive artefacts and a band of pirates was chasing me down a frantically plotted and improvised course. With a route that picked its way in and out of asteroid fields through systems that were well and truly off the charts, it is fair to say I was panicking. I was also pretty sure that my eyes had stopped blinking.

I loved Freelancer; Microsoft's space trading open world game. It resembled an extremely stripped down Eve Online, but with gameplay replacing the spreadsheets. I'm aware that it was a
condensed version of games that did the same thing better and with more depth many years before, but I found it to be a deep and beautifully realised sandbox. In fact, I'm convinced that most players only ever scratched its surface.

I wouldn't be able to tell you the plot of the game, or name any of the systems, although I could tell you that they had flavours of America, England, Germany and Japan. I couldn't name any of the characters without a short trip to Google either. The game didn't leave that sort of impression on me. What I do very strongly remember, though, was having an adventure.


I've played a lot of games that bill themselves as adventure games. Some of them are point and click adventure games, some of them are 3D action adventure games and almost every triple A release involves an adventure of some description. However, I can only think of one time where I have actually had an adventure for myself.

An adventure is only ever an adventure in retrospect. At the time, it's just an ordeal that the adventurers would rather not be tolerating. It was an adventure climbing Mount Snowdon in the cold and the rain in my jeans, but at the time I just couldn't believe I was so stupid to think it was just a hill. It was an adventure getting a chest of drawers home sticking out of the back of my Ford Ka last week, but at the time it was a living nightmare going up hills, as I was worried that it would slide into the car behind that I couldn't see.

An adventure game is a comfortable experience, no matter how well it immerses you in its world. You're still playing an interactive story, and it's only once you start getting towards the open world games that the capacity to have an adventure starts to kick in. However, even then there's a danger that it will just feel like a great big toy box, rather than sparking any significant connection with the player.

For example, for all the sandbox fun to be had in GTA, I couldn't care less when one of the thugs got shot, arrested or squashed by his own stolen ambulance. In those cases, what I was doing felt like an exercise in karma, as opposed to anything that could provide sufficient tension to facilitate adventure.

With Freelancer, I had become invested in the game, and my main memory of it is a single encounter of being chased. Most of my ship had been destroyed, and I was limping from wormhole to wormhole, desperately trying to get back to civilisation so that I could hide and repair my craft after my ill- advised drift from the beaten track.

There probably wasn't even that much of a consequence if I failed, got killed or ditched my cargo, but still I felt as if failure would result in me being hunted down in the future by bounty hunters, and that I would maybe end up frozen in Carbonite and propped up in Jabba's palace.

I've never seen or experienced this sort of gameplay before or since. I've felt engaged by games, and I've even been threatened with high-stakes failure, but never has it felt quite the same as this single encounter in which I was trying to get away from space pirates.

That said, I nearly felt something similar quite recently while I was playing Mount and Blade: Warband. My medium sized army was chasing down a small band of looters while being chased by a much larger army from an enemy faction. I was the latter that provided the fear of failure. There was a feeling that this was of my own doing, and I felt outside of my comfort zone.


However, this thrill subsided shortly after the second day of chasing, when it became clear that all three armies were running at exactly the same speed and not gaining or pulling away from each other. After that, the only excitement was the realisation that sooner or later my army was going to run out of food and become highly irritable.

There was also a brief foray into genuine adventure during my time with Morrowind, as you can easily get lost in the game's huge world. After missing a crucial direction, I once ended up on the other side of the game world several hours later, being chased by a crocodile-like demon walking on two legs. Again, however, this was less of an adventure and more of an exercise in making me feel like an idiot.

I'm fed up with pre-baked sequences and scripted events in my first person shooters. I get tired of plodding through what amounts to an overly long film with hand-eye-co-ordination exercises to progress the plot. Although I love playing through some of these titles, and it would be difficult to argue that Half-Life 2, the absolute king of disguised linear gameplay, was anything other than a masterpiece, but I want to have adventures as opposed to sitting through those of someone else.

