August 2009

Archive for August, 2009

BlizzCon 2009 – Starcraft II

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

This is a guest post by a friend of PlayHaven, avid gamer Albert Ko, of CheapIrvine.com.

Today my friends at PlayHaven flew from SFO to SNA and hopped over to BlizzCon 2009. I picked them up at 8AM and we waited in line at 8:30AM for nearly an hour along with thousands of people.

I got to speak to the lead designer of Starcraft 2, Dustin Browder:

Dustin Browder, the Lead Designer of Starcraft II

Dustin Browder of Starcraft fame

One of the main questions that I really wanted to know, being an avid Starcraft Player for over 10 years, was, “When is Starcraft 2 being released?”

According to Dustin, they’re actually trying very hard to release the Starcraft 2 Beta by the end of the year. However, he said that there are no guarantees and it will be done when it is done. Well, that’s Blizzard for ya!

Here are some pictures from the Starcraft II demos they had on display. This game is totally going to kick ass.

Infested Kerrigan

Here is the “Queen of Blades” herself – pretty freaky.

There were a ton of people playing Starcraft II. Just look at how many computers were set up.

Starcraft II Battle Scene

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Discussion Forums Launched!!!

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Ok folks, you asked for it, you got it!

We just launched our discussion forum system tonight, so come mingle with the community! The primary purpose of the discussion system is to give the PlayHaven community a medium to communicate with each other. While the topics may widely vary, we encourage discussions to:

Stay on topic
Q&A on questions our guide system cannot provide
Collaborate on guide writing

Most of the designs should be fairly familiar to you as we mimic a lot of the traditional forum designs. However, we also took it to the next level and tried to enhance on all the little things that bug us from time-to-time. For instance, some of the new features from traditional forums are:

Threaded conversation – no more quoting and everything is kept chronological!
In-line reply – this should make replying to a thread much easier
Rating on posts – we are hoping this will eliminate trolls and inappropriate comments

I hope you enjoy our new discussion forum system. Of course, we know not all new things are better than the old ones, so if you find any of our new features annoying or less useful than traditional forums. Please don’t hesitate to voice your view! Now, please come check it out!

Posted in PlayHaven | 1 Comment »

Has iPhone become a legitimate gaming platform?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

In the past few months, I have found myself spending more and more time on my iPhone playing these simple yet addicting games. Looking at how the iPhone has evolved from first gen, to the iPhone 3G, and now the iPhone 3GS, as well as see how the games have evolve along the way — I can’t stop but wonder if iPhone has finally become a legitimate gaming platform. First let’s applaud Apple has finally come around and realize gaming is a market should not be ignored (we all know how crappy the Macs are for gaming). Anyway, if it has, where does the future hold for iPhone? I am going to geek out my old consulting habit… and let’s have a look:

The Market:

14 millions iPhones were sold in 2008, and estimated 24M iPhones will be sold in 2009 (5.2M iPhones were sold in Q209 alone).

During the first year of AppStore, over 10,000 games have been developed, which is about 18% of all apps developed for the iPhone.

(more…)

Posted in General, Industry | 7 Comments »

Peer Reviews: Promoting quality guides

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Collaboration is one request we get frequently, and today we’re announcing a first step towards getting the PlayHaven community to collaborate on guides: peer reviews.

This new feature will help reinforce our mission to host high quality user-written guides on the Web. Peer reviews will also give readers a chance to contribute in finding factual corrections, spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, etc. The process is very simple and will be extremely valuable for guide writers.

Upon publishing a guide, you will be presented the three options to invite your friends for peer review: Facebook, Twitter, or Email. When two or more people have peer reviewed your guide, a special recognition icon will appear next to let readers know your guide has earned the seal of approval among the community. For those of you who are friendless – don’t fret! Any member of PlayHaven community can also peer review your guides as well – just ask around and I’m sure someone will help you out

A special icon for peer reviewed guides!

Posted in Guides, PlayHaven | 5 Comments »

The PlayHaven Guide Editor vs. Notepad

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

I’d like to take some time to take an in-depth look into one of the more popular features of PlayHaven’s guide editor – the ability to export your guides to text. Here’s a simple case study on how it can be used to maximize your guide’s viewership and exposure across both PlayHaven AND all the text-based gaming sites while at the same time minimizing the amount of time it takes you, the guide writer, to create the actual guide and distribute it.

Since PlayHaven takes care of all the structuring and all the technical bells and whistles that many people find time consuming in creating a guide in notepad, most guides and walkthroughs can be written in a much shorter amount of time. There’s no need for creating elaborate ASCII tables, art, or a CTRL-F style table of contents. One favorite game of mine when I was a kid was just recently re-released in a special edition – The Secret of Monkey Island, on the PC, 360, and the iPhone. I’m a big Tim Schafer fan and I knew right there I had to do a full walkthrough for the game. It was also a chance to see how much faster it would take me to do a walkthrough on the PlayHaven editor vs. a notepad one (I have done some in the past). It ended up taking me only one weekend (and not all devoted to it!) to complete most of it, even having to run through the entire game to get screenshots!

So now what? I have a pretty guide that I had created, but only available to visitors of PlayHaven. With the new text exporting feature, I just click one button, and it gets all formatted to 79 characters per line, and ASCII. But, the big question probably looming over your head is, will GameFAQs accept it? I decided to see if this text based version of my guide would pass the submission process over at GameFAQs – I submitted an unedited text file straight from PlayHaven and soon found out that it had been accepted!

(more…)

Posted in Guides, PlayHaven | 6 Comments »

Over 10,000 games added!

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

We have heard your voice, we have heard your pain, and we have found a solution!

Expanding our game database has been one of the most frequently requested features. While we have the most current generation platforms and the most current games, there are many more out there on older platforms that we know people would love to write and read about. I’d like to announce that we have added support for over 11,000 games AND 3 additional platforms, which includes the Xbox, Gamecube, and the Gameboy Advance.

There is a twist though. Because we are adding so many games simultaneously… we haven’t had the opportunity to populate all the details yet (such as the logo, game icon, etc.). So when you write a guide for a game that’s recently added, you may encounter a message that says “Publish availability pending…”, it simply means we haven’t had the chance to populate all the details of the game just yet. No worries! As soon as you start writing for that game, the PlayHaven Team will receive an Email alert, and we will automatically put that game on the top of our queue. Within 24 hours, your guide will be ready for publishing!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to shoot us an Email or leave a comment below. Give it a shot!

Posted in General, Guides, PlayHaven | 1 Comment »