www.youtube.com Click this to watch the previous episode of Machinima Today! Machinima Today 2/18/2010 (Machinima News/Videos/Directors’ Spotlight) S01E45 Hey there, it’s Machinima Today for February 18th. We’re only a month and a half into 2010, and yet it already feels like spring is in the air here in Machinima-land. The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and a new crop of videos have been hand-picked for your viewing pleasure. TODAY’S VIDEOS Dead Rising 2: IG Plus X10 Interview (Microsoft Tech Event at MacWorld) www.youtube.com Alan Wake: IG Plus X10 Interview (Microsoft Tech Event) www.youtube.com Crackdown 2: IG Plus X10 Interview (Microsoft Tech Event) www.youtube.com ETC 2/18/10: Macworld Event Recap (Black Dynamite, Mac World, Toy Story, Snooki) www.youtube.com City 17 Chapter Two (Half-Life 2 Machinima) www.youtube.com The De-Ranker (Halo 3 Machinima) www.youtube.com – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - Follow Machinima on Twitter! Machinima twitter.com Inside Gaming twitter.com Machinima Respawn twitter.com Machinima Entertainment, Technology, Culture twitter.com FOR MORE MACHINIMA, GO TO: www.youtube.com FOR MORE GAMEPLAY, GO TO: www.youtube.com TAGS: Machinima Today MT MachinimaToday Inside Gaming IG Plus X10 Special Event Coverage Macworld ETC Mac World The Dead Pixel TheDeadPixel DeadPixel Khail Anonymous annonymous MW Crackdown 2 Crack Down 2 Dead Rising 2 Alan Wake allen alen allan Interview Preview Demo …
Video Rating: 4 / 5

It’s so appropriate yet sad that Alyx is tasked with announcing the six-year old Half-Life 2’s Mac launch. But really there’s no shame in playing the some-what old Half-Life 2 even today. It’s one of the games that we agreed with in PC Gamer’s top games of all time list. But it’s yet another sign that the Mac gaming scene still has a long way to go.

This week on preGAME we bring in fellow CNET editor Scott Stein to help us take a look at all the stealthy goodness Splinter Cell: Conviction has to offer. We’ll chat with Scott about all the week’s gaming news and check out a brand-new trailer for Gears of War 3, which is due out in April 2011.

Do you have a favorite first-person-shooter of all time? We’ll run down a list of 10 titles–most of which should appear on your roster. Where do games like Half-Life 2 and Doom fall? You’ll have to tune in to find out.

Also on today’s show we’ll chat about Hideo Kojima’s recent comment about the inevitable death of the home console. Will these staples of the home theater ever become extinct?

We all know about Conan O’Brein’s recent announcement that he’s moving to TBS in November, but what would it have been like if he left TV altogether? We’ll tell you about a story that had Coco flirting with an exclusive show on Xbox Live.

Finally, we’ll discuss the age of the average gamer. Are we ever too old to be gaming? Are you ever embarrassed to play games in public? Tune in and join the discussion!…

Remember the rash of celebrity deaths last year? Well this one just affected me more than all of those combined. The voice actor who played Dr. Wallace Breen, of Half-Life 2 fame, has passed away. Sad news is sad.

Robert Culp died after falling in an unnamed Los Angeles park. He was 79.

He did other stuff besides utterly creeping you out as you fought your way across City 17. Did you know he co-starred, alongside Bill Cosby, on a TV show in the 1960s called “I Spy”? I certainly didn’t know that. He also played Ray Romano’s father-in-law in “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

But to us gamers, yes, he will forever be known as Dr. Breen, the Earth Administrator who tried convincing us of the futility of resisting the Combine.

Y’all might want to check out Edge magazine this month, since there’s a pretty great feature talking to Valve on how they made Half-Life 2 so damn good. I’ve actually replaying through the game of late—pretty crazy that a five-year-old FPS has never been topped.

