Gaming News

The first expansion for Left4Dead 2 has been released this week. Here's a quote from the Steam News article...

The first game add-on for Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) brings the original Left 4 Dead Survivors down south for a meeting with the L4D2 cast, while delivering new single-player, multiplayer and co-operative gameplay for the PC and Xbox 360.

"The Passing" features 3 new maps, new weekly game modes (Mutations), a new "uncommon common" zombie class (the fallen survivor), melee weapon (golf club), firearm (M-60), support for infected bot play in Versus, 10 new achievements and more!

This is a free update, and no doubt will feature in our next Friday Night session :)

Yet another great LAN party hosted by DF-Lynx, aka Bob. Thanks from all the lads :)

The most played games this time round have to be Forza 3 and CS GunGame. There was a little L4D2 and UT2004. No UT3 or QuakeWorld this time. There was also a game of Battlefield 1942, however with all the problems encountered getting the game to run on Windows 7, 64-bit and widescreen monitors, it has been decided that BF1942 will no longer appear at BobLAN. Hopefully Battlefield 1943 will be out in time for the Autumn LAN :)

The turnout was good too. Thursday and Friday were the busiest days, with Saturday and Sunday relatively quiet. The Wednesday setup night was a success again, with some actual gaming taking place. It was good to see Trebz and Gren back after missing the past couple of LANs, but a shame that Reubs couldn't make it this time. Skonley popped round with his lad on the Saturday for a bit of CS. Neither Eddie nor Kevin put in an appearance.

The complete schedule of activities can be seen on the BobLAN 2010.1 page, along with links to the forum thread and Twitter site.

The first LAN of 2010 is well underway, with some quality gaming all round. Favourites so far have been CS GunGame, Forza 3, L4D2, Lego Rockband and TF2. No signs of any RTS games, UT or QuakeWorld yet.

The diary of events is being recorded on the BobLAN page so future generations can see what they missed :)

Nvidia have released a new set of drivers. Hopefully these 197.13 drivers will prove to be more reliable than the previous version, which got removed from their site due to fan control issues on some GeForce chipsets.

As usual, a download link is available on our Games and Files page.

Nvidia have released a new set of ForceWare drivers, just in time for the BobLAN change freeze. A download link is available on our Games and Files page.

Claimed performance improvements include up to 30% in L4D on a single GPU. No mention of L4D2. This is over the previous WHQL version 196.21.

Update
Nvidia have pulled these drivers and recommend all users roll back to the previous version (Driver rollback help)

Windows 7 allows you to include web sites in your local search, via Federated Search Connectors. DFC now supports Federated Search - simply download the connector and follow the r-click context menu prompts. IE can install it directly.

The result should be a Desert Fox Clan entry in the Favorites list in Windows Explorer, with search results that change as you type in your search query.

All the categories that have previously been included in the site's search feature will work, eg News, Match Reports, Humour etc.

The DFC site has moved hosts. Thanks to }data{ we're now hosted in Europe, meaning quicker response times and the latest PHP and MySQL versions.

If anyone spots any problems with this or the Forums site, please let Mesmer know.

Nvidia have release new WHQL ForceWare drivers for all platforms. Changes include bug fixes, tweaks to specific games, and PhysX updates. There appear to be no major performance improvements in this version.

Links to the drivers for WinXP, Vista and Win7 can be found at the bottom of our Games and Drivers page.

A few updates will be applied to MW2 via Steam, primarily aimed at h@x0rs. Details below, courtesy of Steam News

• Fix for latest texture hacks


• Fix to prevent players from getting inside geo


• Fix to prevent players with illegally pirated copies of Modern Warfare 2 from matchmaking with legitimate Modern Warfare 2 players


• Connection improvements for NAT-PMP routers


• Fix for "elevator" glitch that allows players to get out of playable area

Today sees the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This is the sequel to the hugely popular Call of Duty 4, and it's just a shame that it wasn't released a week earlier in time for the LAN. I'm sure it'll feature heavily at the Easter LAN tho :)

The Autumn LAN is well underway, with a relatively painless setup evening, and late night Rockband mincage.

Follow events and view the live webcam on the BobLAN page.

Treyarch have released an update to Call of Duty: World at War. The patch includes 3 new multiplayer maps, gameplay changes and bug fixes.

For some bizarre reason, this is yet another incremental patch on all the other incremental patches, meaning you need to download well over 2GB of files to get a clean install fully patched. Why not combine them all together into a single point release?

Find links to this and previous patches on our CoD WaW page.

EA have release a major patch for Battlefield 2. Here's Gamespot's quote on the release:

This is the long-awaited version 1.50 patch for Battlefield 2. In addition to making all content from both expansions free-to-play, it includes a number of bug fixes and gameplay tweaks.

Read the full description on Gamespot and download the patch via our BF2 page (2GB).

The next gaming weekend will be Friday 6th to Sunday 8th November. In practice, it is likely to start with a setup night on the Thursday.

Keep up with events at the LAN on the revamped BobLAN page, which includes a live webcam feed, links to our Twitter page and Forums topic, plus a rough schedule of activity (to be completed as each day progresses).

Valve have announced more DLC for L4D. Planned for September, it should be out in time for the next LAN \o/

Bean has posted details on the DFC Forums.

ShackNews have posted some details of what L4D2 will contain. Melee weapons will include a cricket bat and a chainsaw, and there will be 5 new campaigns. It is slated for release in November, so we'll not get to see it at a LAN until next Easter.

Read more at ShackNews.

Valve have announced that they are working on L4D2, due for release later this year.

"Featuring new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, Left 4 Dead 2 offers a much larger game than the original with more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, and maps for Survival mode available at launch."

Read more about it on Steam News.

I can't quite be sure when DFC was officially formed, but the date we tend to go by is the date we joined the MCW league (Modemers Clan Wars, for those who can remember what a modem was). It was 11 years ago to the day that we were accepted into MCW, and the landscape of online gaming was changed forever :)

See the News Archive from 1998 for more.

Valve have issued a series of updates for L4D. The major one being the addition of a new game mode - Survival - plus enabling the other two campaigns for Versus mode.

You can read about the updates on the Steam news site:

• Major update details
• Minor tweaks and fixes
• Survival mode gameplay changes

The LAN is in full swing, with plenty of Left 4 Dead, CS GunGame and RockBand so far.

Follow BobLAN via:

• WebCam
• Twitter