'Awakening' update for Rusty Hearts announced,
dated

With the open beta past us now, Perfect World has just announced its first major update to Rusty Hearts. Launching on October 11, "Awakening" will give players, both new and experienced, the content they have been craving.

"Awakening" will bump the level cap up to 30 and feature new dungeons to explore, a second underground training facility to prep your character, and hundreds of new items plus quests that will help fill in the player on the back story of Rusty Hearts. On top of all this, "Awakening" also introduces new skills and weapons for characters to help beat back the forces of Count Vlad.

Some of the new dungeons will include the labyrinthine halls of "Steamworks," the lurking shadows of the "Collapsed Halls," the shark-men infested "Public Baths," and a friendly meeting with the denizens of the "Guest Villa." While some of these dungeon names could use a bit more originality, I'm sure the update will be well worth playing.

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Cave Story 3D screenshots, now with 2D

Cave Story 3D was originally meant to come out this summer, otherwise known as the past. It's now scheduled to come out on November 8th in the United States. Perhaps these screenshots will tide you over.

Feel free to stick them to your 3DS and pretend you are playing. Note that the hero is a 2D chap living in a 3D world. It's an optional feature for those who fear the future or simply prefer the original style.

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The Binding of Isaac and its music deserve your
attention

The new game from Florian Himsl and Team Meat's Edmund McMillen, The Binding of Isaac, is up on Steam for PC and Mac. You should consider playing it if you have ever enjoyed 2D Legend of Zelda, Robotron, and roguelikes. Better yet, earlier adopters can buy it for a mere $4.49.

Similarly, you can grab the chilling soundtrack from either Steam or Bandcamp. Excellent stuff as always, but what else would you expect from indie music legend Danny Baranowsky?

While I just started working on our review a couple of days ago, I'm having a hard time not telling you to drop money on this gross, brutal, highly entertaining game right now. Hell, I spent more money on college-campus lunch today than the game/soundtrack bundle costs. You know what to do.

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A quick look at Petroglyph's Rise of Immortals

There are many good options out there for MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) games these days. League of Legends is the frontrunner of the pack, Heroes of Newerth has a strong player base -- it also just went free-to-play -- and Valve is going to be offering us Dota 2 sometime soon, just to name a few.

One that you might not have heard of yet is Rise of Immortals, a free-to-play MOBA created by Petroglyph Games (Star Wars: Empire at War, Universe at War, and End of Nations).

Rise of Immortals (PC)
Developer: Petrolgyph Games
Publisher: Petroglyph Games
Released: September 12, 2011
MSRP: Free

Design-wise, this game is a perfectly standard MOBA game. It's got a nice selection of heroes to pick from, and there has already been a new one added since launch. The combat and controls feel nice, and most of the abilities all work well together and are generally a lot of fun.

The visuals are probably the best to date for a MOBA. They ditched the cartoon look of most other genre titles, instead opting for a realistic art style. The animations themselves look nice nice and smooth, and it's fun to watch your mages fight each other.

One unique difference from other MOBAs is that when you play a hero, you get persistent level points for that hero. So if I play a lot with Lazarus, the vampiric tank, I will gain levels over time. Each level will let you add points to a talent tree that will give you better statistics, improved cooldown times, and various other benefits. This also makes it easy to tell who has experience playing with a certain hero. The matchmaking is based on your hero level, so in a high-level match, you'll know that everyone is solid with their character. It's not completely groundbreaking, but it is very cool.

Rise of Immortals is well made -- there's no arguing that fact. What Petroglyph has done is solid; there are not many bugs, the game looks nice, and it plays well. Sadly, there is no one playing it.

I was in the beta for about a month, and I've tried playing it a few times since its launch. There is at least a ten-minute wait to get into a 5v5 match. 5v5 is also the only game type that people seem to be playing. There is 3v3 and 3vAI, but I haven't really had a chance to check those out for the aforementioned reasons.

I can't really go into too many details about the game, because I don't have enough time to wait ten to thirty minutes to join a match repeatedly. From what I have played, though, I came away feeling that RoI was good. I don't know enough about each of the heroes to tell you anything specific about balancing; that said, nothing jumped out as being way off.

