Do Not Use Your PS3
If you own an original, fat model PS3, then Sony is suggesting you stop using it for a period of 24 hours while the company institutes a fix for a problem plaguing PS3s worldwide.
If you haven’t experienced the problem yourself, here is what is reported to occur: When you try to go online or boot up certain games, the system displays “Error: 8001050F,” and it endlessly reboots, rendering the games/online functionality unplayable. Complaints about the error have apparently begun pouring in since Sunday, and Sony has indicated that the flaw is related to clock functionality in the fat-model PS3. Sony does not believe that the error is affecting PS3 Slim models.
Oddly enough, the flaw has reportedly affected retail display models and titles currently in production for the PS3.
So in the mean time, Sony is suggesting that you stay off your PS3 until a fix is instituted. From Sony:
“As you may be aware, some customers have been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network today. This problem affects the models other than the new slim PS3.
We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.
Errors include:
* The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
* When the user tries to sign-in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
* When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game.”
* When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
* Users are not able to playback certain rental video downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.
We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.
As mentioned above, Please be advised that the new slim PS3 is not affected with this error. We are doing our best to resolve the issue and do apologize for any inconvenience caused.
For the latest status on this situation please check either the PlayStation blog (blog.us.playstation.com) or PlayStation.com.”
Source: Kotaku.
Activision Sodomizes King’s Quest Fans
A small group of loyal King’s Quest fans have been toiling away on a fan-made sequel to the classic adventure series for eight years. Eight years! At one point, Vivendi, the IP rights holder, got all uppity and made an attempt to shut the project down, but an agreement was reached that allowed the team to continue working on the project. Known as “The Silver Lining”, the team hoped to release the game, for free of course, at some point in 2010.
Unfortunately, Activision recently came into possession of the King’s Quest IP and are now acting like big, throbbing dicks. That’s a technical term, look it up. Activision has demanded that all materials relating to King’s Quest be removed from The Silver Lining Website, in effect destroying eight years of dedication and labor…and for what? They weren’t going to make any money from this project. The Silver Lining was made for fans by fans. No threat whatsoever to Activision’s license.
A sad turn of events that makes Activision the Darth Vader of the gaming industry, at least until the next corporate snafu comes along and pisses me off.
Statement from The Silver Lining Team:
To Our Fans:
In 2005, Phoenix Online Studios received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King’s Quest IP, in regards to our work on The Silver Lining. We complied with the request, and over the months that followed, we were able to work out a non-commercial fan license with Vivendi that allowed us to continue our work on the game.
We have spent a lot of time recently reworking the material of The Silver Lining into episodic releases, with the first out of a planned five episodes completed, and submitted for review, and had hoped we would be able to bring our game to you, the fans, in the Spring of 2010.
Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.
As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.
We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.
Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.
What the future holds for us, as individuals or a team, we cannot say. We have an amazing development team, however, filled with talented and hard-working individuals, and we hope the teamwork and rapport we’ve developed won’t go to waste. We hope that when we do know what the future holds for us, our fans will be there to enjoy what we can give them still.
Again, thank you all so much for everything. This has been a long and crazy road, full of more twists than we could’ve anticipated, but more triumphs and wonderful memories than we could’ve ever hoped for. And for that, to all of you and to everyone on our team, we will always be grateful.
Thank You,
The Silver Lining Development Team
StarCraft II Beta Gets First Major Patch, Major Nerfs
Blizzard is rolling out a new patch for the StarCraft II beta and, like most Blizzard patches, it takes a jackhammer to various skills, in some cases removing entire entire skills from units considered overpowered. Changelog below:
Balance Changes:Terran:
- Viking:
- The armor value for this unit in Fighter Mode has decreased from 1 to 0.
- The damage done by this unit in Fighter Mode has changed from 6 (+8 armored) to 10 (+4 armored).
- Reaper:
- The damage done from D-8 Charges has decreased from 40 to 30.
- The delay between attacks for D-8 Charges has decreased from 2.5 to 1.8.
- Orbital Command:
- The build time for this upgrade has decreased from 50 to 35.
Protoss:
- Observer:
- Gravitic Boosters: The cost of this research has decreased from 150 Minerals and 150 Vespene Gas to 100 Minerals and 100 Vespene Gas.
- High Templar:
- Phase Shift: This ability has been removed from the game.
