The Guardian has some follow-up on the Half-Life 2 sourcecode arrests:
“Investigations are continuing, with those involved found to have links with similar crimes. Valve is preparing to sue the hackers for damages, while working towards an end-of-summer release date for Half-Life 2 – widely considered the most anticipated shooter in PC gaming history.”
Normally I wouldn’t really want to mention this, if it wasn’t that I had covered it rather comprehensively when it first hit the net. And also, I wanted to just take the time out of my schedule to address a little something, namely the FBI Cybercrime Task Force…
Cybercrime… Cyber… Not only is it so cheesy it hurts my head, but you can’t even use the word ‘cyber’ in that way! It’s not a catch-all term for the Internet or technology dammit! (here’s why)
I kept help but think of the cheesiness of the 1960s movie “Turbocharged Thunderbirds“ when I hear about the FBI Cybercrime Task Force in the media. Like for instance, right now I’m trying to flush the image out of my mind, but it’s just not going away.
In regards to Half-Life 2, I’d expect that it should be released sometime this year, now that DooM has gone gold it’s only a matter of time.
FBI’s Information Super-highway Intarweb Multimedia Droid-Buster Strike Team. Hyper-Mega.
Half-life 2, though. There’s a game having given us reason to look forward to it. Not like that ShrooM 3 or whatsit!
I like your game updates – they are the only source of gaming news I get.
Jens: Is that purposefully or not?
Michael,
maybe being in the industry, you’ll know the answer to this….
why in the HELL do they not release the system requirements for new games like Doom 3 & Half-Life 2 when they announce them? I’m sure they have at least a general idea of what’ll be required….
Well, I’m not sure. (Just as I don’t understand why a game like D3 doesn’t get released on DVD. And yes, I know that they have told us that it would be too expensive to go both ways, but then why the hell don’t they just go all out on the DVD? DVD-drives are a dime a dusin these days!).
But here are the sys reqs if you’re in doubt.
Cultures and especially American cultures have a tendancy to adopt a definition, misunderstand what it really means and use it for their own purposes, so popularly, that it gets a new definition the more use it gets by society-wide midunderstanding. It’s even possible the original defiintion will get (over)written or lost.
And it’s only natural for people to not fully understanding many terms dealing with technology. So it was bound to happen.
Wait till Precrime is created.
But still… Cybercrime?… Sounds like a second grader came up with it!
Second graders is who they are targetting…
Touché!
Because usually the requirements (min, midi, max) are put together by the publisher after testing. Not that the developer does not have an idea of min, midi, max system, but they are usually contractually obliged to shut up about it because the publisher gets to deal with support.
So there’s some kind of equation saying: How many people do we want buying our game vs. how many angry consumers will bitch about not being able to play it (due to having a computer that’s officially fast enough, but practically too slow) vs. how many of them are going to call our hotline forcing us to hire more people vs. the bad press.
In other words, the kind of stuff most developers would love to not deal with. Hence, the birth of the mighty publisher.
Michael: well, when the HL2 code leaked, it was such a project keeping up to date on what was going on. You would have to be a game freak to bother reading the forums for the latest news. I hardly play any games, but I like to have a vague idea of what’s going on. Thankfully you bothered posting your findings in snippits I could read in a few minutes, and then I was on top of what was going on.
I know that if some new game comes out that blows everything else to pieces, it will crop up on BB sooner or later. That’s pretty cool.