Staff Blog

The new PC Prince of Persia...AWESOME.  Go get it, as soon as you possibly can.  People have been complaining about the lack of difficulty or the lower number of fights in the game, but if you loved The Sands of Time and thought that its followups were too dark, broody, and filled with inane combat, THIS is the game for you.  Whether it's the storybook graphics oozing off of the screen or the elegant and intuitive gameplay that you love the most, one thing is for certain, Prince of Persia is one of the most enjoyable early experiences I've had with a PC game, and if the atmosphere, environments, and gameplay hold up past the first hour, like I would hope they do, this game may sneak right in as a contender in the PC marketplace.

Expect a full review (and some delicious screenshots as soon as Xfire supports the game, I don't like Fraps) as soon as one of us sits down and plays through the entire adventure.

In this latest podcast, me and Sam discuss our impressions of Left 4 Dead and what we hope to see added to it in the future, we have also put together a special intro from the four survivors in the game... We managed to keep it down to about 30 mins so it's not too long this time.

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 Remember, if you want to play some L4D with us, just add us on Steam, our usernames can be found in our forum profiles, stay tuned as we will try to get another proper podcast up later this weekend if all goes to plan.

Until next time, The De-Frag Team.

After recent news that Microsoft were going to start putting full PC games among other DLC on their digital download client, I decided to boot up Flatout: Ultimate Carnage (the only game with GFWL I currently have installed since my reformat...) to see if there were any evident changes to the service already... and well, there clearly are. As you can see from the above image, after a quick update there is a new interface to the whole system. It's certainly better than the butt-ugly Xbox interface we had to put up beforehand, and they have improved the controls too, having taken away all the Xbox controller button symbols... Read on for some more pictures of what this new interface looks like.

Hey guys, last night me and Grant jumped on Skype and recorded another podcast for you all. This is our 3rd (discounting our Eurogamer Expo special) and it's almost our longest. Grant goes into details on his experiences with Fallout 3 and I discuss my final impressions of Far Cry 2 before getting carried away as we discuss RTS's. We also covered the biggest PC news of the past 2 weeks and what we thought of the Call of Duty: World at War Beta and the Left 4 Dead demo.

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The Podcast naming contest is still going, so be sure to sign up to the site and PM me your suggestion for a name.... Until then, keep an eye out on the site as we will be bringing you some Prince of Persia stuff soon and more.

We'll see you next time!

The De-Frag Team.

Ever since the demo went live a couple of days ago I have been wasting zombies like a madman... and well I though I'd post a few screenshots up here for you guys to ponder over. It has been tough to get into good servers since the matchmaking system is a pile of arse... but when things get going its damn good fun, so take a look after the jump for more pics of the bloody mess these creatures leave behind...

In this special edition of the podcast, we discuss everything we saw at the Eurogamer Expo, including what we did and didn't play and more. We managed to keep the length down on this one to a sensible 30 minutes, so we hope you enjoy it!

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There is still a slight echo, though we are still working on getting the quality up to scratch, we are progressing at least...

Also, remember that we still have the podcast naming contest running, and we'll keep it running until we can be bothered ending it... so get your submissions in ASAP, considering the number we have had so far, you have a pretty damn good chance of winning the $20 for spending on Steam. (send your submissions to me via PM on the forums)

See you next time,

The De-Frag Team.

UPDATE: EA Have responded:

"Posting in EA Forums is enabled by an EA Nucleus account -- but access to the forums and access to the games are separate. Players who have been banned from EA Forums are not automatically banned from online access to their other EA games. Players can be banned if they breach the Terms of Service or Code of Conduct in a forum, game or service. Each forum, game and service is managed independently by customer support representatives responsible for that specific forum, game or service."

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I've always understood why people get banned from forums for posting stupid things and generally being immature, but I really think that EA are taking it too far with regards to punishment for poor forum activity. When their new site/forum launches, anyone who gets banned from the forum will have all their games banned too, as both accounts will be tied together. That is EVERY EA game you own that is registered to your account in some way... in other words if you have played it online with a CD-Key.

"Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you'd actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It's all one in the same, so I strongly reccommend people play nice and act mature."

The last time something like this came up, it was quickly shot down by EA officials as it was just the workings of some pissed off forum moderator, so the same might happen here, but what if it isn't? Is it actually legal for them to sell you games, and then because you said something nasty, they rob your ability to play them? What if you are like me and have loads of EA games registered to your account... they are potentially leaving me £100's out of pocket... Well there is one thing for sure, I'm avoiding their forums like the plague... the only times I contact EA is when their games break (and that is way too often). If this turns out to be official EA policy I hope there is a seriously huge back-lash because to be honest, I think it's totally unacceptable, it's a direct threat to their loyal paying cutomers and the only response they will get will be visible on the torrent sites...

To see the forum post that this is from, go here. The post in question is about 10 replies down the page.

Well what do you know, me Sam and Grant finally got round to recording our second podcast... it only took the good majority of a month but hey, it's here now. In this episode we briefly discuss a lot of the news we missed from BlizzCon, and also more recent announcements such as the revealing of Star Wars: The Old Republic. We managed to make it much shorter this time, but it still comes in at just over an hour.

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!!!EPIC CONTEST ALERT!!!

If you bother to listen all the way through, towards the end we talk about the contest we have been planning on having, well, as we say in the podcast, the prize will be $20 worth of games from Steam, and for the contest, I think we should do this:

Name our bloody podcast!

Simple as that... we need a name, and our imaginations are crap, so it's up to you guys to think of one for our podcast... something PC related, for example, IGN's is called Command Prompt, so something along similar lines unless you can think up something else which is totally awesome. The winner will have their suggestion be the official name of the podcast, and as already mentioned, will win $20 worth of games from Steam, so you can choose what to buy with that.

Send your submissions in to me via a PM on the forums, only one submission per person please, If you aren't already signed up then now is your chance to do so and win some monies.

Thanks for listening, oh and remember, feel free to send in your questions to podcast(at)de-frag(dot)com

The De-Frag Team.

It's here folks! Me and Sam finally got round to recording our first podcast... at like 1 in the morning (we prioritise well). We used a call recorder for skype so it is kind of experimental, we will be sure to improve over the next few episodes as we develop a more permanent format and time frame... we aren't sure if it will be weekly yet. This first episode clocks up to a mighty 90 minutes long as we cover all the recent news in the world of PC gamers, our trip to Coventry for the PC Gamer Showdown and more!

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NOTE: There is some... colourful language (what!? we were tired.. and hungry...)

Things start a little rough, but it starts rolling a bit better after the first 10 minutes. Tune in next time and we may be giving away game(s) to listeners who are signed up on the sight via competitions. Also, we would love to have a Q&A section at the end, so feel free to email us your thoughts, ideas and questions at podcast(at)de-frag(dot)com

We'll see you next time!

The De-Frag Team.

Don't like using WASD? You don't have to.