There have only been a few games that I’ve been more excited about that Command & Conquer 4: Half-Life 2, Day of Defeat: Source, and Command & Conquer Red Alert 2. That’s it. C&C 4 should launch on March 16, 2010, but follow this quick guide ASAP and you’ll be able to see a bit of the game early through the beta program. But you better hurry. There is limit to the amount of keys they are giving out.

It seems like EA has teamed up with Gamespot for this program. Fine with me.

1. Head over to the Gamespot C&C4 page and either sign in or make a new account
2. There you’ll receive your key code and a link to C&C’s site
3. Follow the rabbit through the link and put in your key code.
4. It might make you sign up for a EA account. Do it. But you might have to go back to the Gamespot page and start again.
5. Agree to the terms and conditions to get the download link
6. Download the 1.4GB game and install.
7. Easy peasy

For all of its stupidity, the music industry should be commended for relaxing its DRM requirements. Every single song on iTunes is DRM-free, as are the songs on Amazon MP3 and electronic music specialist Beatport. The Zune Marketplace works a little differently, but many of the downloadable songs there are DRM-free, too. But PC game publishers? They’re still bat-shit crazy, as evidenced by the DRM requirements of BioShock 2 and presumably every single one of Ubisoft’s upcoming releases. What’s it going to take for PC publishers to step back and realize that DRM does absolutely nothing to prevent piracy? Not only that, but that it encourages piracy because the pirated version of the game ends up being superior to the legitimate copy?

DRM’s purpose, nearest I can tell, is to control the distribution of copyrighted works. Company A sells you Its Stuff but doesn’t want you to make copies and give them your friends, or to several thousand of your online “friends” on BitTorrent. That’s fine theoretically, except that the DRM implementations are often destructive pieces of junk, gunking up your PC with all sorts of unwanted nonsense. Never mind the fact that they simply don’t work.

I remember when Half-Life 2 first came out, in 2004. People didn’t think it could be pirated because it required Steam server validation. So what did pirates do? They reverse-engineered the handshake between the game and the servers, then created an emulated server for the game to connect to. Congratulations, you just cracked Half-Life 2. And this wasn’t months later, either, but within a few days of the game’s release.

The point is, what was considered to be an uncrackable game was cracked without breaking a sweat. I mean, people have been cracking games for how many years now? It’s an awful lot of programming know-how to draw upon.

The DRM only serves to annoy legitimate customers. You need to enter a CD key. You need to keep the disc in the drive. You need to authenticate your installation at first launch. You can only install the game five times before having to call the FBI to get permission to install again. A CD key I can see; that’s only fair. But why do I need to keep the disc in the drive if I’ve already installed the game to my hard drive? Why should I have to authenticate when I just put in a CD key? And what happens on release day when your authentication servers are getting absolutely hammered, and are unable to authenticate a damn thing? (What happens if the authentication servers are disconnected in five years?) Why if your lousy DRM totally trashes my Windows installation, and I have to reinstall the game? What happens in that happens five times?

All the while, Mr. High School Pirate can hop on BitTorrent or Rapidshare or whatever, download the game as fast as his connection will allow, copy over a CD crack, then have to put up with none of the above. The DRM has stopped nothing, and the pirate has a better gaming experience.

I understand that publishers freak out over piracy, particularly PC piracy where the perception is that it’s easier to pirate a PC game than it is a console game. (That’s nonsense, by the way. Any 16-year-old kid with a free afternoon can hack his Xbox 360 and pirate games all day long.) But it comes to a point where they have to realize the only thing that DRM does is to upset legitimate customers. That’s putting it lightly, for it’s not uncommon for DRM to totally hose a system.

Can we all agree that, for a while there, the music industry was dumb as a box of rocks? And yet those guys got off their DRM kick. How long is it going to take PC publishers to set aside the notion that you need to lock down a person’s gaming experience in order to protect their investment? I think you’ll find that treating PC gamers, who are a prickly lot to begin with, would like to be treated with a bit of dignity.

But that’s probably too much to ask.

