Myplayyard Launches New Girls Games

Jack — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:03:58 +0000

Myplayyard.com has launched a slew of new games for girls. According to reports, these have been under development for the last several years and were finally launched in the beginning of the year 2010.

The company has received good response to its new range of games from girls around the world. When asked about the kind of response received to its new releases, Jack Wills, PR Manager at Myplayyard said, “The response has been very impressive. The demand overtook our bandwidth capability and we had to scale up our servers and bandwidth within 2 days of releasing the girls games”
The company has launched the games that require the Adobe Flash Player and the Shockwave player to run. These players have become the standard in the online gaming environment and dominate the arcade game sites all over the internet.
While the company gave no word on the revenue generated from the new games, it said that the traffic numbers will be released very soon. “We will soon release the site statistics for our investors very soon. We are carefully tracking the response to our new launches and we will make the information available at the right time,” said Jack.
The company has reportedly also launched quite a lot of fashion games intended primarily at the young gamers. These are targeted at both the male and female audiences all over the world.

New Shooting Games Launched by Myplayyard

Jack — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:45:17 +0000

Keeping in line with its launches related to various gaming fantasies, Myplayyard today brought a huge lineup of shooting games for gamers. More than 10 new shooting games were suddenly introduced. This bring the total number of shooting games released this year to over 20.
The vast increase in recent game launches by Myplayyard sheds light on its aggressive development team that is cranking out award winning games regularly. All of its new releases are currently available for free for gamers, even without any requirement to sign up for an account.
When asked about their plans about the upcoming game launches in the month of March, Jack Wills, PR Manger at Myplayyard said, “Our development team is working on around 10 new games right now. These are at various stages of development. Most of them have passed the conceptualization stage and are undergoing vigorous testing and trial runs by a select group of gamers. We will be releasing various new shooting games in the month of March this year. We do not intend to start charging money to play these.”
While the announcement by Myplayyard can be taken as a positive step for the gamers, there is still uncertainty over the time the company will be able to continue offering these for free.
According to reports, the development team at Myplayyard is working overtime to launch a range of new shooting and action games in March this year. The response to their new releases has been great so far and gamers are increasingly having their fingers crossed over the new games scheduled for release in March.

Classic Games Still Going Strong

Jack — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:04:45 +0000

Fans of old Classic games have always missed their favorite classics in recent times. Demands have come up from large section of classic gaming enthusiasts to various popular flash game developers around the world.
Keeping in line with popular demand, Myplayyard has introduced a collection of old time favorite Classic Games. In recent months, Myplayyard has released quite a lot of new games but it is heartening to find that it has not forgotten the demand of Classic Game Fans while bringing forward its new releases.
“It is great to see that a company has finally launched the games I used to play years ago. I simply love them and I’m excited to play all of these ever again,” said Evans Miller, a classic gaming fan. There have been thousands of similar responses after the scheduled launches began earlier this month. The launches will be completed by the end of this month.

“Our developers are working on almost all types of online flash games that are run using the Adobe Flash player. We have kept the demands of classic gaming fans under consideration while conceptualizing new games. We are grateful to the gamers for such a great response. We will also be introducing various exciting girl games during the month of March and afterwards,” said Jack Wills, PR Manager at Myplayyard.com
According to reports, a number of flash game developers have recently expressed interest in introducing their games on the Myplayyard.com platform. We will surely have more exciting news to share in the coming weeks.

BioShock 2 Lack of Widescreen Should Be Fixed Soon

Roy — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:59:00 +0000

It might seem like we’re picking on BioShock 2 after last week’s story about the DRM that developer 2K games are using, but it couldn’t be further from the truth – we’ve been playing the game on the Xbox 360 and it’s been a great experience so far. We might not have time for a proper review but trust us – it’s worth buying and it’s easily as good as the original, which is saying something! Of course, that’s if you have time between playing Mass Effect 2 (probably more than once)… and STALKER if you’re a PC gamer with a love for the FPS.

But this news is again negative – 2K has managed to mess up and not include proper widescreen support in the game on the PC. While you can happily select widescreen resolutions from within the game all these do is simply give a cropped version of the normal 4:3 version of the game. This means that instead of being able to see more on the screen left and right you’ll see the exact amount of space whether you have a big widescreen monitor or not.

Nearly all modern PC games – even many indie ones – include full widescreen support, and it doesn’t require hardly any time or effort to code it in. What’s even worse is that 2K Games made exactly the same mistake with the first BioShock and didn’t patch it for months. How can you make the exact same mistake twice, especially when PC gamers made such a fuss about it the first time round: It hardly passed under the radar!

