February 14, 2012

A New Take on Call of Duty

So I was surf­ing the inter­webs and came across this lit­tle gem. If you’re like me and are kinda tired of the same ol’ Call of Duty then check this out.

Keep in mind this is totally not a real thing. How­ever I thought it was a pretty cool con­cept and some­thing I would like to see happen.

You can check out the web­site http://policewarfare.com/

February 7, 2012

Real Racing 2: a Must-Have for Racing Enthusiasts [iOS]

If you’re like me, you like bits and pieces from all sorts of dif­fer­ent rac­ing games. The vehi­cle cus­tomiza­tion and real­ism of Forza, the accelerom­e­ter con­trols of Mario Kart Wii, etc. Lucky for us, those first two exam­ples meld beau­ti­fully together in Firemint’s Real Rac­ing 2 for iOS.

Playable on a wide range of iOS devices, Real Rac­ing 2 is visu­ally gor­geous. I play on my old iPhone 3GS and, and it still looks amaz­ing… Though it must look incred­i­ble on a retina dis­play, or even on a TV using it’s air­play sup­port for split screen par­ties with Apple TV. Should you choose to play on your inte­grated screen, there’s even sev­eral dif­fer­ent view modes to choose from, most of which sup­port a hori­zon tilt fea­ture, to coun­ter­act the dis­play tilt of accelerom­e­ter steer­ing. They obvi­ously wanted every­one to think this game looks fan­tas­tic, and it does. Don’t worry, though– these graph­i­cal good­ies don’t come at the expense of qual­ity con­tent or play time.

The career mode is rather expan­sive, grad­u­ally going from races with lit­tle cars like a Ford Focus all the way up to 8 and 10 cylin­der mon­sters from the likes of McLaren and BMW. Inte­gra­tion of achieve­ments and social net­work­ing through the game cen­ter is a nice plus, too.

That brings me to the next point: mul­ti­player. I don’t care if my motives for writ­ing this arti­cle aren’t entirely self­less or not. The truth of the mat­ter is that this is truly on of the best iOS games ever devel­oped for rac­ing fans, and yet (shock­ingly) none of my friends have it to play with me! So peo­ple I know, and even peo­ple I don’t, get this so you can come race with me. It’s a great game that you’ll love, and I’m lonely out there on the tar­mac. So I’ll be wait­ing for you guys! If you grab the game off of my rec­om­men­da­tion, add me on Game Cen­ter so we can squeal some tires. My name on Game Cen­ter is Trevor­Dunkin (cre­ative, right?) See you out there!

February 7, 2012

Kinect Star Wars Gets a Release Date and a Ton of Screen Shots

Today Major Nel­son from Xbox Live revealed on his blog that Kinect Star Wars the game and lim­ited edi­tion con­sole will be released on April 3^rd. He also stated that there will be 5 game modes includ­ing: Jedi Des­tiny: Dark Side Ris­ing, Podrac­ing, Ran­cor Ram­page, Galac­tic Dance Off and Duels of Fate. Yes that’s right there is a dance mode! He also stated” That as you travel the Galaxy to face an evil that threat­ens to under­mine the fab­ric of the Repub­lic, you will engage with forces of the Empire in intense space battles. “

Also included with the Lim­ited Edi­tion con­sole bun­dle will be an exclu­sive unlock able C3PO dance mode to add to the fam­ily friendly theme this game is por­tray­ing. Pric­ing for Kinects Star Wars will be $49.99 for the game and the Kinect Star Wars Lim­ited Edi­tion con­sole will run you $449.00 accord­ing to Amazon.com.

Check out the screen shots and new trailer below and tells us what you think!

February 3, 2012

Review: Crysis for the Xbox 360

Adapt.Engage.Survive

Video source: Game Trail­ers

Story: Ten­sions between the U.S. and North Korea have reached crit­i­cal mass as they square off on a small island located in the South China Sea. Why? A team of U.S. arche­ol­o­gists have unearthed an arti­fact of unknown ori­gin that may pre-date the exis­tence on humans on earth! North Korea moves in and takes con­trol of the dig so the U.S. dis­patches an elite Spe­cial Forces Unit out­fit­ted with the lat­est in Nanosuit Tech­nol­ogy to assess the sit­u­a­tion and try to res­cue the trapped archae­ol­o­gists. The ensu­ing bat­tles trig­ger the arti­fact to come to life releas­ing a new enemy bent on all our destruction!

Back in Octo­ber EA and Cry­tek re-released the mod­i­fied and enhanced ver­sion of the game that killed your com­puter Cry­sis. If you want more info. check out my arti­cle HERE. I down­loaded Cry­sis shortly after it was qui­etly released onto Xbox Live and started play­ing; I’m only now post­ing my review due to the glut of  Hol­i­day sea­son game releases, work and well… Skyrim delay­ing me fin­ish­ing this excel­lent campaign.

