DHAJ (Forum) on 18 Aug : 14:43 [re: World of Tanks Closed Beta] Yesterday, I was accepted into the closed beta (as were a few of you who signed up the same day I did). I promptly created an account and began downloading the 1.1GB installer file. This afternoon, ...[more]
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Welcome to Christian Gamers Network! CGN is a Christian Gaming Community for anyone looking for a fun, clean place to play games. Most of our members use Xfire, so check out the Member Profiles page. If you have a question or comment feel free to email the admins at admin_cgn@christiangamersnetwork.com.
I'm very pleased to announce that Christian Gamers Network has joined forces with the World of Warcraft guild "The Fish and Bread Trick". We have plenty of space to go around, so let's make the new members feel at home. TFABT is a Christian Guild that plays mostly on the US-Ghostlands server in WoW. They've been around for about a year and are all a blast to play with and talk to.
Over the next few weeks, you'll see lots of changes going on around the ole website. Forums have already been added and new links have been added to the main menu. Please bear with us while we add these changes. I believe that both groups can help further enrich each other in the gaming environment and continue to provide a Christian influence on the gamers around us.
This is part one of a seven-part video. In this segment, we meet a module called Weatley that had been told that if he detached from his rail that he would die. I could go on, but just watch the video for yourself. It's well worth it.
An update for Counter-Strike: Source was released today that includes support for the Mac as well as adding 140 achievements, lifetime stats, and an updated scoreboard to name a few. They basically updated the Source engine for CS:S so it's more current and using some of the features available in Team Fortress 2. Like TF2, CS:S now has player domination, death animations, and the ability to take kill cam shots.
I played against some bots for a bit and the basic gameplay is basically the same. The scoreboard is now huge and has large text to emphasize things like the team's score and how many players each team has (total and alive). At the end of each round, it shows the MVP for the round which earns that player a little star next to their name. If you get more than one, you get a star plus the number of times you got MVP. At the end of the round, it also shows some mini-stats that change every time. For example, one round it showed who had the most kills on both teams. The next, it compared the best player's accuracy to the enemy team's overall average accuracy.
The lifetime stats are rather interesting, though. The game keeps track of how many rounds you've played, won, and lost... starting right now. It also tracks how many kills you get with each weapon, your stats with the weapons, and displays your favorite primary and secondary gun. This really shows way too much information. I used to play CS:S quite often, but I've moved on to newer, better games. Yes, the gameplay is still fun but it gets old pretty quickly. I look at some of the achievements and know for sure that I've probably done that a time or two or have never even tried, but I just don't feel the urge to try to get them. It's not like in TF2 where you can upgrade that class by collecting the achievements or like in Killing Floor where working on your stats gets you better perks. With so many "upgrades" to an already established game, I just can't help but wonder how many addons and mods are going to be ruined...
Oh by the way, CS:S is on sale for $6.80 for the next couple days... for anyone in the world who just started gaming in the last few weeks and hasn't automatically bought it yet.
In an effort to make our community and LAN Parties better, I just created a new topic in the forums about LAN Parties and their future. It's a pretty long post, but it will hopefully give some insights in the method behind my madness. It should also provide a focused outlet for you to voice your opinion on some upcoming changes and let you help decide how things will work out in the future. Remember, this is a community of gamers... so everyone has a voice. This is your chance to use it!
Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight has been out since mid-March, but I only just now decided to go ahead and buy it. We were at Fry's this last weekend and they had it for half off ($25 instead of $50). Now since I've been a fan of CnC since highschool (late 90's), I just had to pick this one up. It's supposed to be the final episode and the answer to all the questions about Tiberium. I played the first few missions in the campaign. The play-style is similar to the older CnC games, but they've made a major change. What the original Command and Conquer called the "Construction Yard" and later CnC games called the "Mobile Construction Vehicle" (MCV) has turned into the "Crawler". Instead of it being the key to building all your buildings, this is the sole construction building that creates both structures and fightings units (soldiers, tanks, etc.). It packs and unpacks quickly, so it can be moved around the battlefield easily. You can't produce units or place built structures with it packed and moving, but you can get them ready to be deployed. This means that while the Crawler is walking around, you can have 3 tanks in the build queue. When the Crawler unpacks, it shoots out a tank. This gameplay is taking me a while to get used to. Also, ALL the previous versions involved collected Tiberium and selling it to get money. That's no longer the case. In CnC4, you have a certain number of Command and Structure points. Each structure and each unit has a numeric value. Larger buildings and tanks have a higher value. You can only build up to that Command or Structure point number. For example, if the tank costs 3 Command Units and I only have 9, I can only build 3 tanks. Same thing for structures. It's like they've tried to simplify the game so you don't have to worry about resource management. You don't have to worry about building your base and building the technology tree to unlock advanced units. You just have to worry about building units to either defend or attack your objective.
There are 3 different types of Crawlers you can pick from. Offense, Defense, and Support. Obviously, Offense and Defense are about attacking and defending, but Support is where you get the air units. You also get these little repair drones and you constantly have to tell who or what to repair instead of them being somewhat automatic. CnC4 also has a coop feature, which is somewhat unique to Real-time Strategy games. They tried adding it in CnC3, but they're really pushing the coop feature in this version. The wife isn't much of an RTS fan, so I guess I have to find another coop parter to test this part out.
I also tried a Skirmish just to get the feel for the new play style. I immediately attacked the enemy Crawler and destroyed it thinking the game would be over and I would have won in just a few minutes. Nope, it just spawned another one. The goal was to "hold" key places around the map. You capture them by having units next to them and you get points for keeping them. The more you have, the more points. After finally figuring this out, I eventually won. I opted to leave my Crawler at a fortified area and just ran my tanks around the map. The enemy was constantly moving his Crawler, but it was also getting destroyed frequently. This tactic helped the enemy get lots of units in focused areas, so I should probably learn a good way to do that. But right now, it's just a tough transition from being base-oriented. So far, I'm not really enjoying the latest version but I keep playing it in hopes I start to like it.
Finally, a computer game developer that bridged the gap between the PC and the Mac. Well, technically both platforms are PC... using the same hardware and all. This is really a great move by Valve. With the growing popularity of Macs, there are hundreds of potential gamers out there. This could be exactly what the PC Gaming industry needs to keep itself alive.
So how does all this work? If you've already bought some games and have them tied to your Steam account, then you don't need to do anything. If you have Portal, for example, then you can install it on either a Windows or Mac computer. There's no need to purchase two different versions of the game. As of this writing, there aren't a whole lot of mainstream games available on the Mac. I've read that all the Source games will be available, including Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead 2. I've also read that Tripwire Interactive is very close to having Killing Floor available on the Mac. Obviously, this isn't a huge list, but it's a good start. Plus any new games should be available on both platforms.
Well it seems that our game server is currently down. This is following a power outage from the thunder storms last Friday night. I was hoping a series of reboots this morning would resolve the issue, but it is still not responding. My fear right now is this is a hardware problem and that something major is broken. Hopefully later today we'll have a little more information as to what's going on.
Update (2:15pm): After a few tests, it appears the hard drive is dead. I was doing remote troubleshooting so I'll know more when I see the server in person. Hopefully the data can be recovered easily and I can move it all to a new hard drive (as soon as I find one). More info to come!
Update: Well, it looks like the hard drive was ok. Either the SATA or power cable was to blame, but it seems to be working again. The connection seems to be pretty fragile since it stopped working between the test bench and the server rack. But the server is up and running for now!
