News Round Up: 1/3/10 – 7/3/10

March 1st 2010 will soon be forever known as the beginning of the end, or ‘ApocalyPS3’ for those who enjoy giving the end of all life as we know it a name. In the early hours of March 1st, owners of the non-Slim models of the PlayStation 3, hereby referred to as the ‘Phat’ model, began to notice that they were unable to sign into the PlayStation Network, or play games which were supported by Trophies. Instead of enjoying the visceral delights of Heavy Rain gamers were instead greeted by the error code 8001050F.

This code is of course the harbinger of doom, signalling the start of the machine uprising and the antecedent to our existence as brains in vats. Well, that is what conspiracy theorists will have you believe. In reality the inability to connect to the PlayStation Network and play certain games was due to an internal clock bug, in which the Phat PlayStation 3 consoles believed 2010 to be a leap year, and upon finding this was not the case (I was as shocked as the consoles) they proceeded to reset their internal date to 1/1/2000. Whilst I realise that Sony have been a little behind the times recently, for example bringing motion control into their games, 10 years is an awfully long time for one of their products to catch a version of the ‘Millennium Bug’.

Of course the World didn’t descend into a global meltdown as a result of this bug. Rather, time just carried on in it’s stately fashion, and when March 2nd rolled around the Phat PlayStation 3’s fixed themselves and people were once again able to play their beloved video games. So much for the fabled end of days.

In other news this week, Activision terminated the contracts of Jason West and Vince Zampella; the now former heads of Infinity Ward, the team behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. However, Activision did not simply just hand these two developers their marching orders. Instead the publisher sent over several “bouncer-types” to the Infinity Ward studios, creating a “confused” mood amongst employees. As the day wore on it emerged that Activision had conducted an internal enquiry into “breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward”, the outcome of which appeared to be the firing of West and Zampella.

Of course this is just the beginning of the tale. West and Zampella are now suing their former employers over the substantial royalty payments that they were due to be paid for their work on Modern Warfare 2. As Zampella notes, “After all we have given to Activision, we shouldn’t have to sue to get paid”. In response to this legal action, Activision have stated that they are “disappointed” with the two developers, and that they believe the claims that have been put forward are “meritless”.

Finally this week, developer Valve has given plenty for it’s fans to be ecstatic with. Firstly, there was the title update that was made available for Portal via Steam. The update included several audio files which were accessed by moving a radio into certain locations within the game, as well as an edited ending for the game. Following this, some highly talented people on the Steam forums were able to garner images from the audio, leading some to suspect either a new Portal game was heading our way, or perhaps even Half Life 2: Episode 3 (though the chances of that occurring were about as likely as Gordon Brown cracking a smile). It transpired a few days later that the former was true: Portal 2 is due for release this holiday season.

Secondly, last week Valve released a series of mysterious images to various websites, which can be found here. The images were mock-ups of adverts for Apple products, such as Alyx Vance from Half Life 2 featuring in a parody of the famous ‘1984’ commercial. The images spread rumours that the Steam gaming platform, along with various Valve games, would soon have Mac support.

As this article was being written it was confirmed by Valve that this was indeed the case, and we can expect to see Steam and the Source engine being released for the Mac in the near future. What was particularly interesting, and something which was not hinted at through the faux-pas adverts (if it was I certainly missed it), was the announcement of a feature known as ‘Steam Play’. This feature allows consumers to purchase a product on one system, and then play it free of charge on the other. When used in conjunction with the existing Steam Cloud, Steam Play will, according to Jason Holtman of Valve, allow gamers “playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac”. The dream of combining our work and home gaming lives is slowly but surely coming to fruition.

Alex Wozniak

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