Kotaku has come with the news that the new Call of Duty game which hasn't been announced yet will be released in 2009. This game will be created by the team that made Call of Duty, Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4: Infinity Ward. According to Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick this news has been confirmed.

Kotick said the publisher switches between Treyarch and Infinity Ward when releasing a game. At the moment Treyarch (CoD3) is working on Call of Duty: World at War and Infinity Ward is already working on the next CoD.


The Infinity Ward team also announced that they're busy working on a project which finds place in the future. Maybe the new Call of Duty-game contains lasers and Space Marines? Could be...

Source: callofduty4.nl/
[Submitted by Rellix]

British pro-gaming team Birmingham Salvo have been crowned winners of the 2008 Championship Gaming Series (CGS).

The ten-strong team share the top prize of $500,000 (£252,000) for coming out top of the eight teams who made it to the grand final.

Birmingham Salvo dominated rival San Francisco Optx in the battle for the title winning four out of five events.

The win marks the first time that the CGS trophy has been awarded to a British team.

"I'm extremely proud of my team right now," said Michael O'Dell, manager of Birmingham Salvo in a statement. BIRMINGHAM

Behind the scenes at the CGS

"We faced a lot of tough competition throughout the season," he said, "but when our backs were against the wall, every player demonstrated the skills and the poise to step up when it mattered the most."

The CGS season started in March when players competed for a slot in a CGS team. Each player winning a place on a team got a contract and a monthly wage to support them as they took part in the various CGS competitions.

The 18 teams that emerged from this first stage then went forward to regional competitions to find the eight that competed in the grand final.

The CGS is organised around four games - Counter-Strike: Source, Dead or Alive 4, Forza Motorosport 2, and Fifa 08.

In the final, Birmingham Salvo started strong and only lost the women's Dead or Alive 4 round to San Franciso Optx. The final score across all rounds was 22-15.

For coming in second San Franciso Optx picked up a cheque for $150,000 (£75,000).

Two Birmingham players, Dean "Picaso" Sutton and David "Daveyskills" Kelly, were named as the 2008 CGS most valued players.

The CGS was set up in 2007 and is a joint venture by broadcasters BSkyB, DirecTV and Star.

Source: BBC News Page

[Submitted by Dmurtonator]

During its Gamefest 2008 developer conference in Seattle, Microsoft officially announced DirectX 11, the newest version of its multimedia API package. Like its predecessor DirectX 10, it will be exclusive to Windows Vista "as well as future versions of Windows."

Features include new shader technology that begins to allow developers to position GPUs as more general-purpose parallel processors, rather than being dedicated solely to graphics processing; better multi-threading capabilities; and hardware-based tesselation.

Said newly promoted Microsoft's Entertainment Business Division CTO Chris Satchell during a Gamefest keynote, "We want to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders."

DirectX 10, which was first released in 2006, required DX10-specific hardware, creating a clearly-defined split between it and DX9. "We created a discontinuity; that was deliberate," Satchell said during his address, but DX11 will be compatible with DX10 hardware.

"DX11 is totally compatible with DX10. There's not that 9/10 discontinuity we created before," he said.

On the state of the PC hardware switch from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture, Satchell noted that software has been the limiting factor. "We've been shipping 64-bit CPUs on the hardware side for awhile," he pointed out. "We're not at the point where the 64-bit OS is catching up. I think we are [there] in the next six to eight months." Satchell did not specify Windows platforms when referring to 64-bit systems.

Source:

Gamasutra
Kotaku

Microsoft to unveil DirectX 11 at XNA Gamefest

Seattle (WA) - Microsoft will take the wraps off DirectX 11 at its annual XNA Gamefest, which is scheduled to take place on July 22 and 23 in Seattle, TG Daily has learned.

This year’s Gamefest will be built around DirectX 11, to relight the fire of the multimedia and gaming API. The software is scheduled to be made available for Windows Vista and Windows 7, but Microsoft wants to avoid the same mistakes it made with DirectX 10.

According to our sources in the game development world, DirectX 10 failed to capture hearts and minds of developers, since Windows Vista and the development environment were just too unstable to use them as a development foundation, we were told. Vista came with a "passing the cost to the consumer" approach in term of hardware performance as the operating system was burdened with DRM in too many stages.

Stay tuned for more details to come.

Following the XNA Gamefest, Microsoft, Nvidia and AMD (ATI) are expected to start talking about DirectX 11 at conferences such as Siggraph 2008 (August 11-15) and Nvision 08 (August 25-27).

