Gadgets and Video Games

[ sugree ] After a rocky launch period, EA assures us via Twitter that the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 online servers should now be finally stable. Pretty much every iteration of Bad Company 2 has seen issues arise when connecting to EA’s servers for multiplayer online, with Xbox 360 kicking some users all the way out to the Dashboard and PC users experiencing authentication issues with PunkBuster. The developer now says that those issues have been addressed, due in no small part to new servers being added over the weekend. “All new hardware is in place and ready to serve your BFBC2 needs,” the tweet reads, backed up by a Q&A on the Battlefield Blog with more info

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EA completes Battlefield: Bad Company 2 server maintenance

Filed under: Mac , PC , Meta (about Joystiq) A ton of huge PC game news surfaced this past week, such as the launch of StarCraft 2 ’s beta test and the announcement of Civilization V . Who says PC games are dead? No, seriously, who

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The Best of Big Download: February 15 – 21

Based on the precedent set by your reaction to similar news for StarCraft 2 and Modern Warfare 2 , we’re guessing you’re not going to like the information Command & Conquer 4 lead designer Sam Bass recently shared with Destructoid . According to him, the FMV-filled strategy title won’t provide any LAN or dedicated server support to its players. These two features were apparently struck from the game in favor of a server-based character progression system .

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Command & Conquer 4 won’t have LAN support or dedicated servers

We sure hope you’ve gone through the rigors of grabbing the Platinum trophy in Uncharted 2 already, because it’s about to get a tad harder to unlock. On February 25, a patch for the multiplayer component of the 2009 Game of the Year[TM] will be released, adding 12 new trophies and 12 in-game medals. You can find a list of both of these unlockables after the jump. In addition, a batch of Uncharted 1 -themed DLC will be simultaneously added to the PSN, giving players access to six character skins from the original title: Original Drake, Elena, Atoq Navarro, Eddie Raja, Gabriel Roman and Javier.

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Uncharted 2 getting multiplayer trophies, more DLC Feb. 25

[ Image credit: Negative Gamer ] Allow me to break from the usual third-person writing style we employ at Joystiq to address my personal stake in writing this post — I’m part of the approximately 10 percent of human males with colorblindness. I had to return Super Puzzle Fighter for GBA and turn on the symbols in Hexic (the price I pay for the love of puzzle games). Like Russ at MTV Multiplayer , I (quite likely) have the most common form of colorblindness: Deuteranopia . Personal info aside, Negative Gamer put together a bit of an analysis of BioShock 2 ’s hacking system — a system which applies color matching to various rewards/punishments (green = hack, blue = reward, red = alarm, white = electric shock) and one which could be problematic for those suffering from colorblindnesses many forms. The piece takes a program called ” Colour Contrast Analyser ” (yes, it’s a British-born application) and runs an example image of the hacking program through it, pointing out how the colors would appear to people with a variety of types of colorblindness — the image you see above is but one example

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BioShock 2 hacking minigame could cause issues for colorblind gamers

We might normally start a post on a regional game launch event (or events , in this case) by questioning if you live in or around the geographic location in question (San Francisco), but with a game like Final Fantasy XIII , we’re not entirely sure if that kinda thing matters — we hear that FF fans can be a bit … dedicated . That said, Square Enix is holding two separate parties celebrating the March 9 release of its next in the Final Fantasy series. Both are limited to Square Enix Members , with the launch party on the evening of March 8 limited even further to just 50 Bronze (and up) Members while the day event is limited to “200 Members and their guests.” In order to snag yourself an invite, you’ve gotta have one of those snazzy Square Enix Member IDs and enter the sweepstakes right here before February 23. After you hurriedly enter the contest, come right back here and check out the 20 new screenshots of FFXIII that we’ve dropped into a gallery below.

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Final Fantasy XIII gets two launch events in San Fran and a mess of new screens

We’ve received a number of reports from readers who’ve been participating in BioShock 2 ’s multiplayer component and succumbing to a variety of game-crashing bugs. The reported causes of the freezing are widespread — some Xbox 360 players encounter it during the post-game recap, while some have reported freezing up while in their apartment hubs. We’ve contacted 2K to find out if anything is being done to patch whatever issue might be causing the breakdowns. We were going to make a joke about the freezes being caused by the overzealous use of the Winter Blast plasmid, but that would have been one of the dumbest things we’d ever written.

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BioShock 2 players report multiplayer freezing issues

Okay, internet, deep breath. In. Out

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Assassin’s Creed 2 MP on iPhone isn’t the teased multiplayer game

It’s indicative of Valve’s creativity that we don’t play Team Fortress 2 , but we still get excited about the game’s hilarious updates. In its most recent patch, TF2 received the new “Highlander” mode , in which teams are composed of nine players — but each team can only have one of each class. In other words, “There can be only one (Spy, Sniper, Heavy, etc.).” This not only sounds like an interesting new mode, but it also gives us occasion to link to the intro for the Highlander television series , which scientists recently concluded is the coolest intro sequence in the history of mankind .

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Team Fortress 2 update adds Highlander mode

We thought that, for a change , we’d give you the facts before we got into the crazy, reactionary speculation. There is a page on Ubisoft’s website announcing an odd-looking, top-down multiplayer game for the iPhone called Assassin’s Creed II: Multiplayer . In it, you attempt to kill three other players across WiFi before they kill you

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Assassin’s Creed II: Multiplayer announced for … iPhone?