PCGP Episode 80: Four Score!
This week we welcome Mike Legg, President of Petroglyph, to talk about Universe at War: Earth Assault. Also, in the news: PC Game sales are up; Richard Garriott & Steven Hawking are currently on the vomit comet; Lord of the Rings Online goes live; Hands on Team Fortress 2; Intel CPU price drops; Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare announced; fire at Human Head Studios; rumored DirectX 10 hacked into Windows XP; playlists!
April 26th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Just so you can’t say first…
April 26th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
you know Burning Crusade also has online distribution that’s not being tracked by NPD
April 26th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
No Q&A’s/
April 26th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Just to let everyone know, gogamer.com has a special on Supreme Commander for 25 bucks. I haven’t got it yet, but when I saw the price, I couldn’t resist. What’s up with all the cheap prices lately? I would imagine that not only will the NPD not count online sales, but the average PC game is much cheaper than your average console game, thus showing a much lower number when everything adds up.
http://www.gogamer.com/Supreme-Commander-PC-Games_stcVVproductId8330016VVcatId444758VVviewprod.htm
April 26th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Great guest! It’s refreshing to hear a guest so excited about his product, and not reading from PR cards.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Oh hell yes - go get Supreme Commander! It’s a steal at that price.
And yeah, Mike was a lot of fun to interview. While I was in Vegas for the story, that whole Petroglyph crew was a riot - especially their stories about the Westwood days working on the C&C games. He’s definitely on our callback list.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Yea Mike was really great. Sounds like he loves what he does (cries and prays for the same). Looking forward to the game and more info (directly from him even better!) Great podcast.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Also Penumbra: Overture is fantastic! Looks amazing and has the best motion blur I’ve ever seen in a game. I’m serious. What’s crazy is the game is like only 300+ MB. Not to mention the use of physics is great as well. Opening drawers never gets old.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:37 am
So does what the guest said about being proud of EA for how they handled C&C 3 mean that all of the EA haters can shut the hell up about how Westwood would have done it better and all that crap?
Dan: Have you tried countering the Shadow Teams by popping a few rocket guys and rifle guys out of your barracks as soon as you have it built, try that with at least one watchtower up, that shouldn’t slow you down too much in the race to a War Factory. I hope this balance patch they’ve been talking about fixes a bunch of this stuff so almost every game doesn’t devolve into a rushfest.
April 27th, 2007 at 7:33 am
“Stryc9 Says:
So does what the guest said about being proud of EA for how they handled C&C 3 mean that all of the EA haters can shut the hell up about how Westwood would have done it better and all that crap?”
Don’t be daft of course they wont.
another great podcast congrats on your 80th and a brilliant guest
April 27th, 2007 at 9:54 am
death rally pwns!!!! if someone were to make a version in first person, it might be one of the only games i play. once i get out of college with my software developer degree, i might be the one to do it. whenever i have a lan party, some of us fire up dosbox and multiplay, unfortunately, im the only one that really knows how to play it.
oh, and nice podcast. cant wait for #100. any plans for it?
April 27th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Stop typing!!! :p
April 27th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
wow, thats the first good interview i’ve heard on any podcast in a long time… i hate hearing from PR people for publishers, but hearing from developers who love what they do is great. They actually let a “real” interview occur. Great podcast.
Direct2Drive.com also recently dropped several games to $19.99; GRAW and Titan Quest among them… pretty damn good deals if you ask me.
April 27th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
That was bloody hilarious, by the way.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
So which is better C&C3 or Supreme Commander? And did the core duo make a vast improvement over the athlon?
April 27th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
It depends on how you like your RTS C&C 3 moves along very quickly, you can be at the top of the tech tree in 8 - 10 minuets if you try hard enough. My machine can’t handle SupCom so I can’t personally attest to how it plays but everyone seems to be saying it’s a slower more tactical game.
April 28th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Great interview by Dan. Doesn’t Mike Legg sound like a fantastically nice person?
As for PC game price drop, this has been happening in the UK for a while now. We get some really good deals both on-line and in retail. I’m really hoping that publishers are beginning to realise that if you drop the price you get a lot more people buying. And the more people buying means more people are interested in your future products. Grow the market!
April 28th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Oh, I have to agree to Gary. After hearing Jack Thompson bashing CS so much i too started playing it again… however, i immediately started slaughtering some poor sods, guess it is just like riding a bike…
April 28th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=23478&vpn=001PSYC&manufacture=MAJESCO&promoid=1064
psychonauts, 3.99 CDN, limit 5 per customer. Now that’s a steal! last time it was 10 per customers and I actually bought 4 for me and my friends
April 28th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
theres a (really early) cod4 trailer on www.gametrailers.com looks amazing.
