Stronghold Kingdoms Announced

Grabbing out attention this afternoon, Firefly Studios has officially announced the development of Stronghold Kingdoms, an MMO based on their popular castle-building series. Scheduled for release in 2010, the game has you starting out as a humble peasant, completing tasks to earn research points which you can use to specialize in various areas including trading, diplomacy, warfare, farming and much, much more. As your character grows, you'll be able to expand your kingdom, participate in a country-wide war for the Crown, join medieval social networks, overthrow tyrants, pillage your neighbour’s resources and even gain notoriety for your accomplishments via the game's global stats/rankings. Head over to the official website for more details and some early screenshots!

Steam Weekend Deal: 50% Off Assassin's Creed & Splinter Cell

Attention bargain shoppers! Valve has announced that Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell: Double Agent are 50% off through Steam from now until Sunday, May 31st. So if you're looking for some stealthy fun, you may want to check them out!

Update: Looks like FLOCK!, the Bone-Breaking Racing Pack (Trials 2 and Monster Trucks N 214d itro) and all MumboJumbo titles are on sale through Steam this weekend as well. Don't miss out on these deals! :D

Electronic Gaming Monthly resuscitated

Ziff Davis Media, as you may recall, sold the 1UP Network to UGO last year, to much fan rage. The long and short of it is this: 1UP would either go under or be sold to a network that actually cared about it and its staff, contrary to your average acquisition.

Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), part of the network, was even less fortunate, as it was a print magazine with higher production costs and a readership that was dropping more all the time. As such, it got the cut. A sad day, indeed.

Fans can rejoice though: today an agreement between Ziff Davis and EGM's founder Steve Harris has been made to bring the magazine back. After all the economic turmoil and such especially, this is beautiful news.

The press release states Harris has "[re-acquired] certain assets, including trademarks and publishing rights, with plans to re-launch EGM in the second half of 2009."

“The re-launch of Electronic Gaming Monthly represents a welcome opportunity to continue delivering quality content to gaming enthusiasts,” said Harris. “I feel honored to once again be associated with this respected magazine. The talented writers and designers who built upon EGM’s original vision have left behind a publication that is uniquely positioned to be successful.”

“Electronic Gaming Monthly is and always has been one of the most respected publications among the gaming enthusiast community,” said Jason Young, CEO, Ziff Davis Media Inc. “We are pleased that EGM is now in the hands of its original creator, Steve Harris, and wish him and the publication the best of success in the future.”

“We have exciting plans for the evolution of what will once again be a leading independent voice for the gaming community,” Harris continued. “The twenty year success of the EGM brand has always been built upon a commitment to its readers who I believe will enthusiastically embrace the changes we are planning to introduce.”

More details and future announcements are assured to be coming at E3 and posted on the magazine's new website -- www.EGMNOW.com.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Shipping In August

Pinning down an exact release date for us this afternoon, Eidos Interactive and Rocksteady Studios have announced that their upcoming Action-Stealth title, Batman: Arkham Asylum, will begin shipping to stores across North America on August 25th and Europe on August 28th. The game was previously scheduled for release in June, but was recently pushed back to "the end of summer 2009" to allow for more polish time. I can already hear the fanboys planning a "sick day" for the launch. ;)

Wolfenstein Gets North American Release Date

According to an update on the official Wolfenstein Twitter feed tonight, Raven Software's highly anticipated World War 2-based FPS will begin shipping to stores across North America on August 4th for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The European release date is still TBA, but they promise pass along that info as soon as possible...so stay tuned! :)

Plug being pulled on the Matrix Online

The Matrix Online, after a fairly long, mildly successfull and partially profitable run, is going to cease existing on July 31st.

Following the storyline after the trilogy of films, The Matrix Online attempted many things and got some of them right. The game tried to focus on storyline and interactive, global events, but beyond a first few good chapters after launch, these quickly became infrequent and sporadic.

On the technical side of things, the game looked quite good for its time -- but on the other hand, it required unreasonably high-end hardware to run smoothly.

