Loading ...
The World GameMaster Tournament is back for another yearly round here in India. Preliminaries had already started a few weeks prior, taking place in Chandigarh, Delhi, and Chennai respectively. Bangalore is next on the menu, and most likely our ever-dear editors Krishnan and Abhinav Pattanayak will be there to cover the event. Take a few snaps here, talk to a few participants there - you know, stuff you wouldn’t normally find at certain Game Parties that they’ll be unable to attend today. Right, fellas!
Worth mentioning are the featured games for the competition, which include something other than CounterStrike 1.6. What are the odds of that! Those games are: Call of Duty 2 (Deathmatch), F.E.A.R. (Deathmatch), DOTA All-Stars (for Mumbai only), WARMONGER and the Unreal Tournament 3 demo. For Venue Details, click here.
Most of us that play Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) do so because we get our ya-yas blasting total strangers into a fiery oblivion with the Necris DarkWalker. Or in my case, trying to see how long I can survive without having some form of death befall my virtual character. (In case you’re wondering, not long) But for Holland native Frederiek van Gammeren (aka Frantic), the UT3 launch party at Omega Sektor turned out to be a night to remember.
After all, it’s not every day you create a Guinness World Record for racking up 131 kills in half an hour. The first official UT3 tournament in Europe saw Epic’s Mark Rein, game journalists and top ranked UT3 players get together for a massive fragfest, as Stuart Remnant walked away with a high end SCAN PC and Frantic took the record for the most number of kills in a 30-minute UT3 deathmatch. At the event, Mark Rein confirmed the November 23rd European release date for the game, which comes as a sore issue for Xbox 360 owners, considering Epic has already announced that the Xbox 360 version of the game will be delayed to 2008 due to issues with the mods.
Hit the jump for pictures of the event, as I go and try to best my personal best of fragging 4 enemies before splattering all over the place.
If haven’t already had the chance to go play and/or try these two demos just yet, I highly recommend that you do so with all due haste. Till then though, here are my impressions on both:
First up: F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate
“640k ought to be enough for anyone”. Remember that? D’you also remember how Microsoft was slamming the PS3’s decision to use BluRay media and how a DVD9 was more than enough? Well, as if it wasn’t enough that Microsoft is choking on the Blue Dragon fiasco (the game, incidentally, ships on three discs) it looks like Epic, who gave them their system seller, Gears of War, is also head-over-heels in love with BluRay. Speaking at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Epic head honcho Mark Rein said that while the PS3 version of their upcoming flagship shooter, Unreal Tournament III was going great, thanks to BluRay, the Xbox 360 version may suffer in the long run, simply because they don’t have enough space to pack it all in.
We’ll compress some things. But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version… Blu-Ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom.
If you think down the road, well maybe the next UT beyond this one, on Blu-Ray disc, we might fill the whole damn disc with all the cool stuff the mod makers make.
Sure, we all knew Epic was pissed at Microsoft for deciding to charge people for their map packs, but after taking it lying down, it looks like Epic may be finally getting back at Microsoft for the Gears of War Hidden Fronts map pack release. So, enjoy, ladies and germs, who plan to enjoy this super fast paced, frag or get fragged in 1/100th of a second on a console (somehow) while the rest of us will just get it on the PC, with all the mods and maps and TCs that you can shake a controller at.