The press release claims that only “a handful of entertainment properties that have ever reached the $1 billion mark.” I would love to rattle off some of those properties here, but I’ve been so far unable to dig up any supporting data. Let’s assume for the sake of this post that the Sims, Half-Life 2, and one of the Mario games reached that mark. So much for that boycott, eh? I found the game amazing and plan on playing through it again starting today.

The collection comes on DVD and features Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode One, Half Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. The Orange Box normally sells for around $30 and up. If anything, just buy it and keep it on your bookshelf or desk so when other computer people come over, nobody will steal your stuff.

That’s the code between Orange Box owners: No stealing other Orange Box owners’ stuff.

Half-Life 2- The Orange Box for PC [GoGamer.com via FatWallet]

Winner: Half-Life 2

Valve’s follow-up to the revolutionary Half-Life is our game of the decade not just because it’s a fantastic game, but because it is a fine example of modern gaming. It exemplifies DLC done right, community support done right, and comes part and parcel with Steam, which has helped revolutionize digital distribution for games. All this while still being the standard by which other FPSes are measured.

Half-Life 2 is merely one game in Valve’s expanding oeuvre, but it is still the poster child for doing it right. Now let’s get episode three coming already, guys! Come on!

Runners Up

World of Warcraft Having never played it myself, I can only report what everybody already knows about WoW: it’s like crack. Everything about it made for an optimized and addictive online experience leagues beyond what was available when it launched. The enormous world, regular updates, incredibly well-thought-out dungeons and classes — all part of a package so compelling that players now number somewhere around, what, 11 million? Beyond that, it’s led to a halo industry of gold farmers and loot auctions that is unprecedented in its size. WoW shows little sign of slowdown and will probably not be replaced until Blizzard decides it’s a good idea.

Call of Duty (franchise) While the early Call of Duty games competed directly with Medal of Honor in the heavily-scripted WWII shooter market, it has since gone on to be such a juggernaut in so many ways that it would be a travesty not to include it here. Not only is Modern Warfare 2 just selling like hotcakes, but the Modern Warfare games have expanded and refined what is possible, and what is acceptable, in modern gaming. The first Modern Warfare was a strong entry in the “games as art” category, and the multiplayer aspects (while controversially crippled in MW2) are a breath of fresh air when set next to the aging Halo and Counter-Strike.

The Sims Raise your hand if you have never played The Sims. Oh, nobody. That’s really all that needs to be said here. But I’m paid by the letter so I’ll go on. The Sims was one of the first PC games your mom could play and like, and with more than 16 million copies shipped to date, your mom was obviously a market waiting to be tapped. Nintendo realized that as well, and has exploited it most profitably with the DS and Wii. But EA and Will Wright were the first to the table, and let’s be honest, they overdid it with the Sims 2 and all its expansions. But if you can sell a million copies of an expansion pack that took a week to make, well, I don’t blame you for doing so.

Our take

Devin: I have to add Serious Sam and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory to this list. I had more fun playing those two games with my college roommate than a hundred other games combined. And of course, let’s not forget Portal.

Matt: I doubt I played any game more over the last 10 years than the Day of Defeat mod for Half Life. I probably spent 5 hours a night for a couple years in that game. It was truly the best WWII multiplayer game until Call of Duty 2 came around 2005 and even then that game was quickly trumped by the Day of Defeat: Source. Man, I loved that game.

John: I’ve never been a huge PC gamer but I’ve loved the Civilization series over the decade and I’ve often fired up my emulator to play Civ IV. It just goes to show that a good PC gaming concept can shine for almost two decades.

Nicholas: World of Warcraft. That is all.

Doug: I have to agree with The Sims, if only for how seemingly dumb an idea it was at first to how monstrously addictive it ended up being for most people. A premise built upon mundane daily activities goes on to become the best-selling PC game of all time. Go figure.

If anything, it looks more awkward than playing with dual analog sticks, but given the right game design, it could work well. Something where precise movement is less important than intuitive interaction (the Penumbra series comes to mind) might just make this fly.