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. (more…)

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]

Got room for this beast next to your quad SLI setup?

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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Every so often for the last year or so I’ve checked the Quake Live website to see what was going on with it. It all seemed so hopeless. I felt as id Software had betrayed me and it was all a lie. Until today… I checked the website and to my surprise a splash page.

“What is this crap?” I said to myself. Where’s all the text that I had been accustomed to since the day I started looking at it. I decided to read what it said, “coming at you live 02.24.09″ and “no way!” I said. I had to call Kyle (a friend) to confirm what I was seeing is true. Oh, and is it so true. Tuesday people, Tuesday.

For those of you that don’t know what Quake Live is I’ve provided you with a couple links. You geeks out there know what I’m talking about.

Quake Live Site
Quake Live Wiki
Quake Live Screen Capture

This whole week, you’ll be hearing news on the official Team Fortress blog about the newest upcoming update for the Scout class.  Can’t wait for the newest video.  I wish Pixar and Valve would make a Team Fortress 2 movie.  Doesn’t Team Fortress and The Incredibles characters look alike?

[via Team Fortress Blog]