BigPond, the ISP arm of telco Telstra, is closing the doors on its virtual island in Second Life. What’s a lot more interesting is that Second Life traffic (that is, downloads and uploads between players of the game and its servers) will now be flagged as metered usage for BigPond subscribers.

Unmetered usage is one of those big features you look for in an ISP. Internode, for example, has unmetered downloads to its gaming servers and site, so users can grag patches (which can be 100s of MB in size) and play Counter-Strike without it eating into monthly allowance.

According to a Telstra spokesperson, this should only affect 2000 of its clients; the regular players of the game. I’d be a bit angry if I’d signed up to BigPond just for the unmetered Second Life traffic, but I’d also be just as crazy for signing up to Telstra in the first place. It’s no mystery the ISP is a joke when it comes to pricing, and if you really, really love Second Life, I’d take this as an omen to hitch up with Internode, iiNet, or one of a dozen other much better providers.

BigPond pulls plug on Second Life [The Age]

Titillating gaming news I’ve come across in the last couple of days. Some old, some new – all pants-bulging!

Ikari Warriors Publisher Passes On [gamesindustry.biz]

After a lengthy battle with illness, businessman and civic leader Leland P. Cook Jr. passed away on Friday, November 6, 2009. He was 75. Gamers might find this significant as Cook was one of the founders of Tradewest, the now-defunct video game publisher that reached prominence in the mid-‘80s.

When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality [Chris' Survival Horror Quest]

This means that there is a correlation between game quality and sales which can be stated thusly: bad games do not sell. This does not mean that good games always sell, just that bad games cannot be saved by marketing. The data also suggests that the games that sell the most have to not only be really good, they also have to be marketed heavily. The conclusion is not that marketing is irrelevant, only that its powers are limited without the help of high quality game play.

The End of Hit Points [Trembling Hand]

While it stretches plausibility for an individual to take more than one hit from a mace (although Conan was known to shrug them off, to some degree), it is utterly suspension of disbelief-breaking to weather several hits from a phaser.

I don’t have anything super huge to divulge this update, but I can say that, after many requests, I’ve added outside movement to Zafehouse 2. This means instead of taking a turn to move from one edge of the map to the other, it’s looking closer to five or six turns, as you dodge between buildings and the inevitable (and darn hungry) undead.

Currently, you can only move to entrances and zombie “hotspots”, as I didn’t really see the need to position survivors outside in the middle of nowhere. If someone can give me a really (really) good reason why it should be any different, I’ll think about it.

Implementing outside movement required me to confront my fear of A* pathfinding and, while it was a tortuous and many times frustrating endeavour, my work paid off.

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The Shit Fight of the Day award goes to the ABC’s Good Game and its former host, Jeremy Ray, for hitting the front page of News.com.au over what could have been a quiet affair. Ray, who goes by the nickname Junglist, was recently replaced by Stephanie Bendixsen, an unknown in the worlds of journalism, TV and well, gaming in general. Turns out the whole thing was less than amicable, with Ray suggesting (okay, it was more accusing) the ABC of dumping him in exchange for, essentially, eye candy.

I’ve meet Junglist. Hell, I’ve meet him a few times. First when he interviewed me for a feature on MMOs in Season 2 of Good Game, and secondly when he and his co-host Steven “Bajo” O’Donnell hosted a ASUS-sponsored LAN at Atomic LIVE in 2007. He’s a great guy, very passionate about his craft and definitely heavily chop-laden when it comes to presenting. I can’t really comment on what he’s like to work with on a day-to-day basis, but I noticed nothing amiss when he grilled me about all things massively multi-player.

I should note this was around three years ago, maybe a little more.

While we’ll probably never know what happened in the depths of the ABC’s media bunker, we can try and put the pieces together.

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The headline says it all, really, but to get into the specifics – Steam has the price of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 set at US$59.99 for US customers, while the Oz version is at US$89.99.

Put simply, you’d have to be high or stupid to buy Modern Warfare 2 off Steam if you live in Australia.

While I was on Kotaku AU I reported a similar pricing disparity with Call of Duty 4. Before you get angry at Steam – don’t. This is Activision Blizzard’s way of playing nice with local retailers so, if you have angst (which you should), be sure to direct it at the publisher.

If you must have the game, buy it from Play-Asia.

Smart’s studio 3000AD has announced Galactic Command Online. Going by the feature list, GCO is essentially Smart’s last 100 games condensed into MMO form.

You can’t argue his style of game is ripe for an MMO treatment, though the man himself is reluctant to place Galactic Command Online in the same genre as the likes of World of Warcraft. In his words: “…The game isn’t really an MMO in that sense of the word (it’s not more an MMO than APB, Global Agenda, Crimecraft etc) but unfortunately thats the terminology the industry seems to have stuck with – as are we”.

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The GDAA has posted a program for this year’s Game Connect Asia Pacific, and the lineup isn’t half bad.

Tim Stellmach of Vicarious Visions and Eat, Sleep, Play’s David Jaffe headline the conference, while the sidelines (depending on your priorities) contain Farbs of Captain Forever fame, Screenplay’s Jason Hill and fast-talking, British-tinged game critic, Yahtzee.

A PDF of the program is available at the GCAP website. So, if your interests are tickled pink or some other fleshy colour by these names, get a-clickin’.

Press release after the fold.

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EA’s decided to mix chunks of Mythic and Bioware to create a new group to handle the publisher’s RPG and MMO projects, with Bioware’s Ray Muzyka manning the helm. No doubt Bioware’s Star Wars MMO was a catalyst for the move.
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Totally did not see this coming. ZeniMax, owner of Oblivion developer Bethesda Softworks, has picked up id Software. I’m used to id being independent and publishing via Activision, so this change will take time to sink in. At least for me.
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