Mobile MMORPG

Here's one for all of you with unlimited data connections on your mobile phone plans: German developer CipSoft have finally introduced a worldwide version of their Tibia MMORPG for Symbian Series 60 phones. For those of you paying per kilobyte, one hour of gameplay averages around 400kb of data transfer. Could this be a threat to the dominance of World of Warcraft? No longer will people need to closet themselves at home to get their online gaming fix!

Plague (honestly!) on World of Warcraft

A report on Ars Technica today discusses a virtual plague spreading across World of Warcraft servers. Essentially a new high-level area was introduced in which a new in-game magic spell can infect players with a 'disease'. This disease can spread from infected players to nearby players. However when infected players returned to the population centers the disease started spreading like wildfire. Unfortunately since the disease was meant to do moderate damage to high-level players it started indiscriminately wiping out low-level players. Even computer-controlled characters in the cities have caught it - but they regenerate fast enough to not die from it, thereby perpetuating the disease.

Ars cite a discussion on ShackNews as the source:

Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul'Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).

Funnily enough most World of Warcraft players are fairly blasé about the whole epidemic, regarding it as not merely a programming foul up, but as a hazard of virtual life and something to celebrate! Rightly so, in my opinion! This is fantastic stuff, how can anyone not love it?

Update: Someone made a video.

Video game TV adverts

Breaking Windows mentions a link to an amazing page containing over 2500 television adverts for video games. All in WMV format.

Half Life physics

Breaking Windows mentioned this incredible video of someone's experiment testing Half Life 2's vaunted "real world physics" environment. It's a 2.2MB WMV download, but most definitely worth a watch!

Wolfenstein 3D on UIQ

The granddaddy of first-person-shooters has been ported to UIQ . Wolfenstein 3D is available for download here. Note that you will need the original shareware game's data files. The data files from the paid game will not work. Update: version 1.0.1 has been released - it now supports the full (paid) game data files.

MGS Virtual Pool 2 reviewed

After briefly mentioning MGS Virtual Pool 2 a short while ago, I had planned on doing a fuller review at some point. That will no longer be necessary, since AllAboutSymbian today posted a glowing review of the game.

MGS MadMacs UIQ

Noumena have released their latest Magic Game Station (MGS) game. It's a 3D turn-based tank game named MadMacs which apparently includes the capability for 8-player online games. There is a downloadable demo, as well as a Series 60 version. If you haven't tried any MGS games, you are strongly urged to. Every one of their MGS games easily makes my list of great games available for the UIQ platform, while some, such as MGS Karting or MGS Virtual Pool 2, would both make the top five.

tintin++ 1.93.5

Igor asked me to compile his latest version today - I had a look at my previous write-up on the process, but I needn't have worried - it installed without a hitch.