By far the coolest thing you’ll see all day and, most likely, all week.

Back to the Future Delorean Crysis Mod [YouTube]

Yes, I decided it was finally time to give Zafehouse.com a brand new skin. It was coded in a day (phew) and uses WordPress as a CMS, and it seems to be working fine. I have a sneaking suspicion it breaks in older version of Internet Explorer, but I’ll get round to fixing that.

For now, Firefox and Chrome love it, and that suits me just great. Go take a look!

Zafehouse [Official site]

The global financial crisis continues to disembowel the Australian games development scene, with reports suggesting up to 60 employees have been cut from local stalwart Krome.

The cuts have been confirmed by Krome’s CEO Robert Walsh, in a statement to Australian Gamer:

These cuts, while incredibly difficult as they affect the co-workers we consider friends, are necessary as we position Krome for the future. We’re also actively pursuing several business opportunities which, if secured, will enable Krome to reemploy some of the staff given notice.

All three of Krome’s studios have been hit – its Brisbane presence lost 30 people, 16 are gone from Melbourne, and Adelaide is weaker by 14, according to comments on Tsumea, a networking and news site for Australian developers. If these numbers are accurate, the Adelaide studio took the brunt of the damage, relatively speaking – it’s original complement was just 36.

Krome’s titles include Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on Wii and a number of games in the Spyro series.

All the best to the employees affected. Many say the economy is well into recovery, but personally, I find it hard to see the truth of this given the current state of our industry.

The latest round of redundancies [Tsumea]
Krome Studios official statement [Australian Gamer]

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.

Recently I watched a pre-release video for the PC port of the expansion set to the Star Wars Force Unleashed re release; Ultimate Sith Addition *mouthful*. This video showcased a mission taking place on Hoth during the events of the Rebs vs. Emps skirmish circa Episode #5, over the course of the video were additionally showcased;

• Multicoloured sabre crystal customisation toggles.
• Adjusted and/or rebalanced attacks.
• An extremely extensive library of alternate player skins.

The skins library could even be altered live during play at any time the player wished to do a quick wardrobe change. Naturally due to this abundance of flexibility the demonstrator playing the game quickly jumped through the customisation menus to emerge with a picture perfect C3PO HD skin flaunting a hot pink light sabre.

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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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