Day Z Going Standalone

Day Z Game

The popular zombie survival game Day-Z is a mod for the game Arma II. It’s been hugely successful, but is plagued with numerous issues due to being a mod for a game that wasn’t ever intended to work the way Day-Z does. Bohemia Interactive, the company that makes Arma II has now given the developer of the Day-Z mod the greenlight to develop it as a standalone game. They’ve already got a website for the game: dayzgame.com and it will be updated in the days coming. The Dev says that the project will follow the Minecraft development model; fast iterations with the community alpha available for a heavily discounted price.

This is great news and I think the only people who will be upset are the (more than likely) thousands of people that bought Arma II during the Steam Summer Sale. Development and updates of the mod will continue in parallel with the development of the game, so anyone who is playing the mod now will be able to continue to do so.

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EA Sues Zynga for Copyright Infringement

EA Sues Zynga

Boom! Saturday update out of nowhere. In gaming news however there’s a bit going on – EA has filed against Zynga alleging copyright infringement. I don’t believe there’s a popular game out there that Zynga hasn’t copied and put on Facebook or the iOS app store. EA knows that and didn’t really care much about Zynga’s business practices until they released “The Ville” which is a clear ripoff of Maxis’ The Sims Social. Since Maxis is an EA studio, Zynga’s stepping on some mighty heavy toes. Here’s the whole complaint. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, at least look at the pictures. They make it pretty obvious that it’s a blatant ripoff even stealing artwork directly from The Sims Social. If there’s one company you don’t want to aggro – it’s EA.

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Minecraft 1.3 Out

Minecraft 1.3

Jeb tweeted earlier that 1.3.1 has gone live and is out. Loads of new features like single-player being a self-hosted server and allowing LAN friends join SP games, Adventure Mode which doesn’t allow building or setting things on fire, Villager trading, made enchanting easier, automatic downloading of texture packs from servers (standard size only), added a multiplayer hardcore mode wherein players are banned upon death, fixed the creative mode pick-block key, and lots and lots more. For a full changelist, read this Reddit Post. Your client should update on it’s own.

Server news: We’ll be updating the server today but we will be wiping the map clean when Bukkit comes out for 1.3 so don’t make yourself too permanent of a house… I’ll also be opening up the whitelist to allow anyone that wishes to join to do so.

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