- Feedback: New Ability. Drains all energy from the target unit and causes damage equal to the amount of energy drained.
- Colossus:
- The building pathing radius for this unit has decreased from .75 to .5625.
- Mothership:
- Vortex: The energy cost of this ability has increased from 75 to 100.
- Vortex: The target radius of this ability has decreased from 3.0 to 2.5.
- Temporal Rift: This ability has been removed from the game.
- Wormhole Transit: This ability has been removed from the game.
- Mass Recall: New Ability. Teleports all of the player’s units in the target area to the Mothership.
- Gateway:
- The build time of this building has increased from 50 to 65.
Zerg:
- Infestor:
- Fungal Growth: The damage done by this ability has decreased from 48 to 36.
- Fungal Growth: This ability now prevents affected units from burrowing.
- Neural Parasite: Functionality changed. The Infestor now channels this spell, which lasts 10 seconds or until the Infestor is destroyed. You can now target all units with this ability.
- Terran Infestation: The ability’s energy cost has reduced from 50 to 25 and Infested Terrans now spawn 1 at a time.
Bug Fixes:
- Addressed an issue causing people to receive an “Internal Battle.net Error” message with their game client.
- Muting your microphone will no longer cause your microphone to be turned off in the operating system once the program has exited.
- Please note that the voice chat functionality has only partially been implemented. There are many known issues with voice chat that we expect to address in a future patch.
- The “Medium” graphical settings were reconfigured to work better on appropriate machines. The video settings “auto-detect” functionality has been reset as a result.
- Added a frame rate limiter to the game menus to prevent some graphics cards from running at higher frame rates than necessary.
- Added GRB rating tags to the login menu for the Korean version of the Beta client.
Do Not Use Your PS3
If you own an original, fat model PS3, then Sony is suggesting you stop using it for a period of 24 hours while the company institutes a fix for a problem plaguing PS3s worldwide.
If you haven’t experienced the problem yourself, here is what is reported to occur: When you try to go online or boot up certain games, the system displays “Error: 8001050F,” and it endlessly reboots, rendering the games/online functionality unplayable. Complaints about the error have apparently begun pouring in since Sunday, and Sony has indicated that the flaw is related to clock functionality in the fat-model PS3. Sony does not believe that the error is affecting PS3 Slim models.
Oddly enough, the flaw has reportedly affected retail display models and titles currently in production for the PS3.
So in the mean time, Sony is suggesting that you stay off your PS3 until a fix is instituted. From Sony:
“As you may be aware, some customers have been unable to connect to the PlayStation Network today. This problem affects the models other than the new slim PS3.
We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system.
Errors include:
* The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
* When the user tries to sign-in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)”.
* When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; “Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game.”
* When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the Internet, the following message appears on the screen; “The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)”
* Users are not able to playback certain rental video downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.
We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.
As mentioned above, Please be advised that the new slim PS3 is not affected with this error. We are doing our best to resolve the issue and do apologize for any inconvenience caused.
For the latest status on this situation please check either the PlayStation blog (blog.us.playstation.com) or PlayStation.com.”
Source: Kotaku.
Activision Sodomizes King’s Quest Fans
A small group of loyal King’s Quest fans have been toiling away on a fan-made sequel to the classic adventure series for eight years. Eight years! At one point, Vivendi, the IP rights holder, got all uppity and made an attempt to shut the project down, but an agreement was reached that allowed the team to continue working on the project. Known as “The Silver Lining”, the team hoped to release the game, for free of course, at some point in 2010.
Unfortunately, Activision recently came into possession of the King’s Quest IP and are now acting like big, throbbing dicks. That’s a technical term, look it up. Activision has demanded that all materials relating to King’s Quest be removed from The Silver Lining Website, in effect destroying eight years of dedication and labor…and for what? They weren’t going to make any money from this project. The Silver Lining was made for fans by fans. No threat whatsoever to Activision’s license.
A sad turn of events that makes Activision the Darth Vader of the gaming industry, at least until the next corporate snafu comes along and pisses me off.
Statement from The Silver Lining Team:
To Our Fans:
In 2005, Phoenix Online Studios received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King’s Quest IP, in regards to our work on The Silver Lining. We complied with the request, and over the months that followed, we were able to work out a non-commercial fan license with Vivendi that allowed us to continue our work on the game.
