Modern Warfare 3 had its premiere yesterday.

Is another sequel to the legendary Call of Duty series good enough to satisfy the expectations?

Well... in Poland we would call the situation - a reheated cutlet.

The game is good in itself, its fun, it looks good, its playable and so on. But to be honest, the way I see it? Its just a glorified map pack for the MW2 - with new campaign.

Multiplayer is still good, this time they finally reintroduced server support - a big shame that its well hidden option, and the servers are unranked - it will always be beyond my comprehension why a company that has multimillion budget for this series, earns shitload on console versions, doesn't want to spare couple of hundred thousand dollars to optimize the multiplayer for PC. All they need to do to have a perfect multiplayer game - is to copy what they already had in first Modern Warfare :(

Anyway - if you ignore all the bullshit, and have a good internet connection, you will have a lots of fun on the silly IWnet matchmaking system.

So should you buy it? Well... i think so. It's a solid, fun multiplayer experience, with relaxing, mindless shoot-em-up campaign.

If you're into something more elaborate - stick to BF3 (Ill write up few words about it later)

(re)Introduction

Wow... its like 1,5 year since I last posted here.

Recently my friend started a blog about his 1 year (riiight....) trip to Ukraine so in the heat of the moment I thought - what the hell, let's reactivate treadle union and post something from time to time.

Much has changed over those months - I'm no longer an active member of Aszune community - it died of natural causes some time ago.

I play a bit of Starcraft 2 with my another friend in a 2v2 team - and I suck miserably at it currently :)

Also - I'm total addict of Minecraft. Love you Notch.

My latest hypes in gaming? shitload of quality games released recently (Battlefield 3, Arkham City, Take On Helicopters and rushed but a diamond in the making - Sword of the Stars 2) and those to be released in upcoming weeks (Minecraft retail, Skyrim, MW3, SW:TOR)

Pretty much that is about it when it comes to re-introduction - Ill pop in with a proper update soon.

GLaDOS rebooting ?

 

Valve launched today what i consider to be one of the most successful virals lately. The speculation is that it's about either Portal 2 or Episode 3, my money is on Episode 3 that will feature elements of Portal. All in all it's probably the same world.



Anyway - what is it all about ? Well yesterday Valve released a ninja patch to the Portal gamer for Steam users that had only one line in the patch notes :


"Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations"



Curious stuff right ? It gets MUCH better as we go on. After starting up portal you can now find 26 radio receivers scattered all around game world, each of them receiving a part of encoded transmission consisting of beeps, tones, muttered words and static.


The community jumped in and started to decrypt shit. First and easiest thing was to get the Morse code translated. The solution reveled some kind of system startup messages. Then some radio enthusiast noticed that the tones and beeps in the sound files resemble what is called  SSTV transmission.

The images reveal series of keys on a keyboard and blacked out BBS addresses and other weird shit. And guess what ? After some trials and errors people ACTUALLY MANAGED to modem themselves onto a real working BBS.

Another obstacle poped out here - the login and password - but thanks to the clue in welcome message of the server it was quickly cracked as "backup/backup".

After succesfull login BBS starts to post a series of ASCI art images showing some more weird stuff. And better version here.

Thats about it at the moment, but im sure theres more to that riddle, so stay tuned for updates.

People are looking into a theory that you could use the ASCII arts as some kind of command language to run something somewhere but i have absolutely no clue how and where and what...


Very impressive if you ask me.


Weird day for gaming... first the apocalyps3, then Activision Blizzard firing hey Infinity Ward figures and now this. Also supposedly the Chille earthquake moved the axis of the earth and now the days are shorter, says NASA.

PSN Fixed.

Either the magical date of 2nd march did it or Sony did a good job. Either way everything is working again.

Playstation 3 internal RTC faliure.

Tonight during date transition from 28th of February to 1st of March internal Real Time Clock of PS3 units other than 160GB, 250GB Slim, and one series of 80GB Fat, suffered a major failure resulting in a system failure.



Basically what happened is that the internal clock of your PS3 thought its a leap year and tried to set the date to 29th of March 2010. This caused something like a mini-millennium bug and hell broke loose.


The affected consoles are reported to be unable to connect to Playstation Network. In addition the savegames and trophies seem to have been wiped, the access to a trophy based games is blocked even in offline mode, and any DRM based content you might have is also blocked at the moment.


How bad it really is should be known at about midnight tonight as the 1st/2nd of March transition might fix the problem by itself. If it does not there is a possibility of a real hardware failure where opening the console might be required.



Officially sony claims to have a fix ready in the following 24 hours, which as i see it is buying time to see what happens tonight.


For those of you technically enabled there's a fix that seems to be working as we speak and requires manual reset of the RTC clock. If at this point you have no clue please just wait. If you know how on the other hand - take the battery out for 10-15 minutes et. voila!

Starcraft 2 Beta launch and crazy developers.

 

As mentioned in the topic - the beta of Starcraft 2 is underway. The rumors were absolutely true. We are dealing with absolutely closed thing here with tense NDA restrictions, nevertheless there are info leaks all over internets. For the luckiest peeps within gaming scene Blizzard prapared full multiplayer mode - with all 3 factions aviable on multiple maps, supporting up to 4 players in match at the moment. The replay recording is also in there. Supposedly there is also a skirmish option to play vs. AI.

Mail services providers are probably having a bad time now as most of the internet population is refreshing their mailboxes like mad, in hopes of getting that highly anticipated beta invitation from Blizzard.

 As usual when Blizzard betas are launched there is a signifficant increase of scam attempts. Double your defenses everyone and carefully verify any email with invitation you might recieve. And for the love of god - if you still haven't - get the Blizzard authenticator token/mobile app!

Some crazy stuff is going on since the begining of the year 2010 - game developers are literally THROWING quality games at players, leaving myself with a growing number of games that i want to play as soon as i finish the one im working on at the moment.

Tomorrow Heavy Rain hits the store shelves and that is probably going to be my main highlight in the upcoming weeks. Since im having one more night left ill spend it on getting further into Bioshock 2, hopefully ill be able to get far enough to have a proper opinion on the game. The Aliens vs. Predator is waiting next in line - i've been hearing all kind of bad and good stuff about it. Its to controversial to be ignored... Let's just hope ill be able to finish the Heavy Rain before Bad Company 2 ships - as this will seriously block me for playing anything else for copule weeks.....unlesss i'll get into the Starcraft 2 beta somehow!

Starcraft 2 beta before the end of February.

 

Blizzard's CEO Mike Morhaim confirmed the rumors of Starcraft 2 beta going live this month, with release of the retail aimed for mid-summer 2010.


Good news indeed :) The beta is planned as a global, meaning that all regions will get it simultaneously, and will include the multiplayer mode of the most anticipated RTS game in history.


Not open thou, so register your games on your region's battlenet account and apply to take part. Hopefully for people that will not get into the game, the good old ripping community will release the cracked beta for the larger public not long after its given out of the Blizzard's development studio.


Be VERY CAREFUL in the account security department in upcoming weeks as information's of this kind usually spawn numerous phishing attempts. And get the goddamn authenticator for your WOW account. Its available for 50 cents on 95% of all mobile phones! If you're unlucky 5% just get the  token - its 7 Euro now with free shipping.


You get the core-hound pup pet no matter which option you choose.