It's hard to fault a game because no one is playing, but that's a huge part of an online game. You need some players to get more players. That can be an understandably hard thing for a developer to do, because they can't force people to play. All they can do is create a game and hope that a community forms around it.

If you are looking for a new free game to check out, then go look at Rise of Immortals. I can't guarantee that anyone else will be playing it, but it's worth taking a look at if nothing else. Hopefully over the next few months, they can get a solid community built up. Only then can it become a contender in the ever-growing MOBA scene.

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World of Warcraft patch 4.3 hits public test
realm

Patch 4.3 has hit the World of Warcraft public test realm, so get ready! If you didn't see already, Blizzard posted the 4.3 patch notes on its website. Two of the more notable additions are Transmogrification and Void Storage.

This is also bringing us the new Tier 13 set and new dungeons: End Time, Well of Eternity, Hour of Twilight, and a new raid: Dragon Soul. We'll also be seeing some significant balance changes, as detailed by developer Ghostcrawler.

Excited for the new content? Let us know what you think of the upcoming patch in the comments.

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Frozen Synapse is part of the new Humble Bundle

The top-down strategy shooter Frozen Synapse has been a critical darling since its release in the early summer. If you've been on the fence about purchasing a copy, then may I point you in the direction of the latest Humble Indie Bundle, which features Frozen Synapse as its main attraction.

Of course, if you've purchased a Humble Bundle before then you'll know how it works: you name your price and you can split how much goes to the developers and how much will go to the various charities that will be receiving donations. If you spend over the average price of $4.42, then you'll get the whole bundle including Trine, Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds Survivor as well as a pre-order of Splot and the prototype of Jack Claw.

Whilst this isn't maybe the most polished bundle we've seen, it's still great value; you get two copies of Frozen Synapse so you can enjoy its fiendish multiplayer with a friend and also the game's cool electronic soundtrack as well. For less that $5, that's an absolute steal plus you get three other full games and some interesting prototypes.  

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Castlevania gets 25th anniversary music tribute
from fans

It was only last month that fans released a double-disc musical tribute celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Metroid franchise, and it looks like the same is being done for Castlevania this coming Halloween with a project called Vampire Variations.  What's different, however, is that while Nintendo has ignored Metroid's 25th, Konami has already released a couple albums to commemorate this momentous occasion.  While the group of arrangers for Vampire Variations is different, readers will likely notice the inclusion of Metroid Metal's stemage on the artist roster, and you can bet the album will be paying homage to the franchise's heavy metal roots which were seemingly abandoned with last year's Lords of Shadow. 

The team has already put together a trailer to let everyone know what to expect, and it looks like tracks from across the entire franchise will be represented.  Best of all, the digital album will be released for free on Halloween, so there's no excuse not to check it out.  You can head on over to the official website to sign up for updates and see the entire list of arrangers.

video details and more

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The Cursed Crusade: Dated Oct 25, demo, new
trailer

There's lots of news today for The Cursed Crusade, an upcoming thirteenth century Europe action title coming to the PS3 and Xbox 360. The first bit is that it has been redated, and is now dropping on October 25. A demo is coming a couple of weeks prior to launch, so don't cry.

The demo will take you on the "Assault on Castle Biron" misson, says Atlus. Expect firey arrows and waves of pissed off, sword-wielding soldiers.

Get some story in the Story trailer, above. It shows Denz and Esteban's beginnings, set during the Crusade. Swords up, shields out, battle cries ready. Blood, armor, frantic drums. What's with this curse...and those eyes?! My kind of game trailer. 

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Review: OCZ Solid 3 solid-state drive

A lot of people have been asking whether solid-state drives (SSD) are up to par, if they're worth your money when compared to a traditional hard disk drive (HDD). Some critics will even go as far as saying that an SSD is the most significant hardware upgrade you can make, and to gamers that sort of benefit is obvious. That said, the barrier to entry for SSDs is high and value-minded gamers can buy ten or twenty times the hard drive space by going with the older HDD technology.

Today, we're going to take a closer look at OCZ's Solid 3 120GB SSD and determine if its rather high price tag is justified.

