As most of you might know, I am an avid Diablo 2 player. With that said, there's little surprise in the reaction to me filing in line behind the other Sixty-Two Thousand other players who have signed a petition to renew Diablo 3's artistic feel and direction. This petition was released nearly immediately after the opening of Blizzards Diablo 3 website and the unveiling of the gameplay videos.

Blizzard responded to this petition by firing their lead art designer but negated that good news with the fact that they're keeping his feel/direction of the game.

All the petition asks for is a change in the feel and colors of the game which would be accurate and familiar to the Diablo universe. What Blizzard seems to forget is, without the devotion of Diablo 1 & 2 fans for 14 YEARS. , there would be no Diablo 3. Give the fans what they want!

To hear bullshit excuses from the designer, check the link:
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/04/diablo-iii-designer-turns-tables/

Xfire has integrated Aol Instant Messenger into their chat program.
For those of you who don't know what xfire is, it is a chat program that tells you what PC games your friends are playing, and allows you to chat with them while in almost any game.
I'll risk my anonymity and give you guys a little sneak peek:

Pretty awesome so far, and it's the first time it's been released so i'm sure there will be many more fixes, patches, and addons for it in the future.

To download xfire, visit: http://www.xfire.com/

Shogun

Hey it's shogun again, with a pretty l3g1t add-on for firefox 3.
It's called adblock, obviously.

This handy little tool blocks a certain amount of ads from popping up on thousands of websites most internet enthusiasts frequent on a day to day basis.

Try it for your self: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

And shogun out!

Swine Flu.

We've all been hearing this term being thrown around quite a bit recently, but what exactly caused this? Or for a more important reason, who?

Three vials of swine flu virus samples were stolen from a Maryland government owned facility.

"The vials contained samples of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, a virus that sickens horses and can be spread to humans by mosquitoes. In 97 percent of cases, humans with the virus suffer flu-like symptoms, but it can be deadly in about 1 out of 100 cases, according to Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for the Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. There is an effective vaccine for the disease and there hasn't been an outbreak in the United States since 1971."
(source: www.cnn.com)

My personal belief, it's bullshit.
About 35k people die from the regular influenza a year. This is just another thing to worry about.
Don't panic, and be informed people.

Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/22/missing.virus.sample/
http://www.jonahsgospel.com/topics/107-pandemic/261-swine-flu-a-comprehensive-guide


-Shogun

Razer, the top name in gaming equipment has recently introduced their newest gaming mouse to the market,
The Razer Mamba® Gaming mouse.

at first glance it looks to be another bullshit Razer® product with a slight ergonomic change they're throwing at WOWfags and such until you review the specs:
5600dpi
1ms delay (solving the lag problem due to most wireless mouses)
and a 72 hour battery life when the mouse isn't plugged in
(yeah, a wire plugs into the front of the mouse to recharge the battery, so at charging times it looks near exactly similar to their older mouse, the death adder)
example:


I've never really been partial to Razer® products due to their design and size. Those factors combined with my huge hand equals no dice.
I have to say, this mouse is definitely a force to be reckoned with and if i hadn't already bought my Saitek Cyborg® mouse which i reviewed a month or two ago, i might have actually purchased this beautiful thing.








For more information on this beast, or if you're looking to buy it, linky time: http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-mice/razer-mamba

Shogun out.

Here's Nvidia's newest step in the footrace towards personal supercomputing.
It is truly a testament to epeen and win combined in a sleek looking case.

Their new Tesla® S1070 supercomputer has the power of up to 250 gaming computers combined.

Specs:
GPU's: 4
Number of processor cores: 960 (240 per processor)
Double Precision Performance peak: 311 345 Giga flops
Single precision floating peak: 3-4 Terra Flops.
Dedicated memory: 16g/b's
Memory bandwidth: 408g/b's
Pci-ex.

The new Cuda® graphics card doesn't even have a fucking monitor jack.
Makes little sense to me actually.

