Archive for Gaming

Halo 3 beta is out!

Err… well its on its way… slowly. Today anyone who owned a specialty marked copy of Crackdown for the 360 was treated to access to download the Halo 3 beta and play though mid June. The launch time was set for 5am PST, and so well hyped Bungie had a counter running for the last few weeks on their website counting down to the very moment… and when that moment arrived….. Xbox Live dropped the ball. The little button wouldnt light up and let you DL the beta. I dont blame Bungie in the least, for starters, cause I know some people there and Im biased, but mostly because lets face it.. Bungie gives the Ops engineers at XBL code and say “here you go” and its up to them to deploy it right.

What was really annoying though was that it took them around 7 hours to find out what was wrong, and durring that time not a single update was given. Bungie made efforts to show they were trying to keep tabs on the situation for us all, but when they had nothign to share, it really didnt help. Finaly around 7pm they announced the problem was tracked down and that it would be fixed in about 3-56hours.

Naturally at the 2 hour point, I was logging back in once an hour looking to see if it was enabled. Finaly around 11 (right at the 6 hour mark) I logged in and WHAM I can download the 900 and some odd meg update… WEEE i was happy.. and now im sad…. 20 mintues later im at 2%.  Makes sense really….. 50 thousand some odd people are trying to download this rigth now, and knowing MS they dont have the server capacity to handle it.

Thats ok, tomorrow I can rock it and alls well. I cant wait though, I might have to go into the office a wee bit late, hehe. Soon I will be ajoy in haoley goodness… planning keggers and going to frat parties… studying for my finals with the guys and shopping for a jeep…

(for those that totaly dont get the reference, click the link, if your still lost as to why this 27 year old is making those references… well… I give up..)

PlayLinc 2.0 beta is LIVE

We did it!! PlayLinc 2.0 web has gone LIVE in beta. Months of work since the holidays have paid off. Its still lacking a lot of features that are still in development, but they are coming. We have a long way to go, but we just passed our biggest milestone of them all, and its awesome.

If you want in on the invite to the beta, its easy, just let me know and I will send you an invite key. Im running the program, so its pretty easy for me to come up with them when needed, I just make new ones ;) hehe. Seriously though, let me know and I’ll hook you up. This new 2.0 version is fully web based, and a working model of what will soon be embedded into live sites. For example, say we partner up with Lanwar.com and I log into there using my [lw]Sargonas[GumiBear] user name. At the same time, I will automaticaly be logged into playlinc in the background under the name ‘[LW]Sargonas[Gummibear]@lanwar.com’. If this aim name does not exist, it will automaticaly be created the first time on the fly for me. Then a skinned version of what the web 2.0 is will be meshed into the site, or in a seperate popup window, or in one of a plethora of other possible ways, its all up to the desires of the site owner and our design team. A way to bring all of the gaming communities together into one, it will be glorious… lol

Eat your heart out xfire. Everything you do we can do now, and we have 3 times that number of things on the boards to add… and some are already in place (like free dedicated servers to run some of the top 15 games).

The future of online gaming and online social networking is about to collide like never before, and I am a key architect in it…. its overwhelmingly awesome, truly.

On a side note, I hooked up the admin for mygamercard.net with a beta key… and lo and behold, I’m now listed on their “celebrity” leader board of 260 or so gaming industry celebs… hehe, rawk on. Phear my xbox live gamercard!!!

Back to the 360

Now that we have a nice big widescreen HDTV at the house (52 inches of such, to be exact) I’ve gone hard core back into the 360 gaming, and loving it. The PC can wait for now, I have achievements to unlock :)

Most of my time this past week was spent on Guitar Hero II. I have completed the game with 5 stars on Easy and Medium, working on Hard now… and some day… maybe just some day… I’ll be good enough to say I’ve done the same on Expert.

Outside of that a lot of time has been spent on Oblivion, another realm im working in. I played a decent chunk of the game on PC a year ago, but really wanted to get back into it and decided if I was going to replay the whole thing, I may as well earn achievement points for it!! Ive done a 300 point gain since around 2 weeks ago, sounds good to me eh?

On a side note related to the 360…. watch out for Timeshift and Frontlines: Fuel of War. I know the Producer of the first and the Netadmin / Head of QA for the second very well, and have gotten to really know the games and I think they are really gona rock things hardcore… check em out.