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The Slowdown

A blog by vrap in General

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A blog for those who spend more time thinking about gaming than gaming

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Entries in this blog

List of Games That No Longer Run on AMD Phenom

Note: I do have just enough self-awareness to file this story under our historical category, Time Machine. There is a tiny, though increasing, category of PC platform video game ports: Games that no longer run on AMD’s Phenom AM2/3 CPUs. There is a simple reason why, shared by all these games: They have been programmed to require CPU support for Intel’s SSE 4 (“Streaming SIMD Extensions 4”) instruction set, version 4.1 or higher. The Phenom CPUs, however, only support SSE up to 4.0. This is
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Jim, Yes Means No

Almost exactly two years ago in 2008, on April the 22nd, the recovering Interplay had just sent out a press release announcing a new Earthworm Jim game to be developed in conjunction with an animated series and a feature film, with original author Douglas TenNapel working as a creative consultant on the game. Conversely, earlier in the same month, Interplay had just “reinitiated its in-house game development studio, and [was] hiring game developers,†and vouched to “leverage its portfolio
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Interview with The Whispered World Designer Marco Hüllen

Note: This is Day 3 of “The Whispered World Week” at The Slowdown. Check back for more tomorrow! Maro Hüllen, with Pet In today’s interview, we talk to the original designer and primary illustrator of The Whispered World, Marco Hüllen (on the right), in the hopes of shedding more light on the curiouser details of the development process of the game – especially, on details that are still left uncertain for non-German audiences. After all, German fans of the adventure game have had the priv
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The Road More Traveled: 5TH Cell?s Hybrid

Cowabunga! Washington-based Scribblenauts devs 5TH Cell probably could not have done a more complete 180 degrees in licensing Valve?s Source engine for their latest game, Hybrid. The just-announced game is unfortunately going to be released on the wrong platform ? that is, as an XBLA exclusive, at least for the time being: 5TH Cell is proud to announce Hybrid, a revolutionary new video game available in 2011 exclusively for Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). Hybrid is a pioneering third person shoote
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Isaac and the ?Grotesque Body Horrors?

In his PopMatters article ?Fearing God, Fearing the Body: The Theology of ‘The Binding of Isaac’?, G. Christopher Williams discusses various aspects of Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl?s ingenious (and mildly blasphemous) Zelda/Roguelike hybrid, The Binding of Isaac. Although his reading of the game astutely homes in on the “meatier” parts of Isaac – that is, the implications of the game?s loathsome representation of the corporeal -, I do nevertheless want to point out some omissions in William
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The Secret History of the Whispered World

Note: This is Day 2 of “The Whispered World Week” at The Slowdown. Check back for more tomorrow! Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles. –Charlie Chaplin Sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words. Other times, a video is worth these thousand words; once in a while, though, there comes a time when neither pictures, videos nor a thousand words can accurately portray a story. One such story, in more than one way, is that of The Whispered World, an apocalyptic f
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Bulletspeak

Together with EA and Epic Games, the Polish Painkiller developers People Can Fly are certainly doing their darndest to specifically target us connoisseurs with their latest Unreal Engine 3 game, Bulletstorm. How, exactly, you may ask? Glancing over older press releases (frantic, adrenaline fueled, immersive) for Painkiller, the lingo has been amped up several notches: Symphony, carnage, blockbuster, unadulterated, entertainment, arsenal, outrageously, unprecedented, frantic, yell-inducing, inci
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Interview with Epic Games? Jay Wilbur

Since its inception in 2008, the Dubai World Game Expo has been the annual showcase for game developers in the Middle East. In the last few years many western studios have taken an interest and have come to sponsor or give panels, including CryTech, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Epic Games. Epic had a large presence at DWGE 2010, showcasing their latest development tool, the Unreal Development Kit. Their booth featured a workshop with tutorials on the basics of the UDK, and repre
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No Deal for Dead Island

? supposedly created by the Glasgow-based animation studio Axis Animation ? has already been viewed far over 3 million times on Youtube, with an equal amount of tweets to go. Its popularity has, in turn, turned up quite a fair bit of misinformation that now surrounds the project. As things stand, a clarification to our earlier report is in order: Unlike previously reported, no movie deal for the game has yet to be made.In speaking to LA Times? 24 Frames, Koch Media representative Malte Wagener s
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Robots In This, Guys

Like a certain caped crusader up until very recently, the Transformers IP hasn’t had much luck in the gaming space, with generally mediocre attempts over the years despite the no-brainer concept. That could change, though, if the new game from High Moon Studios delivers on its potential. Transformers: War For Cybertron was announced at the end of last year with a teaser trailer, showing pre-rendered carnage taking place on Cybertron. Details were scant at the time; Game Informer had the exclus
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The Not-So Silver Lining

Lost at the Sea Fan games based on more or less commercially viable licenses have always faced the unenviable task of navigating the stormy, abbreviated seas of C&D and DMCA all the while keeping a low enough profile to avoid the aforementioned corporate shallows, at the same time maintaining a public enough face to attract necessary fan interest. Some projects, like Indiana Jones & The Fountain of Youth and AGDInteractive’s remakes have surprisingly managed to stay afloat; others,
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Eyeing E.Y.E.