Check this beast out yourself:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_s1070_us.html

Apocrypha, Eve Online's newest expansion, promises to bring a lot of change to the Eve universe for both the veteran and beginner pilots. One of the biggest changes that will affect the new pilots just entering Eve is the New Player Experience or "NPE."

Eve Online has one of the steepest learning curves of all of the massively multi-player games out right now. To help guide the beginners in the right direction Eve has developed a tutorial system to help get the pilot familar with the universe. Yet, the current system still has a steep curve that frustrates and overwhelms new players. To counter this the developers have changed the way the beginner comes into the universe of New Eden.

The developers have modifed the user interface of the beginning stages of when you create your character and have changed up the way you select you attributes. With the current system, you select your race, sex, bloodline, ancestry, career, specialization, school, and allocate free attribute points in the character selection. The devolpers have eliminated the school, career, and specilization and have made it to where the new pilot can choose these choices when they get a more firm grasp on the game. The allocation of the free attribute points have also been moved to a later time in the pilots creation. On top of this, the skills that the new pilot will get are going to be more tailored to helping the new pilot right in the beginnin. This will cause the current amount of skill points you start with to drop from 800k to 50k (This is not final yet, still under going tests. Remember that the older players in Eve started with WAY less than 800k.)

Now, this update also pretains to the veteren pilots as well. All pilots in Eve will be able to reallocate 14 of their attribute points once a year. So that means if you accidently trained Charisma in the beginning then you can now move them to another category. Also, the NPE will help aide in the creation of alternate toons for those vets who need that extra help out in 0.0.

All of this can be read on CCP Fear's blog.

- Noodles

Saitek, a well known name in PC gaming equipment has just released their Cyborg Mouse on the hungry throngs of gamers across the world.This sexy thing comes stock with 3200Dpi, programmable, 4-way, low profile hat switch, adjustable Scroll Wheel that can change the click strength of scroll wheel, and an automatic adjustable mouse size option.

Here's a video demonstrating the auto sizing feature:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3P1qAtjR48&feature=related
(watch in HD to see the sexiness)

Well my buddy just got his fresh out of the box and I broke this girl in for a few hours in CallofDuty4 and she plays like a pro, good feel, with awesome click response.

The only real problem i have with the mouse is the two stacked buttons where your thumb sits, having those buttons there makes it harder to pick the mouse up without triggering whatever you set those buttons to. And if you're like me, you grab on to your mouse pretty tight while sniping or precise aiming which is a problem with those buttons there.

There it is:












Well besides that little problem, this thing is a very sturdy mouse with awesome custom ability.

Alright then, i'm off to go mess with it some more on Cod4, Shogun out!

In an ever changing, multilateral game such as Eve Online, there is no real limit to what the developers can create. A way CCP can attest to this is their new addition to the game involving Wormholes.

CCP Whisper tells us a bit about it:
"We are going to give you uncharted, unknown places to visit via paths that shift and slide through the fabric of space. We are going to give you thousands of new solar systems which will contain new NPC's, new exploration content and new pockets of resources to exploit," Whisper wrote. "You will have the chance to venture into places that promise great rewards but also bring with them great risks."

Such a great change to the game seems to be stirring the minds of Eve players and from what I hear in game and out, it looks like some people will be focusing their time in Eve completely on these very interesting, extremely profitable wormholes.

Along with great profit comes great potential loss, these wormholes will randomly collapse and apparently shoot you out in different areas of space. Not to mention the new breeds of NPC's in them.
Have you ever found one of those amazing officer spawns floating in the belts? Well there are going to be officers in these wormholes as well, but not as stupid.
These NPC officers will be able to web, jam, point, and warp away. CCP is incorporating almost all dynamics of PVP into these NPC's so watch out!

I for one, welcome our new wormhole overlords.

Get your probes together boys, and prepare for march 10th.

Link to the DevBlog: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=616