Loading ...
Following up on its recent Zapak partnership, developer Rocking Pixels has finally updated their official website with the first in-game screens of Love Story 2050. Does it look better than the accidentally-released screens of the engine tests? Sure, but we still don’t see what the big fuss is about it. There certainly isn’t anything that screams massively multiplayer just yet. Nor I doubt I’ll ever publicly blurt out “Sweet Baby Moses, is that puppy running on a 9800GX2?!” while eyeing anyone playing this, but technical accolades were never so much my main point of concern as compared to the general emptiness I felt with the whole art direction and design. GameGuru.in has an amateurishly taken cam video uploaded on Youtube, but there’s not a lot to decipher from there. As usual.
Anywho, we’ll let you guys decide for yourselves. Gallery pics of digital Harman-goodness after the jump!
Back in May, we got an early glimpse of some less-than-riveting screens of LoveStory 2050 for the PC, the official game based on the upcoming sci-fi film that unapologetically “borrows” as many flicks as Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer can do with Hollywood blockbusters in a few months time (minus the near-existent humor). Then Sanjit Daniel, CEO of Rocking Pixels and 2050’s developer, pops in and slaps us with a large cartoon trout with “Engine Tests!” written all over it. He also promised we’d be seeing some real info in about “two weeks time”, but that was nearly a month ago. Fast forward to today, and now we’re hearing talks of a massively multiplayer online game, backed up by Indian gaming portal Zapak. A sphincter says what?!
Rocking Pixels has associated with Love Story 2050 to create for the first time a Bollywood based 3D game that will bring realistic “avatars” of the stars to the masses that will be able to connect with their most popular icons in a way never before possible. The massively multiplayer games with hundreds of thousands of players competing with each other provide the most interactive lean forward medium which associates players with the stars.
On this occasion, Sanjit Daniel, CEO, Rocking Pixels said, “When Love Story 2050 was announced we realized that the movie will be a great fit to showcase our technology as it was futuristic and loaded with special effects. With Harman himself being a hard core gamer we managed to create a breakthrough game which brings the movie in all its glory to the world of 3D gaming. The game will be released as a massively multiplayer game and will feature exciting game play in a futuristic Mumbai, exactly as depicted in the movie”.
Talk about unexpected developments. Yet, there’s still no mention of a pinned release date or what sort of a MMO will this be exactly. RPG? FPS? Second Life meets Blade Runner? Tieing up with Zapak seems like a good initiative, but having to deal with the weight of a thousand or so players all interacting at the same time is a huge undertaking. That doesn’t come from just an everyday gamer’s perspective, that personally comes from a QA tester too.
The movie will be releasing this Friday. As usual, more info when it hits.
How many times have we heard from our less than co-operative girlfriends and wives that “No means no”! Yet, some people just don’t seem to get the idea. Even as Blizzard constantly keeps putting down rumors about their games expanding onto next-generation consoles mercilessly, they never seem to stay dead. After squelching console owners’ hopes of seeing StarCraft II on the Xbox 360 or the PS3, Blizzard descended without mercy on a hapless poster who had the nerve to ask about World of Warcraft on the PS3, responding with:
“We’re madly in love with the PC and Mac platforms, and there are no plans at this time to bring World of Warcraft to any other platforms.”
Sorry, folks, that means no WoW for you on the consoles for at least a couple of more years. And we wonder what happened to that other Blizzard console project called StarCraft: Ghost.
Remember the pornstars that played Strip Halo 3 a couple of weeks back? Well, if you checked Mia Rose out at her site, you’d see that she is a pretty hardcore World of Warcraft player as well, who’s even starred in a couple of episodes of Whore of Warcraft. Recently seen playing a Lvl. 70 Undead Warlock on the Mal’Ganis server, Mia Rose told Kotaku today that she has been issued a temporary ban by a GM after a fan recognized her and mentioned her website in a public chat channel. Talking to Kotaku, Mia said:
“After someone said I had a bad nose, this was randomly it happens a lot, I responded ‘Hey, learn hot to search, stop using Google, go to Myspace or something, I’ve had a noise job. The person then typed MIAROSESEXXX.com ZOMFG.”
About ten minutes later, she apparently received a message from a GM saying she was temp banned. Of course, Blizzard’s policy indicates that their GMs don’t really have to explain the reasons for the bans issued, but this is a case of outright discrimination on the GM’s part for banning someone from a server for no fault of theirs. While she mentioned that she liked playing on this server, she was considering changing her name and her server just to avoid all the unwanted attention she gets when she’s just trying to get her game on. Baring specifically for a game-related job is one thing, but getting mobbed even when just trying to have fun? Must be tough.
“Every time I log on, I get twenty or more messages at a time… it has come to the point of having to contact the GM every time I try to sell something because people are going off with either Mia Rose spam or hate messages.”
One would assume that people would be able to keep their real-world biases from rearing their stinky heads in an MMO, where people are supposed to work together, have fun and nurture healthy social relationships, but then, these are the same kinds of people that made us practically quit playing CS: Source in the first place. We hope that she gets her account back soon, along with an apology for mistreatment and she gets to play her favorite games in peace, like we all dream of doing someday before another greasy 12-year old griefer shows up to rip our last shred of sanity.
PS: You know what I find real funny? A comment on the news item page at Kotaku that reads “Porn really has no place in WoW..” Heh, heh, are you sure? This guy’s probably going to have thousands of people baying for his blood, especially the Night Elf lovers.
You know what I find even funnier, and wonder how I missed it before? The idiot that got her temp banned because he typed in her website’s address? He got it wrong. The irony!
If reincarnation were ever an option (I’m not much of a holy person), I wouldn’t mind coming back as a wolf. A real wolf, that is! Not like the ones that give me the power to grant miracles through my magical celestial brush strokes, mind you, although that would be kinda bitchin’ now that I think about it. No, wait! A real wolf sounds far less selfish and hackneyed. Yes, indeed.
So, check this out. The Minnesota Zoo and eduweb are teaming up to create a realistic multiplayer role-playing game for the PC and MAC, called WolfQuest. From there you take the role of a wolf and are assigned to form a pack in order to survive in the great unknown wilderness. For the amazingly entry price of free, you’ll have the opportunity to interact with your online “kindred” and take on many common everyday tasks – like hunting for meat, defending yourself against other predators (wolf or not), mating, raising your own cub family, howling, peeing and so much more! Check out the exciting video from the official site.
Okay, so it won’t topple the massive multiplayer juggernaut collectively known as WoW, but then it’s not supposed to. Minnesota Zoo’s focus here is to bring “the immersive, compelling drama and action of video games to informal science learning while creating a model for nationwide distribution.” Think Animal Planet audience here, people. Digital vindication, at last? For its admission ticket (Free!), I’m willing to take a closer look before I decide that.