EA and Crytek teamed up for an announcement at E3, confirming that Crysis 2 was under development for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. Details are scarce (and the trailer is no help), but the game will use CryENGINE 3, which will be able to scale performance such that it will look good on consoles while still pushing the limits of PC graphics. Quoting: "When asked if that sounded like a contradiction, [Crytek's Cevat Yerli] responded that you have to think of technology as a tool that can scale. He said the game's content scales to the platform it's on. 'The PC version will look better, because of the fact that the PC can do more. It will be scaling up. But on the consoles, you're competing with console games,' he said. 'The goal is to be the best looking game on PS3 [and] the best looking game on 360 in the entire market.' On the PC front, Crysis 2 will compete with the original Crysis, which still sets the bar for PC graphics."

Two months after releasing an iPhone port of Wolfenstein 3D, id's John Carmack brings an update to the similar effort underway to bring classic Doom to the iPhone as well. He provides some detailed information on the development process, and says they're aiming for a release some time next month. "One of the things I love about open sourcing the old games is that Doom has been ported to practically everything with a 32 bit processor, from toasters to supercomputers. We hear from a lot of companies that have moved the old games onto various set top boxes and PDAs, and want licenses to sell them. We generally come to some terms in the five figure range for obscure platforms, but it is always with a bit of a sigh. The game runs, and the demo playbacks look good, but there is a distinct lack of actually caring about the game play itself. Making Doom run on a new platform is only a couple days of work. Making it a really good game on a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power is an honest development effort."

Over the past several days, Valve has been releasing details on an update to Team Fortress 2. They first revealed that the Sniper was taking its turn in a series of class upgrades, getting a bow and arrow that's capable of pinning an enemy to a wall. Next, they showed off a pair of new maps — a sawmill arena map that's in the midst of heavy rainfall and a circular map built around a doomsday weapon. Valve also mentioned a new game mode called Payload Race — it's similar to a regular Payload match, but both teams have a cart to push. The next day brought about an electrified shield for the Sniper, and hinted that the Spy would be getting an update as well. The following announcement confirmed it, introducing a device that would allow the Spy to feign death, and another that lets the Spy remain invisible permanently, only draining their power while in motion.

PLSQL Guy writes "Duke Nukem Forever developer 3D Realms is shutting down, according to Shacknews. They cite 'a reliable source close to the company,' who said the developer is finished and employees have already been let go. It looks like all of the Duke Nukem Forever jokes are turning into reality; DNF might turn out to be the ultimate vaporware after all." 3D Realms' webmaster, Joe Siegler, confirmed the closing, saying that he didn't know about it even a day beforehand. Apogee and Deep Silver, who are working on a different set of Duke Nukem games (referred to as the Duke Nukem Trilogy) say they are not affected by the problems at 3D Realms.

AlexMax2742 writes "id's Marty Stratton notes the following in his Quake Live developer blog on the subject of the Mac and Linux port of Quake Live: 'These have proved more difficult than expected, but we're getting close. We expect to also be testing Mac and Linux versions of Quake Live internally this month and then making those publicly available just as soon as we feel they are ready. This work is being done by a separate programmer in parallel with the other work that we're doing, and is his only priority — point being, that this is a top priority for us and not being delayed because of other work.' In my humble opinion, it's awesome to see that kind of (continued) dedication from a company." The post also indicates that progress is being made on the much-awaited private server functionality, and part two makes brief mention of match broadcasting and community-made maps.

Time Doctor writes "The de-facto standard in Quake 3 engine technology, ioquake3, has hit version 1.36 recently. It includes a garbage bag full of improvements: in-game VOIP; optional external Mumble (voip); OpenAL; IPV6; anaglyph stereo rendering; Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems; multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders); PNG format support for textures. Of course, there are even more fixes for security holes and other bugs in there. So, if you don't like ads and queues in your Quake 3 experience, get a copy of Quake 3 off Steam and copy your data files and key into your ioquake3 directory."

