cstGaming

In the wake of the 09′ Stanley Cup Final’s we dive into the first game that will be showcased on our Retro Games page.

NHL 94′ was released in North America March 13th 1993 on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Super Nintendo and Sega Mega CD by EA Sports. It’s hailed as one of the greatest NHL games to ever be released and has a “cult following” still 10 years later. While the latest NHL releases strive to make the game as “real” as possible NHL 94′ skipped that idea and instead nailed game play like it had never been seen before in a hockey game. This 3 button classic was the first hockey game to introduce the “one timer”, an authentic hockey move where a player shoots the puck directly off of a pass. The game also included better all-around control of players, breaking the glass, automatic line changes, a stupid kid that sits in the stands and stands up to bang on the glass, and being able to save your records. This was also the first hockey game to allow 4 players on the ice at the same time.

This game was very in depth as compared to other sports games from this era. It included an 88 page instruction manual. 88 pages! This thing covered everything from basic controls to skating, penalties, scoring and the complexities of line changes. The also had the “Rosters and Ratings” section. They go through every single team and list all of the player and team ratings. This is, hands down, the best part. You could spend hours with this thing.

The best players in the game are Mario (he is the only 100), Bourque (99), Belfour (98), and after them it is goes Molgilny, Yzerman, Oates, LaFontaine, Selanne, Roenick, Gilmour, and then Gretzky. That’s right, The Great One is an 87. How can this be? Well in fairness to EA Sports, he is not the easiest player to assign quantitative value too. The best teams in the game are The Chicago Blackhawks, The Boston Bruins, The Calgary Flames, The Detroit Red Wings, and The Pittsburgh Penguins.

The game has been featured on “IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time” twice: #47 in 2005 and #56 in 2007. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it remains in 2009. Recently http://www.boston.com/, the Boston Globes website had a playoff of the greatest sports game of all time and NHL 94′ made its way through the trenches to hold the title. This game was considered to be so good that NHL 06′ had to include a copy of the orginal NHL 94′ game (lacking player names) to get anyone to buy it.

This game is still played all over the world especially in the U.S but the neat thing is how it’s played. Via emulation software on your computer you can play the game competitively online against other people. Grab a Gravis Gamepad and Go.NHL94 Online.com has provided us with a nice how-to guide to setup you computer to be able to do this. They even have updated rom’s of the game with the current rosters. I’ve included below a link to the Emulator and Game if you want to simply try out this all time classic. Oh and one last thing, GO PENS~!!!

Have you ever been standing in the grocery isle and managed to pick up one of those wonderful celebrity gossip magazines? Ever flip to those pages that show the celebs “très naturel”? Pretty scary. So, i wonder what the big time gaming stars look like on their off days?

Flickr user miramarlongboards decided to let us take a look.

looks like sonic's got the "itch"...

Okay, regardless of the lack of “quality” games that surround the PS3, people have to start to realize and acknowledge the hardware that lives inside this beast. This system has been on the market since November 11th 2006 (coming up on 3 years now) and Intel is finally catching up to the speeds and processing rate that the PS3 puts out. Intel! The worlds largest semiconductor company…is finally catching up. Seriously, though, how much of a punch is the cell processor packing that the worlds leader, 3 years later, is just coming into the picture in performance specs?

Orginal PS3 Dev Kit

I remember the original development kits that were released pre PS3 and those puppies were pretty hardware packed at the time. Dual 7950GT’s, 512MB of RAM, and a Cell Processor. As a PC Gamer, mainly, i would have loved to get my hands on those graphics cards. But, who would have thought that the PS3, 3 years later, would be unrivaled hardware wise, even compared to comsumer grade PC’s? I surely didn’t.

PC Games Hardware (a German PC Gaming News Site) was the first to post this interesting information. Below is a rough translation of the article written to compare the video encoding capabilities of the Core i7 965 XE processor to the Cell Processor located inside a PS3. The results are astounding.

“Cell processor faster than Core i7 965 XE
H.264 video: New Playstation 3 codec uses for transcoding

 

A novel transcoding tool Fixstars allows for the conversion of video material on the Full HD format, with the help of a Playstation 3 in real time.

 

Now put Linux Developer Fixstars a video converter called Codecsys CE-10, which was to encode movies into MPEG-4-AVC format (H.265) The Cell processor uses a Playstation 3 – this format will be predominantly on Blu-Ray media and IP-TV via video-stream uses. The CE-10-encoder sends out from a Windows PC, the output data via Ethernet to the console, which finished the encoded data back to the PC sends back.

