EA Not Allowing Porsche for Forza 4

Forza has been the go-to racing sim for the XBox for a while now. While PS3 fans have their Gran Turismo 5 to taunt the Microsoft players with, Xbox gamers will soon have Forza 4 which is set to be Turn 10 Studios’ biggest game yet. Forzamotorsport.net has a good interview with Turn 10 creative director Dan Greenawalt. In this interview he explains some of the new features of Forza like manufacturer specific levels, called “affinity levels”. In this system, if you race in a BMW, you gain BMW-specific XP. You can buy and sell multiple BMWs without changing your BMW XP. Your BMW XP is only changed by the miles you race in BMWs.

One big discussion point of the interview is Forza’s disappointment of not being able to secure the rights to include Porsche in their game. Forza 3 had 35 different models of Porsches and this installment was set to have even more. The Porsche license has been available only through a sub-licensing deal with EA. EA doesn’t want to share their pie with anyone else now and isn’t allowing Turn 10 to feature some of the best road-going cars out there in their game this go-round.

“While we respect EA’s need to run their business as they see fit, we’ve regularly collaborated in the past and hope we can find our way back to that approach. Forza had the exclusive license for all Ferrari cars, for example, on the Xbox and PC platforms. But at the end of the day, we’ve always found that we just weren’t willing to block other racing games from having Ferraris outright, as we believed that this would do nothing but hurt the racing ecosystem.”

Read the whole interview here.

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Preview Video

So we’re familiar with Counter-Strike 1.6 and Counter-Strike Source. The problem these two games face is that there’s a rather divided player-base. They’re wanting more of a competition-focused game and a lot of the money in competition gaming is brought from the sponsors who want pretty games. CS 1.6 doesn’t offer that and new players are completely under whelmed by it. The point of CSGO is to make it easier for new players to get into and to organize the competitive players into their own matchmaking system like Starcraft 2 does.
From my point of view, Valve is seeing that e-sports is getting massive and they’re attempting to take the PC Counter-terrorism-FPS competition scene, because right now, there is none. CoD has died, CSS never really took off and BF is a pub game.
Take a look at the video and see for yourself if Global Offensive meets the mechanics demanded by E-sports competitions and has the visual appeal that CS 1.6 seriously lacks.

 

Update: Kotaku is reporting that CSGO will be cross-platform and gamers from different platforms will be able to play against each other. “On the PS3, players can use the game controller, the PlayStation Move motion controller or even a mouse and keyboard. PS3, Mac and PC players will be match-made against each other, clumped by skill, regardless of input device or platform.”

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Warhammer 40k Space Marine Demo

Carrier, one of our forumers suggested we all take a look at Totalbiscuit’s play the new Warhammer 40k: Space Marine demo. If you’ve ever watched a Totalbiscuit video you pretty much know what to expect. You can now pick up the demo yourself here at the Steam Store and give it a shot yourself. While it’s downloading, take a look at the video below!

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