Left 4 Dead Pre-orders Surpass Orange Box by 60%

For a new shooter IP to make waves in a market saturated with first-person shooters, is a big thing. With a ton of positive pre-release positive reviews (through hands-on previews), Turtle Rock Studios’ Left 4 Dead is doing just that and Edge Online has the scoop. Valve’s funding a $10 million ad campaign, and here’s how co-founder/managing director of Valve rationalizes the move:

"People had really strong reactions to Left 4 Dead when we started showing it…"

"Our pre-orders are running 60 percent ahead of Orange Box. This in combination with the fact that it is a new IP made us think that an extensive marketing program made a lot of sense."

For those of you who don’t know about it – Left 4 Dead is Turtle Rock and Valve’s upcoming horror first person shooter, that’s built ground up to be a co-op game. While the market has a ton of FPSes, the number of co-op shooters is negligible. In that respect, L4D’s like a drop of blood for the hordes of gamer zombies that thirst for some good co-op action.

StarCraft 2 Will be a Trilogy

Blizzard wants to show its fans that they’re making their upcoming RTS sequel – StarCraft 2 – every bit as epic as the series’ fans deserve. They’ve announced that the game will be split up into a trilogy, where each race will get an individual 'standalone product'. Here are the details:

The first game will be called "Terrans: Wings of Liberty"
The second will be "Zerg: Heart of the Swarm"
The third will be "Protoss: Legacy of the Void".

Each campaign will play out differently (maybe just slightly) - the Zerg campaign is said to have RPG elements, while the Protoss one will be more focused on diplomacy. The Terrans campaign will also contain a Protoss mini-campaign.

Apart from this, they also mentioned that they want the games to feel like standalone products, rather than expansion packs.

How do all these things affect your life, you ask? For starters, each campaign will get the full-game treatment; meaning they’ll have a start and end cinematic each, along with many more in between, meaning the number of cinematics in the entire trilogy will be far more than any game you’ve played before (Blizzard cinematics are to die for!). Also - on the flip side – the price of each campaign might cumulatively end up being on the higher side (boohoo!).

Blizzard Worried About Over-populated Co-op in Diablo III

In an interview with IGN, Blizzard’s Rob Pardo revealed that the finer details of co-op play in the upcoming Diablo III haven’t been decided yet. The team behind the game is worried about the games being too swamped with players:

"We’re a little bit worried that if you go up to too many players that you’re not really going to be playing together anymore…

We want to make sure it’s a great co-op experience where you really play with the people you’re with, so we’ve just got to experiment and figure out what the optimal number is."

The traditional way of incorporating co-op play is increasing the number of creatures, or the difficulty of the game to match the number of players. This rarely works out well, and I sincerely hope that Blizzard finds an innovative way to pass this hurdle.

Verbatim Introduces 500 GB Mediastation Pro

Verbatim has launched two new multi-media hard drives, MediaStation and MediaStation Pro. Offering upto 500 GB in storage capacity, these drives enable users to easily store videos, photos, music and films and then play it back directly via the TV or an audio system. These drives weigh just around a kilogram.

The MediaStation features a 3.5" SATA hard drive for smooth writing and reading of data. It can store upto 1,000 hours of video (Mpeg 4) or 6,300 hours of music (MP3) or 250,000 5-Megapixel photos. The multimedia drive can play back all popular video, audio and graphics formats, including MPEG4, DivX, MP3, WMA, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, JPEG and PNG. All connection cables required for this are available with the drive. The included composite and S-video connection cables ensure picture-perfect playback. The standard version of MediaStation offers a scaled resolution of 1080i. A USB 2.0 connection allows additional data media to be docked with the MediaStation Pro and content transferred or displayed directly onto TV.

In addition to all the features of MediaStation, the MediaStation Pro version offers a WLAN connection with the help of which data from the PC can not only be transferred conveniently to the MediaStation Pro, but can also be played back directly in real time on the TV. Offering an HDMI connection for the best possible audio and picture quality, and full HD (1080p), the MediaStation Pro is also capable of receiving Internet radio streams, Shoutcast and Icecast, directly via the Internet connection. Both MediaStation and MediaStation Pro supports Digital Audio 5.1 format and offer a state-of-art remote control that enables easy on-screen navigation. It is even possible to create personal playlists and set up private, password-protected folder options on both the drives.

Both MediaStation and MediaStation Pro will be available by November '08 at an MSRP of Rs 15,000.

LG Announces Prada II Handset

8MP camera phones aside, LG has also announced another partnership with Prada to launch a new version only with a slide out full QWERTY keypad. With handsets like SE's Xperia and HTC's G1 Android all set to launch, LG is making sure they’re not too far behind.

It’s almost identical to the successful original except for the ultra-thin keyboard that slides out from under the handset. The silver keyboard along with the additional on-screen call and hang-up buttons gives fresh tactility to the original minimal concept.

Other features include 3G compatibility with video calling, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, full HTML browser, the 5 mega pixel camera with Schneider-Kreuznach certified lens and Wi-Fi accessibility.

The new Prada mobile will be available at a starting price of Rs. 38, 975 (600 Euros) through major mobile dealerships in Italy, UK, France, Germany, Spain and Netherlands in Q4 of 2008.