Initial Impressions: Lord of Ultima

Lord of Ultima up and bit me in the ass. I didn't even know it existed until a friendly beta invite hit my mailbox. In the spirit of free gaming, I said "what the heck, it's got Ultima in the name so it can't be that bad". Plus, I long for my golden days of Ultima Online. Forgive me, I'm terrible at these sort of things.

Lord of Ultima, by anyone's visit to their home page, is a browser-based strategy game. Players are given a plot of land, which conveniently includes all needed resources, on which to build a city. Anyone that has played any number of RTS games or browser-based strategy games will feel right at home.

Epic Integrates Steamworks into Unreal Engine 3

Steamworks is Valve Software's cloud computing solution for games.  For a big fat price of free, it allows game developers to integrate with Steam and it's many tools: anti-piracy, cloud, matchmaking/lobbies, and DLC.  Epic, developers of the Unreal games and graphical engine, have announced they will be integrating the Unreal Tournament 3 engine with Steamworks:

Epic Games and Valve Software have announced a mutually beneficial partnership to bring Steamworks to Unreal Engine 3. Valve's full suite of tools will now be offered to Unreal Engine licensees completely free of charge.

Steamworks allows developers to utilize any of the features of Valve's digital distribution platform in their own products, including Steam Cloud save importing, Achievements, user stat tracking, and DRM authentication. It's normally available for free, but its integration into the latest version of the Unreal Engine should encourage even more developers to utilize Steamworks.

"Valve has created a world-wide phenomenon with Steam and we're excited to be able to have the Steamworks suite of services available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees so they can take full advantage of all that Steam has to offer," explained Epic's Mark Rein, adding, "With Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer."

I'm very curious to see where this leads. 

The number one annoying aspect of Steam is that so many games don't use its core functionality.  This forces gamers to track a dozen different game IDs and logins.  For example: Games for Windows Live games sold through Steam or games that come packaged with Gamespy for multiplayer.  Steamworks gets rid of all that and plugs a gamer's Steam right into the game, no extra managment required.  It is nice to finally see some bigger developers come on board with Steamworks.

IGNORE ANY EMAIL FROM ME - GMAIL WAS HACKED

Just a quick note, DO NOT open any emails that you may have recieved today from a heartlessgamer AT gmail DOT com.  My account was hacked and used to send World of Warcraft phishing emails. 

Lord of Ultima, browser MMO?

I received an interesting email from EA this morning.  It was a closed beta invite for a new browser game titled Lord of Ultima.  I received the email as a newsletter from Battlefield: Heroes. 

Has anyone else received an invite or even know what this game is all about?

Bad Company 2 Signature Maker

Neat little tool for making Battlefield: Bad Company 2 signatures/widgets.



Now, if only Punkbuster would stop kicking me!