With the end of March upon us, we make the translation from crazy game release period to crazy game announcement period. A few bits and bobs were revealed at GDC this week, but we’ll start seeing the real juicy stuff in the next 2-3 months, particularly with the apparently re-energised E3 happening in June. I think this year we’re going to see a lot more games released during the American summer time – the current release schedule already has Ghostbusters, InFamous, and The Sims 3 are already lined up for the first month. Is possible that gaming sales could top the summer box office?

This week The Warp Pipe will share a bunch of random thoughts and observations on material vaguely related to video games.

Read full article by Matt Keller

Sadly that didn't happen. My bro's still playing Deus Ex (esp with the Nameless mod's release).

One thing I do like about the current game releases is that there's a bit more emphasis on co-op (something I always wish they did for Deus Ex).


Pity Sega aren't doing much to bring their old franchises back to life. Yeah, so they released a new Golden Axe game... but what idiot forgot to make it two player? Just didn't capture the magic of the original.

Not sure I follow this - isn't PAL/NTSC a moot point now with HD displays (720p/1080p) ? Granted we still run 50Hz instead of 60Hz, but it has never been an issue in the past - why is it a big deal now ?

Personally, I prefer PAL, it is superior to NTSC - greater resolution (576 vs 480), albeit slightly lower refresh rate (50Hz vs 60Hz).

It was more of an issue in the past - you are right that HD has pretty much renderred it moot, but everyone still supports those old PAL 50Hz only SD sets. The differences between PAL and NTSC prior to this generation pretty much formed the basis of why people would import consoles and games. It hasn't been too much of an issue with the Wii, but MadWorld and Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop both had kinda lousy conversions.

PAL is the better format (richer colour, 576 vertical lines versus 480, refresh rate closer to filming speed etc.), but since most games came from Japan and America, they'd be made for NTSC. When it'd come to making the PAL version, instead of playing to PAL's strengths, they'd basically slow the games by ~17% (from 60fps to 50fps, 30fps to 24fps) and fill the extra lines of resolution with large black bars.

This video illustrates the difference the best - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0llsb77Esc

Seriously ? Then I understand your point... seems like a really lazy way of doing the port. Why link game engine speed with output resolution ? I guess dropping 1 in every 6 frames would be just as bad...

Either way, now I understand where you are coming from... and also understand why I always used to think Megadrive games looked craptacular (only having seen the PAL demo displays). That Sonic comparison was painful.

I completely regret getting the Halo 3 Legendary edition, frankly I didn't even want it for the helmet, I wanted it for the extra DVD content, it should have been small, like small enough to fit in your hand, it was just plainly too big :/

I personally don't have a real issue with the length of games tbh, if a game gets too long it just gets tedious for me, 21hours of RE4 really started to grate before the half way point and it took me multiple tries to finish KOTOR, as good as it was it was just too long, I also had a multi month break from FF7 when I played it, 40 hours, sheesh, those are pretty much reasons why i'm hesitant of starting games like FF8, FO3, Oblivion etc

I hope by immersion you mean storyline depth and detail as opposed to graphics. Stupid word is so stupidly ambiguous that half the time I can't understand what the hell people mean when they use it. No offense to you or anyone, except the morons that invented the word in relation to game design.

Anyway Deus Ex's level of interactivity was mimicked by Mass Effect this is why the game is rather impressive, it does away with the ye-old KOTOR styled Good-Evil karma crap and instead gives us this really cool "express however the hell you feel like at the time" option, why more games aren't doing that is sad, instead they opt for the Fallout3 styled Karma system which really doesn't do that level of interactivity justice- despite how many people have compared Fallout 3 to Deus Ex- in terms of storyline Deus Ex is the superior at breaking from the good evil path- granted it could have gone much much further- such as to the level that TNM took it (having two entirely separate storylines that just happened to be in the same world.)

There are better ways to extend Non-linearity though, I'm thinking along the lines of Free-Forming mutations to the storyline- no game has tried this. By that I mean free-forming in the way of an event driven system-- similar to Deus Ex yes, but where the storyline mutates and thus alters the gameplay and content of the game- such as changing the world itself and giving the user true presence (often mistaken as Immersion) within this world.

No game has ever done this- Morrowind did come close I'll admit that simply because you could literally damage the world which was pretty cool, kill a plot important character and basically you've created anarchy, a good game designer would instead of creating anarchy build an entire story out of that similar to how Deus Ex did when killing X character (Paul being a MASSIVE alteration to the story)- TNM also used this idea but you can't live with what happened.

I totally agree, Deus Ex should've had way way way more attention than what today's developers gave it- Deus Ex was revolutionary in terms of storytelling in a video game.