I can't help feeling that the medium would be greatly helped if more games were just a little bit more of an ordeal to play. That's not to say that they need to be frustrating, overly difficult or painful to
play, just that they should provide a bit more than 'press X not to die' and raise the stakes for failure a little higher.

Basically, I want to play more games that facilitate the experience of an adventure, as opposed to adventure games. If you know of any games ripe for adventure-mining, let us know in the forums.

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Crypto-currency Security under Scrutiny

Reports that $500,000 worth of Bitcoin currency was stolen from one user's computer this week has highlighted the poor security of the digital cash and the systems available for managing it. For the currency to gain large-scale popularity, it may need to create or work with financial institutions?making Bitcoin less distinct from the conventional currencies some users hope to supplant.

To use Bitcoin, a person downloads the official software client, which connects over the Internet to a global network of other copies of the program. Together, these implement the mathematical scheme that ensures that bitcoins can be transferred, created, and verified without any need for a central authority such as a bank (read TR's explainer on how Bitcoin works).

That official client stores the security needed to use a stash of bitcoins with minimal security, in an unprotected file known as wallet.dat. In a forum post this week, a bitcoin user whose screen name was "allinvain" claimed that a remote attacker gained access to his or her wallet file and stole over 25,000 bitcoins. The value of a single bitcoin at the time of writing (just over $19) makes the alleged heist worth nearly $500,000, although in practice converting such a large number of bitcoins at once would be tricky. It is impossible for the alleged victim to know who stole the money because the cryptographic architecture of Bitcoin is designed to preserve the anonymity of people transferring the currency. Today the security company Symantec reported it had caught a piece of malicious software that infects computers over the Internet and attempts to steal wallet files.

The vulnerability highlighted by the controversy is very real, says Jeff Garzik, one of the lead developers of the official Bitcoin client and one of a few individuals who are the closest thing the currency has to official spokespeople. Today, anyone able to access the machines of Bitcoin users, either directly or remotely?via malicious software?can grab their wallet files, he acknowledges.

An upgraded version of the client, which will encrypt a person's wallet and ask for a password each time it is accessed, will be released in "just a week or two," says Garzik.

Yet users will still essentially be maintaining their own bank vaults on their computers. "[Wallet encryption] does nothing against many modern malware techniques, such as keystroke logging," says Garzik. He advises Bitcoin users to keep encrypted backups of their wallet files away from the Internet, for example on a USB stick, since the file is needed only when sending money to others.

This may be an option for technically minded early adopters. But if the currency is to be used more widely, a new generation of simple and secure tools for using bitcoins is needed, says Amir Taaki, who leads a U.K.-based consultancy of software developers working on a range of technologies for use with Bitcoin, which operates the exchange site Britcoin.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=b053c67331aa5749d5dd19c155c1be64

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The Old Republic: All I Want is the Cutscenes

The Old Republic: All I Want is the Cutscenes

Posted on 13th Jun 2011 at 07:29 by Clive Webster with 22 comments

The latest trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic has been released and it?s freaking awesome. This follows previous cut-scene and video releases that have been similarly impressive, engaging and enjoyable. However, with the game looking a bit duff, I?m wondering if Electronic Arts, Bioware and LucasArts could be persuaded into releasing a cut-scene-only version? I?d happily pay to watch a short film made from them.



If you?re not sure what I?m on about, have a look at the Star Wars: The Old Republic intro cinematic (watch it in fullscreen mode) above, then the other trailers (not the gameplay videos) and come back.

See what I mean? They?re much more reminiscent of the original trilogy than the rubbish prequel films. There?s a focus on people that you readily recognise and empathise with overcoming obstacles; the classic setup for injecting drama and interest into a scene or story. Furthermore, there?s absolutely no mention of trade disputes, midi-sodding-chlorians or annoying lizard-rabbits.

