As you may know, Unreal Tournament 3 received a fair bit of negative publicity for it’s supposed poor sales and low activity during the month of December. Interestingly the activity of the UT3 community, particularly in the UT3 CTF Hosted Cup, seems to dispute this. The cup admins have received well over a dozen emails from teams who were too late to sign up and quite a few matches have already been played. Meanwhile a second coverage team has joined up and started covering division 1 matches with both shoutcasting and videostreams. They even made an awesome intro for their services!

While the cup has been progressing steadily, with an interesting upset when TRS beat fan favorite Sanctuary by 2-1 (1-0 Coret, 1-1 Reflection), modders have released the UT3 version of TAM, which has swiftly become popular in pickups. Subsequently Epic announced plans for a new beta patch to be released pretty much any day now, with a lengthy list of fixes. Hopefully they’ll also manage to squeeze in that all-important “console copy/paste” fix that everyone has been asking for before the final release is done. Now of course that’s all fine and dandy, but what about it’s poor sales and activity? Isn’t Unreal Tournament 3 doing extremely poorly?

Well… looking at todays overview of NPD sales statistics for the month of December: that does not appear to be the case. In November both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 struggled to make the top 20, now Crysis is firmly in 7th place and UT3 ranks in at a decent 15th. Both seem to indicate much better sales in December than the month before and in light of Mark Rein’s recent comment that UT3 is selling quite decently for an Unreal Tournament game - seems to indicate that my initial assumption was correct: the press made a big deal out of something quite ordinary. Hopefully Unreal Tournament 3 will continue to pick up higher sale figures, because while it may not be the most well-polished game, it’s definitely the best multiplayer shooter right now and the polish will come eventually!

Now then, it’s time to get back to playing. We have a cup match tomorrow!

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A few days ago I received my new Razer Barracuda HP-1 headset, which as you may now is Razer’s high quality 5.1 surround gaming headset. I had used a Barracuda before as well, so I thought I knew what to expect when opening the box… nothing could’ve been further from the truth. You see, Razer has been secretly listening in on what little criticisms were cast in their direction for this headset - and has quietly launched a new and improved version (going by exactly the same name).

Having already used it I knew this headset was one of excellent quality, particularly in it’s intended purpose of generating surround sound. Utilizing 6 speakers - 3 on each side - for front, rear and mid sound as well as a fourth unit for bass, surround sound in this headset easily rivals powerful surround sound speaker-sets. The original design had very few flaws, and what flaws it had where trivial at best. As such it seems strange for Razer to release a new version - and particularly odd for them to do it without any announcements or press statements. Maybe Razer wants to push it’s new stereo headset - the Razer Piranha - instead… who knows.

Read the rest…

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This year will mark the release for many long-awaited mmorpgs, along with a couple of promising potentials scheduled for 2009. With the wide variety of mmo’s currently in development there should be something for everyone, but which is the one you’re looking forward to the most? I’ve picked twelve of the most popular ones for you to vote on, so you can select your favorite and see where it ends relative to all of the others. Will press favorite Warhammr Online take the cake, or can underdogs like Infinity and Spellborn do well too? We’ll find out in a few weeks!

As for the results of the previous poll centered around the question: “The best game of 2007 was…”.  We’ve had 17 voters, of whom 5 have chosen the excellent game Crysis as the best game released last year. Unreal Tournament 3 came in second with 3 votes, closely followed by BioShock and The Orange Box with 2 votes each. Rounding out the list of games that actually received any votes at all were Call of Duty 4, Command & Conquer 3, Sam & Max Season 1, The Witcher and World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade with 1 vote each. Guild Wars: Eye of the North, Lord of the Rings Online, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Supreme Commander and World in Conflict received none.

That’s right, it looks like Crysis is well appreciated here. Maybe I should do a blog entry on it when I play through it again! Hopefully this year will yield a similarly impressive list of games, where even stellar games like Supreme Commander and World in Conflict don’t get any votes, because there’s just so much else out there. But at least for now, the games of 2007 will certainly do… I’ve yet to play most of the ones I’ve bought even!

