Joe Salina

Sometimes a game is so good, you don’t even need to play it to praise it. At least that's how the staff of China’s IT community portal (and general tech news hub) Yesky seems to feel about Crytek’s new free-to-play game Warface. According to Yesky's “2011 annual horizontal evaluation,” the game’s graphical fidelity makes it the most-anticipated online first-person shooter in China. The editors at Yesky have singled out this otherwise-unkown game for its visual effects, notably the flashy lighting, shading and motion blur, and have gone so far as to compare it favorably with the visually stunning (and decidely not free to play) Crysis 2.

In what seems like no time at all, the Playstation Vita has already been hacked!

The loosely organized hacker group known as Anonymous has Sony in its sights once again. After releasing a video a few days ago wherein they threaten to destroy Sony’s network, the group, which has been organizing in the IRC channel #OpSony, has clarified the meaning of their declaration. Unlike the infamous PlayStation Network hack of 2011, the target of this attack is not Sony’s customers or even the Playstation Network itself, but Sony’s executives.

With World of Warcraft holding the MMO throne, whenever I hear about a new massively multiplayer online game being produced a part of my brain wonders “why bother?” Clearly I do not work for Bioware (and with that line of thinking, I never will), as in just a little over a week since it’s launch date, Star Wars: The Old Republic is already attracting one of the fastest-growing player communities in the history of subscription-based MMO games.

Of course there have been plenty of positive reviews for The Old Republic, which won MSNBC’s “Best Multiplayer Game of 2011” as well as ratings from various consumer reporting outlets in the high 80's and 90's. And judging from the subscriber numbers, it seems like quite a few players agree with these reviewers.