April 28th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
I’m buying a new PC this year. I’m waiting to upgrade to vista till then. However, at work (I’m a dev at Symantec) we support Vista for certain client installs and it’s caused no end of problems. I think Vista (pre SP1) causes a lot of problems for devs whether it’s business software or games.
April 29th, 2007 at 3:52 am
HEY COD 4 MAY BE PC ONLY
Got this from planetcallofduty.com
“Call of Duty 4 PC Only
Call of Duty 4 - Saturday, April 28, 2007, 11:22 - 1 Comments | Matthew Pruitt
Fourzerotwo, IW’s community manager, has released a statement regarding the release date and platform Call of Duty 4 will appear on:
Some cool things to notice is that all that footage is taken directly from the SP campaign, so you’re looking at the actual gameplay you’ll get to play. The only exception of course are the logos, waving flags, etc. All the action is actual in-game action captured from the SP of the game.
Platform: PC
Release: Fall 2007 “
April 29th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
I find it hard to believe that Call of Duty 4 would be a PC only release. THey wouldn’t buy television ad time for something that is being released just on the PC…
I’ll be suprised if it actually comes out to PC and isnt consolified.
I mean Call of Duty 3, was console-exclusive, so it wouldnt surprise me if thats how it goes again.
Although god damnit that is one hell of a wicked looking game. I cant wait to play it.
April 29th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I forget who, but someone on the podcast said he was upgrading from AMD to an intell 6600. What AMD were they upgrading from?
April 29th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Does anybody knows about Blizzard announcing a new title next month?
http://kotaku.com/gaming/luke%7C-i-just-soiled-myself/blizz-confirms-new-product-next-month-255518.php
The news actually come from another gaming mag but doesnt sound very solid to me.
April 29th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
COD 4 may be PC only, but COD 5 will be on the consoles and (again) set in WW2. =(
April 30th, 2007 at 12:08 am
RyePunk: Star Wars: Empire at War was PC only and Lucasarts bought TV time for that, it doesn’t happen as often as we would like but PC only titles do get air time.
April 30th, 2007 at 12:14 am
That was me, Robert. I upgraded from an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo 2.2GHz. My 3DMark06 score about doubled and now all my games run like silk at 1920×1200.
April 30th, 2007 at 7:16 am
Man and I’m upgrading from a simple 3700+ to a E6700. Safe to say I’ll get a boost? /endsarcism
I’m anxious to hear what the 500lb gorilla has been working on. GO GO GADGET PC GAMER SCOOPAGE!
April 30th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Ah thanks Jeremy. Glad it worked out for you. My x2 4200 is weeping. I got it a years ago. Upgraded from a AMD 64 3200 and honestly, I’ve never been happy with its performance. I was kind of wanting to hold out for the Intel quad cores (just because of Valve I’m sad to say) but I’m getting weak.
April 30th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Jeremy,
You Doubled your scores with that upgrade? Thats great. Can you give the specs? i.e. What changed from your old rig to your new one. Thats if you recycled and its not a completely new rig.
April 30th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
WTB Update on Gary’s WOW guild search on next episode, pst
April 30th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
I doubled my PCMark03 CPU score when I upgraded from a Pentium D 930 to an E6700. I run BF2 maxed out at 1600×1200. I’ve also run the SupCom demo maxed out with no chugging frames. (both with with X1800XT 256MB.) Nothing else was changed, since I was running a C2D ready MoBo (D975XBX).
April 30th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Stryc9: You forget. That’s a Star Wars game. Anything Star Wars does not follow the standard order of things. Lucasarts can afford to throw money at advertisements, because Star Wars sells, doesn’t matter. The Prequels. They sucked, but we all still went and saw them.
Basically Star Wars is a very poor example.
Hopefully CoD4 will be made for PC, and then console heathens can get a port later down the road. I want my games non-consolified thank you.
April 30th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
durran, I used a Geforce 8800 GTS (320MB) in both systems, but the other primary components changed:
OLD RIG (3DMark06 score 4849):
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
- CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR 400
- Abit KN8 Sli motherboard
NEW RIG (3DMark06 score 9291):
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
- Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 (4-4-4-12)
- ASUS P5B Deluxe LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard
May 1st, 2007 at 12:33 am
Rye Punk: I never saw any TV commercials for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy when they were about to be released and they were PC exclusive titles. I think that publisher don’t buy air time for PC titles simply because they don’t figure their games will sell that well and it’s too big a risk if their game doesn’t do well.
May 1st, 2007 at 12:45 am
Gary if you need a good CS:S server I’m in a clan that promotes respectful and mature attitudes http://www.thinking-man.net/index.php. We have an office 24/7, gun game, and rotation map server. Check us out and tell ‘em Pegleg sent ya.
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Good show.