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You may have noticed that the sidebar has grown yet again, with a list of links to the VG Media Network blogs! This VG Media Network is a gathering of video-gaming bloggers who will be working together to improve the quality and popularity of their blogs - and as you may have guessed: The Game Drone just joined up! All of these blogs are related to video games some way or another and each seems to have it’s own take on the business, so you’d do well to give them all a look.

Of course I’m not going to leave it at that, so let’s take a quick look at each participant, shall we?

• Consolation Prize is a blog that covers modern day console platforms and the games that are released for them. This is all done by QuizzicalDemon, who guides you through the world of Nintendo DS’s, Xbox 360’s and PlayStation’s with his twenty-plus years of console gaming experience.
• Daniel Primed is Daniel’s blog on gaming in general. His blog offers well written entries on just about anything retro. As such you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything PC in there, but there’s plenty for console - and retro in general - fans!
• Draining Souls does not actually drain your soul - at least, I hope not. Rather, it’s a blog about draining souls… with a Warlock, in the game World of Warcraft, which I’m sure you’ve heard of by now (if not: welcome to the year 2008, I hope your extended stay in the 20th century was comfortable). Even if you’re not much of a WoW fan - like me - blogger Adrenis still provides a wealth of good reading.
• Girls Don’t Game offers the perspective of five gaming girls on the world of video games, both PC and console. You’re going to find a multitude of varying entries there, which are bound to be of interest. As you may know, I’ve already had a link up to these girls for a while - after all: it’s a blog well-worth checking out!
• Hunter’s Mark is another World of Warcraft blog which offers an amazing amount of content for Hunter players, ranging from guides to comics and whatnot else. Blogger and Night Elf Hunter Lassirra provides a steady stream of new quality content, that even non-Hunter players will appreciate.
• Press the Buttons is an all-purpose gaming blog by Mario-fan MattG, which covers just about anything gaming in pretty much every possible way.
• Tank Hard! rounds out the list of World of Warcraft blogs in the VG Media Networks, offering plenty of content for any tank currently residing in Azeroth. Want to improve your game, or just read stories about the experiences of like minded individuals? This blog has it.
• The Server is Down takes a good look at anything online gaming, which means you’ll find plenty of Massively Multiplayer Online gaming content here! If you’re looking for opinions, information or visuals on any recent MMO, chances are this blog has it.
• Write the Game covers gaming from an unusual perspective: trying to help you understand games. The process of development, the history and future of gaming are all topics you’re going to come across here. This interesting blog is hosted by K. Peney, with assistance from the occasional guest writer.

That’s the extent of the VG Media Network for now. So go on, give them a look - and see which one takes your fancy! I’m certain there will be something there for any kind of gamer!

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That’s right: I finally received copies of The Settlers 6: Rise of an Empire and Supreme Commander, along with Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance for good measure! Last weekend I already got a chance to try out Supreme Commander for a bit and it’s definitely still as good as I remember from the demo, except now I can play it all maxed out with proper framerates! It’s awesome to see hundreds of units go at it on a giant battlefield - and the singleplayer campaign isn’t half bad either.

As for Settlers 6… I’ve installed it, but haven’t played it yet. I might get a multiplayer game in this weekend with Killer397 if we’re bored (he has it as well now). Hopefully it won’t be too disappointing and the combat will turn out to be at least semi-decent in this full version, because the demo kinda disappointed there. Ah well, even if it’s no fun in combat - I can always build some cool cities and watch my settlers go about whatever they do when settling new lands. That’s the main appeal of a Settlers game anyway.

However, for now it looks like I’ll mostly be sticking to Unreal Tournament 3, because the CTF Hosted Cup has started this week. While my clan DooZer doesn’t have any matches this week, we do have a match for ladder supremacy lined up for tomorrow and it can’t hurt to practice a bit, seeing as we’re in the 1st division up against some of the best clans in the scene. So for now I guess Supreme Commander and The Settlers 6 will have to be put on the backburner, alongside all those other games from 2007 (and before). Oh boy, I have a lot of catching up to do…

PS: Yay, I’m actively blogging again! And yes, you’ll be seeing a “best of 2007″-ish post soon enough, but it probably won’t be anything like you’ve seen on other blogs/sites

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