In fact, some of the intros' cinematic characters are really close to those of Episodes IV to VI. There?s a dependable droid that happily receives rushed instructions, and it?s on a ship with dingy, circular corridors and laser-cannon pods. Then there?s the pilot of this ship ? he?s instantly introduced as a likeable yet roguish smuggler, and his attire hardly suggests otherwise. He even seems to steal Han?s dialogue: his is the fastest ship in the fleet, even though it might not look like much. All we need is a co-pilot with a shaving phobia and we?re done.

But who cares if Bioware is borrowing heavily from the source material to produce something this fun? Arguably, the mistake that George Lucas made with his prequels was refusing to follow his own conventions. We wanted a bit more of the same please, not some confused reinterpretation of the Universe we?d spent the last however many years discussing in detail.

So when the ?trader? ship blasts through the Imperial turbo laser, rushes through its guts, and then hits its hyperdrive, we?re cheering on the crew. When the Jedi master Force-pulls the second lightsaber to him, we?re given a moment to consider the great duel that?s about to ensue.

Even the cutting and pacing between the personal fight between Jedi and Sith and the action on the not-Millenium Falcon is so reminiscent of The Empire Strikes Back that it can?t fail to make Star Wars fans happy. The trailer even conveys emotion brilliantly ? Malcus exudes rage as he stalks towards the Jedi master and bats away his defence, while you can read the thoughts of his Padawan perfectly well after his death.

So please, can we just have the cinematics to watch, and leave the MMO to WoW deserters? Please?

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Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita

Gaming 27 - The PlayStation Ryvita

Posted on 15th Jun 2011 at 07:41 by Podcast with 8 comments

Joe, Clive and Harry are joined by David Hing, who sit down to help discuss the wealth of news that poured out of E3 2011 last week. This includes the unveiling of the Nintendo Wii U and the PlayStation Vita, as well as the release dates for Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3.

We didn't limit ourselves to just E3 announcements, though. A croaky Joe also let us know what the Duke Nukem Forever launch party was like, while the rest of us speculated about how the game would shape up. Check out the Duke Nukem Forever review to see how right everyone was in their predictions!


After that, we go through the usual reader mail and competition details. As always, feel free to send in any questions you might have for us too.

The bit-gamer podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Adventures and Adventuring

Three of my five weapons were offline and leaving small ion trails in space, my cargo hold was full of rare and expensive artefacts and a band of pirates was chasing me down a frantically plotted and improvised course. With a route that picked its way in and out of asteroid fields through systems that were well and truly off the charts, it is fair to say I was panicking. I was also pretty sure that my eyes had stopped blinking.

I loved Freelancer; Microsoft's space trading open world game. It resembled an extremely stripped down Eve Online, but with gameplay replacing the spreadsheets. I'm aware that it was a
condensed version of games that did the same thing better and with more depth many years before, but I found it to be a deep and beautifully realised sandbox. In fact, I'm convinced that most players only ever scratched its surface.

I wouldn't be able to tell you the plot of the game, or name any of the systems, although I could tell you that they had flavours of America, England, Germany and Japan. I couldn't name any of the characters without a short trip to Google either. The game didn't leave that sort of impression on me. What I do very strongly remember, though, was having an adventure.


I've played a lot of games that bill themselves as adventure games. Some of them are point and click adventure games, some of them are 3D action adventure games and almost every triple A release involves an adventure of some description. However, I can only think of one time where I have actually had an adventure for myself.

An adventure is only ever an adventure in retrospect. At the time, it's just an ordeal that the adventurers would rather not be tolerating. It was an adventure climbing Mount Snowdon in the cold and the rain in my jeans, but at the time I just couldn't believe I was so stupid to think it was just a hill. It was an adventure getting a chest of drawers home sticking out of the back of my Ford Ka last week, but at the time it was a living nightmare going up hills, as I was worried that it would slide into the car behind that I couldn't see.

An adventure game is a comfortable experience, no matter how well it immerses you in its world. You're still playing an interactive story, and it's only once you start getting towards the open world games that the capacity to have an adventure starts to kick in. However, even then there's a danger that it will just feel like a great big toy box, rather than sparking any significant connection with the player.