An anonymous reader writes "It's been a long-talked-about but never fully realized aim of developers, publishers and format holders to create a game that runs on multiple platforms, but connects and exchanges assets between them — e.g. you play a game as an FPS on a console/PC but control it as an RTS on mobile devices. Now, Rockstar Games seems to have cracked it, on a small scale, with news that a new Flash game will allow PC gamers to generate in-game cash — true to form for GTA-creator Rockstar, it's through 'money laundering' — that is then transferred to its new Nintendo DS title, Chinatown Wars. GameSpy's online technology seems to be responsible for this latest gimmick, but most interesting is the idea that this could allow an interface between platforms like the iPhone and consoles as well. How long until an indie developer creates an MMO that has different interfaces for PC and mobile?"

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is running a news story about the XreaL project, which its lead developer claims is the most advanced open-source game engine. XreaL is based upon the vintage Quake 3 engine, but it has been rewritten over the course of many months such that it no longer resembles the original id Software engine. The XreaL engine has its renderer written entirely in GLSL with compliance toward the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification in mind, but it supports the new OpenGL 3.0/3.1 specification and is able to take advantage of its new features. XreaL has also added an HDR pipeline to its engine and on modern hardware is actually GPU — not CPU — bottlenecked. XreaL can also load game content from Unreal Tournament 3. This engine, which is described to be as powerful as what can be found in Doom 3 or Call of Duty 4, is written entirely with free software. The XreaL project has created plug-ins for Maya to broaden their game development capabilities."

Resident Evil 5 will be getting a new multiplayer mode later today that allows players to square off against each other. It will be available on the Playstation Network and Xbox Live for a fee of $5. Two different game types will be available, according to Capcom. In one, Slayer's Rule, you'll compete against other players to kill the most enemies. The other mode, Survivor's Rule, pits you directly against other players, either one-on-one or two-on-two.

Michael writes "A new version of Nexuiz, a GPL-licensed, first-person shooter, has been released. There are over 3,000 changes in Nexuiz 2.5, including new maps, new game-modes, enhanced graphics, new audio, and other major changes. Phoronix has posted a preview of this Nexuiz 2.5 release, with screenshots showing the impressive graphics and how it has raised the bar for open-source gaming. Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge."

Attendees of this year's GDC were given an early look at Wolfenstein, the new shooter in development by id and Raven. We've previously discussed the "Veil" ability that protagonist BJ Blazkowicz uses to hide himself, and much of the coverage relates to how it affects gameplay. "Early on, Blazkowicz stumbles upon an experiment and manages to blow it up, releasing waves of ethereal blue material. The Veil seems to turn gravity on and off as Blazkowicz tries to escape the area, making for some very original gunplay. ... The folks on hand told me that the Veil would be incorporated into game's multiplayer, but wouldn't go into details." A trailer for the game is available at Joystiq, and they had this to say: "Wolfenstein's look and gameplay is dated — and not in a retro chic way. Without the Veil, the game could be mistaken for a last-gen title, so the game's success rests on how compelling this feature will be throughout an entire playthrough."

Ponca City, We love you writes "According to a new study, people who played fighting games on their PCs became up to a 58 percent better at perceiving fine contrast differences, an important aspect of eyesight. The breakthrough is significant because it was previously thought that the ability to notice even very small changes in shades of grey against a uniform background could not be improved. Contrast sensitivity is the primary limiting factor in how well one sees. Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks with either Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and the results were compared with another group who played The Sims 2, which is richly visual but does not require as much hand-eye coordination. The improvements lasted for months after game play stopped. The new finding suggests action video games could be used as training devices as a useful complement to eye-correction techniques, since gaming may teach the brain's visual cortex to make better use of the information it receives."

An anonymous reader writes "id Software has released a port of the classic Wolfenstein FPS to the iPhone. Some of the coding was done by John Carmack himself, who also used original code combined with new code from Wolf3D Redux. The original code was open sourced years ago, and enthusiasts have been updating it, which made the port considerably easier for id. It's available in the iTunes App Store, but the source is available for free at id's website." Carmack also posted a detailed writeup about the decision to bring Wolf3D to the iPhone, including design notes and a few snippets of code. At the end, he says, "I'm going back to Rage for a while, but I do expect Classic Doom to come fairly soon for the iPhone." Kotaku got a chance to try the game at GDC: "It's not just a good reproduction of the original, it seems better."