The good news is the game is likely to be patched pretty quickly this time. A community manager for 2K games said the topic has been brought up with the development team and that a fix is on the way. We hope that this time it takes a few days rather than a few months!

It’s a shame such silly errors are marring an otherwise brilliant game. As for the DRM, the game was pirated several days before release… was it really worth it? Probably not.

StarCraft 2 Beta to Begin in February

Roy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:58:18 +0000

StarCraft is one of the most popular RTS games in the world, and creator Blizzard have been working on a sequel for several years. Although the game has yet to have a release date the beta has now finally been announced and should be coming to gamers sometime this month. Considering February is the shortest month of the year, hopefully it will be soon!

StarCraft 2 will have a hefty single player mode, but it will be in the multiplayer mode where the game is likely to shine. That people are still playing StarCraft today years after its original release speaks volumes – how many other RTS games have come and gone in that time?

Of course, while StarCraft is a popular game in the UK the South Koreans go absolutely crazy for it, with tournaments regularly appearing on national television. We can’t really imagine an RTS tournament being put on after Eastenders.

But what people want to know is where to get a key for the beta. Blizzard have actually been releasing keys since March of 2008 so there are already a new of people with the keys who may well be receiving an email about joining the beta very soon. For those us without a key though, registering a battle.net account and checking the box to test out new games is the best choice although it’s likely people will be selected at random to participate.

Of course, there will likely be hundreds of competitions, promotions and giveaways across the net for the keys over the next few weeks, so we suggest keeping your eye out on the Blizzard twitter account and the gaming news. Blizzard has previously mentioned that people with a game registered to their Battle.net account or members of the original StarCraft community are more likely that receive keys than those who have not.

Gaming 2 – BioWare Talks Serious Business

Roy — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:55:00 +0000

BioWare have been having a really good time in the last few weeks. Their newest release, Mass Effect 2, has gained an overall score of 94 from review aggregator Metacritic – the fourth highest in the story of the site that compiles the scores from review sites and publications all over the world. We haven’t had a chance to review Mass Effect 2 yet as it’s a pretty big game, but from the ten or so hours we’ve already sunk into it we can safely confirm its brilliance.

Of course, the game is a commercial success for BioWare, and so recently from its other smash RPG, Dragon Age that will see an expansion coming out in March and a sequel already on the cards. Bioware announced this week their intentions to make the Dragon Age sequel more visually attractive – one of the only weak points of the original game:

“I can confirm that we’re doing a lot of work on the Dragon Age engine, and doing a lot of stuff to pump it – to make it visually super hot.

I think the overall visual style we’re going to continue to evolve in Dragon Age. People are going to see some cool stuff. I can’t really say too much, but I think Dragon Age as a world is interesting. It’s a timeline, and you can go anywhere.”

The company have also stated that their best work is still ahead of them, and talked about their ambitions to make each game better than the last:

“The way we approach it is that each game has to be better than the last one, that’s always been true for the last 20 years we’ve been doing this, that’s just what we do. It’s kind of in our culture now.

If it wasn’t difficult it wouldn’t be worthwhile our best work is still ahead of us. That’s why I’m doing it, because I think our best work is still ahead of us and that’s why our teams are doing it I think."

It’s great to see a company that relies on well written stories and interesting gameplay mechanics doing so well. Here’s to Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age 2!

Ubisoft Announce New Form of Game DRM – Game News

Roy — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:54:55 +0000

Ubisoft have announced that their PC line up will now be using a new form of DRM – instead of having disk checks or SecuROM piracy protection, all Ubisoft games will now only be playable by registering for a Ubi.com account and playing your games online. That means if you want to play the single player mode of Assassin’s Creed 2, you’ll need to logon and stay connected throughout the game in order to access the content. The game will pause if your connection suddenly goes down.

The whole idea sounds a little like Microsoft’s service, Games for Windows Live, which is nearly universally hated by PC gamers for its poor quality. However, even GFWL doesn’t stop you from playing a game if you can’t get online, or pause the game when your net cuts out.

It may seem like a mute point for many people with computers online 24/7, but it’s a dangerous road to travel for many consumers. What are we going to do when Ubisoft’s servers go down? The games that we have purchased will be unplayable. Ubisoft have promised that they will patch any games to be playable offline if the service was ever closed permanently, but considering the only reason that would happen is if the company itself folded, we’re not convinced by that promise.

It feels like Ubisoft have decided that the small (but not insignificant) number of its customers that don’t have regular online access on the PC they play games are not worth their time. It may also mean that millions of people behind restrictive firewalls like university students may also remain unable to play Ubisoft games until they purchase their own internet connection or apply to lift access.

