According to the GRiD developer, Codemasters’ forums and Destructoid, the game’s 360 iteration suffers from bouts of stuttering. As Destructoid’s Jim Sterling puts it:

Reports are coming in of problems with the Xbox 360 version of Codemasters’ Race Driver: GRiD. There is an issue with the game where it suffers from perpetual freezing and stuttering during races. I can confirm that the review copy Codemasters recently secured for me suffers from this as well.

GRiD’s dev team say they’re close to figuring out the problem and that a patch is on the way. Meanwhile, those suffering from freezing issues are advised to take out their hard drives and play using a gamertag that’s been saved to a memory card. I am sure I could say something acerbic and nasty, but I’ll leave it.

While it is great that the guys on GRiD are close to rectifying the issue, this reeks of poor quality assurance and not enough testing. A rush to get this superb racing title out it seems?

If  Infogrames president, Phil Harrison is to be believed, gamers don’t want to be entertained with a good single-player game. All we want is something with an online, community component like Halo 3 or World of Warcraft.

“Alone in the Dark is a beautifully crafted single-player adventure game. I don’t think the industry is going to make many more of those,” said Harrison.

“I just don’t think consumers want to be playing games that don’t have some kind of network connectivity to them, or some kind of community embedded in them, or some kind of extension available through downloadable content.”

As a gamer I feel deeply offended by this statement, I guess Mr. Harrison hasn’t heard about BioShock or Grand Theft Auto 4, two games which sold solely based on their awesome single-player experience. And while such a strategy might seem grand for the West, broadband penetration in India isn’t exactly the highest in the world, it is a good thing then that we’ve some local developers coming out with single-player content, no matter how crappy the effort.

While some of us have had the chance to purchase and play Deus Ex arguably one of the few games that can be said in the same breathe as Half-Life, most people side-stepped a title filled with conspiracies, RPG elements and an extremely well-crafted story.  Luckily for you, subscription-based PC gaming service GameTap announced it will be available for free. 

 The title will be playable via the service’s free-to-download launcher program, which allows users to browse and download a variety of PC and emulated console games. Those players who don’t shell out the $9.95 per month for the “Gold”-level subscription can expect a 15 second video advertisement to air before each play.

In addition to Deus Ex, GameTap also offers Ion Storm’s Thief: Deadly Shadows and Doublefine’s Psychonauts among some 120 other titles in its free game roster.

And if good games aren’t your thing, you’re sure to find something up to your standards on GameTap.

Via Shacknews.

There’s no denying that Far Cry 2 looks gorgeous and the scale of the game seems mind-blowing, much like it’s predecessor. However if there’s one place it falters, it is in character creation.

Unlike most games that allow you to customize your character, you cannot play as a female character in Far Cry 2. Yes you read that right. According to what Ubisoft has told Kotaku:

 ”There are so many lines of dialog that they would have had to rescript and record if we let people play as a female,” I was told.

So while you choose to play 9 of the 12 available characters in the game (the sub-missions you can do depends on your choice of character), your choice is restricted to the male populace. Considering that this is Ubisoft and not any old developer/publisher they could be less lazy. Or are we being too hopeful?

When the fine purveyors of research, Nielsen, announce results of a study, everyone reads. And when they make a particularly astounding discovery when it comes to gamers, you’d be plain stupid not to:

 In a document which revels in shattering stereotypes, there’s some incredible news for the industry’s money men: the European Union is now the second-largest videogaming territory in the world, generating €7.3bn during 2007, compared with €7.4bn in Asia and €6.9bn in the US. This also reflects in the year on figures with UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia enjoying an average 25% growth in software sales.

Videogamers are growing up, too, with the UK boasting the most mature players. The average age of an gamer in the UK is now 33 – the highest out of the territories surveyed. In Finland they are, on average 30 while in Spain they are 26.

