Forget candy; celebrate Halloween by taking to the post-apocalyptic streets of London and violently plowing through hordes of demons in Flagship’s PC action RPG. Billed as the spiritual successor to the Diablo franchise, Hellgate: London includes randomly generated levels, tons of prefix/suffix-modified items, and six playable classes with unique skill trees. Despite being entirely instanced, Hellgate: London also features a subscription model that has been the source of much criticism. For $9.95 a month subscribers gain access to additional characters slots, a hardcore mode, and all future content updates. Non-subscribers can play the entire game in both online and offline modes and can play alongside subscribers, but are unable to benefit from any post-release content.

Before getting caught up in the subscription controversy, however, be sure to check out the Hellgate: London demo. Consider it a Halloween treat.

Detailed impressions from my time in the beta after the jump.

More …

Remember when retailers breaking Mortal Kombat’s “Mortal Monday” release date was big news? These days, it seems like a major game release doesn’t go by without someone breaking the street date. Case in point: according to Gameeater, an unnamed video game store in Westminster, Colorado has (and by now, “had”) four copies of the Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty 4 available for purchase. Meanwhile, user adams828 has posted screenshots from his Playstation 3 copy of the first-person shooter over at the AVS Forum.

When a retailer breaks a release date, they are forced to pay fines to the game’s distributor, if they get caught, of course. These fines are usually extremely high, as the distributor charges the retailer for each copy sold before the official release date. For example, when Target broke the Nintendo DS Lite release date, Nintendo fined them $10,000 per unit sold early, according to unofficial sources. Despite the detrimental effects on some poor retailer’s pocket books, however, many stores often respond to a broken release date by breaking the date themselves, not wanting to lose potential game sales to the competition. So, start calling local stores to see if they’re selling their copies of Call of Duty 4 yet. At the very worst, all they can say is no.

Big news from the Smash Bros. DOJO!! this morning: Super Smash Bros. Brawl will include a full-featured level editor, allowing you to build your own Smash Bros. stage from scratch. Brawl now officially has too many features; no other game will be able to compete. You can select from a host of pre-built components and enlarge, shrink, and rotate them as needed to build your own perfect custom stage. You can even use any of the background music you’ve unlocked to lend your masterpiece the perfect atmosphere for frantically bashing Nintendo mascots.

Best of all, you’ll be able to use the Wii’s Wi-Fi capabilities to share your custom levels with your friends, so long as they’re registered as both a Wii Friend and a Smash Friend, that is. You can even submit your stages to Nintendo who will select a level daily and make it available for everyone to download.

That sound you hear? That’s the collective social life of an entire gaming generation suddenly dying.

Dylan Jobe, game director of Warhawk, has opened the floodgates on new information concerning upcoming Warhawk patches at Playstation.Blog. Patch 1.1 and 1.2 will hit at the end of October and mid-December, respectively, and include a host of bug fixes, server stability improvements, and new map layouts. Most importantly, with these new patches Sony is letting the Arbiters loose on the community. Judge Dredd-like super moderators, these Arbiters “protect the community and preserve the legitimacy of the worldwide leader boards” with the power to issue warnings and permanent bans. They will join games and play alongside other players, and their PSN names will remain a closely guarded secret.

It’s nice to see a developer taking such a strong stance against online cheaters. Dylan admits cheaters and stat padders are a minority in the Warhawk community, but he doesn’t want to see a few bad apples ruining the whole bunch. MMOs have used Game Masters for years, moderating player behavior and punishing players that degrade the experience for others. Seeing this same sort of tactic applied to an online shooter is a step in the right direction, and hopefully something we’ll see more of from other developers in the future.

Splash Damage is happy. Quake Wars has received glowing reviews from publications and websites, and it should of. It’s a solid piece of FPS design in a season where there seems to be a lot of that going around.

Still, more was needed and they have obliged with the first patch/fix/update/insert favorite term here. The full round up is here, but for those who simply want to get back into shooting random people over the Internet, here’s the basic rundown:

-Full voice chat
-Game Balancing
-Ability to save passwords
-Log maintained of messaging
-Bugs fixed… lots of bugs

While nice, it’s becoming an irritation to consistently find developers hinging on patches to fix things. Seriously, save passwords? Why wasn’t this in the full store bought game?

With Halo 3, Bungie has ensured every Halo fan will be sufficiently entertained for the remainder of the hardware generation. Sure, there’s a single player campaign with variable difficulty, a full featured multiplayer mode, and plenty of achievements to hunt, but the ingenious Saved Film feature will keep us all playing Halo 3 until, well… forever. And when we’re not playing Halo 3, we’ll be looking at Halo 3 pictures and watching Halo 3 movies online.

