beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com Saving computers one at a time from their owners

After months of financial statement teases and the initial reveal in an issue of Game Informer, Activision has officially released the first details of Guitar Hero 4, now known as Guitar Hero: World Tour. The game will be available this Fall on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii and Xbox 360. The same development teams that created Guitar Hero III are back on board with the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions being developed by Neversoft, while Vicarious Visions is creating the Wii version and Budcat is bringing it to the PS2.

Guitar Hero: World Tour looks to be the beginning of a completely era for the Guitar Hero series. As was revealed by Game Informer, World Tour will feature a drumkit and microphone along with the Music Studio track editor and an eight-player Battle of the Bands mode. Any song created in the Music Studio can be shared with other gamers through the game’s online database GHTunes.

Other gameplay options will include a four-player “full band” mode (that can be played both online and locally) and singleplayer Career mode that can be played with any instrument. ..

Activision is saying that World Tour will feature the largest number of tracks in a music game ever. As of now, four bands have been confirmed to have a place in World Tour: Van Halen, Linkin Park, The Eagles and Sublime. And all of the songs will be master tracks; there will be no covers on Guitar Hero: World Tour. The game will also offer “significantly more localized downloadable music than ever before on all of the next-generation consoles.” So while it’s vaguely worded, it sounds like downloadable tracks are coming to the Wii as well as the PS3 and Xbox 360.

After what many have seen as an eternity, Flagship Studios has finally released another patch for the single-player version of the Hellgate: London. Caution that the patch is a beta and not a final release. If you wish to install the beta patch there are a large number of fixes discovered and tested in the multiplayer version. Just be certain to back up your save games before installing beta patch.

Download Hellgate: London SP patch 1.2 beta (US)
Download Hellgate: London SP patch 1.2 beta (UE)

Also of note is that the Test Center server was updated with an early build of Hellgate: London Patch 1.3.

Hellgate: London SP patch 1.2 beta Patch Notes:

Hello Hellgaters!

We’re very pleased to bring our single-player gamers up to date with this patch. We’ve been putting a lot of focus on the online space where we get a great deal of testing done on our Test Center servers. The consistent feedback and requests to have these same improvement made available for those of you that enjoy offline, single-player gaming has not gone unheard! We’re still a small studio, so getting everything done as fast as you and we want to can be a challenge. So we greatly appreciate your patience while we got this patch into the development / test / release cycle.

You’ll find tons of bug fixes, skill changes, class balances, UI updates, graphic enhancements, and much more in this patch.

This Bonus Pack includes 3 new maps (well, 2 revived back to life for UT3 and 1 completely new map).

• Morbias is the deathmatch arena that started it all, perfectly suited for anything from small intense duels to chaotic free-for-all matches.
• The Unreal Tournament classic, Facing Worlds was one of the most played maps in gaming history, beloved sniper map.
• Searchlight is an intricate new capture the flag map designed for both z-axis rooftop runs and strategic indoor gameplay. Returning classics and fresh new designs let you experience Unreal gaming like never before.

DM-Morbias: The Morbias Station is a transport hub that focuses all traffic passing through Taryd’s jumpgates. The Station offers a terrestrial shuttle, storage facilities (with quarantine services for live cargo), and a social center where guests can meet incoming visitors or hold private meetings in a neutral setting.

DM-FacingWorlds: The Necris have forced their way into even the most revered of Izanagi landmarks. Their corruption has spread to the Temple of Facing Worlds, and one of its towers is already showing the effects of infection and decay.

CTF-Searchlight: The lighthouse serves as a beacon to this remote island, thought to be the ancient home of the Necris Prophet. The spiritual components of the Necris conversion are greatly misunderstood, and their power is vastly underestimated. Those who are willing to face the impact of their conversion often come to religious centers like this one to meditate.

This patch was created to address a few minor issues prior to the next release of America’s Army.

FORCE CLASS
We have enabled Global Forceclassing (FC) on honor bearing servers. Individual FC can still be used but not on honor servers. Using a Global FC on everyone levels the playing field for all. When using Global FC, honor is accrued at less than normal rates due to the fact that old maps were created with specific weapon loadouts in mind. Forceclassed Servers will show up in MBS with an (FC) preceding their name for easy identification.

USERNAMES
Spaces in user account names are no longer permitted. If you have an old account with a space it has been replaced with an underscore character (_) or in the case of conflicts a number. You should have received an email to your address of record indicating the change. All of your other account information was retained.

BAN SYSTEM
Ban system again supports banning by IP, MAC, or Name/PBGUID (for PB servers banning by NAME will result in a PBGUID ban instead of a name ban). Ban system now supports console commands to list ban lists in sets of 20 (or so) to allow “scrolling” through the list to locate banned players. The Admin Command Post only supports showing the first 100 ban entries but now has a wider list to show all the ban details. The Banning system was rewritten and includes the preliminary ability to download a ban list from a web server on game server startup.

StarCraft II continues the epic saga of the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. These three distinct and powerful races will clash once again in the fast-paced real-time strategy sequel to the legendary original, StarCraft. Legions of veteran, upgraded, and brand-new unit types will do battle across the galaxy, as each faction struggles for survival.