Overview: solid-state drives vs. hard disk drives

In case you aren't familiar with the difference between solid-state drives and hard disk drives, here's a brief overview. A normal HDD is made of several magnetic disks that spin around and record data by changing the surface of those disks, and capacity increases as disks, or platters, are added to the drive. Because of the method by which the HDD stores information, retrieval of said information is dependent on the speed at which those disks are spinning (normal "gaming"-grade hard drives spin at 7200RPM or higher), so retrieval isn't instantaneous.

Solid-state drives are completely different in that they behave somewhat more like the RAM in your computer. These drives have no moving parts (no rotating platters), which means they are completely silent. In addition, they have lower access times and latency and are more resistant to physical shock, but this comes at a price: they're typically much more expensive per gigabyte than a hard drive.

Nowadays, SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, which uses transistors that closely resemble a NAND gate used in many circuits. This unique architecture allows SSDs to have seemingly instantaneous access times and has allowed gamers to relieve the common hard drive bottleneck.

OCZ Solid 3 Specifications

OCZ's third generation of SSDs consists of three premier drives in descending order of performance (and price): the Vertex 3, the Agility 3, and the Solid 3, which we will be covering today.

The Solid 3 comes in two sizes, 60GB ($99.99) and 120 GB ($171.44). With a blazing-fast max read/write speed of 500MB/s and 450MB/s respectively, the drive seems to dust any other HDD out there.

However, you will rarely (if ever) reach the max speeds, so it is generally better to gauge performance off the regular speeds, which are quite lower than the max speeds. Although the sequential read speed is about 40MB/s higher than my Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM HDD, the Solid 3 actually lost in terms of sequential write speed, which surprised me a little.

OCZ Solid 3 and WD Caviar Black Benchmarks

Here are the benchmark scores I got for both the OCZ Solid 3 and the Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM 1TB Hard Drive ($79.99). Both hard drives have 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate installed on them along with multiple programs, with the OCZ Solid 3 on a SATA 6GB/s interface and the WD Black on a SATA 3GB/s interface.

OCZ Solid 3WD Caviar Black
I AS SSD Benchmark. Here's where I was really shocked that the Western Digital actually beat out OCZ in sequential write speed. Upon buying the SSD, I was under the impression it would be substantially faster than any HDD. I guess I was slightly wrong. However, the race was only close in sequential read speeds. In all others, the Solid 3 simply annihilated the Western Digital HDD, ending with a final score over seven times greater than the Caviar Black.
 

Next up is the ATTO Disk Benchmark. Although the graphs look similar at a glance, you have to remember to look at the numbers. They were at least in the same ballpark until it got to around 4KB transfer size, and then the SSD strapped a rocket to itself and took it to another level.

In HD Tune Pro, we see similar cases yet again. While the SSD wasn't as constant as I would have liked, it was still significantly faster than the HDD, which actually slowed down over the course of the test. While access time was more or less constant with the SSD, access time increased for the HDD.
 

Real-life tests

For some real-life performance tests, I decided to evaluate start-up times for Windows, Photoshop CS5, and StarCraft II, and load times for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Portal 2. All these times are averages of ten trials each and results vary somewhat due to human error. It should also be noted that each record was taken starting from when the splash screen appeared on the screen until the application was done loading. Of course, lower numbers are better in all of these boot and load times, so don't get confused.

Average OCZ Solid 3 Photoshop CS5 startup time: 1.37 sec
Average WD Caviar Black Photoshop CS5 startup time: 1.06 sec

Upon seeing the Photoshop CS5 results, I was stymied. Seriously, I ran both tests twice just to make sure I wasn't screwing something up. As it defies every other test, I do not have a clear-cut explanation as to why this happened. However, there are two possibilities that come to mind.

First, SSDs are known to have poor, random read/write times, though a lot of this has been fixed in newer versions such as the Solid 3. Second, my SSD is over 50% capacity, which may be slowing down performance slightly. Again though, I was under the impression this rule does not apply to SSDs. Both possibilities should be noted, but are not concrete answers as to why this happened.

Average OCZ Solid 3 Windows 7 boot time: 17.66 sec
Average WD Caviar Black Windows 7 boot time: 35.94 sec

On the other hand, the Windows 7 results do follow the trend that the Solid 3 outperforms the WD Caviar Black. By over halving the Windows boot time, it is actually a true example of how the SSD dominates over the HDD.

