ePeen News

On February 28, a bug in millions of Sony PlayStation 3s mysteriously changed the internal clock of the consoles to Dec. 31, 1999. This error forced gamers to be unable to play games or connect to the internet. Y2K all over again.

Video gamers were forced to put down their joysticks Sunday as tens of millions of Sony PlayStation 3s were hit by a bug in the console's clock that prevented owners from playing certain games or connecting to the Internet. The problem is apparently caused by the device's internal clock, which for unknown reasons on Feb. 28 changed to Dec. 31, 1999.

A Sony Computer Entertainment America spokesman warned in a blog on their site that any PS3 sold before September may be effected and for all owners of the older model PS3 not to use their consoles. The only exceptions are for owners who have the new "slim" version.

Canada just took home 14 gold medals after showing the most dominant display of perfection in olympic history. After a grueling OT win over a very young and talaneted team USA, Canada sealed with win with a thrilling give and go tick tack toe play from Iggy to Sid the Kid.




Team USA thought they had hope when team Canada was stone cold robbed by Ryan Miller, currently the best goalie in all of hockey and easily the MvP of the entire Olympic tourney. His hot streak finally came to an end when the boys played with fire Canada has been accustomed to watching.




So you probably sit at home and ask yourself everyday, what makes Canada so awesome? What makes Canada so dominant? Is it our clean healthy air, our care free lifestyle, or that we are just plain awesome? Actually it's all the sweet pussy we have to look forward to after dominating the world in hockey. There 2 things girls in Canada get hot for, hockey players and guild leaders!!

The iMMoRtALs alliance launched another massive offensive assault to move the Mpire alliance back to the stone ages in the technology war. The day started like this:

After hours of intense battle with the top alliance on obelisk the mission was a huge success. We destroyed almost all tech 2 facilities on the map and set them back a couple weeks of building. After the zone closed another alliance was left in ruin and the map looked like this:



After all was said and done we completed the objective put in front of us and look forward to the next assault. Mpire seems like a pretty solid crew so I am sure they will bounce back and rebuild quickly, but for now our alliance is on top of the world.

For those of us who played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the name Taris will immediately spark up some memories of those first few hours of playing the original game that started it all. Taris, for the record, was an ecumenopolis (or city-wide planet) much like Coruscant, only unlike the more famously known hub of the galaxy, Taris was destroyed and forgotten during the events of KOTOR.

This week's new Developer Dispatch video covers the dev team's efforts to make a uniquely post-apocalyptic zone for Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it really delivers. Even if you haven't had the pleasure of playing KOTOR, we think Taris is going to be something to really look forward to -- except perhaps those Rakghouls.

Find the video below the break.



by Kyle Horner of massively.com

There are beasts out there that are far worse than a simple macro auto-pilot program, a la Glider. In the FPS community, beasts like the notorious aim bot, capable of auto-targeting your enemies in a game of shooting skill, exist to ruin everyone's fun. And when you cross your MMORTS with the battles of an FPS... well you start getting people using the latter program.

Global Agenda finally has one such program out for it, and yes, it does work. Snipers are accurately killing people from across the map, assaults are using chainguns that never miss, and all other types of havoc are being let loose. However, we don't recommend that you use any of these programs, unless you want to be targeted by Hi-Rez Studios.

Hi-Rez is actively targeting players who run these programs, sending out lifetime bans to those they catch. Yep, that's right, no warning, just a nice lifetime ban. We caught up with Todd Harris to briefly ask him about what the company was doing in light of this whole aimbot situation.

"Cheating is relatively rare within Global Agenda," executive producer Todd Harris told Massively. "However, as within any competitive shooter, some players are trying to cheat their way to success. Fortunately, since we run centrally managed servers, we can identify and react quickly compared to other online shooters that rely on community managed servers such that a cheater could simply hop to a new server. With our monitoring and stat collection we detect cheaters and reward them with a lifetime ban. We've already implemented an initial batch of bans and we'll continue to have a zero tolerance policy for cheating."

So there you have it. Don't cheat on centralized servers, unless, of course, you don't want to play.

by Seraphina Brennan of massively.com

Global Agenda isn't necessarily for everyone, but there's no shortage of people it is for, and their reception to the game thus far has been positive. Still, like any new game there are kinks to work out and things not quite ready for launch time. Both are making a showing in the game's 1.1 patch, which has just hit the test servers in anticipation of hitting live servers next week. Among the larger changes are the implementation of a Friend/Ignore list, further queueing improvements, and a widespread overhaul to crafting and blueprints to make upgrades easier to work with.

The crafting overhaul is probably the biggest single gameplay-related change, with the randomness of crafting replaced with a more specific set of craftable items. Upgrades have also been streamlined and clarified to make it easier for players to identify what they want rather than manually searching through each item on a list. With a number of bugs also having been squashed, the patch is no doubt going to improve the lives of Global Agenda players significantly, so take a look at the full notes and expect for it to hit the live servers very soon.

Original written by Eliot Lefebvre of massively.com