AMD video card driver updates through Steam, Blizzard talks about cheating in Starcraft 2, WoW Armory upate

For the record, Impulse did this with Nvidia over a year ago. Go Stardock

Via Bigdownloads:

Up until now Valve's Steam download service has been mostly for downloading games, demos, movies and strategy guides. Today it was announced that the service will be used by processor maker AMD for another purpose. If you have an ATI Radeon-based graphics card in your PC, Steam will automatically detect that and make available the latest driver updates for your graphics card.

This will certainly be a huge benefit for Steam owners which those graphics cards since many issues with PC games can be solved with a graphics driver update. The updates will begin later this month with the release of the 10.9 version of the Catalyst drivers. Ironically this announcement comes on the heals of the word that AMD intends to dump the ATI brand name for its graphics cards by the end of the year.

Update: Those 10.9 drivers are now available to download via Steam and from AMD's Game web site.

Cheating in Starcraft 2

If you listen carefully, you can here the soft whistle of the Blizzard Entertainment ban hammer falling as they release this statement:

Blizzard Entertainment has always taken cheating in any form in Blizzard games very seriously, and that's no different for StarCraft II. If a StarCraft II player is found to be cheating or using hacks or modifications in any form, then as outlined in our end user license agreement, that player can be permanently banned from the game. This means that the player will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net to play StarCraft II with his or her account.

Playing StarCraft II legitimately means playing with an unaltered game client. Doing otherwise violates our policies for Battle.net, and it goes against the spirit of fair play that all of our games are based on. We strongly recommend that you avoid using any hacks, cheats, or exploits. Suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.

World of Warcraft Armory update.

So I was looking through the Wow character links that I have along the right side of this blog under recommended games, and I noticed they updated my pages (along with everyone else's) to include pictures. I thought that to be pretty cool. Behold Solice and Darkforge. Turalyon sever rules.

Solice



Darkforge

Dungeon Defender, Diablo III health system overhauled, Caprica season 2 starting early

Dungeon Defenders

Trendy Entertainment just announced their Co-op Tower defense/Dungeon Crawler/RPG hybrid game Dungeon crawler will be simultaneously released for the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, and PC via Steam, Impulse, Direct2Drive, and GamersGate. I played the demo for this, and it really was clever.

And its price tag is 9.99



Release from Blizzard:

Diablo III Health System Overhauled, Less Emphasis On Potions
Sep 10, 2010 at 2:34 PM - OhmWrecker - 22 Comments
According to an update at the official Diablo 3 homepage, Blizzard has made some pretty significant changes to the health system of the game. While adventurers can still buy health potions, the meat and potatoes of regenerating health will be based around a new health globe system.

Potions and skills offer excellent boosts to your health, but to survive multiple battles, you'll need to use them alongside a more reliable, renewable means of recovery.

That's where health globes -- floating, crimson spheres that rise from the corpses of your defeated foes -- come in. These globes are the core means of regenerating your health in Diablo III, and all other methods of healing support them. When you pick up a health globe, your health (and the health of any allies in your party) is restored by a fixed percentage depending on the type of globe you've grabbed.

Potions will now have a cooldown timer attached to them according to the update, thus eliminating the potion click fest minigame seen in previous Diablo games.

Caprica

Syfy just announced that it's moving the premiere of season 1.5 of Caprica to Oct. 5 at 10 p.m. instead of the originally planned return in January 2011. This is good news for fans who were left hanging with the midseason finale cliffhanger back in March and were disappointed that the show would take so long to return.

The move will put Caprica on Tuesday nights following Stargate Universe and push back the premiere of the new season of Sanctuary to Friday, Oct. 15, at 10 p.m. Sanctuary will air on Fridays instead of Tuesdays as part of the shift.

Duke Nukem Wherever, Stardock Layoffs

via Bigdownloads:

While the official Duke Nukem Forever web site pretty much gave away this fact on Friday with its trademark fine print at the bottom, today Gearbox Software made it official. The developer formed by a number of ex-3D Realms employees announced in a press release and at its PAX Prime 2010 panel on Sunday night that it has now acquired the Duke Nukem franchise and IP from 3D Realms. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Naturally these rights include the revived Duke Nukem Forever first person shooter game which Gearbox is now in charge of completing after over 13 years in development. 3D Realms' co-founders Scott Miller and George Broussard have given their blessings for this deal with Broussard stating, "Gearbox was the only home appropriate for the Duke Nukem brand." The big question: with its most lucrative brand now sold off to Gearbox, what is the future going to be like for 3D Realms as a company?

A: They have no future

Stardock Layoffs

Via Elemental forums, commenting on a story by Shacknews:

It is true.

Elemental's revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team's next project as well as a second team. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we've had to start laying people off.

No one is being fired. None of these people did anything wrong. Stardock is a small company and each person here is truly amongst the best and brightest. So you can imagine how much it sucks for all of us to lay off anyone. We haven't had to lay anyone off since our migration from the OS/2 market in 1998. It would be great if we can bring as many of these people back over time if the studio can afford it.

No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected.

Elemental's rocky launch can be summed up (IMO) as follows: Our QA process was insufficient to handle a brand new platform (Elemental = Kumquat 1.0 versus say Galactic Civilizations II was using Pear which was the same engine, modified, from 1997's Entrepreneur) + my own catastrophic poor judgment in not objectively evaluating the core game play components.

Although I love Stardock as a company, and admire the regard they hold their fans in, The development team Messed up bad with Elemental. The multi player features still are not enabled, screens overlap each other, and the game is just buggy overall. I feel bad for them, but that's what happens when a substandard product gets released.

On a positive note however, check back on this game in a few months. Stardock does not abandon their games.