The new Steam User Interface (UI) Update is finally here! I could post screenshots, but you can see for yourself on Valve's website or just wait for your computer to finish downloading it. It's a required update, so whether we like this or not is irrelevant. I've been using it for the last almost hour and it's starting to grow on me. I used to use Steam in the minimal mode (where it's just a sliver on the side of my screen). You still have that option with this update, but I've switched over to the full view. With the new UI, when you select a game, it tells you which of your friends have it, your stats, and any news related to that game. I haven't had a chance to try it out, but the new Downloads tab looks interesting. I always hated how difficult it was to stop, slow down, or even monitor active downloads. Now there's a whole tab dedicated to current downloads. The taskbar icon also got a facelift. Nothing major, though. The tray menu has a couple more options. Now you can right click the icon and select one of your recently played games to play. So far, it looks like everything works. They did a short beta to work through some of the bugs, but I'm sure a few more will pop up in the next few days.
Speaking of the next few days... With the release of the new UI, Valve has promised to bring Steam to the Mac. This will also include most (if not all) Source-based games including Counter-Strike: Source, the Half-Life 2 series, Team Fortress 2, and the upcoming Portal 2. The best part is gamers won't be required to buy their game for Mac or PC... if you have already bought CS:S, it will work on either the PC or Mac! Please be aware that even though you can get tons and tons of games on Steam, the Mac support is (currently) limited to the games Valve produced. Others, such as Killing Floor, have hinted that they'll also be supporting the Mac "soon". Native Linux support is still not available yet, but I'm betting once they get the Mac platform working decently enough they'll soon have a Linux solution as well.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is set to be released this March. No official date yet, just "March". From what I've read, it sounds like the gameplay is going to be just like the Battlefield 2 we grew to love... with the addition of destructible environment. What's that you say? Oh yes, you can destroy the cover your enemy is hiding behind and even take down entire buildings. Unlike all the other PC Battlefields before it, BF:BC2 has a single player campaign. (Note: Bad Company 1 was for console-only and had a single player.) Even though it will probably be fairly short, it should still offer a few hours of enjoyment. I don't believe this will be available for coop, though. Multiplayer will also offer a new gamemode called Squad Rush. In Squad Rush, two squads of 4 players will face off against each other. This is the alternative to a 32-player multiplayer game of conquest. Squads can still be created in the regular multiplayer, though.
My one big problem with all the Battlefield games is you have to play on ranked servers to increase your rank. This means that if we wanted to run our own server, we'd have to pay for it. We could run an un-ranked server (I assume), but that would disable any unlocks anybody has. So that just wouldn't be fun for the players who actually earned the new perks. Currently, if you pre-order from Steam, you get access to 6 unlocks and can play the Beta starting on the 28th of this month. I'd really like to pick this one up. It's $50, which is decent considering most new games are selling for $60 now. But I imagine the pre-order offer will be available for a while.
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An update for 
Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight has been out since mid-March, but I only just now decided to go ahead and buy it. We were at Fry's this last weekend and they had it for half off ($25 instead of $50). Now since I've been a fan of CnC since highschool (late 90's), I just had to pick this one up. It's supposed to be the final episode and the answer to all the questions about Tiberium. I played the first few missions in the campaign. The play-style is similar to the older CnC games, but they've made a major change. What the original Command and Conquer called the "Construction Yard" and later CnC games called the "Mobile Construction Vehicle" (MCV) has turned into the "Crawler". Instead of it being the key to building all your buildings, this is the sole construction building that creates both structures and fightings units (soldiers, tanks, etc.). It packs and unpacks quickly, so it can be moved around the battlefield easily. You can't produce units or place built structures with it packed and moving, but you can get them ready to be deployed. This means that while the Crawler is walking around, you can have 3 tanks in the build queue. When the Crawler unpacks, it shoots out a tank. This gameplay is taking me a while to get used to. Also, ALL the previous versions involved collected Tiberium and selling it to get money. That's no longer the case. In CnC4, you have a certain number of Command and Structure points. Each structure and each unit has a numeric value. Larger buildings and tanks have a higher value. You can only build up to that Command or Structure point number. For example, if the tank costs 3 Command Units and I only have 9, I can only build 3 tanks. Same thing for structures. It's like they've tried to simplify the game so you don't have to worry about resource management. You don't have to worry about building your base and building the technology tree to unlock advanced units. You just have to worry about building units to either defend or attack your objective.