DirectX 11 is set to debut in late 2009, several months ahead of the release of Windows 7.
[Submitted by Brownbear]

German S.T.A.L.K.E.R. community site Stalkerzone has published the system requirements for the prequel to the award-winning Shadow of Chernobyl.

According to this cover the game, published by Deep Silver, will have the following system requirements:

Microsoft Windows 2000 (SP4)/XP/Vista
Intel Pentium 4 2GHz/AMD XP 2200+
512 MB Ram
10 GB free hard disc space
128 MB DirectX 9c compatible card
Lan/Internet for Multiplayer
Keyboard, Mouse

Recommended System Requirements :

Microsoft Windows XP /Vista
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400/AMD 64 X2 4200+
1.5 GB Ram
10 GB free hard disc space
256 MB DirectX 9c compatible card
Lan/Internet for Multiplayer
Keyboard, Mouse


GSC Game World had promised to keep the specifications around the same as those for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl but the requirements to run Clear Sky with DirectX 10 settings have not been released yet.
[Submitted by Brownbear]

Rumour has it that Fallout 3 won't be rated by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) Board of Australia.

According to a post on the GameSpot forums the game has been denied classification due to scenes of drug use, in particular the use of morphine, in the game. Fallout 3 is said to fall under the OFLC set of rules for not classifying a video game:

Depict, express or otherwise deal with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults.

If this rumour is confirmed it will imply that the game will not be sold on retail shelves down under.
Additionally, we can expect an increase in the talks on expanding the rating system in Australia from MA15+ to R18+.

Australia has a long history of censoring video games; Manhunt, Postal 2 and Reservoir Dogs were banned outright for high impact violence and cruelty. The Grand Theft Auto series, Duke Nukem 3D and Soldier of Fortune: Payback were eventually released with censored versions conforming to the MA15+ classification.

Other games have been banned or censored for sexual violence, explicit sexual dialogue or references to illegal drug use including The Getaway, Shellshock: Nam '67, Dreamweb and The Punisher.
[Submitted by Brownbear]

Since it was announced last week, Diablo 3 has received some criticism for not including consoles in it's release schedule.

Click to Enlarge Although Blizzard announced last week that the game was to be a PC and Mac exclusive, vice president Rob Pardo has said that Diablo 3 on a console is plausible:

I think it's theoretically possible. It would have some control changes that I think you'd have to make... But it's probably, of our major franchises, the one that's most console friendly, for sure.

Pardo was also quick to point out a few of the practical and design problems with a console version; loss of target selection and something similar to line-damage implementation. Pardo does not believe that the game would need a full redesign, but would be the easiest to port to consoles compared to StarCraft, Warcraft or World of Warcraft but would still be a lot of work.

Although the PC was said to be the most suitable platform for the game, Rob Pardo might take a chance and take a step into the console world.
[Submitted by Brownbear]

Activision have partnered with McFarlane Toys to release a line of action figures based on the forthcoming Treyarch game Call of Duty: World at War.

Click to Enlarge US-based firm McFarlane Toys are already well known for creating action figures based on other video games such as Metal Gear Solid and Halo.

The full set of 'highly detailed' and 'game-accurate' figures will consist of:

# Marine Infantry, Battle of Peleliu
# Marine Corps with Flamethrower, Battle of Peleliu
# Marine Corps with Machine Gun, Battle of Okinawa
# British Special Ops, Battle for the Roer Triangle

The Call of Duty: World at War action figures will be on sale for $10-15 (€6.50-9.50) each and are expected to be released this autumn.


[Submitted by fice]

LADS, ITS NOW DOWN TO YOU!.

UPLOAD THE BEST BIKINI PICTURES YOU HAVE ON YOUR PC OR ANY YOU HAVE SEEN AND UPLOAD THEM INTO THIS POSTS COMMENTS!

GOODLUCK AND LETS GET THE PICS ROLLING........


[Submitted by krip]

The new patch for Call of Duty 4 has been released. The patch has fixed :

• Fixed an exploit that allowed players to access certain console dvars during multi-player matches
  

• Fixed a crash that could occur when a Chinatown Sabotage match would go into over-time

• Fixed a bug where the MP icons (Bomb, Defend, Capture, etc) were always showing up as English regardless of the install language

The patches can be downloaded from here :

Gamershell
Filefront

[Submitted by Brownbear]