Visu­als: The first thing I noticed was that for a DLC title this games visu­ally rivals that of any newly released game that hit in the last year! Re-mastered using Cryengine3 this game looks stun­ning right down to the expres­sion on an ene­mies’ face while you gab and crush the life out of him! This trop­i­cal land­scape looks amaz­ing, and if it weren’t for the bad guys bent on my demise would be a great vaca­tion spot. When the game tran­si­tions from: trop­i­cal to “alien” and then to frozen waste­land the envi­ron­ments really come to life with stun­ning light­ing and water effects, and envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions that change almost on the fly. But, not all is per­fect in the­land­ofCr­y­sis, watch­ing some explo­sions (BIG BOOM, yes please!) I noticed some pix­i­la­tion and blocky-ness. Also in dark or low light rooms the gamma is pre­set way to dark but this just my per­sonal opin­ion because I love to see as much detail as possible.

Sound and Musi­cal Score: The sound was re-mastered as well giv­ing com­plete sat­is­fac­tion to every pull on my RT trig­ger but­ton and toss of every grenade. Voice overs were ok but noth­ing amaz­ing the Korean sol­ders would speak some Korean but mostly Eng­lish with a generic asian accent. Musi­cal score was as epic as it should have been adding depth to the story and alert­ing you to upcom­ing large engage­ments and story progressions.

Con­trol Scheme: Con­trols are tight and well layed out for the most part. The usual but­ton apply LT aim, RT fire, Y change weapon, X reload, A is jump, B is used for menu options like inven­tory, map and quests, LB and RB are your nanosuit abil­i­ties, the BACK but­ton has dual pur­pose of weapon load­out and map, the start does it’s nor­mal fuc­tion and the D pad does as well. My only real com­plaint is that there is no way to quickly throw a grenade with­out equip­ping it first by going into your inven­tory or hold­ing Y for the popup menu ala’ por­tal and Halflife. The down side try­ing to grab fast-moving ene­mies or melee’ can be a major chore are times

Game­play: I tend to play single-player cam­paigns on harder set­tings just so I have more of a chal­lenge and, in this time of the six hour story, so the game takes longer to com­plete. My play-through clocked in some­where between 8 and 10 hours (on hard dif­fi­culty not Delta I’m not man enough of that) so, above aver­age length for the cam­paign. The game is fairly open world but you are moved in the liner fash­ion of:  receive a mis­sion, then a sec­ondary  mis­sion, engage, clear, and move on which works well for pro­gres­sion of the story. Now, you think that with all the com­plain­ing and since the game was being reworked any­way that, well, maybe Cry­tek would do some­thing with the freak­ing A.I. and they didn’t! Sadly the A.I. is just as retarded as in the orig­i­nal PC release lead­ing me to believe that the hel­mets the sol­ders wore were not to stop bul­lets but to pro­tect from walk­ing into walls…. I would shoot an explo­sive bar­rel next to a group of sol­ders and the few that sur­vived would not react and say “what was that?” or “Is any­one there?” and start skulk­ing around until I was in their line of sight. One final gripe and this is more the aging hard­ware more that the game but when there was a lot of action on-screen at once the game would drop down to less than 10 FPS it  seemed but this only hap­pened a few times.

Over­all: Cry­tek has done a awe­some job in “enhanc­ing”  Cry­sis and squeez­ing some juice out of the ole’ Xbox 360. Cryengine3 looks great and this PC port is a clas­sic that deserves some props! The A.I. maybe still the same but Cry­sis has very much to offer and for the $19.99 price tag (1600msp) it is so very worth it!

PROS:

+ looks great Cryengine3 makes this game look fresh and wor­thy of being com­pared to full retail releases

+ Sound design and music score are top notch

+ Story is inter­est­ing and compelling

+ Con­trols are tight for the most part

Cons:

- Great visu­als come at a price of some blocky-ness and pixilation

- Ho-hum voice act­ing at times

- Truly short-bus A.I.

- Would have liked eas­ier access to grenades and the grab/melee can be very frustrating

In the Grey Zone:

~ The old Xbox 360 is still breath­ing but it some­times drags this title down with its obvi­ously aging hardware

January 30, 2012

D20 Girls Giveaway Second Winner!

A sec­ond win­ner for the D20 Girls Give­away has been selected. Con­grat­u­la­tions to MaxxTx on being the sec­ond win­ner of the D20 Girls Giveaway.

MaxxTx, you have been con­tacted by TGB list­ing instruc­tions on how to claim your prize (Skyrim or SWTOR).

Again con­grat­u­la­tions to MaxxTx and keep an eye out for more giveaways!!!