E.Y.E. is a dystopian cyberpunk/sci-fi/fantasy “50% FPS, 50% RPG, 100% immersion†game from French bedroom developers Streum On Studios, who have, much like Natural Selection, Red Orchestra, Killing Floor and Nuclear Dawn, decided to undertake the long hard road from modification to full retail game on the Source engine. Halt. Enter The Metastreumonic Anarchist Conspiracy Movement website. Confused yet? I know I am. The only thing that’s absolutely clear is that E.Y.E., by all means,
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In Deep Shadows

Remember Boiling Point: Road to Hell? The ambitious, sprawling “high-maintenance†2005 PC FPS title that in many ways beat Far Cry 2 to the punch and was, erm, sternly chastised for being released in unfinished state, but ultimately got patched up with several then-massive patches and in the process became a minor cult hit among the PC shooter crowd. Despite the proven updates, the game nevertheless became a bit of a poster boy for bad launches. But did you know a sequel for the game exists
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It’s Not Too Late / To Spank It

First, Tim Schafer and Brütal Legend. Then, Ron Gilbert and DeathSpank. According to EA Partners, DeathSpank will be published via Xbox Live and PSN: EA Partners … and leading independent developer Hothead Games announced today an exclusive publishing agreement that will bring DeathSpank to Xbox LIVE® Arcade and PlayStation®Network in 2010. Does “exclusive†mean what I think it means? In that case, I suggest a solution: Spank you, Ron! Spank you very much. In the meant
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Portal 2 Official

Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season. Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007’s Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards Even if the game is now official, the Portal 2 ARG, nevertheless, is hardly over: In the press release above, the underlined letters form the word “drattmannh0nee”, which in turn can be used to lo
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Revolutionary Title, Devolutionary PR

Square Enix Ltd recently grabbed the trademark name “Deus Ex: Human Revolution†(008862153) for decidedly game-y purposes; should the forthcoming Deus Ex 3 be subtitled as such remains unconfirmed, though, but at the time of writing, that’s as close as it gets. The company has also started an underground advertising campaign for the game – one that might not reflect as well on the game’s profile as they might have hoped, for reasons that are rather out of the company’s hands: While Valv
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Next for Nexuiz

When it comes to deathmatch-oriented open source FPS games based on the multitudinous engine offspring of Quake (1-2-III), a plethora of choice exists: Warsow, Alien Arena, World of Padman and Trepidation to name but a few. Out of these, the highly-enhanced, DarkPlaces–based Nexuiz has always been a favourite of mine. This particular open source, GPL-licensed shooter was first released in 2005 and has since seen a vast amount of updates and improvements, including the addition of particle ef
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From New Reno to New Vegas

Thanks to Bethesda’s ingenious assessment of the gaming market in first pushing out the Oblivion-style Fallout 3 to an established player base (fans of the original are known to be a bit on the grumpy and sour side, for good reason too, and therefore harder to market to), it’s not at all difficult to get a strong double act vibe from the very latest screenshots of Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas. Taking on some geographical and narrative cues from the unreleased Van Buren project, the game se
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20th Anniversary NeoGeo Museum

SNK Playmore have put up a dedicated, if Engrish-ridden 20th anniversary website for their console, the “NeoGeo Museum,†ten years after the last NeoGeo console was shipped: Looking back 20 years ago to 1990, a video game company by the name of SNK teamed up with ALPHA DENSHI (ADK) to develop a video game console. That console was made for arcades, yet at the same time was completely compatible for home use. It was called the “NEOGEO,” meaning “new land,” and owns a significant chapter i
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Monkey Island 2: Special Edition

Below, LucasArts’ all-new Monkey Island 2: Special Edition key art, side by side with my Mac box cover for LeChuck’s Revenge: When I linked these to a friend, he instantaneously called the new art “’special.’†Yeah… yeah: Even the poor little monkey responsible for numbering the sequel got a visual keelh… uh, overhaul. If nothing else, contrasting the original with this all-new interpretation goes a long way in illustrating the amazing talents of the man behind the original cover, S
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Body of Work: Human Revolution Trailer

Like the original Deus Ex 3 teaser trailer, the latest Deus Ex: Human Revolution teaser chooses to toy with the concepts – humanism, transhumanism, mechanistic anatomy, corporeality – that fascinated the scientists and artists of the Renaissance: In the new trailer, the subliminal glimpses from before have now been rendered visible and brought to the fore: Not only is the scene of Rembrandt van Rijn’s “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp†replicated fully in the dream/nightmare sequence, t
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Sam, Max & The Devil Makes Three

Sam & Max, season three, “The Devil’s Playhouse.” First episode, “The Penal Zone,” April 15th. </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> Source
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Quote of the Day: Portal 2

[Chell’s suit] is not supposed to look like a sexy Marvel superhero suit. It’s supposed to look like it was designed without any thought of making her look attractive. We don’t want to make her be unattractive, but we want to balance that out. Chell is a test subject, so she should look like one. –Matt Charlesworth, concept artist, Valve </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> Source
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