What would have Guitar Hero been like if it were released in the early 80s? I’d imagine something very much like this! I particularly like the grating (but familiar) “game over” sound. (thanks Dave!)

While we have a bit of a running theme of stuff I should have posted ages ago and World of Warcraft, here’s The Onion on the forthcoming World of Warcraft sequel.

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

While firing up World of Warcraft today for the first time in months (funnily enough to use as a chat client to see if a friend was around, not to play!) I noticed that Blizzard had announced Diablo III.

An intro trailer and all the usual bits and bobs over their site but, most interestingly, a pretty hefty introductory video to the gameplay. Rather lovely it looks too, introducing the Barbarian and Witch Doctor character classes (there’ll be three more, in both male and female flavours) it looks rather WoW-inspired — no bad thing — with lots of lovely touches like destructible scenery which can used to the player’s advantage.

And, oh yes, walls of zombies! I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

Remember Atari? They used to be good. Actually they were rather great and pretty much defined my childhood. Anyway, Kotaku do too and have uploaded a rather cool catalog of Atari stuff from 1981.

Those sure were the days…

Yezzer has been working all hours on something, but wasn’t allowed to tell me anything about it. Now that Alice has spilled the beans over at Wonderland and Kotaku are all over it I can finally check it out… and it certainly explains a few things!

Created to accompany the Channel 4 TV drama City of Vice around the beginnings of the police force in Georgian London, Bow Street Runner is a Flash-based game reminiscent of those point-and click “multi-media adventure games” like Return to Zork in the 90s. Except that it’s actually good (and on a web page instead of 5 CD-ROMs).

City 7: Toronto Conflict is an interesting looking mod, produced as part of the first thesis project from the Game Design program at George Brown College in Toronto, for Half-life 2.

City 7: Toronto Conflict, is an action packed Half-Life 2 mod with a variety of unique levels and game play. Explore what has become of City 7 in areas like Dundas square, Eaton Center , Mel Lastman square, St. Michael’s Hospital and TTC system under the Combine rule. This version features Gordon Freeman as the main character, stuck in Toronto due to a teleporting accident in Kleiner’s lab. Try to escape this war torn city by finding any type of teleporting technology and send him back to City 17.

Despite our small development team and short production time, we managed to get halfway to the CN tower and have already created 2-3 hours of fun and action packed game play! We want to finish this mod the way it was intended it to be, as a glimpse at what happen to a part of North American during the Combine invasion.

I’ll have to check this out at the weekend… Though I still haven’t played through Episode 2! (via Boing Boing)

Seeing as we’re on the topic of Half-life 2: Episode 2, here’s a bunch of cool stats that Valve released on the game (that I meant to write about before, but forgot). There’s some cool new stuff in there like a heat map of where players have died the most.

Mr T (above) and William Shatner star in commercials for Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. They really play. No, really, they do.

Check out this absolutely awesome t-shirt from The Internet’s Penny Arcade.

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Want.

I had a Halloween post all ready but never got around to posting it. I guess it’s a bit late now so I’ll have to save it for next year. C’est la vie.

This, however, I do have to share. Friends of a friend of a friend (yeah, we’re that close) created (and dressed up as) a Big Daddy and Little Sister from the Bioshock. Amusingly, the costumes are better than the ones at the games own launch event! (Thanks to See-ming for the tip!)

More Bioshock Halloween costumes on Cult of Rapture.

Update: Forgot to link the “making-of” set.

Update 2: Another video of a dad and his kids playing Big Daddy and Little Sisters. “no little sisters were harvested in the making of this video or when walking rapture looking for treats” (via Wonderland).

Ever since I installed Windows Vista and discovered that it didn’t like to play nice with my video games, despite me running a fairly capable set-up (AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 2Gb RAM, 7800GTX graphics card), I’ve just slipped into my “comfortable old slippers” Windows XP partition and played them there.

This week, however, perhaps freshly fueled by my installation of Bioshock which ran (well, hobbled) like a spluttering, stuttering mutant — and annoyance with World of Warcraft playing at between 5-20fps — I decided to find an answer. And I did! At least in part.

After much trial and error I fixed World of Warcraft to run again between 35-50fps at 1900×1200 under Vista by doing the following:

Right clicking on the application icon and choose “Properties”, then clicking the “Compatibility” tab.

Enabling the check boxes next to: “Disable virtual themes”, “Disable desktop composition” and “Disable display scaling on high DPI settings” and Windows turns off Aero and all that other resource-hungry GUI crap while you’re running the game.

Running it in “Windows XP compatibility mode” didn’t seem to make any difference.

With that fixed, I decided to take a look at Bioshock, which really didn’t play nice in Vista at all with the audio stuttering and the high resolution texture maps not showings up — no matter what resolution I ran it at or whether I chose the lowest quality settings despite it running perfectly happily in XP on the same machine. I’d assumed that there was something buggy with the on-board Realtek ‘97 audio drivers or the nVidia video drivers but, with my newly fixed World of Warcraft behind me, I thought I’d have a go at trying to get it to run properly as well.

Firstly, I changed the compatibility options as I did with WoW, above, but this didn’t seem to make much of a difference — if anything at all. Then I remembered reading something about disabling vsync when trying to fix WoW. I didn’t work for WoW, but I thought I’d try turning it off in Bioshock. I also forced it to load in DirectX 9 mode by using “-dx9″… and it all seemed to make a slight difference. Not enough to make it playable yet, but definitely an improvement.

Still… one out of two isn’t bad.

Update: I managed to improve game play in Bioshock further by using an X-Fi sound card instead of on-board sound upgrading my processor to an Opteron 180. I’d imagine that I’d be able to play it full-screen at 1920×1200 with maximum settings if I had an 8800 graphics card — or at least one with more than 256Mb of RAM. Half-Life 2 already runs much more happily.

Update 2: This Bioshock Tweak Guide might also help you gain a couple more FPS.

I want both of these retro Pac-Man T-shirts! Distressed Pac-Man and Power Pellet Ghost, from 80stees.com. (via Wonderland, again, how does Alice find all this cool stuff?!)

There are a whole bunch of rumours about a new Monkey Island game flying around that almost definitely aren’t true. Probably. Either way, here’s some fantastic concept artwork by Steve Purcell.

The I Am 8-Bit 2007 exhibition opened on Tuesday at the Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in LA. Thankfully, for those of us too far away to enjoy the video game inspired artwork in person, there are loads of places to get a sampling online:

• Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight
• Cartoon Brew
• Destructoid
• Fort90 part one
• Fort90 part two