InstantAction.com is the name of a browser-based gaming service set to launch some time in 2008. Initial impressions seemed to point to a mostly casual gamer site that tries to combined services like Steam with sites like Youtube. Not particularly interesting for the ‘hardcore’ PC gamer.

That all changed yesterday with a newspost up over at Shacknews, which features a video and snapshots demonstrating a Tribes-like game, in development at GarageGames, for the browser-based InstantAction service. According to comments from one of the developers on the project this is leaked footage featuring their current alpha build, which has only been in production for a mere 3 months. In fact, it only hit alpha status last Thursday!

More inside.

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You may have been wondering why there still hasn’t been a review of The Witcher on this blog. Truth be told, I haven’t actually played it much since the release of Unreal Tournament 3 and my EVE Online account reactivation. Aside from that, I have been waiting for CDProjekt to release it’s next patch, which promised to solve the notoriously long loading times and occasional crashes. As of last Thursday this 1.2 patch has been released - and has proven to be a welcome surprise well beyond anything anyone could have expected.

Random crashes are essentially gone, as are a couple of minor bugs. These are of course only minor issues - and not particularly worth noting (or at least, not worth writing a blog post about). The real reason why everyone has been waiting for this patch is in the promised loading time improvements. And these certainly do not disappoint. I loaded up a later game and started moving into and out of houses in the most demanding area of the entire game. This highly demanding area used to take 30-35 seconds to load. Now it takes 5-8 seconds! Needless to say houses are nearly instant loads and there’s absolutely no way anyone is going to get fed up with these loading screens anymore.

So let it be known that on Thursday the 20th of December, any and all The Witcher reviews containing complaints and deducting points over loading times and/or crashes - instantly turned into trash. You can download this godly patch here.

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As expected the Unreal Tournament 3 modding community has already launched a variety of promising projects, of which the first few can already be downloaded and played online! Most notable amongst these is the oldschool favorite gametype of ‘Invasion’, of which a team of modders had made a UT3 v1.1 compatible alpha release. You can find this modification here. This mod is receiving constant updates, as is evident by the fact that the most recent release dates to… yesterday.

Meanwhile another, more imaginative, team of modders has actually managed to design and code a full-scale new mod project in the month since release. Fleet Wars, as it’s called, introduces various gamemodes in which you can launch your space fighter and shoot down your mates in intense space combat. Unreal Tournament 3 owners can already enjoy this mod’s version 0.1 alpha release as of two days ago.

More mod news further in!

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The unbelievable has happened! That’s right: Epic has released a beta version of it’s Linux Dedicated Server tools for Unreal Tournament 3! The first hundred-or-so linux dedicated servers have already been spotted online, so be on the lookout for those proper low pinging servers! Hopefully this release will help some server admins, and players, make the jump to UT3.

If you don’t quite understand the advantages of Linux Dedicated servers over Windows Dedicated servers; it’s simple really. Linux Dedicated servers tend to be more efficient, running the same games with lower pings for players and at lower bandwith costs for server hosts. Aside from the obviously improved pings these servers bring, another advantage is that linux dedicated servers tend to be priced lower. This means clans should soon be able to rent their first low-pinging linux servers for UT3 - and get that clan scene going!

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So what’s the big deal about these games? Apparently Crysis, which was released on November 13th (not a friday), ‘only’ sold 86,000 copies in the month of November, in the United States. Meanwhile Unreal Tournament 3, released on November 19th, sold ‘only’ 34,000 copies. Gaming sites are citing these as pitiful numbers for long-awaited PC games, but are they really all that bad? Let’s take a look, shall we?

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