Tech Olive

Though I have been trying my best (which could have been better, if I’m honest) to drag Tech Olive along under my own steam since Craig’s resignation last month. However, I’ve recently decided that I should follow Craig’s example and take what I’ve learned from Tech Olive and move on to greater things. So, for all intents and purposes, this will be Tech Olive’s final post. The site will stay up for a while, but it’s unlikely that any posts will continue in the future (though anything is possible).

It has been an amazing 2.5 years for us, and it’s all thanks to you guys for being our fantastic readers. Without you, Tech Olive could never have become what it did today. So thank you for sticking with us and making us feel important over the years.

Craig is now doing free-lance tech writing all across the Interwebs, and I have plans to start up a new site of my own in the coming months (Hint: It won’t be very tech-related). If you want to keep up with us, you can follow Craig or myself on Twitter for updates on our future plans, or to simply keep up with us as people (Spoiler: We’re not very interesting).

According to NPD analyst Anita Frazier, Black Ops has pushed Wii Play out of its #1 spot on USA’s all-time best-selling charts after only a few months on the market. Last October, Nintendo reported about 13 million copies of Wii Play had been sold since its December 2006 release, and reports are saying that Black Ops has surpassed that.

Activision has yet to release the actual number of units sold for Black Ops, but we do know that 5.6 million units were sold on release day, and that Black Ops had surpassed $1 billion in sales by late December.

via [Joystiq]

Epic Vid of the Week is a weekly series that showcases an awesome video that we or our readers discover. Some you may have seen before and others you may have not. If you’ve discovered any videos that might be worthy of an Epic Vid of the Week title, let us know!

What happens when you take a few students, a ton of free time, an intimidating amount of beer and put them all together in an apartment with an Internet connection and a video camera? A unique musical number wrapped in 24-karat YouTube gold.

In the unlikely event that Facebook isn’t good enough at eating all of your free time, Warner Bros. has announced plans to offer a movie rental system through the massively popular social networking site.

How will it work? After you “Like” the movie’s page, you can then purchase a 48-hour rental of the movie for 30 Facebook credits (equivalent to $3). The system went live this week with the first title being The Dark Knight. Warner promises many more titles for rental and purchase through Facebook soon.

via [Game Informer]

Developer Eidos Montreal confirmed via Twitter that the PC release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution will release August 23rd in the US and the 26th in Europe. Don’t forget to pre-order your copy of the game for some bonus starting items and bonus missions.

The Bargain Bin is a weekly feature that helps out gamers in this tough economy. How does it help? Once a week, it offers a great and cheap game ($10 or less) to keep you going until your next paycheck.

With new independent developers popping up every day, each with their own games to show the world, it can be difficult to find the hidden gems in all the hustle. Luckily, the Independent Games Festival helps us with this very issue. This week’s budget title was among only a few finalists for IGF’s prestigious “Seamus McNally” award.

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Always working to further improve Steam’s user-friendliness and security, Valve has announced the latest feature to enter beta: Steam Guard. Steam Guard is a system designed to keep user accounts safe from hackers and other nefarious persons, even if your password gets out in public.

“Account phishing and hijacking are our top support issues,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “With Steam Guard, we’ve taken a big step towards giving customers the account security they need as they purchase more and more digital goods.”

What Steam Guard offers is hardware-based recognition and authentication, much like many online banking systems use. For a login to be accepted, you must manually define if a PC is allowed access via an activation email sent to your Steam account’s email address. Gabe Newell is so confident in the technology that he even publicly released his login details to prove the system’s reliability. In the future, Steam Guard will make use of technology built into second-generation Intel CPUs that generates a new password every 30 seconds.

[Press Release]

Finally and officially announced, the third installment in the Saints Row franchise will be exclusively gracing Game Informer’s April cover. Saints Row: The Third will take place after The Third Street Saints have evolved past being just a street gang, straight into super-stardom with bobble-heads, branded clothing, and specialty merchandise. This new fame becomes a problem for the gang after getting noticed by The Syndicate, a massive crime fraternity.

“Saints Row: The Third puts you on top of the world, right at the beginning of the game, with all the perks that go along with being the head of an elite criminal organization,” said Danny Bilson, THQ Executive Vice President, Core Games. “There’s no delivering pizza, no shuttling family members about in a long series of taxi missions. Instead, you take all the power of the Third Street Saints and you take the world by storm.”

via [Game Informer]

Epic Vid of the Week is a weekly series that showcases an awesome video that we or our readers discover. Some you may have seen before and others you may have not. If you’ve discovered any videos that might be worthy of an Epic Vid of the Week title, let us know!

Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, many of us have had the pleasure of watching live-streams of NASA’s space shuttles launching, some of which even follow the action into space and allow us to watch the astronauts doing astronaut things. In space. This week’s video gives you a whole new perspective of a shuttle launch.

As Black Ops slowly evolves into a snag-free multiplayer experience, a new server-based PC patch has rolled out. Fixing only some issues with reserve slots and kicking players, this should be the last patch we see before getting the large upcoming 1.07 update that Treyarch keep mentioning. Hopefully we’ll get details on that patch soon.

Also on the Black Ops multiplayer front, we’re getting another double-XP weekend running from March 4th to the 7th on all platforms.

[Twitter, Community Forums]