Pure Gaming Attending Cod4 European Lans in Summer 2009

Pure Gaming will be representing North America this summer as the only team to cross the Atlantic for the 2009 European Lan season. Pure will be attending two events, Outpost On Fire and The-eXperience for a total of 16,000 € and additional hardware on the line. The first event, Outpost On Fire, is located in Antwerp, Belgium and will take place on July 24-26 against some of Europes finest. Currently there are 28 teams pre-payed as of now and a cash purse of 6,000 €, but if the number of teams reaches 32 then the cash pot will be raised to 8,000 €.

The next event, known as The-eXperience, is the bigger of the two and is possibly one of the most anticipated European events of the summer. On the 29th of July "the eXperience" will start the cod4 tournament in Roskilde, Denmark. So far, over 28 teams from all over the world have signed up and paid for the event. On the site www.the-experience.dk you can see all the teams planning to attend with only pureEsports coming from the USA. With over 10,000 € and hardware riding on this event alone, you will be sure to see some of the best cod4 teams from around the world attending this event and giving it their all.

The current pureEsports roster is as follows:

Josh “Glad” Adams
Eric "Snatch" Brinkley
Alexander "Malex" Solis
Taylor "Taylor" Sheridan
Alex "flak" Lasselle

Starcraft 2 Death Animations

Starcraft II will be featuring multiple death animations for each unit in the game. In an effort to make the game become more alive the animation team at Blizzard has put in some time to animate some of the finer aspects of the game. In this Starcraft 2 Death Animations Video, which demonstrates some of the death animations, features a protoss carrier being shot out of the sky, several zerg units dying, and even what a skirmish might look like.

Duke Nukem Forever Developer 3D Realms Shuts Down

Many people have been anticipating the next installment of Duke Nukem 3D since its original release in 1996. Now it seems that these people may never see that wish come true. 3D Realms, the creator of several popular games such as Wolfenstien 3D and most notably Duke Nukem, has finally closed its doors after due to lack of funding. The fate of Duke Nukem Forever, which has been in development for over 12 years, is still uncertain but many believe the closing of 3D Realms may be the final nail in the coffin.

Read the full story of 3D Realms and Duke Nukem Forever here at the PC Game Tech blog.

Final Fantasy XIII Videos

With Final Fantasy XIII being one of the most anticipated games for the PS3 in 2009, there has been tons of buzz and speculation on the game. Just last week there have been several gameplay movies released to give fans a little taste of what to expect including a boss fight.

Heres a link to the Final Fantasy XIII Gameplay Videos and let me just say this game looks amazing.

Tritton AX Pro Gaming Headphones - 5.1 Surround Sound

So I'm currently in the market for some new gaming headphones and particularly those that employ surround sound as well as have a great sound quality. I've noticed many popular gaming headphones currently on the market claim surround sound but only use two speakers. After some looking around I've come across the Tritton AX Pro Gaming Headphones which employ Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound through the use of 8 different speakers, 4 in each earpiece.

From the look of the Tritton AX Pro Headphones Package Contents, they don't seem very travel friendly but I have no qualms with that seeing as a LAN environment are always extremely noisy and my current headphones will suffice. The fact that each earpiece needs its own power adapter and connects to a audio decoder box seems to indicate the quality of sound that I should expect from these headphones. I've also read that each audio channel is customizable so I can custom set the volume of my game as well as my ventrilo as well as set which speakers they come out of. I'll probably be ordering these within the few coming weeks and Ill post back again with my review of these headphones.

Matt Cutts Plays Portal

For those of you who don't know, Matt Cutts is the Head of the webspam team at Google and is extremely well known within the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community. Since I myself work as an SEO technician in a web department, he is very related to what I do at work.

While reading an article on his blog about Google Chrome Privacy Options, I happened to come across his twitter in which the latest post was " I'm stalled on level 18 of Portal and need to spend some time on my todo list. :)". It gave me a little laugh that somebody as important as him seemed to be regretting not being able to play a video game but instead had to finish his work. It sounded a little bit like myself when I have an organic chemistry lab due the next morning.

How to Build a Great Gaming PC For Under $800

Here is a great article I wanted to bring attention to titled How to Build a Kick-ass $800 Gaming PC which I found on MaximumPC. Generally if you are going to be buying a PC of any sort, you are going to want to order all the parts and build it yourself to get the most bang for your buck. Buying pre-built and configured PC's may be easier often times you will find that the computer doesn't do things quite how you would like. Building your own rig ensures that your computer is built just how you need it.

In any case, here's how Maximum PC's $800 rig stacks up in terms of gaming performance.

We went into our gaming benchmark with low expectations from our budget card, the Radeon HD 4850. Obviously, it is no match against the dual GeForce 8800 GTX setup in the Zero Point system. With settings cranked up to the max, our card was barely able to spit out 16 FPS in Crysis. While playing Crysis at the highest settings possible and a resolution of 1920x1200 simply isn’t an option, turning down the graphic settings to medium resulted in 43 FPS made the game much more playable. Unreal Tournament 3 managed to give us a stellar 78 FPS. If you’re running at typical 22-inch LCD resolutions, this machine should kick ass.