Vehicles are one of the differentiators in the Battlefield franchise and one of the many reasons I love to play. Here is part four of a series of blogs in which I share some tips on how to use them. I’ve broken the classes up into offense and defense. Offense focuses on gameplay using the vehicle, defense focuses on gameplay against the vehicle. AAV-7A1 AMTRAC The AMTRAC's primary function is t...
Vehicles are one of the differentiators in the Battlefield franchise and one of the many reasons I love to play. Here is part three of a series of blogs in which I share some tips on how to use them. I’ve broken the classes up into offense and defense. Offense focuses on gameplay using the vehicle, defense focuses on gameplay against the vehicle. Many of the points made in my previous entry abo...
Vehicles are one of the differentiators in the Battlefield franchise and one of the many reasons I love to play. Here is part two of a series of blogs in which I share some tips on how to use them. I’ve broken the classes up into offense and defense. Offense focuses on gameplay using the vehicle, defense focuses on gameplay against the vehicle. Many of the points made in my previous entry about...
Vehicles are one of the differentiators in the Battlefield franchise and one of the many reasons I love to play. Here is the start of a series of blogs in which I share some tips on how to use them. I’ve broken the classes up into offense and defense. Offense focuses on gameplay using the vehicle, defense focuses on gameplay against the vehicle. Main Battle Tank (MBT) Tanks pack a big punch but...
We have something fun coming up soon and as a precursor I have rewritten the way we upload images on the Whiskey Media sites. For as long as these sites have been around, we've used flash to upload images. I deployed a change today that allows you to 'opt-in' to using a new uploader built in good old HTML and JavaScript. This will allow us to do some neat stuff in the future. As it is, the chan...
This weekend I was staring intently at my monitor thinking of all the possible moves the A.I. could do in Frozen Synapse when I heard the sweet sound of nostalgia floating in from the next room. Yes that's right. My wife was playing FF VI for the first time. I fought back a tear of joy, but could not resist moving into the room where she was playing. I probably should have played it cool with "...
Over the weekend I noticed that I've topped 100 hours in Men of War: Assault Squad . I was trying to think of other games that I've put that kind of time into and not very many came to mind. Here is what I came up with. 1. Half-Life: Counter-Strike Freshman in college in the dorms with fast internet. Ping 2. Battlefield 2 My brothers and I poured countless hours into this game. Well, I guess th...
Tomorrow FireFox 4 will be released. It will be the last of the three major browsers to update. Two weeks ago Chrome 10 came out, last week IE9 came out. Let's take a look at the adoption rates for each of those on Giant Bomb. One week after release, 60+% is Chrome 10. Hey that's looking pretty promising. Not bad for the biggest change being the options menu. Note that there are two minor versi...
I thought this was interesting. Chrome and FireFox traffic are flipped between Giant Bomb and Tested. The same goes for Safari and Internet Explorer traffic. Fascinating. Giant Bomb Tested
Video immersion We just launched a shiny new HTML5 video player and I wanted to briefly point of some interesting stuff about it. It's not a replacement to the current video player, just a little something extra. It's up on all sites for subscribers: http://www.giantbomb.com/video/theater/ . Uses the same video files we serve to the flash player: H.264 in mp4 Uses the flexible box model. If you...
Last night as I was falling asleep, it occurred to me why I've been enjoying the Men of War beta so much recently. Back in the 90s I played a lot of the Close Combat franchise. This was back when it was a WWII RTS. My brother and I played the first four or five iterations which were all roughly the same game. Eventually we got bored with the series as they didn't do anything to improve it. Even...
The past weekend's RTS of choice was the Men of War: Assault Squad multiplayer open beta. Back in January I played Men of War and gave some quick impressions . At the time I didn't try out the multiplayer as I tend to suck at multiplayer RTS. However, who can argue with free open betas? I gave Assault Squad a go over the weekend and quite enjoyed myself. I found this video commentary of someone...
This weekend I played a lot of Theatre of War 2: Africa 1943 due in no small part to it being on sale last week for $5 on Steam and me having a wife that watches my spending habits like a hawk. It took me a while to warm up to. The first few plays were bogged down by the game being a terrible system hog and me, despite going through the tutorials, having no idea how to play. Originally I was us...
Back in July my PC died . I'm happy to report that it's finally up and running again. I didn't get all of the replacement parts I was looking at. Instead, a friend gave me his working PC and I swapped out some parts. The only thing I ended up buying was the Radeon HD 4870 which seems to be a significant improvement over the Nvidia 8800GTX I was using before. After all was said and done I'm left...
More updates for the mobile sites. You can now choose your video quality from the videos hub. It's stored in a cookie so if you have an iPad and a smart phone, you can have a different quality set for each. quests module on the profile page browse quests blog last blog on profile page browse blogs write blog achievements module on profile page module on game page browse game achievements browse...
Here are the changes since monday! Bug Fixes: podcast xml can now complete video quests on the mobile site embedded videos in articles now work html5 video for iDevice users. link to file for everyone else New Features: followed user status updates added to front door followed user blogs added to front door podcast mp3 link home screen icons reply/quote in forums and comments More stuff coming...