Invisible War deserves some credit to, it was much more non-linear towards the end compared to the first game- however the change in style ruined it for nearly everyone and again with Deus Ex 3 it looks to be the same deal there- fans are rather pissed at the abandonment of TRUE Cyberpunk aesthetics yet again. It will be interesting to see what Eidos considers "Improvements" over Deus Ex 1, they've been hyping the game up and I suspect they'll fail... miserably because the team doesn't in my eyes seem to "GET" what worked in Deus Ex and Invisible War rather disregard the whole thing entirely- its very similar to what Bethesda did with Fallout 3- hence why that worries me.

I'm honestly hoping its not as "black & white" story wise as the magazines have been telling us that is it (they compared it to Karma claiming that people are too stupid to come up with their own ideas of Good and Evil.- this was said by PCPowerPlay .)

I'll be interested to see how it goes.

green hill melody is so much more chilled out.

so there was no good/evil system in Mass Effect? you were always good but you could be a d!ckhead without being bad? like essentially be nice to people you like but be a complete a$$ to people you don't? that's mad! I really wanted to do that in KOTOR T_T I always choose the 'good' option, sometimes I wanna choose the bad option cuz that's what I was feeling towards a character I hate but I don't wanna kill em or get 'evil' points so I go the good option anyway

and what's TNM?

In Mass Effect the "good and evil" are "Paragon and Renegade" - you can gain points in each without (as far as I can tell, (I'm not very far in)) affecting the main-plot arc too much - but each side quest / planet you travel to is in pretty much its own little "chapter" that exists outside of the main plot arc (except for a few missions that are, obviously related to the plot).

TNM is The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex, I know majority of the characters in the game in the forums that the game is based on- having worked with OTP for the past 6 years. http://www.tnm.offtopicproductions.com its also in the File Database if you search for Deus Ex mods. Also be sure to get HDTP with it New Vision was also recently released and once I get confirmation that it works I'll be submitting it to the file database too

TNM is non-linear to the degree of needing mutliple storylines that also branch non-linearly. You can practically kill every character in the game which is also a plus- and the story caters for that and changes accordingly in some cases. (such as killing the lead bad guy right at the start of the game.. Highly recommended)



Yep In Mass Effect I was a Paragon, Good upstanding guy who held up the citadel's will... However, I wasn't exactly nice about it It got things done and the citadel council loved me for it... but I was a total asshole to them sort of an Anti-hero really. I loved that about Mass Effect.



not really, Paragon isn't necessarily "Good" nor is Renegade "Evil", rather different ways of getting the job done- Paragon being the "Professional Military" way of doing things, the Renegade being the "Quick and to the point" way of doing things- often resulting in many "I haven't got all day" lines.

You can be a total dick, kill a lot of innocent people and still be a good guy- or you can be a opportunist. It just determines who you're really working for, do you work for the Council or do you work for the Alliance? that IMO is what made it great because neither was a good or bad side- rather opportunistic sides vying for power- this is what Deus Ex did and this is what Mass Effect took to the next level.



Which IMO was the weakest points of the game, in Mass Effect 2 I hope they have been better designed to rather than side track the player accompany the main story better and allow the player to maintain story progression by following an "optional" task or "Secondary" objective- identical to how Deus Ex's side quests worked- I think they got stuck in KOTOR mode.

The problem with all of the Fallouts was that it had a Sliding bar effect, you couldn't be GOOD and EVIL- rather different shades and levels of good or evil based on leveling or de-leveling an attribute (ie Karma)- the earlier fallouts though did a better job at hiding it compared to Tactics and Fallout 3.

I've also been playing Assasins Creed and FarCry2, which I bought during the UbiSoft sale.. Sooooo baaaaaad, as fun as they are to play, their idea of story progression is rather warped, side quests are utterly useless and time consuming- during my first play through I ignored them and had more fun just playing the game . I think more games should play into that too- rather than try to do what GTA did (which was as LINEAR as fsck! and I mean VERY linear, GTA4 was only nonlinear at the end and didn't really do a lot IMO in terms of the whole "reward" bit. As I felt with the previous installments I left utterly resenting Niko and his stupid friends (except Brucie! YOU GOTS TO BE DA ALPHA! If anything he should've been the main character- would have been a much better game IMO)- just as I did with CJ before him.)

Racist Alien Ass Kicking Commander Shepard will always be IMO one of the best video game characters EVER to me, simply because I practically created him by influencing him.

omfg I wanna play Mass Effect now

is it possible to be a bad guy or did they remove 'bad' completely and just make it a case of what type of good guy you wanna be?

this talk about the side planets being there own little 'chapters' are they required or optional?

For the most part, a lot of them are pretty optional. I like to explore in games like Mass Effect and do everything - so far everything I've done has crafted the story out pretty well.

In essence, Mass Effect IS Kotor 2.5, just without the Star Wars license

Well if you act like a big enough asshole sure, I've always felt that the Udina ending was the EVIL ending because he was an asshole to everyone throughout the entire game. So siding with him would be the BAD GUY role.

It would've been cool to have had a third option, which was to join the reapers and become a geth (ala Captain Picard).

I love spoilers