For example, for all the sandbox fun to be had in GTA, I couldn't care less when one of the thugs got shot, arrested or squashed by his own stolen ambulance. In those cases, what I was doing felt like an exercise in karma, as opposed to anything that could provide sufficient tension to facilitate adventure.

With Freelancer, I had become invested in the game, and my main memory of it is a single encounter of being chased. Most of my ship had been destroyed, and I was limping from wormhole to wormhole, desperately trying to get back to civilisation so that I could hide and repair my craft after my ill- advised drift from the beaten track.

There probably wasn't even that much of a consequence if I failed, got killed or ditched my cargo, but still I felt as if failure would result in me being hunted down in the future by bounty hunters, and that I would maybe end up frozen in Carbonite and propped up in Jabba's palace.

I've never seen or experienced this sort of gameplay before or since. I've felt engaged by games, and I've even been threatened with high-stakes failure, but never has it felt quite the same as this single encounter in which I was trying to get away from space pirates.

That said, I nearly felt something similar quite recently while I was playing Mount and Blade: Warband. My medium sized army was chasing down a small band of looters while being chased by a much larger army from an enemy faction. I was the latter that provided the fear of failure. There was a feeling that this was of my own doing, and I felt outside of my comfort zone.


However, this thrill subsided shortly after the second day of chasing, when it became clear that all three armies were running at exactly the same speed and not gaining or pulling away from each other. After that, the only excitement was the realisation that sooner or later my army was going to run out of food and become highly irritable.

There was also a brief foray into genuine adventure during my time with Morrowind, as you can easily get lost in the game's huge world. After missing a crucial direction, I once ended up on the other side of the game world several hours later, being chased by a crocodile-like demon walking on two legs. Again, however, this was less of an adventure and more of an exercise in making me feel like an idiot.

I'm fed up with pre-baked sequences and scripted events in my first person shooters. I get tired of plodding through what amounts to an overly long film with hand-eye-co-ordination exercises to progress the plot. Although I love playing through some of these titles, and it would be difficult to argue that Half-Life 2, the absolute king of disguised linear gameplay, was anything other than a masterpiece, but I want to have adventures as opposed to sitting through those of someone else.

I can't help feeling that the medium would be greatly helped if more games were just a little bit more of an ordeal to play. That's not to say that they need to be frustrating, overly difficult or painful to
play, just that they should provide a bit more than 'press X not to die' and raise the stakes for failure a little higher.

Basically, I want to play more games that facilitate the experience of an adventure, as opposed to adventure games. If you know of any games ripe for adventure-mining, let us know in the forums.

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Four Egyptian startups are US-bound for funding

Four Egyptian startups are making their way to the US today, in an effort to pitch their ideas to investors in New York and San Francisco.

In a trip which represents a networking opportunity, as well as a chance to get more exposure, the main idea behind the venture is to take Egypt?s startup scene global, and secure the financing necessary to do so.

Kngine, which featured on our very own list of  Middle Eastern Startups you should know about, is going across the pond, along with three other companies. The semantic search engine already has an international following, but is hoping to secure both funding, as well as a mentorship to improve the product.

Kngine is joined by two mobile services companies, Vimov and Alzwad Mobile Services. Vimov is the company behind two popular iPhone/iPad apps, namely, iSimulate and Weather HD, while Alzwad Mobile Services is the company behind Gazar, a trifecta of an iPhone app with a food delivery service, TV Guide, and prayer times guide, all rolled into one. The fourth and final startup heading to the US this week is SilMinds, a hardware accelerator company for financial transaction.

Sawari Ventures,  an international venture capital firm, is behind the concept, and is supporting the four Egyptian startup companies as part of its efforts ?to identify, serve, and provide capital for extraordinary entrepreneurs who are determined to change the MENA region.?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/me/2011/06/19/four-egyptian-startups-are-us-bound-for-funding/

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