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Need For Speed World — Another EA Free-To-Play
EA is coming out with another NFS. The beauty of this one is that it’s free. That’s right. Absolutely free. EA has is experimenting with free-to-play games. Before this one, it released Battlefield: Heroes. It got Best of 2009 from IGN. I’ve played a few of these free-to-play games, and I loved them. Combat Arms was my first one, and it was brilliant. Battlefield Heroes was a great game as well. For those of you who don’t know how these free-to-play games work, here’s how it goes:
Usually you have to register on the site
download the game
install
Play.
Yep, that’s it. However, there is a catch. Usually you can’t get special weapons or you can’t customize your character quite as much if you put a few bucks in the game. Meaning, if you charge your account, you can buy special weapons or equipment that could aid you in your game. EA hasn’t released information on how they are going to profit off NFSW, but I imagine that you won’t be able to get certain cars, gadgets, or little add-ons without throwing in a few greenbacks.
Photo from IGN. Game in early testing stages.
One of the few cars obtainable in this game. Porche
As you can see for yourself, the game looks great. And remember, it’s a free game. Free games don’t look this good, until now. EA is planning to include ~250 cars with around 50-100 when the game launches. The maps are from previous games including: Carbon, Most Wanted, and EA also plans to include maps from the other NFS games.
Onto gameplay. It’s fairly straightforward. It has a minimalistic hud and simple controls. It’s more arcadey than a real simulation. You can have nitro boosts and power-ups. EA also said that they would include other modes like in Pursuit, where you had cops. Yes, you will be able to play as a cop. Customization options are adequate, paint jobs, wheels, etc. When you launch the game, you are landed into a massive world. Just a press of the button has you matched up with 7 other players. Now all that’s left is to pick a game mode and your set. The racing is seamless.
Oh and one more thing, it’s PC only.
The game still has a ways to go, but so far it’s looking promising. What are your thoughts? Put them in the comments. Do you think this will be a hit or miss? Leave it in the comments.
-TJ
Share You Stuff Easier
bMost of us are familiar with email and sending things through it. We are used to attaching a document to an email and sending it. It’s fast and easy. Email is all well and good, but what if you are working on a project that had multiple people working on it? Email would be a hassle, and you would have to appoint a person to view all these different changes to the project. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way were multiple people can access your file and also speak to each other about changes? Well, I’m about to give you 3 sites that you can do that on.
The first one is Etherpad.com. It sets up a random URL for the web page of your document. However, I wouldn’t recommend this one because of one flaw, there is no security. Once someone knows the URL to your document, they can get it. There is no way to set a password or anything of the nature. It is very useful however, for quick meetings on non-sensitive material. You have a chat window off to the side where you can discuss your project and you can see everyone’s changes to see which is better. It takes far less time than email. Each person’s changes is highlighted a different color AND this is a free service. I may start using this myself, it sounds very handy.
No. 2 is something a little more secure and feature rich. It is Box.net.
A team of people can share a collection of documents that is posted to their own Web page. You can do full-text searches across this collection, and have threaded discussions too. The cost is $15 per user per month. And unlike Etherpad, you can share all kinds of files, not just word processing documents.
That basically says it all. You can upload multiple types of documents and search text through your pile of documents. You can have conversations as well. I don’t believe there is a chat, but the conversations stay put like a forum post.
The last of these services is Drop.io.
This is like Box in that you can save a wide variety of files and do so securely, like Etherpad in that you have real-time chat. But there is plenty more going on here. The cool thing about Drop.io is that you have so many ways to get information in and out of the shared Web page. You can upload content via Web, e-mail, send via a text message, Facebook feeds, or even phone or fax it in. The phone calls are saved as audio files.
As you can see, Drop.io is basically a combination of the previous two. You can try it out for free. If you want to create one shared page, that will be $10 per year for 1 GB of space. Personally this service sounds the best to me. Many features and seems to be easily accessible. I haven’t tried out these services myself yet, but I may come back and update this with my own opinions of the one(s) I’ve tried. These are great services if you are part of a big company working on many projects. It is faster and easier to share your projects through one of these services.
Read the full article at: Computer World