January 27, 2012

Release Date Revealed For The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition on the Xbox 360

Yes­ter­day in a press con­fer­ence in War­saw, Poland, CD Pro­jekt RED revealed the release date for The Witcher 2: Assas­sins of Kings Enhanced Edi­tion for the Xbox 360. Also revealed was that there will be two ver­sions avail­able to pur­chase, hit­ting store shelves April 17^th 2012!

Adam Bad­owski, head of CD Pro­jekt RED stu­dio had this to say about the game:

 “The Xbox 360 ver­sion is a com­plete adap­ta­tion of the game to the new plat­form; we’ve rewrit­ten the code so it feels native to the con­sole. This lat­est ver­sion of The Witcher 2 has been expanded in many ways, and some experts believe it to be one of the best-looking games ever to make it to consoles,”

The game has been extended through added quests and loca­tions enhanc­ing the already com­plex story of the bat­tle for the North­ern Kingdoms.

“PC users who already own the game will be happy to learn that they will be able to down­load all the added con­tent free of charge. At the same time, the Xbox 360 ver­sion will incor­po­rate all DLCs and upgrades made avail­able thus far for the game’s orig­i­nal plat­form (includ­ing the ‘Arena’ arcade mode and Tuto­r­ial that were part of the lat­est and rich­est PC ver­sion)” added Bad­owski.

For details on the 2 edi­tions and pre-order infor­ma­tion head over to: buy.thewitcher.com, But for now check out the amaz­ing CGI release trailer below!

I think this is great news, an incred­i­ble award win­ning title ported over from the PC to the con­sole AND all the added con­tent avail­able FREE to every­one who bought it on the PC! What do you guys think? Have your say below!

January 25, 2012

Music for Gamer’s: Wednesday Edition

Stan­dard Pod­cast [ 3:03 ] Play Now | Play in Popup

Today were going to some­thing a bit more epic, slower, and could be quite pos­si­bly the best sound­track avail­able on the Xbox Live Arcade. This is Aster­oid Belt by Steve Burke off of the Fusion: Gen­e­sis Sound­track. For a small project started by a group of for­mer Rare employee’s, the game play and sound­track are ambi­tious. Fusion: Gen­e­sis has the sound­track of a full pro­duc­tion which, par­don the pun, is rare. Steve Burke deliv­ers a sound­track as epic as the vast­ness of space. This par­tic­u­lar piece is in one of the early sec­tions of the game and you can get a great sense that what you are going to expe­ri­ence great Sci-Fi bat­tles and explo­ration. Hit the link to find the down­load and take a look into Fusion: Gen­e­sis a great “Diet” MMO avail­able on XBLA.

http://www.steveburkemusic.com/music.html

January 24, 2012

D20 Girls Giveaway Winner!!!

We apol­o­gize for the delay but we have a winner, Congratulations to Karen from D20 Girls for win­ning the giveaway!!!

Thanks to every­one who par­tic­i­pated and we hope to con­tinue to see you on the site

January 23, 2012

Music for Gamer’s: Monday edition

Stan­dard Pod­cast [ 4:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup

As of today I am launch­ing a new Mon­day through Fri­day fea­ture arti­cle that will encom­pass all things video game music related. The title of the arti­cle is still up in the air at this point but the con­tent will remain the same, I am tak­ing sug­ges­tions.  Game Trax has been sug­gested but I am giv­ing it up to a vote. To the con­tent! Every day dur­ing the week I will high­light a new song, orig­i­nal or remixed. I have a plethora of con­tent to post and hope that you, the read­ers, find some really great music to lis­ten to and down­load. I will only be post­ing things I have obtained through the proper chan­nels and will be post­ing links to where you can down­load this fine con­tent and give the artist their dues. Don’t worry there will be plenty of free stuff but all worth check­ing out regard­less of price. Not enough gam­ing news sites fea­ture game music and it is a real crime, but no fears, we are here to pick up the slack. To kick start this new wave of fea­tures, we will be vis­it­ing one of my favorite series and giv­ing thanks it was around to cel­e­brate it’s 25^th anniver­sary late last year. This song, Thun­der­struck, was done by Big Giant Cir­cles ft. some1namedjeff, and came from the Over­Clocked Remix album 25YearLegend: A Leg­end of Zelda Indie Game Com­poser Trib­ute. A great mix of 8-bit sounds and mod­ern sounds this song and album are becom­ing one of my favorites from the great men and women over at Over­Clocked. The link to the album is below and hope every­one enjoys the new daily article.

http://ocremix.org/album/33/25yearlegend-a-legend-of-zelda-indie-game-composer-tribute

January 21, 2012

Life IS better with games!

Truly life is bet­ter with games in them or if you splice life with games. Thanks to Scro­tuskilmystr, this made my week­end. Some of you may have seen it before but if not this is just fur­ther evi­dence games are great. Have a great week­end every­one and check out the site on Mon­day for a brand new fea­ture article.