Curiously "MSN" rather than the Live team have released a beta of "wallpapers".
The app allows you to select from "over 100 wallpapers", and lets you customise the wallpapers by combining elements (background images + foreground images), by adding text, rotating or cropping them. Think of it as a very basic way to create custom wallpapers, but without having to spend any money on programs Photoshop, but still having more power than Paint.
It looks like Thin Martian are behind this wallpaper venture (at least, that is who has digitally signed the installer). Just like the recently released Live Wave 3 Messenger Beta, this acts like a WPF app, but appears to be a native code (rather than managed code in .NET) – at least that's what a combination of my eyes and ProcessExplorer are telling me.
Be warned that the first 124 wallpapers seem to have to download the very first time you launch the app, or at least thumbnails of, which makes it very slow to run.
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The Windows Live suite of applications has now entered beta for "Wave 3".
The UI on all apps has changed to look more like the Wave 3 design, as well as slowly working in the Office Ribbon, but most noticeably Windows Live Messenger (now version "2009") has undergone drastic changes. The jury is still out on whether I like it or not, I welcome change but there just seems to be more wasted space than before.
New to the Windows Live suite is Windows Live Movie Maker, which is set to replace Windows Movie Maker (much the same way Live Mail replaced Windows Mail). It's great to see more frequent development (or at least more frequent updates) been released for Movie Maker, but sadly this first beta of Live Movie Maker lacks some very basic features such as being able to trim/edit the timeline of a clip.
Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker now feature an SDK for publishing to a third party sharing service which is great! This means you will no longer need to hack the Internet Printing in Live Gallery to upload photos to a custom gallery.
edit: LiveSide have a much more indepth look at Wave 3, if you can't be bothered installing for yourself :)
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Please note: I must stress these are my impressions from the beta (v1.4), and may not represent the final product.
Because I bought Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath, I was given access to the Red Alert 3 beta program. Additional keys have been released as part of an exclusive deal between EA and Fileplanet, first to their (Fileplanet) premium account holders but most recently to the free accounts too.
The beta is limited to online multiplayer only and to four maps (2x 2v2 and 2x 1v1 maps), but there is no limit to access to the three factions and their respective units.
Gameplay
It's hard to comment if the gameplay is good, bad or otherwise in a restricted beta of a game especially when it is limited to just multiplayer, but I can draw comparisons. It plays much like any RTS - you collect resources, create buildings that provide X resource (in this case, electricity), create units, provide defense, or unlock further units (in the case of Russia; the Allies and Empire of the Rising Sun both 'research' the next tier of units). There is nothing particularly different or innovative with the gameplay presented in RA3.
The previous two games released by EA since acquiring Westwood/C&C rights have been C&C: Generals (and it's expansion, Zero Hour) and C&C3:Tiberium Wars (and it's expansion, Kanes Wrath), if I was to pick which one RA3 is most like, it'd definitely be Generals.
Generals has a "rewards" system, where you earn "experience" by doing stuff, which could include creating buildings, units, or removing substantial chunks of the enemy. In return, you could spend your experience on three rewards trees (dubbed at the time 'General Abilities'), which included unit upgrades, aerial assaults, spawning units anywhere on the map, etc. RA3 features the same system, although the rewards don't seem to be turning-the-tide-of-battle as some of the Generals rewards were (hint, this is a good thing – it sucks when all your hardwork can be undone by an enemies reward).
Zero Hour introduced another dimension of combat (sea, alongside air and ground) to Generals (which does not appear in C&C3), but is present in RA3. While this does have the problem that the developers have to balance yet another playing field, it really does add so much more to the game.
Graphics/Art Style
While I haven't played a lot of the older games in the C&C universe, I've played a fair bit of Generals, and C&C3, and it is safe to say the visuals in RA3 are nothing like those. The easiest comparison would be Half-Life 2/Counter Strike to Team Fortress 2. The former are 'realism' shooters while the latter is a stylised, over the top, brightly coloured piece of art. RA3 falls into latter category, having many over the top effects and everything is very brightly coloured.
Like all games thus far based on SAGE (or RNA as its now known) it has appealing visuals in the unit models, detail textures, and particle effects, but throw it into a multiplayer arena and massive slow downs occur unless all players turn the graphics quality down. The game doesn't become choppy as if frames are being skipped, it simply slows down the game speed so it takes longer for things to occur. With C&C3, I found settings that were silky smooth in single player, even during the epically scaled final battles, would bring the game to its knees in even the smallest 1v1 game online.
Problems
While this is a beta and you must expect most bugs or problems that will be fixed, it is hard not to see some that will never be fixed given the track record of EA.
Gamespy
For reasons that have never benefited actual gamers, Gamespy is involved in the multiplayer aspect of RA3, providing the chat lobby and game match making services. It is extremely rare (Quake…sure) to see a game that has benefited from Gamespy's assistance with lobby/match making – and RA3 is no different. It mimics all the flaws of C&C3's online play, where available games often don't appear at all or the list continually expands and contracts so fast that it is often impossible to actually select the game you wish to join! One of the worst 'features' is that you have to be in the chat lobby (and currently there is over twenty) of the game creator to see the game; change lobbies and you see a different subset of available games.
Netcode
One thing that has played SAGE/RNA games has been poor networking code. During the days where I semi-frequented a gaming focused NetCafe, it was rare to see a LAN game of Generals finish without at least one of the players crash out due to network issues. The initial release of Kane's Wrath was plagued with a 'out-of-sync' issue, which after a period of time would just lose connection with other players, rendering the game useless. EA denied that such a problem existed (stating it couldn't be replicated and that a very small percentage of the player base was effected) for some time, until they decreased such occurrences with a patch (but not totally removed) after three months!
In RA3, I've already seen one or two out-of-sync issues, and many players randomly dropped from the game!
Balance
In one of the patches C&C3, the ability to construct multiple defenses at once by building multiple cranes was removed. It was a fairly drastic change, and effected singleplayer as well. I can't help but shake the feeling that there will be some major balance upsets after the release of the game. Russian submarines currently seem to be overly powerful just as their Terror Drones are – to the point where I've had a few games where people have quit when others have gone Russian.
Will it drain my wallet?
The inevitable question is: despite its flaws, is this game "good enough" to be worth shelling out for? If you're a hard core C&C/RA fan, it's got some solid stuff in there which you'll love. If you are a C&C/RA fan but are a Westwood purist? Not a chance – there is too much of the "EA Influence" inherited from Generals and C&C3. I fall short of being a fanatic to the series or to Westwood so the decision is a little tougher. I've been burnt by the flaws in Tiberium Wars and Kane's Wrath and generally poor support by EA in those games as well as Battlefield 2/2142, but RA3 does offer some genuinely different gameplay to be entertaining.
My answer is, no, I won't be buying it upon launch because I don't feel it is worth the launch RRP of AUD$99.95; while the game might be fun, it's just too "same-y" in both the good and bad aspects. If I can find it for AUD$60 or under, I'll reconsider, but for now the similarities in gameplay to C&C3 and Generals are just encouraging me to hold tight to my money until StarCraft 2 is released.
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Be warned that the first 124 wallpapers seem to have to download the very first time you launch the app, or at least thumbnails of, which makes it very slow to run.
