Battlefield 3 news coming tomorrow

Two days ago a Battlefield 3 PR event was held in London according to this thread but you won’t be hearing about it until tomorrow as there’s a news embargo until then and I guess nobody is as big as Techcrunch so they won’t break it. Nevertheless…

Ok, so they didnt let us near the machines to play it as its pre-alpha code (and even in the demo it crashed occasionally).

Also, they wouldnt talk about certain aspects. (boooo)

And they have embargoed the whole world from talking about until the 8th (Friday). So, until then, all I can really say is “wow… it looks awesome and I seriously think I might play this”.

I have answers to some of your questions but they were quite tight lipped but I’ll tell you what I know come Friday.

DeV.

Keep an eye on the Battlefield forum at boards.ie tonight then!

Gaming History in Pictures

A few games I found recently while sorting through boxes at home:

  • Quake 3 tin box, Linux edition. I wrote an article about this for the Irish Times a few years ago.
  • Double Dragon, C64 version, I posted pictures of this before of course.
  • Gyroscope, the first 5 1/4 disk based game I owned on the C64. It was given to me by someone, can’t remember who now but I used it later for Stunt Car Racer and even printed the loading screen from that game on a dot matrix printer for the disk cover.
  • The excellent Stunt Car Racer manual and box cover.
  • The System 3 Premier Collection and Thalamus The Hits compilations were the pride of my games collection at one time. I still remember the excitement of getting those boxes in the post.
  • C64 Cabal, tape version. Brilliant game. I remember spending as much time tinkering with the game ASM code as playing it..
  • Half Life 2 Collector’s Edition and Half Life 1. Steam was launched when HL2 was released and I was recently able to register the HL1 CD key in Steam and download that great game.

Steam games on the cheap

The wonderful thing about PC games is the competition among online retailers and the lower than console prices charged for most games. While Xbox Live now has older full price games for download they’re usually given a premium price too. Steam and the other online PC game stores regularly have sales where even big name games are offered at a discount.

Here are a few links for keeping track of what sales are going on plus price comparison sites:

  • First up is Steamprices.com where you can compare the prices of most games in Euro, Sterling and US Dollars. What becomes obvious is that people paying in Euros are over charged more often than not. Boo!
  • Steamgamesales.com and Didimatic.com are great for tracking what’s on sale on Steam and other online stores. You can subscribe to both in your RSS reader but the former being better because you can limit it to regional sales.
  • The Big Download Blog is a great resource too, listing the bigger sales in the main stores and elsewhere. Worth subbing to that too.
  • Finally, there are online stores where you can buy CD keys cheaply. These stores buy the keys in less expensive regions and then allow people in richer areas to buy these legitimate keys at knock down prices. Here’s a thread on boards.ie about them. I haven’t tried them and responses are mixed. Buyer Beware!

Oh, if you know someone in another region served by Steam and the prices there are cheaper you could ask them to buy games for you and then pay them via PayPal for the gift. Thanks Alex, I owe you a few drinks next time we meet! 🙂

Xeer

Many moons ago I wrote about where my handle xeer came from. A planet in the classic 8-bit game Elite was called Xeer. Unknown to me, Xeer is also the polycentric legal system of Somalia!

Back in 2003 someone asked to use my hotmail account of the same name but I declined and found out it was something to do with the constitution of Somalia. That Wikipedia page dates from 2009 so at least I can read up on the part of Somali heritage now!

Lead and Gold free this weekend

Yes well, I’d rather have some free gold but this budget shooter, Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West is free to play all weekend on PC. Fire up your Steam client and the game will download when you click the link in the news page. Or so I presume it will as I haven’t tried it yet. The game is also 75% off which is a pretty good deal.

Links: metacritic page (70%) and game forum.

So who’s up for some wild west shooting?

Moriarty Tribunal in Text

The Moriarty Tribunal cost the Irish tax payer more than 100 million Euro and all we got was a 2,400 page protected PDF.

If you view the report’s PDF files you won’t be able to quote from it by selecting and copying text. You’ll have to manually type out anything you want to extract because the files are protected.

Value for money eh? Anyway, I ran the pdf files through the tool “pdftotext” and came up with m1.txt and m2.txt.
Use the original PDF files to read the report but for your convenience these text files will be much easier to quote from.

Please don’t link directly to them, mirror them on your own site if you write about them!

Here’s a Wordle tag cloud of the findings created by Jamie Lawrence.

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