I don’t even think I can name all of the games coming out that have caught my eye. There’s just so many I want to try (or buy) and Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X is one of those. UbiSoft has now stated that the game will have photo realistic satellite images from GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite. Oh man, that sounds good.

“High-resolution satellite imaging is moving from the black world of intelligence to the white world of commerce and Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X will bring that reality to gamers,” said Mark Brender, vice president, corporate communications and marketing at GeoEye.

“With video game graphics becoming more realistic, the use of high-quality photographic ground textures in H.A.W.X adds true photo-realism to the air combat experience.”

Now to see how it’s all going to come together with the flying controls, etc is going to be interesting. One thing of note, I’ve only played one bad Tom Clancy game (Ghost Recon 4 I believe) so I’ll be up checking this one for sure.

I had a few emails recently about the new Star Trek Online game and people were speculating as to the level of customization they might have. Well here’s a tidbit I found on the develover’s blog.

Will I be able to trick out my Bird of Prey with green flame decals to show off when I decloak to “pwn Federation nubs”?

Captain Geko: One of Cryptic Studios’ hallmark features in all of its games is giving players ultimate customizability when it comes to their characters. We are fully utilizing our character creation technology in Star Trek Online to include customizing both characters and starships. You will be able to customize your ship’s geometry, as well as its color, decals and fleet insignia.

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How cool is that? I’m not sure if that’s a game I’ll be playing or not, but the whole idea seems pretty incredible.

The install starts, and the “rolls back” when it encounters a “security issue.” Of course, at that point it wants me to download a security scanner which, you guessed it, doesn’t find a dang thing. Of course, it says to go ahead and proceed. But then, it won’t install because there is a “security issue!” What a load of monkey poop.

Unfortunately, I have learned after literally trying for nearly a month to work with their “Customer Service” team that 1) I know more about computers than the lousy people who work for the company. 2)Trend Micro must be owned and operated by evil chimpanzees who even now are working to overthrow the human race by foisting bug ridden crap labeled as virus protection on unsuspecting consumers.

Trend Micro’s customer service works this way:

A) Try and call them at 1-800-864-6027. I did and waited on hold for 118 minutes without being able to talk with someone. But I did get to hear the exact same song played in an endless loop. It’s not even a good song, either.

B) Try and get your problem solved by an online chat.  It might have worked, except mid-way through the chat, 5:00PM rolled around and I was cut off from the chat.

C) Try and get service via email. This is a very slow and frustrating process. Here is how it works: 1) You email your issue. 2) Two days pass. 3) A person emails you back with a canned solution. 3) You try the solution and it doesn’t work. 4) you email the person back immediately. 5) Two days pass. 6) A completely different person emails you a solution. Etc.

I got 9 emails back from the company, each from a completely different person, each with about a two day space. How’s that for customer service?! At one point, I think they started sending the same solutions again just to play with me.

Just as bad, the company won’t offer a refund, and the retail establishment I purchased it from only takes software back after 10 days or so, but never opened software. Basically, I’m boned.

Please, do yourself a favor: don’t buy trend micro products. They are terrible and buggy.   The customer service is worse. I had to go and buy a whole new set of software from a different company. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

There’s a new free 1.5 update coming for Warhawk on Wednesday that will add Trophies (yay!), tutorials, and some other stuff. Not only that, but the 3rd expansion pack is coming out on Thursday called “Fallen Star” that adds the new Tau Crater map.

Tua Crater is an island centered around a crashed capital ship and the there will be one other very cool addition, the jetpack. Once you enter a vehicle or mount a turret you’ll have a jetpack and after that, you’ll be able to use both items. How about bailing out of a Warhawk before it crashes or launching a air attack after loosing a tank? There is a deeper look at how the jetpack works at PlayStation Blog.

The new expansion will be $8 and from the sounds of it, it could be worth the money just for the entertainment value alone.

This whole thing pretty much blows me away. Manchester University released the results of a study on “Gold Farming” and it pegs the profits of the whole venture at about $500,000 per year.

From the start of the 21st century, a new form of employment has emerged in developing countries. It employs hundreds of thousands of people and earns hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Yet it has been almost invisible to both the academic and development communities. It is the phenomenon of “gold farming”: the production of virtual goods and services for players of online games. China is the employment epicentre but the sub-sector has spread to other Asian nations and will spread further as online games-playing grows.

Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming”: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games

BBC news talks about the study and says that Gold Farming employs about 400,000 people world wide who make about $145 (£77) a month. Simply amazing stuff.

“I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry,” said Professor Richard Heeks from the University of Manchester who wrote the report.

“In a way that is still true. It’s just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands.”

In many online games virtual cash remains rare and many people turn to suppliers such as gold farmers to get money to outfit avatars with better gear, weapons or a mount.

Some gold-farming operations offer other services such as “power levelling” in which they assume control of a player’s character and turn it into a high-powered hero far faster than the original owner could manage themselves.

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This type of stuff and the fact that it would consume most of my life is one reason why I try and stay away from these games. The fact that you can hoin and thousands of people out there are cheating or paying to get ahead just blows the whole “have fun” aspect of it for me. What are your thoughts on this stuff. I’d love to know.

Bionic Commando Rearmed has accomplished something quite impressive. The game has sold over 130,000 units in its first week of release. That’s a real impressive feat.

While I have to admit, throwing out a number like 100,000 seemed pretty overzealous after seeing how hard digital titles are to sell, I still hoped we could reach that lofty goal. Boy, did I miss the mark.

7 days — over 130,000 units.

Holy fiddlesticks! That may not seem impressive compared to package titles that sell in the millions but compared to other digital titles that is a friggin JUGGERNAUT!

And while, it’s great to have my first title be not only a critically acclaimed one but also a financial success, there is a bigger picture at play here that we need to look at. Consumers voted with their dollars. They basically have sent the message loud and clear:

We are tired of meta-emulated crap.
We want the titles of yesteryear to be paid the proper respect.
We want them done right.
And if the price is right, we’ll buy.

Basically, we have set a standard in digital gaming. The bar has been raised and you have let developers around the world know that if they invest the time, money, and heart into making (and remaking) some great games, you will support that initiative.

That’s the way it should be. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store…

It’s good to be a gamer.

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Very cool stuff. I’m going to have to go check out more about this game because I honestly know very little about the actual gameplay.

Mercenaries 2 is going to be out August 31st and this commercial they’ve released pretty much will have you all worked up over the game.

I’ve long been an advocate of this game and I’ll tell you that I still play the original Mercenaries even now. It’s one of those games that just holds up over time and I actually liked it better than Grand Theft Auto games of that time. That was the main comparison, but I liked being on the battlefield capturing bad guys more than running around a city.

I think Mercenaries 2 is going to be amazingly cool and I’ll go on record now as saying that due to the past history, this is a must-own game.

Someone had spoken to me recently about a game they heard of the could do upto 64 players online in battle and Battlefield Heroes is that game. The problem is that to have that many players in a free-to-play online shooter would require a PC with high specs and that’s not what DICE or EA wants for the game.

Ben Cousins, DICE’s executive producer of the Battlefield series explains:

“We have really good 16-player matches [but] the engine supports up to 64 players and we reduced that because we want to have a sensible minimum spectrum of player and also for the servers - the servers are slightly less costly to run than previous Battlefield games.”

“Really we’d like to have huge 64-player crazy Battlefield Heroes matches but that’s not possible at the moment - that’s something that we’d look at maybe in the future, maybe we would have special access to 64-player games potentially.”

We’ll just see how things turn out after the closed Beta testing, but I suspect that this is going to be a very cool and widely played game.