IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 23/12/2009

Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem

We can't let the decade slide away without one last look over our shoulder at Duke Nukem Forever, the best game never to be released, and as retrospectives of what went horribly, horribly wrong with the development of this title this is probably going to be as good as it gets.آ So, grab yourself a coffee, sit back and read this article, and find out just what happened to the Duke Nukem dream.

By May 1998, the team had created enough material to show off at E3, the annual videogame industry convention. Duke Nukem Forever was set in Vegas; in the game’s plot, Duke operates a strip club and then has to fight off invading aliens. Broussard showed a trailer featuring a dozen different scenes, including Duke fighting on the back of a moving truck, jet airplanes crashing, and furious firefights with aliens. Critics were awed: “It sets a new benchmark for making a 3-D game more like a Hollywood movie,â€‌ Newsday proclaimed. Broussard was clearly obsessed with making his product as aesthetically appealing as possible. When he brought a few journalists over to a computer to show off bits of the game, he pointed out the way you could see individual wrinkles on characters’ faces and mused over how to make his campfire more realistic. (â€‌As soon as we mix in some white smoke and some black smoke, I think we’ll be there,â€‌ he said.)

Wired has the four-page article in full.

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Elite Bastards review: XFX Radeon HD 5770 XXX 1GB / Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 Vapor-X 1GB

Now that AMD's mainstream Radeon HD 5700 series parts have been available in the market for a couple of months or so, we're starting to see more boards deviate from the company's reference design in an attempt to offer something different to potential buyers.آ Today, we take a look at two such boards with very different agendas, from the heavily overclocked XFX Radeon HD 5770 XXX through to the vapour chamber, custom cooled Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 Vapor-X.

While XFX have kept their eyes firmly on clock speeds and performance, Sapphire's Radeon HD 5770 Vapor-X board sees only a token 10MHz core clock speed increase in this discipline to mark it out from the pack.آ Instead, the real highlight of this particular part is the presence of Sapphire's custom-built vapour chamber cooling solution, as you can see below.

This dual-slot Vapor-X cooler differs from a reference cooling solution not just in the way it works, but also in size, utilising a larger fan but not covering the entire front of the board like AMD's own offering.آ The only real downside of this design is that it renders it unable to effectively exhaust hot air out of the rear of the chassis like a reference part.

XFX Radeon HD 5770 XXX 1GB / Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 Vapor-X 1GB video card review

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Serious Sam 3 to be completed in 2010

With Croteam recently releasing a "remixed" HD version of the first Serious Sam game, and with Serious Sam 2 also due the HD treatment next year, is there a third game in the works?آ There sure is, according to the development studio's boss Roman Ribaric, and it should be finished some time in 2010.

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter reminded me of the simple joys of wave-based shooting mayhem, and news of Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter only made me happier. However, the news we all want to know is this: Is Serious Sam 3 ever going to arrive, and if so, when?

Well, we put that question to Croteam boss Roman Ribaric in no uncertain terms, and we were pleased with the answer. Serious Sam 3 is totally still in the works, and what's more, we should be hearing more about it very soon.

"Serious Sam 3 is happening for sure," Ribaric tells us. "It is currently planned to be finished in 2010."

Destructoid has the full story.

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