Quakecon 2007 Coverage

Name: Quakecon 2007 Coverage - Page 5
Brand: Quakecon

by Paul Jastrzebski — Wednesday, August 08, 2007, 12:00 PM EDT

Patriot, PNY, Valve, and Armadillo Aerospace

Patriot:

At Patriot’s booth, the company was showcasing some of their new and highly overclockable memory products. The company was displaying their 1600MHz DDR3 (9-9-9-24) and 1150MHz DDR2 (5-5-5-12) desktop memory as well as their new Xporter XT line of USB sticks. The Xporter XT comes in 4GB and 8GB configurations and like the OCZ ATV Turbo USB sticks we showed you in our Computex coverage, is guaranteed to work under water.

PNY:

Next up we stopped at PNY’s booth and took a look at their new XLR8 line of graphics cards. You may recall that PNY once only had the Vertigo series of cards for desktop users, but since late last year, the company has been on a marketing and branding campaign and created the XLR8 line to cater to the demands of high end gamers. PNY was showing off their XLR8 GeForce 8800 Ultra and even hinted that in a few months we might see a PNY branded XLR8 motherboard hit the market.

Valve:

As mentioned in the id Software keynote address to Quakecon attendees, id and Valve are now partners and Valve’s Steam online distribution system will distribute id’s current catalog, and likely future catalog of games over the internet. The company came to Quakecon to show off a new game they’re helping to develop called Left 4 Dead, based on Valve’s latest source engine.

Left 4 Dead’s premise is that the world has been taken over by zombies and you are one of four survivors trying to stay alive. The catch is that the game is co-op based, meaning that you have work with the three other people around you to make it. I was able to play the game for a few minutes and enjoyed the new approach Left 4 Dead is taking to first person shooters. Co-op games are definitely fun; hopefully we’ll see the addition of co-op in future Valve developed titles. Look for Left 4 Dead to come out in early 2008. Also, Valve mentioned that Team Fortress 2 and Half Life: Episode 2 are almost completely done, the development team is just in the process of fixing bugs in the game and doing last minute balancing. The Valve representative mentioned that there are only about two more weeks of development left on the games, then there will be a beta, and then the game will hit store shelves.

Armadillo Aerospace:

And finally on display in the vendor area of Quakecon was the Quad vehicle of Armadillo Aerospace, the company that John Carmack founded to create a space ship capable of manned space flight. The Quad space vehicle was a bit of a hit with Quakecon attendees and is even officially sponsored by NVIDIA.