The game’s physics alone will yield a wealth of crazy content. Take this video for example, and be sure to keep a close eye on the SPANKR missile:

And to think, Bungie’s simple decision to take a standard RTS replay feature and apply it to a wildly popular FPS was almost lost during development. Bungie.net lead web developer, Chris Gossett, overheard someone (presumably higher up the economic food chain) say “no one will use screen shots, cut it.” Something tells me every major FPS release for the next few years will include something similar to Halo 3’s Saved Films. Even Super Smash Bros. Brawl will include the ability to save and share replays up to three minutes long.

Chances are you’ve never heard of RF Online. Codemasters released the South Korean-developed MMORPG over a year ago, but it never quite found an audience outside of its homeland. Perhaps that’s why Codemasters has opted to rerelease the title as a completely free download with no monthly fee. That’s right, RF Online is now entirely free to play.

Set in an anime-inspired, sci-fi universe, RF Online is a solid, if fairly standard, MMORPG with a strong focus on large scale player versus player combat. I spent some time with the game around its release, but found it much too grind-heavy for my tastes. Still, those looking for a decent MMO experience should walk away pleasantly impressed by RF Online. You certainly can’t beat the price.

Detailed impressions after the jump.

More …

We are getting prepared to launch some very cool and helpful tools very soon here at MPG but first I wanted to share some cool utilities.

Have a gaming blog?
Get the latest MultiplayerGames.com content in your sidebar with our new widget from Widgetbox:

Want to subscribe to this blog and have updates come into your inbox? Sign up for email updates (all articles sent in one simple email)

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

You can also subscribe to the MultiplayerGames.com Feed - just click below and add us to your favorite reader:

Subscribe in a reader

To see the rest of the 20+ options check out the rest of this article below
More …

By gamereviewgod

EA’s Head of International Publishing Gerhard Florin stated in an interview with BBC that “We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible.”

Ironic coming from someone inside a company founded by Trip Hawkins, the same man who tried this back in the early/mid ‘90s. Hawkins was the mind behind the 3DO, a console with standardized hardware which any manufacturer could take and make their own version. Ahead of its time, the system failed due to its absurdly high price.

Stranger still, EA makes a ton off of multi platform releases. Madden appears on the PSP, DS, PS3, 360, mobile phones, PS2, Wii, Xbox, and PC. That’s a lot of consumers, though admittedly a lot of coding too. Think of Madden on a single platform, unified online multi-player, and everyone on equal ground. Interesting concept, but the market doesn’t see to have any problem handling itself now, and EA is doing a fine job or reaping profits off the current model.

That said, imagine a world where fanboys argue over which model of this standardized hardware is the best as opposed to the Sony vs. Microsoft vs. Nintendo conflict we have now.

BlackSite: Area 51, Midway’s impressive FPS based on the classic lightgun arcade game, has suffered from some unfortunate multiplayer content cuts, according to a recent IGN preview. While all versions of the game will no longer support the much-hyped online co-op, these cuts have hit the PS3 the hardest. Xbox 360 owners will still be able to play either ranked or unranked matches, as well as utilize a proximity-based voice chat feature allowing members of the opposing team to overhear confidential tactics, but PS3 players are out of luck. At this point, there’s still a slim possibility the PC version may escape unharmed, but I wouldn’t hold out too much hope.

At least the game’s Unreal 3 engine-powered single player campaign still looks fantastic, and standard multiplayer modes like Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, as well as new multiplayer game types like Abduction remain intact. With less than three weeks before BlackSite’s November 12 release, hopefully no more features are left on the cutting room floor. The game will need every advantage it can get in a holiday season saturated with excellent FPS offerings.

Normally, I would avoid writing articles about such similar topics so often, but I cannot resist this time. Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix is an awesome game. The multiplayer on PC has been unmatched by other shooter games. This game has brought endless hours of addiction on, even while newer games continue to be released.

My love for this game may have come from circumstance. Besides jumping on a few friends’ computers a couple times, I didn’t really play SOFII until the price drops. With my impeccable shopping skills, I became proud owner of this game for around $20. Man, did I get my money’s worth.

More …

Back in the days when dinosaurs wandered the Earth and kids walked to school in 20 feet of snow, 16 miles at a time, there was a thing called mail. No, not e-mail. Actual physical mail. See, people wrote stuff on paper and you could send it to each other.

Some people used this ancient method to play chess. They would send letters detailing their moves, and the opposing player would make the move on an actual board in their home. Weird, huh?

Now, every portion of that method to play chess is obsolete, much like that “mail.” thing. Online at Ajaxplay, it’s even free with no stamps needed. Once you’re registered, you’re free to play as many games are you want at once.