For all you Windows gaming fans that play Team Fortress 2 and haven’t been up to date with the Team Fortress 2 or their blog, you’ll be pleased to know that a major update has been will be released later tonight. This time; the Demo and the Soldier duke it out to claim victor, as well as a class update for both. The battle is fought to win a extra 4th weapon to which ever class kills the most of the opposing class. I’d now like to go over some key new weapons I personally like in this update.
A new sticky gun named “The Scottish Resistance” that will double their sticky amount (because they obviously didn’t have enough before), which also enables the Demo to control two groups of stickies (because capping a point that had stickies on it before was obviously too easy) and can also destroy enemy stickies. The down side? Longer priming rate of 0.4 seconds which according to Valve will make it harder for close range combat.
A new rocker launcher named “The Direct Hit” that will increase both damage by 25% and speed of the projecting rockets by 80%, oh did I mention that if you hit players in the air you get mini crits? (I can here the crying scouts now). Of course this comes at a cost, the rockets splash damage is 70% less than normal rockets.
Another new weapon for the Soldier is “The Buff Banner” which is more like a skill in World of Warcraft than a weapon in a FPS should be. This “Skill” charges as you do damage to enemies, once full you can activate it by sounding your bugle, which will give all nearby allies mini crits for 14 seconds.
There are many other weapons I’m not covering in this post, be sure to check it out. No word on this mysterious 4th weapon or who the victor is at this moment.
Head over to www.teamfortress.com/war to catch up on all the little goodies like comics and new weapon info.
Soldier image is Dapper Topper by J.Axer who won the Propaganda contest.
A few days back I did a quick post on HoN (Heroes of Newerth) by our good friends at S2 Games. While at the time I wanted to keep that post short due to the very first page when you sign up as a beta tester asks you not to disclose any non public information about HoN. This to my knowledge was actually lifted on the 13th of this month, with one exception; to not “disclose any game related media to those not actively in the Heroes of Newerth Beta.” as S2 Games put it. This means I cannot post any of my own Screenshots or Videos, but I am free to share any details in text. Since this game very much deserves a more In Depth review, I will go into detail about every Pro as well as Cons this game has over the original game DotA (Defense of the Ancients).
For those of you who don’t know, Heroes of Newerth is a upcoming game that is basically a clone of the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA) by S2 Games and has a native Linux client! as well as Mac and Windows clients. The main purpose of this game is to take DotA to the next level of competition, by creating a standalone version of DotA that is not held back by the obstacles found in Warcraft III’s engine. All the things you’d expect for DotA is in HoN, the items, the Heroes (Although some heroes are changed) for the most part it’s the same with different names.
The following features are not in any peticular order. Keep in mind that all these features are only new or improved things HoN has over DotA.
Features:
In game voice support – That’s right HoN has in game voice support! This is a great feature to have for a DotA like game. In regular DotA depending on your typing speed you would have to stop for several seconds in order to call a missing hero. This of course leaves you vulnerable while you’re typing to be unexpectedly ganked and killed. Thanks to In game voice support this doesn’t have to happen!
Better Graphics – There isn’t much to say about the graphics other than it looks much more smooth and crisp over regular DotA.
Support for new maps – This is a interesting feature that I expect to like a lot in the near future. Currently there is two maps in HoN, for the most part they are the same except for one big difference. There is the classic DotA map where the lanes are diagonal across the map, and the new map that has the lanes vertically. It will be interesting to see what new ideas and game experiences can be had with new maps in the future.
5 Minute Reconnection time - This is another great feature. In regular DotA if your connection suddenly goes out, you have no way of rejoining that game once disconnected and the whole game has to pause while you’re disconnecting. Thanks to this feature, each player is given a total of 5 minutes to do what ever they have to do in order to reconnect and the game does not pause while this happens.
Built in Voting systems – With this feature you can call votes to do several things where depending on the vote type either everyone on your team or the whole game has to agree on. Examples are; Vote to kick a player, vote to restart the game, vote to conclude the match.
Built in Statistics and leveling – For every game you played your statistics from each game is recorded and then tallied with your previous games and displayed in your Community Panel. These statistics include such things as number of games you’ve won and lost, Kills, Deaths and assists, and ratios for each. There is also a leveling system presumably based on how many games you’ve played.
Built in Clan and Community Panel (Like steams community panel) – This feature almost feels like a exact clone of Steams Community panel while in game. When activated it gives a panel over lapping your game much like Steams and displays your friends list where you or your buddies can join each others games. It will also displays notifications such as friends joining or leaving games, much like steam as well.
Hosting off of official servers – HoN provides you with servers to host the games with, much like how Warcraft III’s ladder system works. There is no way to host the game on your own connection at the current time. However there seems to be grayed out options in place for this to be a feature in the future.
Multi OS clients support – Unlike DotA, HoN can be played natively on Linux. This is great news to all Linux gamers alike as I can imagine that this game will become popular when it’s released.
Improved pregame Hero selecting – Before the players can play the game, once the game has been started you first have to go through the “selecting hero stage”. Unlike DotA where you’re already in the game when you pick heroes, this is a screen that pops up before the game starts to load. The advantages here is that you have more time to focus on a strategic team game plan against the enemy’s team.
