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Blizzard has posted a listing of changes that accompany its recently released update for World of Warcraft. Fairly large in size, the listing includes major updates, character updates, updates to PvP, bug fixes, and a number of other changes.

Major changes include the addition of a high-level dungeon known as Diremaul, new outdoor raid bosses, meeting stones, and dungeon player caps:

All dungeons now have a cap on group size to limit the number of players that may enter the dungeon. It was necessary to add this cap as raiding these dungeons trivialized much of the content. Because of this change we can now look to adding better loot to them during future content patches.

WoW - Patch Notes - 3/22/05

Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft

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IMG has posted a review of Kill Monty, the latest game from Freeverse Software. Here's a clip from the review:

As the subtitle above states, Kill Monty's story, objective, and ultimate purpose of existence can be summed up in two simple words. Highly reminiscent of an old personal favorite of mine, Smash TV, Kill Monty deposits Jen, Freeverse's enigmatic poster girl, into an enclosed area, hands her a gun, and starts sending wave after wave of cannon fodder after her. It's the player's job to keep her alive as long as possible, which is best expedited by running frantically while blasting away at anything that looks even remotely biological. The phrase "Look out, it's coming right for us!" has never been more applicable.

IMG Review: Kill Monty

Freeverse

Kill Monty

Beenox, Inc., a leading porting house and a growing development studio, has recently received two prestigious business awards, each of them less than a week apart. Last week, Beenox won the "Innovative Enterprise of the Year" award, given by Québec Minister of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade, at the 22nd edition of the Fidéides Awards, organized by the Québec Business Council. Later that week, Beenox received the Desjardins Commercial Merit Award of Québec's National Capital Region, for the month of March 2005.

Here's what Beenox had to say:

"We are honored and proud to receive these two awards for our excellence and innovation." says Dee Brown, president and CEO of Beenox, Inc. "About two years ago, we launched our Beenox Shift division and brought Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 to the Macintosh. Last year we reached the number one position in the game conversion industry, completing 10 products for Windows and Macintosh in a timely manner. Now, we are reinventing the porting business by developing games on various platforms simultaneously. Beenox equals more games for more markets."

Awarded to profit making organisations, the Desjardins Commercial Merit Award highlights their growth, promote innovation and recognize their achievements. Every organisation winning this award automatically becomes a finalist in the next edition of Fidéides Awards, which will take place on March 16th, 2006. Beenox could be crowned "Enterprise of the Year of Quebec's National Capital Region", in the categories "small business" or "medium and large business".

Beenox

Apple has posted an feature on edutainment titles available for the Macintosh. The edutainment genre covers games that mix learning with the fun of playing games. Number Munchers and Oregon Trail are some of the earliest examples of edutainment on Apple computers.

Today's edutainment titles are much more advanced, and some are hard to tell apart from pure entertainment titles. The titles available for the Macintosh run the gambit from games based on children's shows, such as Dora the Explorer and Blue's Clues to games based on toy lines, like Rescue Heroes, to original games such as Didi and Ditto.

Here's what they had to say about Did and Ditto:

Didi & Ditto are a pair of beavers, one a boy and one a girl. During a stroll through the woods, one of them is kidnapped by Zolt, a vegetarian wolf (your child can play as either beaver). The player must guide the other beaver through a series of kindergarten-level math, reading, thinking and problem solving exercises, the rewards for which are the vegetables needed to exchange with Zolt for the trapped sibling. Three difficulty levels allow you to make the problems more challenging as your child gets older.

Edutainment: A Trojan Horse for Learning

It's nearing that time of the year again, as gamers with itchy trigger fingers prepare for the impending QuakeCon event. Celebrating 10 years of what is describes as "peace, love, and rockets," QuakeCon 2005 is looking once again to provide 4 days of non-stop contests, gaming, exhibitions, and other such events.

"QuakeCon’s 10th anniversary is a historic milestone and a time to celebrate the volunteers, fans, sponsors and games that have driven QuakeCon to become the largest event of its kind," said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. "We’re going to have the party of a decade, and we want everyone to be there."

QuakeCon

Gaming site 3DAvenue has posted an interview with Travellers Tales about their in-development game, Lego Star Wars.

The article talks about how Travellers Tales got the idea to do the game in the first place, how the LEGO component works into the game, and the span of the game over the first three Star Wars movies.

They had this to say on the subject of using characters in scenes in which they did not originally appear in the movies:

you unlock and build up your collection of characters as you progress through the game, and you can then tale any of those characters into any of the scenes you’ve completed, even scenes from movies in which they didn’t originally appear. We call this “Free Play”, and it’s something we were really keen on from the start, as an original LEGO game feature. And, as you suggest, we were initially a little worried about how the folks at Lucasfilm would react to the possibilities this feature enables. But like everything else in the game, they were just incredibly supportive. Because, you know, “It’s LEGO!”

3DAvenue - Lego Star Wars Q&A

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