Deployed an update to the mobile site. Here are some changes since Friday. Bug Fixes: more comments button spoiler tags line breaks in posts notification links (at least for the pages that are supported) fixed some of the activity entries. cache was getting mixed up between full site and mobile site. Video Support Update: I took out the video tags and replaced them with links straight to the fi...
As you probably know, I've been working on the upcoming mobile versions of the whiskey sites. Today I'm touching up the Comic Vine skin and it's looking pretty good, so I thought I'd share it with you guys. Comic Vine Giant Bomb Hope the rest of the skins look as nice. :)
Yep. We've got you covered.
As you may or may not know, my PC died about a month ago. So I'm going to replace the CPU/motherboard and figured I'd upgrade my video card while I'm at it. Here's what my friend suggested: Intel Core i3-530 ASUS P7H55-M PRO Radeon HD 4870 Clearly I'm not going for top of the line. Just mid-range to get back into the game. You guys have any thoughts on the matter?
Every now and again Dave let's me have a little fun. Blaaaaaaaaarrrghhhhh I just missed the deploy to GiantBomb so if you want to take a look, go to AnimeVice or ComicVine and click on quest link while logged out.
It's been a couple of weeks since my PC died and I haven't spent much time trying to track down the problem. In years past I would have stayed up until the crack of dawn troubleshooting but I'm old and uninspired. I wasn't playing anything amazing (was finishing up Settlers 7 ) and I use my MacBook for general computing and internet consumption. Aside from StarCraft II , there really isn't anyt...
Every day for the past few weeks I've come home to a tough question: What am I going to play tonight? Five games from my list of 7 have come out and I'm falling behind. I've played SupCom 2 and Bad Company 2 the most, but I haven't finished the single player campaigns of either. I haven't beaten Napoleon: Total War yet and I haven't even installed Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising ! Fortunately I'm n...
I don't know if any of you listen to T.W.I.T. but I thought T.W.I.G. would make a funny name for a podcast or something. Somebody get on that. In the mean time, games! Tomorrow is the release day for two more games from my 4 weeks of awesome list . Supreme Command 2 is pre-loaded at home on the PC and ready to play when Steam unlocks it. And I just got word from amazon that my copy of Bad Compa...
The other day my mom asked how my brothers and I learned to type. As it turns out, I learned with Mario Teaches Typing , a computer program released back in 1995. Oh floppy discs, where have the years gone? And without further ado, here's a clip: This game, combined with chatrooms on Prodigy Classic, made me the man I am today. How did you guys learn to type?
Next Tuesday begins four weeks of gaming madness for me. Seven titles are coming out in that time frame that I want to play. That's over $300! (Don't tell my lady.) Let's run down the list. Napoleon: Total War (Feb 23) Despite its flaws, I loved Empire: Total War . It's surprising to see a full sized release within a year of the previous game, but who am I to complain. I'm hoping they've cleare...
I've been playing a lot of the Bad Company 2 beta recently in anticipation of the March 2 retail release. Here are just a few things you can do to have a better experience. Teamwork Don't just join a squad, play with the squad. Compliment each other by picking different kits and working together. If you're the medic, don't rush out in front where you'll die first and not help anybody. If you're...
From time to time I'll buy a game on a whim. Steam makes it a little too easy to purchase on demand. Usually I'll be bored, look through my Steam game list, and then move on to see what's on sale. This time I noticed Far Cry 2 for $10. It's been out for a little while now and I don't really remember much about it from the reviews and what not, but I remember a friend liking it. Or at least I th...
Somehow Men of War slipped under my radar this year. Yesterday I noticed it was on sale for $12 on Steam. I'm a sucker for WWII strategy games so I thought I'd give it a shot. When I bought it I didn't even realize it was in the same series as Soldiers: Heroes of World War II , which I liked, and Faces of War , which I didn't. I installed it pretty late last night so I only played through the f...
Snider and I have been overhauling the frontend to the Whiskey sites. We're going through all the templates and CSS and cleaning up everything. For the most part we're not changing any of the design so when it rolls out you won't notice much of a difference. For example: Current Empire page Cleaned up frontend code There are still spots that need to be fixed (like the search bar), but we're get...
I redid the user lists lists yesterday. Some of things I wanted to address were: All of the lists looked the same. Couldn't always tell what you were getting yourself into. Rating was meaningless. So here's what I came up with: I blew up the titles, added the description and explained the ratings a little better. The thumbs are larger now too because, who doesn't like thumbs? What do you guys t...
Yesterday I got a beta key for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from GameSpot and got in an hour or so of gameplay. I hear they have keys at a lot of different places if you're not a fan of GS. Here are some quick take-aways. It looks good. The Battlefield series has always looked good to me. Vast draw distances, solid character and vehicle models, dusty explosions, tracers, rocket trails. You can no...
Since Coonce has been rewriting the activity backend we thought rewriting the frontend would be nice too. What Jeff's activity looks like today What it will look like in the future Here's what a mixed feed will look like We'll be rolling this out soon. Maybe today maybe Monday.
We rolled out a quick update to the achievements page of games. Halo 3 Achievements Old Achievements New Achievements The rest of the achievement modules will be getting similar upgrades in the next week so if there's anything missing that you want, now's the time to ask.