For the next test, I decided to try StarCraft II, and while the difference was minimal in my opinion, it was a decent gap.

Average OCZ Solid 3 StarCraft II start-up time: 7.09 sec
Average WD Caviar Black StarCraft II start-up time: 7.63 sec 

While it was only about a half-second difference in launch times, the OCZ Solid 3 did come out ahead. However, as I will discuss later, hard-drive access time plays little to no part in the speed of online games, other than the time it takes to launch the game or load new maps.

Next up are load times for Portal 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Average OCZ Solid 3 Portal 2 load time: 7.87 sec
Average WD Caviar Black Portal 2 load time: 8.89 sec

Average OCZ Solid 3 Deus Ex: Human Revolution load time: 24.49 sec
Average WD Caviar Black Deus Ex: Human Revolution load time: 25.82 sec

The OCZ Solid 3 beat the WD Caviar Black by at least a full second in both cases. While this may not seem a lot, the small amount of time adds up pretty quickly (especially if you suck at DXHR and die a lot like me).

The HDD's times were really sporadic as well, with times deviating by about a half second from the average in both games, while the SSD was much more consistent, hovering within .01 seconds of the average. However, I have to note that the time difference wasn't very noticeable in general. So while the SSD was faster in the end, it didn't drastically change my game experience.

Stability

I dealt with a lot of frustrating stability issues when working with the OCZ Solid 3. The drive would blue-screen my computer five to seven times a week, and initially had some trouble installing Windows 7. After speaking with customer service, they advised me to install new firmware.

Unfortunately, you could not install the firmware if you were using the SSD as your primary drive; this turned out to be not as much of an issue for me, as I could switch over to the WD Caviar Black. After running their "toolbox" software on the HDD, the computer would BSOD whenever it started downloading the patch. So yet again, I went off to customer service, and they directed me to a post on their forums where I could make a bootable disk to install the software. It worked, and my BSODs became somewhat of a thing of the past. This entire process took me about two weeks to get through because of their slow responses, and I wondered why they didn't just include the solution that worked for me on the actual website, since it was pretty simple.

Bottom line

The OCZ Solid 3 SSD offers a huge increase in performance in most aspects of computer performance over most, if not all, HDDs currently out there. For gaming, however, it should be mentioned that a hard drive (or solid-state drive) has no bearing on online play. The only thing it may improve is load times between maps, which will be negligible on games that use an Internet connection. While you will see an improvement in single-player games, I don't believe the increase in performance necessarily justifies the price tag for most gamers.

Even if you are looking into getting a solid-state drive for that extra boost anyway, I do not recommend the Solid 3 for multiple reasons: stability, performance, and competition. While the stability issues I encountered may have just been bad luck, they did leave me with a bad impression.

In terms of performance, the Solid 3 vastly outperformed my HDD in a lot of ways. That said, the HDD and SSD's scores for sequential read weren't so different that I believe it's worth the price difference. For $30 more, you can get the OCZ Vertex 3 ($199.99), which offers even better performance and stability than what I experienced with the Solid 3. My review for the OCZ Vertex 3 will be up relatively soon, so stay tuned!

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Live show: Mash Tactics at TopWare this Saturday

Mash Tactics will be live today, playing... something. But, we want to use this time to let you know about a special edition of Mash Tactics airing this Saturday, October 1st, from 12 to 5 PST. This event will be Pico Mause's final show, and she will be going out in style as the crew broadcasts live from TopWare Interactive.

We have a lot planned for this event, though what actually happens is subject to change. TopWare will be showing off their new dystopian action title, Scivelation. There will be interviews with some of the minds behind Scivelation and TopWare's other titles. We will also be getting an exclusive look at the new DLC for Two Worlds II, Pirates of the Flying Fortress. And yes, there will be giveaways! All of this, and a few surprises we're keeping up our sleeve on our Super Saturday show.

Mash Tactics airs Monday through Friday at 4pm Pacific. Watch Jon Carnage and Pico Mause let loose with off-the-wall humor and discuss the issues of the day in the live chat on Destructoid's Twitch.tv channel. Also, there are videogames being played. Join us for your chance to win prizes, talk to industry guests, and witness all of the glorious antics.

 

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