Xbox 360 update – friends and themes

Major Nelson has another behind the scenes look at the upcoming spring (fall for the people in that other hemisphere) update to the Xbox 360 dashboard.  This version includes a stack of screenshots that showcase the themes and friends systems and how they work.

Microsoft’s Gamerscoreblog has an article with commentary of each screenshot that you can read here.  You can alternatively view all of the screenshots at Flickr here.

Director of 300 working with EA

Zack Snyder the director of the movie 300 (yep, the movie all of those "This is Sparta" images are from) has signed a deal with EA to work on 3 game titles for them.  This follows on from Steven Spielberg’s foray into games as well with EA.

Looking into what Synder has been involved with in the past doesn’t really give a really clear indication as to the type of games we could expect.  But given that he’s worked on 300 and Dawn of the Dead, you could take a stab in the dark and assume that its probably going to be something in the action/shooter type genre.  Joystiq has more on this here.

Mods coming to a Steam content server near you

 Valve have announced that this week some of the more established mods will be making their way to their Steam distribution platform.  The first 5 cabs off the rank are Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic.

This means that rather than having to stuff around with downloading zip files or exes of these mods, they will be automatically installed and kept up-to-date through Steam.  Good to see Valve as one of the few developers that really do support the game modding community.  I mean everyone should remember that Counter-Strike started off as a community mod made for Half-Life and the same with Day of Defeat.

So hopefully this content should be showing up on the our very own 3FL steam content servers as well.

Left 4 Dead – system reqs revealed

It must be the day for it, with CoD: World at War having its PC specs revealed earlier today and now its Left 4 Dead’s turn.  A post on the Halflife2.net forums has revealed the system requirements for the upcoming zombie slaying game Left 4 Dead from Valve.

# OS: Windows Vista, XP or 2000
# CPU: 3.0 GHz P4, Dual Core 2.0 or AMD64X2 (or higher)
# RAM: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
# DISC DRIVE: DVD-ROM Drive
# HARD DRIVE: At least 7.5 GB of free space
# VIDEO: Direct X 9 compatible video card (Video card must be 256 MB or more and should be a DirectX 9-compatible with support for pixel shader 2.0)
# SOUND: Direct X9.0c compatible sound card

So that should be good news for the gamers out there who don’t upgrade their computers every 12 months.  Left 4 Dead is out on the 18th of November for the PC and Xbox 36o, but there hasn’t been any further news on whether EA’s interest in bringing it to the PS3 will materialise as we previously reported here.  Hopefully one thing that will materialise before then will be the demo we previously mentioned.

Wrath of the Lich King – DVD only

Wowinsider has news that Blizzard have confirmed that their upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft – Wrath of the Lich King – will only be available at retail on DVD.  To me, I don’t see a problem with this and to be honest having still not pre-ordered Wrath, I am glad that I’ll be able to just pre-order the normal version and get it on DVD (I was contemplating shelling out for the Collector’s Edition simply to get it on DVD).

As anyone who has installed WoW before will know, its quite a slow game to install and having to swap CDs is a rather annoying part of the installation.  With it on DVD, this means that you can go watch TV for 10-15 mins or something whilst you’re waiting for it to install rather than waiting to change discs.

For those wondering what this Wrath thing is all about, you can check out the trailer here in our downloads section.

Call of Duty: World at War system specs revealed

Treyarch has revealed the system requirements that PC gamers will need to play the upcoming Call of Duty: World at War.  They are as follows:

Processor: AMD 64 3200+/Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz or better
Memory: 8 GB free hard-drive space, 512MB RAM (XP)/1GB RAM (Vista)
Graphics: Shader 3.0 or better, 256MB Nvidia GeForce 6600GT/ATI Radeon 1600XT or better

The game will be out on November the 11th for PC, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and even the Nintendo DS.  Which basically means no matter what gaming platform you’ve got, you’ll be able to play World at War.  For those that want a bit of a sneak peak at the game, you can check out some of the videos we have for the game in our downloads section here.

Atlantica Online – open beta underway

Atlantica Online by Ndoorgames is a turn based fantasy styled MMORPG that has just gone into open beta.  So if you’re after something a bit different or just want to have a go at a free game in beta, then we’ve got the beta client available locally for you.

The beta client comes in 2 parts, part 1 enters the ring at 1.32Gb which you can get from here and part 2 weighs in at 763Mb and can be grabbed from here.  Details on how to install from the 2 parts can be found by visiting the following page here on the official web site.  Further details of how to participate can be found at the official web site.

Props to Ray88 on our forums for the heads up.

Gears of War 2: “Delta Blues”

 In the third part in the series, Epic Games have released another behind-the-scenes short documentary showing aspects of the upcoming 360 shooter Gears of War 2.  The episode is titled "Delta Blues" and looks at the characters within the new edition.

How well do you know your comrades? In “Delta Blues,” the latest installment of our behind-the-scenes video documentary series, the crew at Epic digs deep into the cast of characters who make up Delta Squad and gives the lowdown on some of the new faces in Gears 2.

We have this episode mirrored for you locally once again in 720p format, it weighs in at 275Mb and can be downloaded from here.  If you missed the previous episodes, see our previous posts about "Touch the Sound" here and "Every Gun has a Story" here.

Medal of Honor 10th anniversary pack

Never let the facts get in the way of Christmas sales.  That must be EA's motto with its release of a special 10th Anniversary pack for the Medal of Honor series a year before its the actual 10 year anniversary for the series (the first one was released in 1999).

The pack will be including Allied Assault, Spearhead, Breakthrough, Pacific Assault and Airborne.  It is available in the US now, but a release date for the rest of the world isn't available yet.

Via:  Kotaku

Halo MMO – the game that never was

 Following the closure of Ensemble Studios by Microsoft, it has been revealed that an unnamed project that they were also working on that ended up being cancelled most probably late last year was going to be an MMO based on the flagship Halo series of games.  Gamasutra has news that even though the game was cancelled part way through Ensemble, that it doesn't mean that another studio won't create a Halo MMO at some point in the future.

They note that Microsoft have already stated that they have more than 1 development teams working on Halo franchise related games at the moment, including games that I'm sure they haven't announced as yet.  There is a collection of concept art and test screenshots from Ensemble showing some of the ideas they were working on for the Halo MMO on Flickr here.