It seems like we’re covering this story every single week, but we feel like we should be giving our coverage to the problem of DRM. Between Bioshock 2, Modern Warfare 2, Starcraft 2 and Bad Company 2 it seems like PC gamers are being cheated out of an experience. As usual it’s a case of legitimate consumers being harmed by piracy. We’re pretty certain hacking groups will find a way around this new form DRM very quickly, while consumers will be stuck with it for the foreseeable future.

Gaming Can Cost You More Than Just Cash…

Roy — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:16:00 +0000

Its official: Games will force your girlfriend to dump you. Well Ok, it’s not quite that bad, but research released this week has suggested that heavy amounts of gaming and other online activities can put a strain on a relationship.

Around 20% of women have dumped a partner directly because of the online gaming habits, MyVoucherCodes revealed. The research also suggests that 80% of women believe that their partners spend too much time on the computer in general.

Oddly enough, Call of Duty is the number one game that is likely to break up a relationship.

Research Mark Pearson Commented:

“While men are more likely to spend their time running recon with, scoring goals against or shooting at people from all over the world, women are just as to blame for the time they spend online for relationship breakups according to the study.

I’m no relationship expert, but it seems that as technology improves, our ability to interact with those around us lessens – hopefully these statistics will be the push people need to reassess the way they treat loved ones.”

We’re not so sure about all that, and we agree with Mr. Pearson – it’s hardly like women aren’t often ‘addicted’ to online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Besides, too much of anything is normally bad for you, and like everything in life, gaming is an activity best enjoyed in moderation.

Still, maybe we’ll think twice next time we want to play a game of Call of Duty online, huh? We’re just surprised the title winning the crown of most common to destroy a relationship wasn’t the huge time sink that is World of Warcraft!

BioShock 2 and DRM

Roy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:15:46 +0000

It seems like every week we’re reporting more problems for PC Gamers. This week the problems haven’t been about Modern Warfare 2 or Battlefield Bad Company. This time, its 2K Games in the firing line after it was revealed that the company would be using fairly heavy Digital Rights Management (DRM) to control how users played the game.

The information was first revealed on Steam, which stated that the game would use both Games For Windows Live for activation, use SecuROM and have a maximum install limit of 15 times:

“Initial installation requires one-time internet connection; Ability to save game, earn achievements, receive title updates and online play requires log-in to Games for Windows LIVE; software installations required including Microsoft Visual C++2008 Runtime Libraries, Games for Windows LIVE client, Games for Windows LIVE Client Patch, Sony DADC SecuROM, Microsoft DirectX.”

“3rd-party DRM: SecuROM™ and Games for Windows LIVE 15 machine activation limit”

Some of this was later removed from the Steam page after the news hit. Currently nobody is quite sure about the level of DRM BioShock 2 is set to use. However, it’s been confirmed that the game will be using Games For Windows Live and will require online activation. This is a real shame considering how buggy and poorly made GFWL really is.

We hope it won’t get in the way of our enjoyment in the game too much, but it’s a shame to see another PC game get buried under anti piracy methods that simply do not work. It’s even stranger that BioShock developer 2K Games have decided on such strict DRM considering the large amount of negative press that was generated when the first game had a 5 computer installation limit – something they later removed.

Bad Company 2’s Bad Decisions Anger PC Community

Roy — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:22:00 +0000

The original Battlefield might have been a PC franchise, but Bad Company marked the brands move onto consoles and was well received by console fans. Overall, it was a great move for the Battlefield series and few people will contest that.

What people are contesting is the way that DICE are treating the second game, which is due to be released on both consoles and PC. Although many PC gamers are excited to see the series return, others are not so happy with some decisions being made by the company during development. The decisions remind us of those taken by Infinity Ward during the development of Modern Warfare 2.

Firstly, DICE have stated that there won’t be any private dedicated servers and secondly they’ve now revealed that the game won’t have a developer console. Neither of these decisions are as big as Modern Warfare 2 not letting people use dedicated servers at all, but they are still things that many PC gamers expect, and the kind of things that more hardcore players and server admins often get angry about.

We’re not sure what to think. If DICE had simply been open about these decisions earlier we might have had more respect for them. Instead, they spent a lot of time during the Modern Warfare 2 boycott stating how they would be making a game that would have all the typical elements of a PC game and wouldn’t go all ‘infinity ward’ on us.

They’ve also stated that their decisions have been made to stop cheating during the game, which we find absurd considering that many of the most popular PC games of the last few years have had both private servers and a developer console without any problems, including games played in international tournaments such as Counterstrike.

If Modern Warfare 2’s $1 billion sales figures are anything to go by though, the small percentage of people who make a large fuss about such things will just end up buying the game along with everyone else anyway, which could mean similar decisions by other PC developers in the future.