TAR Tom's blog

From the latest Dev blog here comes the news that Invention in EVE is going to undergo some changes.

About time too, quite frankly. If you can assemble the components and get the skills for the invention process, why on earth are the results random? Once these changes are made, you'll be able to focus your invention on a specific outcome.

Well, with everyone eagerly awaiting the Orange Box, Valve have once again dropped a bombshell on cafes. I couldn't care less about Half Life 2: Episode 2, but people have been clamouring for Portal since seeing the early trailers.

And with good reason, too - it has all the makings of a classic multiplayer game, the sort that goes well with the very social atmosphere of Internet centres.

So naturally Valve won't release Portal to Steam for Cafes centres until .... Boxing Day. Yeah, that's right - another 2 months.

A lot has been promised for Hellgate. It's been pushed as the MMORPG successor to Diablo, an RPG with guns and demons. The attention to detail for the locations is a great thing for anyone who knows London at all well. However, Hellgate's buildup has not been without controversy.

The announcement that you'd have to pay a monthly fee to get the real goodies irked many. The real problems, though, lie in the recent videos that have been released.

You may sense a recurring theme here. It's not that I think the Playstation platform is a bad one (it's not - apart from the PSP. Having now tried one, they are *utter* rubbish) but the lies, arrogance, and disrespect Sony show their customers is reaching unsustainable proportions.

You give a company hundreds of pounds over the years, investing in their console, their games, their peripherals. You'd think they'd make some sort of effort to give you recurring value? To, you know, keep you as a customer?

The breakup is official: Bungie and Microsoft have parted ways.

Via a press release that's being covered on every gaming site on the planet, as well as the BBC and other mainstream news sites, Bungie is now a privately held company in which Microsoft holds a minority stake.

Bungie will continue to develop Halo related titles for Microsoft, but as I previously mentioned, moving away to become a separate company once more frees Bungie to put all that talent to work for other platforms.

Back in 1951, a voice actor recorded a scream for the film Distant Drums, for use in a scene where a cowboy gets his arm bitten off by an alligator.

Innocuous enough. However, it seems the sound engineers have been using this scream ever since, in a variety of bizarre places - from Aladdin and Toy Story to Star Wars and Transformers.

This video from YouTube is golden - it features clips from some of the films that have used the scream.

While delayed launch dates are never good news, it's nice to see the Tabula Rasa developers admitting to pushing back the release date to fix bugs found in the beta.

The posting from Starr Long on the Tabula Rasa Community News site explains:

"Many of you have heard my mantra for game development: "Stable, Fast, Fun. In that order." We need a little more time to make that happen.

The rumour doing the round this morning is that Bungie and Microsoft are set to part ways. I can see a lot of reasons for both sides of the argument here, which makes it all equally possible.

Having just pushed Halo 3 out the door, Bungie have shown they can deliver a compelling, tight FPS. It may not be the best at any one thing (graphics, play style, weapons, etc.) but the over-all package is a consumate piece of work.

Stop what you are doing - this is not to be missed! As part of the London Games Festival, Video Games Live is coming to London.

In case you've missed it so far (how?) Video Games Live is a series of concerts given by top-rate orchestras, playing iconic themes from classic games. This event has been touring the world, with all the US-based concerts now over.

If you don't regularly follow Simon Travaglia's BOFH column at The Register, then you're missing out. Missing out bigtime, as the BOFH's adventures go back to the dawn of time - Simon started writing them as a bored operator in the mid-90s, posting the occasional homicidal story of revenge on users to Usenet.

The current episode is a classic, with a dig at Mac users, followed by a hilarious twist involving the PFY and Acorn machines.

The BOFH regularly slams OS/2 as well, so it looks like all my favourite computing environments come in for a kicking ;-)