We have spent a lot of time recently reworking the material of The Silver Lining into episodic releases, with the first out of a planned five episodes completed, and submitted for review, and had hoped we would be able to bring our game to you, the fans, in the Spring of 2010.
Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.
As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.
We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.
Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.
What the future holds for us, as individuals or a team, we cannot say. We have an amazing development team, however, filled with talented and hard-working individuals, and we hope the teamwork and rapport we’ve developed won’t go to waste. We hope that when we do know what the future holds for us, our fans will be there to enjoy what we can give them still.
Again, thank you all so much for everything. This has been a long and crazy road, full of more twists than we could’ve anticipated, but more triumphs and wonderful memories than we could’ve ever hoped for. And for that, to all of you and to everyone on our team, we will always be grateful.
Thank You,
The Silver Lining Development Team
StarCraft II Beta Gets First Major Patch, Major Nerfs
Blizzard is rolling out a new patch for the StarCraft II beta and, like most Blizzard patches, it takes a jackhammer to various skills, in some cases removing entire entire skills from units considered overpowered. Changelog below:
Balance Changes:Terran:
- Viking:
- The armor value for this unit in Fighter Mode has decreased from 1 to 0.
- The damage done by this unit in Fighter Mode has changed from 6 (+8 armored) to 10 (+4 armored).
- Reaper:
- The damage done from D-8 Charges has decreased from 40 to 30.
- The delay between attacks for D-8 Charges has decreased from 2.5 to 1.8.
- Orbital Command:
- The build time for this upgrade has decreased from 50 to 35.
Protoss:
- Observer:
- Gravitic Boosters: The cost of this research has decreased from 150 Minerals and 150 Vespene Gas to 100 Minerals and 100 Vespene Gas.
- High Templar:
- Phase Shift: This ability has been removed from the game.
- Feedback: New Ability. Drains all energy from the target unit and causes damage equal to the amount of energy drained.
- Colossus:
- The building pathing radius for this unit has decreased from .75 to .5625.
- Mothership:
- Vortex: The energy cost of this ability has increased from 75 to 100.
- Vortex: The target radius of this ability has decreased from 3.0 to 2.5.
- Temporal Rift: This ability has been removed from the game.
- Wormhole Transit: This ability has been removed from the game.
- Mass Recall: New Ability. Teleports all of the player’s units in the target area to the Mothership.
- Gateway:
- The build time of this building has increased from 50 to 65.
Zerg:
- Infestor:
- Fungal Growth: The damage done by this ability has decreased from 48 to 36.
- Fungal Growth: This ability now prevents affected units from burrowing.
- Neural Parasite: Functionality changed. The Infestor now channels this spell, which lasts 10 seconds or until the Infestor is destroyed. You can now target all units with this ability.
- Terran Infestation: The ability’s energy cost has reduced from 50 to 25 and Infested Terrans now spawn 1 at a time.
Bug Fixes:
- Addressed an issue causing people to receive an “Internal Battle.net Error” message with their game client.
- Muting your microphone will no longer cause your microphone to be turned off in the operating system once the program has exited.
- Please note that the voice chat functionality has only partially been implemented. There are many known issues with voice chat that we expect to address in a future patch.
- The “Medium” graphical settings were reconfigured to work better on appropriate machines. The video settings “auto-detect” functionality has been reset as a result.
- Added a frame rate limiter to the game menus to prevent some graphics cards from running at higher frame rates than necessary.
- Added GRB rating tags to the login menu for the Korean version of the Beta client.
Monster Hunter 3: No Friend Codes Confirmed
We had heard for a little while that the North American and European versions of Monster Hunter 3 would likely not be hampered by Nintendo’s friend codes system. But now, thanks to statements by Nintendo’s sales and marketing EVP, Cammie Dunaway, we can officially confirm this rumor.
During Nintendo’s Q1 Media Summit in San Francisco this week, Dunaway confirmed the lack of a friend code requirement in the upcoming Capcom title for the Wii, stating, “We felt that this was the best way to deliver [Monster Hunter Tri].”
This means that not only will the title have free online play and text and voice-based chat (available through Wii Speak) when it arrives in the U.S. on April 20, but the game will allow you to group with anyone, and evidently, speak with anyone via text or even Wii Speak. Hello annoying 12-year-olds!