billlava writes "Tired of Team Fortress 2 servers that lie in order to attract players, engineers at Valve (creators of the Half Life franchise) have come up with a way to weed out servers that give false information about the number of players online, or custom server options. 'After kicking around some proposals, we came up with a simple system built around the theory that player time on a server is a useful metric for how happy the player is with that server. It's game rules agnostic, and we can measure it on our steam backend entirely from steam client data, so servers can't interfere with it. We already had this data for all the TF2 servers in the world, allowing us to try several different scoring formulas out before settling on this simple one that successfully identified good & bad servers.' Of course, this only works with their games running on Steam."

qreeves writes "Here it is, for the whole world to try out — the official Blood Frontier 'Beta 1' release. Compared to our last release, 'Alpha 2,' the game has taken a dramatic turn from the slow and clunky 'third-person' shooter it was. Based on feedback from the community (which we take very seriously — no idea is too big or too small) we refined, polished, and extended our gameplay to what we consider to be the most fun Free and Open Source First Person Shooter out there. Many may think it does not compare, visually, with some of the other shooters out there, but what we lack in art, we more than make up for in gameplay. So, give it a try, play against our new and improved Artificial Intelligence, which is giving even the most seasoned of players a run for their money now. Or, hop on our master server at play.bloodfrontier.com, where there is usually someone either playing, or watching from our IRC channel in #bloodfrontier on irc.freenode.net (yes, IRC chat support is built right in!). More information is available at our website."

The Quake Live team has announced that the beta will open to the public on Tuesday, February 24th. On Monday, they will take the servers down, wipe all stats and prune inactive accounts, then re-open on the public site. Personal settings and current account info will be maintained for active accounts. They also said, "We're going to post some additional information in the Developer Notes about the opening of the game, what it means to leave the 'beta' tag on the site during this time, and discuss some features and functionality that we're planning for the next couple of months that we know you'll be interested in." GameSetWatch ran a story recently by a columnist who tried out the closed beta, and we discussed John Carmack's thoughts on the game a few months back.

Valve's Gabe Newell gave the keynote address at this year's Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit about the cost of games, the effect of piracy, and how to reach new players. Valve undertook an experiment recently to test how price affected the sales of their popular survival-horror FPS, Left 4 Dead. They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which "resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title's original launch performance." They also tested various other price drops over the holidays, seeing spikes in sales that corresponded well to the size of the discount. This will undoubtedly add to the speculation that game prices have risen too high for the current economic climate. G4TV ran a live blog of Newell's presentation, providing a few more details.

An anonymous reader writes with news that Unreal Tournament 3 will be getting a free expansion called Titan Pack on March 5th. It will contain a variety of new maps, and two new game modes: Greed and Betrayal. There will also be new weapons, deployables, and achievements. IGN's preview of the expansion mentions a few more improvements, such as an improved voting system and client-side demo recording for the PC version. Quoting: "... the most obvious addition to the series is the new Titan. As you play through the game, killing enemies, completing goals and generally avoiding damage, you'll build up your Titan meter. Once it fills up, you can instantly mutate into a 15' tall Titan. The Titan has massive health, a decent shield belt and can fire homing rockets. Oh, and he can also pound the ground to knock back any enemies that get too close. In short, the Titan is a real game changer."

theodp writes "CNET takes a look at Web browsers you can run inside of the latest video games, offering mini-reviews of PlayXpert, Steam, Rogue, and Xfire. Why run these instead of your standard browser? Well, these browsers run lean and mean, play nice with full-screen apps, provide hot keys that can make them appear or disappear in an instant, and offer transparency so you can continue to play a game in full screen while chatting, reading e-mail or looking up cheat codes. So how much longer before we see a variation of this on our real-world car windshields?"

First-person shooters comprise one of the most well-developed video game genres in existence. The number of high-quality games and franchises practically demands that any new entry must have an interesting concept and a rock-solid engine. Otherwise, it will quickly get buried under an avalanche of award-winning titles. When the original F.E.A.R. came out in 2005, a well-crafted horror theme, the AI, and a few gameplay innovations allowed it to succeed despite direct competition from established franchises, such as Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2, among others. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin draws on the strengths of its predecessor and adds a few improvements. The question that now remains is whether or not the additions make up for the fact that the game's concept is no longer new and unique. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.