Bully Patch Coming Soon

With the torrent of 360 issues with Bully: Scholarship Edition, Rockstar has announced that a fix should be released within the week. The problems seem to be occuring with later models of the 360 and involve freezing, audio and achievements.

I've been playing the game a lot since its release on Tuesday, and I haven't encountered many problems. The only real problem I had was the game locked up on me the first night when I hadn't saved my game in forever. Stupid no auto-saves. And there's a little stuttering when moving fast like in races.

Shadowrun Patched

A Shadowrun patch is now live for both the Xbox 360 and the PC. This update addresses some problem issues like server disconnects and Vista cheats as well as some gaming issues. More details after the jump.

Game Balance
* Dwarves can no longer be bled out with the katana or Artifact. (This is a dwarven racial advantage that doesn't always works. It sucks being bled out by the katana when it's never supposed to happen to you!)
* The elf regeneration ability has been mildly nerfed by delaying its start by 1/4 second and costing the elf more essence. (I'm glad for this as well. Personally, I suck with elves, but when I fight them, they just run off and regenerate before I can track them down again and kill them.)

Audio
* Enemy footsteps will be louder.

Bots
* Bot intelligence should now scale with players’ average Trueskill in Public Match games. (The bots were sometimes great and sometimes very bad. Hopefully this will help even them out.)

UI
* Added “Advanced Settings” screen when setting up a Private Game, which contains the allows the host to cap the number of players, more control over preferences and the ability to turn karma on or off. (I've never played a private game so it doesn't affect me.)
* Fixed “stop” functionality when a game-start countdown has begun.
* Improved messaging for when your party is split or rejoined due to team balance.
* Improved messaging about Artifact clearing bodies in Attrition. (Yeah, I was a total newb when the first time I played Attrition. I put like five clips into a body, not realizing you can only destroy bodies with the Artifact when playing Attrition.)

Network
* Improved server reliability. (Thank God!)

Dedicated Server
* Improved voting reliability.
* Improved network reliability.
* Improved error messaging.

General
* Local Match games can now be played without a profile. (By local, you mean System Link? Who has enough consoles system linked to play locally? Maybe it's more for PC players...)
* Fixed numerous crashes.
* Fixed numerous exploits and glitches. (Does this mean no more Vista glitching Katana Elves?)
* Improved Vista multi-monitor functionality. (For the 10 people playing on Vista.)

Gears of War Achievements

Tonight fans will be able to download a patch that fixes some bugs, but also includes the new achievements. The achievements are related to the Annex game type as well as the latest map pack.

Annex-related achievements:

• THIS! IS! ANNEX! -- Complete 100 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in Annex and capture 3 objectives in each match (40 points)
• Inconceivable! -- Win 20 rounds of multiplayer matches in Annex by fewer than 5 points (30)
• Nub Pwn3r -- Win 20 rounds of multiplayer matches in Annex by shutting out the opposing team (30)
  

Hidden Fronts-related achievements:

• You Down With E.P.I.C? -- Win a multiplayer match of 3+ rounds in any game type on 6 different downloadable maps (30)
• Green Thumb -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Garden multiplayer map (30)
• Mind the Gap -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Subway multiplayer map (30)
• All That Juice -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Process multiplayer map (30)
• Purdy Mouth -- Win 20 multiplayer matches of 3+ rounds in any game type on the Bullet Marsh multiplayer map (30)

Some of these will be pretty hard to achieve, but hey the hardcore should be rewarded for being crazy good.

Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Now

I stumbled across a multiplayer beta of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for the PC over at WorthPlaying. It's around 500 MB. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to work. It keeps crashing on me, but some of you might have better luck.

The beta's in Russian. There's a patch to change the menu into English, but when you're installing the beta, it's all in Russian. ... Maybe I installed it wrong since I can't read the buttons...