The game was made by Monolith Productions, but after a few months after release, Sony Entertainment Online bought it out. SOE seemed to have reduced the staff and funding for the game, and most of the community was dissappointed by this (if my memory serves me correctly, having played the game around that time).

The Matrix Online was one of the few (if only) big MMORPGs of the time that allowed for player characters to swap skills interchangabily, allowing for instance, you to play as a Hacker guy one day, then a Combat Operative the next.

With the excessive supply of MMORPGs on the market featuring the same tired cliched fantasy world (Y.A.M.F.R.I.E.S.!), fans of science fiction and cyberpunk might miss The Matrix Online. But then again, probably not, as the game had a very low player base near the end, and promising new MMORPGs are set to take this game's place.

R.I.P, The Matrix Online.

DOSBox 0.73 released

For those still playing DOS-based games, today is a good day as DOSBox 0.73 -- a tool which can emulate but also assist in running legit copies of these old titles on non-native DOS systems -- has been released.

It's actually a pretty big step up from 0.72, with highlights including improved Vista support, heaps of compatibility fixes, increased speed and stability, and lots more.

For Good Old Gamers, the installers there should be updated shortly; if you're too eager to wait, simply install this version and copy the exe to each game's folder as appropriate.

Full changelog is below.

- Add two new opl2+opl3 emulators. (better speed, different implementation
approach)
- Improved DRO recording/better file structure.
- Add EGA emulation.
- Add special vga machine mode. Supports more of the exotic tricks like
changing the palette during screen updates, 9x16 fonts etc.
- Added special machine modes for the following svga cards:
- S3
- Paradise
- Tseng
- Fix problems with the vga split line feature.
- Improve vesa emulation.
- Add optional selection of old vesa mode for games that don't work
with certain vesa features.
- Improve video BIOS emulation to behave more like a real bios.
- Fixes for emulated 4bpp graphics modes.
- Fixes to paging system.
- Various fixes and improvements for the recompiling core.
- Add arm backend for the recompiling core.
- Add some mscdex quirks when dealing with files that are exactly 8.3 long.
- Small fixes to batch file handling.
- Small fixes to the XMS memory handling.
- Various fixes for aligned memory on hosts that want it.
- Various improvements to the mouse.
- Fixes and small speed ups to the debugger.
- Fix and improve lot's of compilation problems. (curses detection,
GCC 3.4 and GCC 4.X fixes)
- Added some basic auto keyboard layout handling. (windows only currently)
- Add basic support for evdev keyboard driver.
- Various fixes to the timer. (improve mode 2 timer changes,
implement mode 1, improve gate2 handling)
- Add audio extraction and mci audio support. Should enable CDROM audio
for Vista and adds volume control.
- Improve the directory cache speed a lot, especially with mounting slow
media like network paths.
- Various fixes to the create temporary file call.
- Don't keep batchfiles open during execution. Allows rewriting of the
active batchfile. (menu programs use this trick sometimes)
- Fix problems with filenames with 2 extensions.
- Add some more lowlevel dos tables.
- Fixes to hercules emulation.
- Fix flag handling for special case of ROR.
- Make the batchfile handling in regard to IF more flexible.
- Fixes to scrolling/panning feature.
- Add prefetch queue emulation.
- Make the emulated cpu type selectable. This is mainly the
identification commands and the way paging works.
- Some special EMS functionality added. (OS handles, zero-page handling)
- Improve support for EMS when booting a different OS.
- Improve cdrom speed detection by games.
- Improve stability of cycle guessing code, when there is background
activity.
- Fix various mscdex and cdrom detection schemes.
- Added Coremidi support on Mac OS X.
- Improve support for DOS devices when used to detect the existance
of directories in various ways.
- Add IRQ 2 emulation on VRET. (ega only)
- Added video parameter table and video state functionality.
- Increase default freespace to 250 MB.
- Some fixes to the fat filesystem handling for disk images.
- Some soundblaster fixes and command additions.
- Fix mixer 16bit direct transfers on bigendian hosts.