I have a very specific sense memory attached to the Worms series of PC games.  So, when our good ol’ editor-in-chief asked me to review the game, my sense of self was rocketed back to a unique time in my life.  I had just finished my sophomore year of college, and my buddy Will pointed me toward the demo for Worms Armageddon.  I downloaded the demo to my desktop (then a paltry 9 GB Dell whose hard drive could hold only three-quarters of Starcraft 2!) but forgot about the game for a while.  That summer and subsequent year, I gave the game a chance and became sucked in to the one-level, nerfed arsenal demo.  Seriously sucked in: I played that one damn level ad nauseum.  I think I even failed a class that I’ve forgotten I ever took because of it.  Let’s be hones: who needs Ethics anyway?  Maybe Jonathan Swift was right all along!  I mean, satire or not, eating babies would end hunger and starvation.  Just sayin’.  Onto the review!

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Last week, I asked for you readers to vote on what MMO you wanted to hear about. And unanimously leading the pact, is….

Cataclysm by definition, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary; means a momentous and violent event marked by overwhelming upheaval and demolition; In short: an event that brings great changes. Fairly soon the worlds we know from lvl’s 1-60 will change before our eyes. Where events will begin to jump start the Armageddon of Azeroth.

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With CES behind us now it’s time to remember some of the cooler things we saw at the Convention. AMD was certainly one of the companies that had a lot to show. What was  especially neat was the new graphic card technology. Most companies were sporting the 3D. While I’m quite enamored with 3D I’m not necessarily sold on it. AMD had it’s 3D demos but it also had something I was far more interested in. It was the ability to stretch the visuals on games to a much wider view. We got to see a demo with Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X and it’s looked great.

Check out the Video above for our hands on time with Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

While the rest of the crew went off to wander the halls of BlizzCon, the rest of us were treated to the release of the official GuildWars 2 trailer. Some deal of time has passed from the first story arcs and now all the races must combine to fight the risen dragons (the most powerful bringing along some undead forces).

One of the additions that struck me a bit was the Asura, a very small, yet technologically savvy race from beneath Tyria. They control magical machines and are adept spell casters.

See more at the official site.

Blizzcon 2009 website is finally launched.  August is getting closer and all you Blizzard fans are feeling that tingle in your pants.  But many of you are thinking, “But, will I even get a chance to buy a ticket?”  Yes, last year’s ticket sales system was a joke.  It was worse than trying to get a Bag of Crap from Woot.com. F5 keys around the world were crying in agony from the constant browser refreshes on the ticket sales page. Well, Blizzard has announce how they will be selling these hard to get tickets this year. More on that after the break.

1st half of tickets go on sale on May 16. 2nd half on May 30th.  People who cannot make the convention can watch via DirectTV. The ticket price has gone UP to $125.

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This Friday only, Valve and Steam are letting you play the super popular PC zombie apocalypse game for free for 24 hours! If you haven’t tried this game yet and were curious about it, here’s your chance.  You’ve got nothing to lose! Except for time installing and playing the game.  But that’s part of the fun!

Go to [VALVE]

A new viral teaser website that popped up is quite spooky. It’s called “Whats in the box?”

When hover over this red circle, you’re mouse point has a pattern of letters and numbers:

0.0.F.F.C.F
F.F.0.0.D.0
8.E.0.1.F.F
D.A.F.F.0.0
F.F.0.1.0.1
0.1.D.4.F.F
0.0.0.B.F.F
4.2.F.F.0.0
F.E.A.7.0.2

What do they mean? Are they a code of some sort? Are they hex color codes? Upon further investigation of this page, viewing the source, there’s this code:

<frame src="http://babel-research.eu/witb">

More information on this site, after the break. Read On

Some time ago, PopCap released a Bejeweled add-on for World of Warcraft, allowing users to play the addictive puzzle game in between raids and quests. A welcome addition, many wondered if Peggle would ever be making its way into Azeroth. Well, the wait is over as PopCap has finally released a Peggle add-on for WoW. In addition to simply playing the game within World of Warcraft, the folks down at PopCap have added a few additions to further integrate the Peggle experience into WoW, such as giving players the ability to activate the Peggle loot system, which can be used as Master Looter, allowing friends and guild members that have the add-on take Peggle shots to decide which player gets loot drops.

The add-on is currently available for free from PopCap’s website so Peggle fans in Azeroth should have nothing stopping them from enjoying the Peggle/WoW experience.

[Source]

Have you ever fancied the kind of graphics possible only in highly detailed fully rendered films from the likes of Dreamworks and Pixar in your video games? Well Caustic Graphics reckon they’ve got the answer with their graphics co-processor the Ray Tracing Processing Unit (RTPU). For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of Ray Tracing it is a computational technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane. The benefit of this technique of image rendering is that it’s able to produce an extremely high degree of photorealism capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration, higher than that of the typical scanline rendering methods currently used in games and anything real time. The main problem with Ray Tracing is that it comes at a considerably greater computational cost, especially for typical graphics processors and CPUs which aren’t geared up for this task. This means Ray Tracing is only really suitable for pre-rendered images and video such as still images plus film and television special effects.

Hit the Read link for more on what Caustic’s got up it’s sleeve

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