So why the exception to the usual rule of “make it free, make it easy, make it safe” in regards to Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection service? After all, friend codes were part of the keep it safe idea since they would “create an online environment free of harassment.” Without friend codes in place, I could very well run into this lovely kid.
Dunaway is quoted as saying, “With each title we’ll make the right determination.” So I guess that means if you have a good enough game Nintendo will let you fudge the rules a bit.
But Nintendo’s voice chat has an interesting feature: it’s based on a table top – er, TV top – microphone that picks up every nearby voice in the room. So let’s say a pre-pubescent little foul-mouth gets pissed at me for not killing that massive water-dwelling Lagiacrus and starts throwing out every available curse word in the English dictionary. Not only would his parents likely hear everything I say back, but I would hear everything his parents say him, including any subsequent scoldings and/or beatings. Youtube is going to love this.
I’ll report back in April with my findings on the unhampered voice chat soon to be flooded by Nintendo fans. We’ll see if they behave themselves any better than certain Xbox Live gamers, though I’m not holding my breath.
Source: Gamasutra.
Quake III Now Available for Android Mobile Phones
If you’re an Android owner and happen to be sick to death of hearing about great iPhone games, you can now rest a little easier as the classic Quake III is now available. You’ll find everything you want, including audio, keyboard input (or touch screen or trackball), OpenGL 3D rendering, networking and ARM optimization.
Installation:
- Download the kwaak3.apk from the download section and install it on your phone. (Note you need at least Android 1.6)
- Create a directory quake3 in the root of your sdcard and also create a baseq3 directory inside it.
- Copy pak0.pk3 of your Quake3 CD (or from the demo) to the quake3/baseq3 directory.
- Download the Quake3 1.32 point release and copy pak1-pak8.pk3 to quake3/baseq3
- Start the game
Monster Hunter 3: No Friend Codes Confirmed
We had heard for a little while that the North American and European versions of Monster Hunter 3 would likely not be hampered by Nintendo’s friend codes system. But now, thanks to statements by Nintendo’s sales and marketing EVP, Cammie Dunaway, we can officially confirm this rumor.
During Nintendo’s Q1 Media Summit in San Francisco this week, Dunaway confirmed the lack of a friend code requirement in the upcoming Capcom title for the Wii, stating, “We felt that this was the best way to deliver [Monster Hunter Tri].”
This means that not only will the title have free online play and text and voice-based chat (available through Wii Speak) when it arrives in the U.S. on April 20, but the game will allow you to group with anyone, and evidently, speak with anyone via text or even Wii Speak. Hello annoying 12-year-olds!
So why the exception to the usual rule of “make it free, make it easy, make it safe” in regards to Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection service? After all, friend codes were part of the keep it safe idea since they would “create an online environment free of harassment.” Without friend codes in place, I could very well run into this lovely kid.
Dunaway is quoted as saying, “With each title we’ll make the right determination.” So I guess that means if you have a good enough game Nintendo will let you fudge the rules a bit.
But Nintendo’s voice chat has an interesting feature: it’s based on a table top – er, TV top – microphone that picks up every nearby voice in the room. So let’s say a pre-pubescent little foul-mouth gets pissed at me for not killing that massive water-dwelling Lagiacrus and starts throwing out every available curse word in the English dictionary. Not only would his parents likely hear everything I say back, but I would hear everything his parents say him, including any subsequent scoldings and/or beatings. Youtube is going to love this.
I’ll report back in April with my findings on the unhampered voice chat soon to be flooded by Nintendo fans. We’ll see if they behave themselves any better than certain Xbox Live gamers, though I’m not holding my breath.
Source: Gamasutra.
Quake III Now Available for Android Mobile Phones
If you’re an Android owner and happen to be sick to death of hearing about great iPhone games, you can now rest a little easier as the classic Quake III is now available. You’ll find everything you want, including audio, keyboard input (or touch screen or trackball), OpenGL 3D rendering, networking and ARM optimization.
Installation:
- Download the kwaak3.apk from the download section and install it on your phone. (Note you need at least Android 1.6)
- Create a directory quake3 in the root of your sdcard and also create a baseq3 directory inside it.
- Copy pak0.pk3 of your Quake3 CD (or from the demo) to the quake3/baseq3 directory.
- Download the Quake3 1.32 point release and copy pak1-pak8.pk3 to quake3/baseq3
- Start the game