 

According to the announcement of Fixstars reached the Cell processor of the Playstation a performance of 29 FPS, that is 1.2 times real-time conversion – so that the cell would have a similar performance as the CUDA Badaboom encoder in combination with an Nvidia Geforce GTX 285, so colleagues from heise online. By comparison, Intel’s current top-CPU, the Core i7 965 XE, does it still at 18 FPS – normal desktop CPUs even create only about 5 FPS.

 

Prices Fixstars said the developer still does not know the Codecsys CE-10 will be on 22 Of June will be – more information, see the datasheet.”

Original Article
The Datasheet

So, i guess the question is when will the processing power of the PS3 be trumped? Another 3 years? I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Okay, if you haven’t already heard the news, The Sims 3 was leaked 2 weeks before it’s release date. EA is no stranger to leaked games, though. This would be the second game from their “major franchise” catalog that was leaked in the past year. Anyone remember a little game called Spore? Spore was in development for over 10 years only to be trumped by our computer hacking friends on the Internets and have its triumphant release stomped out by a DRM complaint swarm. Because the game was leaked EA took it upon themselves to install a DRM validation process in the retail release that caused an uproar in the gaming community involving online registration. The DRM that was imposed allowed you to only install the game 3 times before you had to call EA and have them issue you another validation key. Now this seems easier than it really was. Once you called EA you were presumed to be pirating scum and had to have proof of purchase before they would even continue with validation. One gamer who spoke with ars technica under the promise of anonymity put it best as he canceled his pre-order: “I don’t pay $50 for a broken version of a game. If EA wants to reward the pirates with the best version of the game, why wouldn’t we get the better version [of Spore]?”

From this i propose my question:

Since leaked games are”bad” for the gaming industry, does that mean that leaked games are bad for gamers?

To answer this I’ll use 2 points, one more crudely related than the other.

1.) Industry backlash:
After seeing the outcome of the Spore uproar from people that purchased the game, EA has changed their policy on DRM validation, at least for the release of The Sims 3. The question still remains what is it going to take before the next major publisher imposes DRM restrictions so intense that it doesn’t even make it worth while to purchase the game. From what I’ve experienced most of the people out there that PC game have a decent handle on the inter-workings of a computer and most know what to do if their system is corrupted or fails; format and start over. But, if DRM restrictions put in place to discourage piracy affect our decisions to “fix” our computers where do you go? I don’t keep my software boxes after opening them and i’m certainly not going to cut out the UPC and store it in my gaming DVD’s case. I’d really like to see the sales graph that shows a significant drop in profit from a pirated copy of the game that validates the use of such DRM’s.

2.) Non-completion of Products:

The other realm of bad outcomes for gamers I’d like to explore is for the people that download pre-release/pre-completion games. The comparison I’m going to use doesn’t directly relate to games but it falls under the same category. If you didn’t hear about the ongoing lawsuit with The Pirate Bay (the worlds largest torrent tracking website) you must live under a rock. The issue that brought this website/lawsuit to the forefront was when the latest X-Men Movie was leaked in DVD quality several weeks even before it’s theater debut. The only thing about this leaked “version” was that it was a copy of the film that wasn’t fully completed. The last 17mins (a section of the movie that has an overwhelming amount of CG) was an eye sore due to the fact that you were looking at gray screens and green screens. You can even see the wires that are attached to the actors while they are “flying through the air” at certain parts. I was involved in a viewing of this film and i can say that i truly never want to see a pre-release of a movie ever again. It ruined the film for me. Special effects are such a major role in modern cinema that seeing the final sequence of the movie in that rough of a form turned me off the film in general.

Now, relate that to a game. You download a pirated version of the latest and greatest game that’s supposed to come out 3 weeks from now but it’s missing some of the main content. With that content the game has an entirely different feel to it but you don’t like what you just played so you don’t bother with the game again. This is a scenario that is very possible with the way that things leak and appear on the internet.

How do you feel about this? Do you think publishers are warranted in adding additional DRM restrictions? Do you feel that leaked games hinder on game sales and overall feelings toward specific games? Do you think that their will be a solution that makes everyone happy?

The truth is that piracy will never stop. Remember Napster and the governments attempt at stopping P2P? That only caused P2P to explode into something 1000 times bigger than it ever was. If the gaming industry attempts to stop piracy, piracy will only grow. This formula hasn’t changed since ancient Greece. If you cut off the head of a Hydra, two grow back in it’s place. Wikipedia that shit…

lol, i couldn’t convey it any better myself…