What does this mean for Indian gamers? Well for starters, publishers club India along with European countries when it comes to game releases as all games officially available here are in the European PAL format (barring a few like Konami, which clubs us with Asia) ,we might just get our games a bit faster than usual. Which is already happening with EA’s games hitting India a mere one week after global releases and Microsoft making sure their 360 games hit the nation at the same time if not faster than the rest of the world.

It has been awhile since we’ve had a new Street Fighter game hit the stores, what with Capcom focusing on other lucrative franchises such as Lost Planet and Devil May Cry this generation. However they haven’t forgot that a good number  of us still want our beat ‘em up thrills, announcing Street Fighter IV for the PS3, 360 and PC.

No official date has been mentioned but if we were to guess we’d say around October this year. Weird crotch shots of Ryu aside (as pictured above) it’s a good time to be a gamer but with some nice games coming up in the future, it would be a better time to be a gamer.

Via Destructoid.

While all of us are gushing over the portable awesomeness of The World Ends With You, the company behind it, Square-Enix , also responsible for the highly popular Final Fantasy series plans to take a direction that would , in my opinion, see more remakes of every Final Fantasy game to date.

It seems that their 2007 profits weren’t too good with their highly lucrative overseas market bearing most of the brunt.  According to Destructoid:

…according to company president Yoichi Wada, who recently issued an ultimatum to his staff: if any games are made that don’t fit into the mainstream’s circle of interest, job cuts will follow. So long, unique concepts that break the mold!

Is this the beginning of the EA-ization of everyone’s favorite maker of role-playing games? Only time will tell.

While the PS3’s online component, the PlayStation Network, has a long way to go before it can compare to Xbox Live, it has one major advantage, it is free. And apparently gamers in Japan have been signing up by the boatload with the PSN’s Japanese accounts reaching one million users since it’s inception in November 2006. Not bad at all.

To celebrate, Sony is giving away one thousand ¥1,000 (around Rs. 400) PLAYSTATION Network Tickets for use in the PLAYSTATION Store.  So if you got a Japanese PSN account, now would be a good time to log on.

Nvidia and Intel have been at the crux of a graphics war for quite awhile now and it is seeming to heat up even further. The guys in green have announced their purchase of ray-tracing firm, Rayscale.

This acquisition may help Nvidia develop new ways to draw 3D images. The currently used method, rasterization is getting more and more complicated to process while ray-tracing, a method championed by Intel is yet to be attractive enough to be used by developers. Ray-tracing is thought to be too CPU-itensive to be used, though Intel claim that modern day processors have enough power to make it happen (Nvidia heavily dispute this).

According to VentureBeat:

As its name implies, it involves shooting a ray from a single point in a 3-D scene. If the ray hits an object, it assumes that whatever is behind the object is obscured and therefore doesn’t have to be drawn. Ray-tracing is better suited for the CPU (Nvidia disputes this) and so Intel is naturally a big proponent of it. The technique used to take too much horsepower, but now Intel contends that modern CPUs have the oomph to do it. Intel has shown Quake IV running on an eight-core CPU using ray-tracing techniques.

Rasterization, meanwhile, is getting more complicated. The graphics processor, such as those made by Nvidia, makes a “pass” at drawing a scene by rasterizing, or layering image effect such as colors, shadows, and lighting upon a scene. It does this repeatedly until the 3-D scene looks just right.

For the end consumer, this definitely means a better picture and hopefully  at a better price.

While we got the dope that Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus should be bundled with popcorn due to feature film length comparable cut-scenes, it appears that the reviewer at Gamepro knows otherwise:

“I’ve completed the game twice, and am the author of the forthcoming [GamePro] review,” Shuman said. “Ninety-minute-long cinemas in MGS4 sounds like an exaggeration. Like the other MGS games, MGS4 definitely has a cinematic quality. And yes, some of the cut-scenes in the game are elaborate and occasionally lengthy. But not a one, to my recollection, even approaches 90 minutes.”

So there you have it. At least these cut-scenes can be paused and skipped. Essential for those mid-game bathroom breaks.