There are a few negative points I’d like to go over before I conclude this in depth review. Keep in mind that most of these points are strictly because the game is still in beta and I do not expect most if any to be in the final release.
Cons:
Less heroes (At the moment) – Yes there is less heroes, and yes they are adding more before the game gets released, but at the moment this is still a negative.
Bugs – Guess it wouldn’t be a Beta without it’s bugs right? Most of the bugs are just annoying and can be easily avoided, and yes I expect them to be gone when this game gets released of course.
Unbalancing – Some of the heroes in HoN have been changed, and some are completely new, there is a lot of unbalancing at the moment, but I suspect with the new heroes coming and the future patches that with will be fixed.
In game panel – Now this is something I really dislike, Currently the Community Panel displays things like Statistics for each player and a Chat room, while this doesn’t sound like a problem like me explain why it is. First of all, the chat rooms, what is currently happening in HoN is people are joining Chat rooms while they are in a waiting room for players and massively spamming people invites to join their game to fill it faster, this is a big problem and needs to be corrected. The second is Statistics checking, the host of the games will stack teams by checking who has good statistics and who doesn’t, by placing all the good players on one team and the bad ones on the other team guarantees them a free win, and this of course is a very bad thing.
That pretty much wraps up my in depth review of Heroes of Newerth, if you ever get your hands on a beta key, or get to play in the upcoming open beta, feel free to add me “Wutzan” without the quotations in HoN friends and I’ll gladly to play a game with you.
Below is a video published on the Heroes of Newerth Facebook group. Until next time, cheers!
Like many other power users, I like to try the what’s hot and new in the computer world, and this is not restricted to Linux, I do like to try out what Apple and Microsoft dishes out from time to time. After hearing a friend rave on about Windows 7, I decided to give it a try for myself and jumped over to Microsoft’s site to download their RC of Windows 7. Once fully burned, and popped into the DVD drive it was installing in no time, and it seemed to have been a smooth install. However when the install was complete I realized a few things. The first thing I noticed was that my other partitions did not show (I expected my Linux partitions not to show) but my other NTFS partitions would not show up in My Computer. Thanks to a old friend, Google, I found a solution. This is where things got really sour.
Apparently even though I did not ask Windows 7 to format my Hard drive, it did it anyways, and so I thought, oh well it’s only the partition I made for Windows 7 anyways….but I was wrong. It formatted everything, including my Linux partitions on a totally separate Hard Drive! Why on Earth did it have to reformat partitions that wasn’t even on the same Hard Drive at all? And yes, I realize that it might have been a mistake on my part during the install. But should it really have been that easy to make a simple mistake like that? And no, I didn’t specifically go to each partition and select “Format” on each one… At this point I’m writing this out of anger for losing everything, but also to warn people not to do the same mistake I did. If you want Windows 7, wait till October 22nd for it.
I would like to thank Microsoft for their ease of use when it comes to destroying your computer, cheers!
While I enjoy a good game on Linux, I can’t help but notice serious flaws that playing games on Linux has over playing games on Windows. There are many downsides to choosing Linux as your gaming rig. The biggest and most obvious problem is the lack of games available. However this is not a problem that Linux can fix, so I will skip that. There are two other big problems that I can see for gaming on Linux, and I will go into detail on both.
The first problem is that graphics drivers for Linux aren’t as good as on Windows, regardless of who makes it, they all generally have worse drivers available. This causes problems, such as lower frame rate and graphical glitches that would not be apparent in Windows. Some of these problems may not always be the graphics drivers fault, but regardless it is still a huge problem that cannot be overlooked.
The second thing Windows has an advantage over Linux is built in alt tab support. What I mean by this is the ability to switch in and out of full screen applications such as games. This is easily done in Windows by pressing alt + tab. However in Linux if the game does not have a hot key set to switch to the desktop, then there is no way other than exiting the game to reach your desktop. This problem is very annoying for somebody like myself who plays games almost every day and needs to switch to Pidgin to check some messages during gaming. I am also aware of the few 3rd party hacks and scripts to enable a alt + tab support for Linux that will work at any time, however as Byran from the Linux Action Show would say “It’s freaking 2009!”. Adding custom scripts and hacks is not what every day users would want to do, especially now when things on the Windows side are so easy and hassle free to do, and I myself am disappointed that it has to come to that.
For myself these problems are not so bad that I’m willing not to play on Linux if there is a native client for the game. I would love to see these problems fixed in the near future, but I’m rather doubtful about it, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’m really disappointed by this.
For those of you who don’t know, Heroes of Newerth is a upcoming game that is basically a clone of the popular Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA) by S2 Games and has a native linux client! as well as Mac and Windows clients. Due to being a closed beta tester, I’ve been asked not to share too much information, but spreading the word is always a good thing. Below is a video published on the Heroes of Newerth Facebook group.
A few days back I did a quick 
While I enjoy a good game on Linux, I can’t help but notice serious flaws that playing games on Linux has over playing games on Windows. There are many downsides to choosing Linux as your gaming rig. The biggest and most obvious problem is the lack of games available. However this is not a problem that Linux can fix, so I will skip that. There are two other big problems that I can see for gaming on Linux, and I will go into detail on both.