Featuring a unique single-player campaign that picks up where StarCraft: Brood War left off, StarCraft II will present a cast of new heroes and familiar faces in an edgy sci-fi story filled with adventure and intrigue. In addition, Blizzard will again offer unparalleled online play through Battle.net, the company’s world-renowned gaming service, with several enhancements and new features to make StarCraft II the ultimate competitive real-time strategy game.

Features:
* Fast-paced, hard-hitting, tightly balanced competitive real-time strategy gameplay that recaptures and improves on the magic of the original game
* Three completely distinct races: Protoss, Terran, and Zerg
* New units and gameplay mechanics further distinguish each race
* Groundbreaking single-player campaign
* Vibrant new 3D-graphics engine with support for dazzling visual effects and massive unit and army sizes
* Full multiplayer support, with new competitive features and matchmaking utilities available through Battle.net
* Full map-making and scripting tools to give players incredible freedom in customizing and personalizing their gameplay experience

The Crysis 1.2 Patch is now available for download. The patch addresses the performance of Crysis, contains many bug fixes and also some new features like auto team balance (Players will now be moved from full teams to the opposing side when dead if the numbers are unbalanced), Logitech G15 display now fully supported in MP and SP and Added mod loader to the main menu.

Patch 2 Changelog:

Optimizations and Stability
*Corrected a number of memory leaks with FSAA modes.
*Optimized Object Motion Blur for DX10 Very High Spec
*Destroying objects will now properly remove their decals from the world under DX10.
*Fixed a number of memory leaks with some procedural vegetation and destroyable objects physicalization.
*Fixed issue in windowed mode where the map or weapon attachment UI cursor can leave the game window.
*Fixed potential server exploit that could cause servers to crash
*Fixed crash with AI triangulation in the editor

General Fixes/tweaks
*Added new effects for vehicle shattering after being frozen
*Player movement will now be cancelled if the player is shooting while moving in prone mode.
*Fixed issue where player will exit VTOL from closed rear hatch irrespective of seat.
*Continuously firing the VTOL machine gun in 3rd person mode no longer causes the VTOL to descend.
*Fixed an issue where vehicle 3rd person camera could break when switching the player “ControlledTurret” flag while using the gun.
*Fixed identical swimming sounds being used on surface, underwater and swimming in different directions.
*Frogs will no longer block the player’s view after being picked up
*Fixed an issue where in unarmed mode, the character’s arms will suddenly reappear and disappear when picking up and dropping an object.
*Fixed health recharge rate when computing drowning damage.

Slightly older news but it’s something to post with the new trailer:

- Scott Miller (3D Realms Co-founder) says Duke might make it this year.

- 3DR faced the problems of trying to grow large enough to maintain three simultaneous internal projects while developing DNF, and it threw the company back–some shit got canned, and other shit was either set aside or given to third party developers.

- 12 years of development went towards interactive environments that their game engine was not mature enough to handle, so the code was rewritten resulting in a series of complications which produced further setbacks.

- Scott Miller says they’ve finally achieved their goal of creating a “super-interactive” game environment.

- 3DR won’t disclose how many employees they have, but they hired a crap-load of new talent after–and this is what the article says–firing half its employees. That’s interesting, because I had the notion they left on their own–but I’ll leave it at that because I don’t want to start any drama.

- Apparently Bombshell (which was one of the three stand-alone game projects 3DR was working on) is now integrated into DNF. Miller isn’t quoted on the confirmation, but the article says she’s part of the Duke universe as Duke’s action-female counterpart.

Download Unreal Tournament 3 v1.2 Patch

Changes from v1.2

Gameplay:
Increased UTGame MaxPlayersAllowed to 64.
Fixed leviathan turret instant refire exploit.
Fixed errant lock on warnings when no longer in vehicle.
Fixed first person weapons in demo playback.
Fixed translocator telefrag victim message.
Fixed encouragement sounds not being randomly picked by bots.
Implemented viewobjective spectating system for Warfare.
Fixed berserk held by driver applying to all vehicle turrets.
Only force low gore on German versions that were low gore only before being patched.
Fix for unnecessary content staying in memory on seamless travel.
Fixed shaped charge node exploit.
Fixed the Scavenger exploit.

User Interface:
Clicking on the settings tab goes to directly to the full settings menu.
Added VOIP speaker portraits to HUD.
Fixed character portraits sometimes not showing up on HUD or not staying up long enough.
The Host server menus will no longer disable internet options if CheckNatTypeDisplayError returns true. It’s just a warning now.
Fixed the CD key always prompting when the user has no network card
Added support for commandline log in -login=xxx -password=xxx. This also allows Gamespy comrade and other external applications to be used to launch network clients.
Added UI option to hide objective paths (the white arrows).
Added UI option to enable joystick support.
Added JOIN to midgame menu when spectating.
Added cancel button to “logging in” message box.
Added support for auto-updating UI with new options.
Improved language support for French, Spanish, Italian, and German.
Joystick key bindings in UI display properly.
Added game and UI support for customizing crosshair scaling.
Added “Add Favorite” button to Server Browser server list tab.
Fixed favorites Tab Page server details not updating.
Improvements to voice menu. Added “status” section.