The week in news 17th – 24th April

Gabe Newell causes world-wide depression…

In the run up to E3 there’s been some hot rumours going around that Valve will be unveil-ing a new game and I had high hopes that I could confirm a press conference regarding Half Life 3 but not so! Over at the Valvetime forums a user posted an email he received from the sexy beast himself (no jokes, If he said to me “tits or gtfo, he’d get tits, maybe not my tits but tits nonetheless), which says:

“Dear Gabe,

If you announce a Half life 3 at E3 I will literally attach a valve to my eyeball and go around with it for a year to honour the awesomeness of you and your company. Thank you, that is all.”

The user received a reply from the man himself which briefly explains:

“We are not announcing anything at E3.  Really. We are not announcing Half-Life 3 or Portal 3 or Left 4 Dead 3. We are going to be showing stuff everyone already knows about”.

So I’m pretty bummed out as you probably are too, but in truth I think we all knew this… That is unless Newell is trying to throw us off the scent? *I’m on to you, Mr. Newell* I doubt it, but one can only hope.

…But keeps the hope alive by talking about issues in “Ricochet 2“

Newell has opened up about issues in “Ricochet 2” believed to be code name for HL3. “Ricochet 2” has gone through some unexpected results which has postponed the release of the game. Newell says:

“In terms of Ricochet 2, we always have this problem that when we talk about things too far in advance.

We end up changing our minds as we’re going through and developing stuff, so as we’re thinking through the giant story arc which is Ricochet 2, you might get to a point where you’re saying something is surprising us in a positive way and something is surprising us in a negative way, and, you know, we’d like to be super-transparent about the future of Ricochet 2. The problem is, we think that the twists and turns that we’re going through would probably drive people more crazy than just being silent about it, until we can be very crisp about what’s happening next.”

In other Valve news, Steam’s ban-hammer policy has been updated. Users who have been on the receiving end of a ban can now access their games. There will be restrictions of course such as you won’t be able to trade your games and you can’t purchase new ones but at least they’ve changed their policy from a full to partial ban.

Call of Duty News

Call of Duty fans will be well aware that a world reveal will happen on May 1st. Rumoured to be Black Ops 2, the grapevine suggests that the game will be set in “the near future”, 10 years from now to be precise. The technology that we will see in the game won’t be out for another ten years.  The technology in question is a Quad-rotor RC Attack Drone in which a a peepshow style image  was released for the latest installment. It really is no surprise that the Ministry of Defense are upset that their training simulators are way behind Call of Duty games.

Nintendo confirm Super Mario Bros 2 for 3DS plus follow up news

Coming to US and Japanese stores in August, European release date tbc

Animal Crossing 3DS to hit Japanese stores this fall, Europe and America to follow.

E3 News

As of right now, I have no further news on E3 that I’ve already written about in the past few months, my F5 button is mashed daily in hopes I could bring a more indepth conference timetable and what to expect from developers but there’s been no news at all this week. The second something gets released I’ll post it!

And finally…Family Guy Online is open to all?

So you may remember I posted a somewhat retarded piece about trying to review the new Family Guy Online MMORPG, then it turned out after I signed up and installed the necessary components, FGO was like

“LOL we trol u and spam u! Family Guy Online is not even close to ready.” Well, I wasn’t having any of it and uninstalled and forgot about it. Well, I got an email on Wednesday from Family Guy Online that vaguely went along the lines of:

“We r back lol, no spam.  family guy is open to EVERYONE but because r gayme is so awsum we cant let everyone play because it will break the inturnetz which will cause world war 3 and we don’t want that! So search your inbox for the  speshul “key to quahog” that we sent to you so you can access the game lol”

So, because I’m determined not to be put off by this shoddy management I thought it’d be cool to obtain my “key to quahog” and share it so our awesome Family Guy fans can use my “key to quahog” if they wished and check the game out for themselves (or just read my review, whatever works for you) yay!

Troll me once, shame on you troll me twice and I’m done with you.

Which is EXACTLY what FGO did.

I searched my inbox and there was no email with my code, not even in my spam box so I googled around to find out where this code is, apparently the sooner you signed up the sooner you got your code. I signed up in January and kids that signed up four days ago already got their codes. I ended up going straight to the horses mouth to learn more about “quahog keys” and where the hell mine was and I was hit with this:

They never came back.

That’s all for the week in news!