It is a known fact that many gamers couldn't afford to buy an additional physics processing card from Ageia due to the fact that it had a big price ($130-$180). A lot of games do not offer proper support or don't offer support for such cards at all - rendering the cards useless. What these cards are good for is the extremely detailed and the better rendered explosion and particle effects (for example, a brick would break into 25 pieces instead of 10 in such a blast). So the idea was big price for cool little effects, which were not really significant - therefore the sales didn't go too high. The good news is that Ageia made a deal with the Japanese graphics cards maker ELSA, and this Japanese factory will make Physix cards that will sell for 6000 Yen ($50). If these cards will go for the same price all over the world, they are likely to be a success.

Ever since the first game trailer of Alan Wake was released in 2005, gamers were interested about the release date. The graphics looked really well at that time. The producer Lasse Seppänen said that the game will be released "when it's done":" We're not tied to a schedule, we don't have to aim at a monolithic release date. If we can make a better game by giving it more time, that's the way we'll go. That doesn't mean, however, that we'd mean to be working on Alan Wake five years from now."(...)"While "When it's done" works for us, the concept sometimes seems hard to gasp for the media and press."

Game Trailer



The story is about a succesful writer who suddenly loses his inspiration when his fiancée dissapears and starts having nightmares when he goes to a clinic to treat his insomnia. When asked about the exclusivity on Vista and Xbox, Petri Järvilehto (development team leader) said: "I'll confirm that Alan Wake is Vista and 360 exclusive. I know some people have reacted strongly to that, but for us this was one of the key decisions that will allow us to create the best possible game.We've locked this down a while ago, and being able to focus on fewer platforms means that the game is going to kick more ass than ever before. By going with Vista, we don't have to compromise everything to the lowest common PC denominator and since we're not doing a PS3 version we can go all out with PC and 360 multithreading, HDR rendering etc. This focus benefits the tech and game design immensely. We're really sorry if some end up missing the game because of our platform choice, but in the end of the day we *must* base our decisions on what will let us create the best possible game."

The developers of Half-Life have decided to continue the story even after the third episode. Doug Lombardi from Valve has mentioned in a recent interview: "We haven’t announced anything specific, but Half-Life won’t end at Episode Three – hang on to your crowbars!"

So the fans are to expect either some more episodic content or a really new and big game that could be named Half-Life 3 - there's not much that would suprize us these days, at least from this perspective. However, it would be interesting to see how the plot in the game story would evolve and the possible twists it may have. And since the graphics were impressive in HL2 - Episode 2, one would expect something even better in the upcoming Episode 3.

Being in contact with the game developers has its benefits and one of them is finding out before anyone a lot of juicy details about upcoming projects. This applies to Hellgate London as well, as Bill Roper (Head at Flagship Studios) announced (beside the availability of the 0.6 patch) that there will be an expansion for the subscribers of the online multiplayer version and sent us a Christmas card too that you can see below.

Bill Roper said: "We've decided to take the time necessary to make our first major content patch right. If there is one lesson we've learned from launching Hellgate: London, our releases should be a question of "what" and not "when." We were pushing to get Stonehenge released before the end of the year, but we realized that we wouldn't be doing the right thing to push it out before it was ready and properly tested. We're still on our schedule and meeting our original promise of providing a major quarterly update. We just felt that we would be doing everyone a disservice to push this out before it was right. We are, however, going to have the first in our continuing Hellgate chronicles, entitled Stonehenge, into Test Center before the holidays. This is so we can get a lot of people finding the issues and getting us feedback over their holiday breaks."

Finally, one of the most expected hotfixes for "Hellgate: London" has arrived: Patch 0.6 brings a lot of joy for the gamers who enjoy the single player campains, by increasing the framerate and reducing the memory usage - 2 aspects that seemed to have been overlooked by the developers for the initial release. Now we can truly say that this is an amasing game indeed as most of the bugs have been fixed. So, the game is supposed to run smoothly for everyone at this point.

Here's a list with the most important performance fixes:

- Fixed a known issue with the inventory user interface that caused the client to lock up.
- Fixed a bug which caused the Mini-game to sometimes become stuck.
- Fixed a texture memory leak that occurred when inspecting armor items. This will improve long-term memory usage, especially for players that frequently buy, sell, and analyze items.
- Overall memory usage improved, especially in Stations. This increases client stability, reducing “memory exhausted” crash issues.