February 20, 2012

Mass Effect 3 Trailer

This past Sun­day, dur­ing The Walk­ing Dead the new Mass Effect 3: Tak­ing Back Earth launch trailer was shown for the first time. I was tempted to bother some­one who had a TV just to watch this trailer. I think it would have been worth it. I have always had a soft spot for cin­e­matic trail­ers, but if I wasn’t already excited for Mass Effect 3 I really am now. The Walk­ing Dead how­ever, I really enjoyed the pilot episode and since then have lost interest.

February 14, 2012

What Does This Button Do?

So two days ago you may or may not have noticed Steam was offline for a hour or so. Imme­di­ately inter­net gos­sip spread that it was more hack­ers since Gabe Newell con­firmed last week that more info was lost than orig­i­nally thought in a 2011 attack. How­ever Valve quickly responded by say­ing it was a power fail­ure. The actual quote from Valve’s twit­ter was: “Our data center’s [uni­ver­sal power sup­ply] expe­ri­enced a power fail­ure. Power is back on now and work­ing to get ser­vice restored asap.”

Time to employ DON’T TOUCH post-it notes methinks.

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 13, 2012

Xbox 720 and PS4: The End of the Used Game Market

The recent dom­i­nance of Steam and its com­peti­tors in the PC mar­ket and dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion the ques­tion has been asked are these types of ser­vices going to come to Con­soles and what will it mean to game industry. 

The answer is a rather com­pli­cated one and also kind of fright­en­ing.  There is a silent bat­tle brew­ing in the gam­ing indus­try and it’s not between you and the game devel­op­ers or at least not directly, it’s a bat­tle that has been grow­ing more and more heated as prof­its are falling.  A war is being waged between devel­op­ers and used game ven­dors such as Gamestop, Vin­tage Stock and other used game vendors. 

Used Game sell­ers have been the bane of devel­op­ers for years as every game they sell, unless it is new, does not yield any prof­its for the devel­op­ers and devel­op­ers know that there are hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple who are more than will­ing to wait a few months to save $30 dol­lars on a new title.  Devel­op­ers would love noth­ing more than to put them out of busi­ness and with the next gen­er­a­tion of con­soles this is very much a pos­si­bil­ity.  Up until recently there wasn’t much they could do about it but with the advent of social and ser­vice based gam­ing it has becom­ing much eas­ier to restrict con­tent to those who don’t pur­chase the game.  There are already sev­eral titles out that unless you pur­chase the game new you will not be able to access any of the multi-player content. 

Used game sales have always been pre­dom­i­natly and now days exclu­sively geared toward con­sole gam­ing.  Used games sales dis­ap­peared from the PC mar­ket almost entirely dur­ing the mid to late nineties with the addi­tion of ser­ial keys and game acti­va­tions and registrations. 

Those of you who watch the mar­ket like I do can see the signs that used game sell­ers are start­ing to catch wind of this and they are doing their best to brace for the com­ing storm.  GameStop is a prime exam­ple of this with their recent acqui­si­tion of PC dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion plat­form “Impluse Games” they are one of the larger plat­forms next to Steam and it posi­tions them to come out ahead  when, what I con­sider to be an inevitabil­ity, the used game mar­ket comes to a screech­ing halt. 

In addi­tion to killing the used game mar­ket devel­op­ers have been look­ing for ways to deliver their prod­ucts directly to con­sumers with­out actu­ally hav­ing to send them any phys­i­cal prod­uct.  Ship­ping, man­u­fac­tur­ing, pack­ag­ing, etc all cost lots of money and if you can elim­i­nate that and dis­trib­ute that prod­uct of a dig­i­tal net­work you cut your costs dra­mat­i­cally and you can cut the mid­dle man, retailer, out of the pic­ture entirely. 

All these changes are good in some aspects as it allows the con­sumer direct access to the prod­uct, quick down­loads and auto­matic updates.  Since the costs have been dri­ven down, in a fair mar­ket, the costs should come down as well.  You also have the ben­e­fit of not ever hav­ing to worry about los­ing a game or hav­ing it stolen.

There is also a dark side to this change.  With the loss of the mid­dle man, which can dic­tate their own price, and used game ven­dors there is lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion to keep prices low.  Even with all their increased prof­its and lower pro­duc­tion costs we aren’t likely to see any drops in game prices and in I would expect to see them stay higher for longer. 

There is another nefar­i­ous side this bat­tle that very few con­sider and that is do you really own your games any­more and can you still play them online.  PC gamers have been fight­ing with Steam for years to have an easy way to play your games offline as not every­one can have a sta­ble inter­net con­nec­tion or even one at all.  And let’s not for­get that all of our men and women in the armed forces who are deployed abroad do not always have access to inter­net.  This also brings up the prob­lem of if you say some­thing neg­a­tive about the com­pany can they can come ban your account and take all the games away that you spent your hard earned money on?  EA and Bliz­zard both have been known to swing the ban ham­mer at their users when they speak out against them.  If they com­pletely con­trol their con­tent you are lit­er­ally at their mercy.  Addi­tion­ally if you are like me and have over 300 games on your Steam account what hap­pens if you get hacked?  Do you get your games back?  There are a lot of ques­tions that have to be answered before I would be com­pletely sold on this. 

I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the PS4 and the Xbox 720 were com­pletely dig­i­tal plat­forms and if not com­pletely I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the new games didn’t require reg­is­tra­tion and acti­va­tion to play both sin­gle and multi-player content.

February 13, 2012

The great things you can get from Club Nintendo

If you are a avid Nin­tendo fan then you may already know about Club Nin­tendo, if not then take this as a gate to some really great stuff just by buy­ing Nintendo’s great games. Club Nin­tendo is a loy­alty pro­gram Nin­tendo has been doing for years. Never really pay­ing much atten­tion to the inserts that came with Nin­tendo pub­lished prod­ucts, I took a glance when I picked up Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land and behind the instruc­tion book­let was  a small flyer for Club Nin­tendo and a code to reg­is­ter the game. So I took the time to reg­is­ter the games and soon I found myself reg­is­ter­ing my Wii, 3DS (which was also avail­able for an extended war­ranty) and all the Nin­tendo games I could find with a Club Nin­tendo voucher inside. With the con­soles and games I hit Plat­inum sta­tus and was able to get a free DSI­ware game, these beau­ties below and still have plenty of coins left over. It is one of the best reward pro­grams out there and I strongly rec­om­mend check­ing it out. The poster set that I am show­ing below was a lim­ited run I ordered mine back in late Decem­ber and they finally arrived today due to back order. Club Nin­tendo is full of some truly unique items that can’t be found any where else (sans Ebay).

The posters are no longer avail­able on club Nin­tendo, sorry, but I did see an Ebay list­ing cur­rent bid was $60. There is still great stuff to be had from them, plus the great Nin­tendo game you bought.

February 10, 2012

Femme Shepard and Mass Effect 3

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A new trailer has been released show­cas­ing the femme com­man­der Shep­ard. For the first two games I played as a female, and pleas­ingly enough my char­ac­ter was also a red­head. I was really happy when last sum­mer they let the fans choose what hair color the base female Shep­ard char­ac­ter would be. Red­head won (of course) I am really happy that Mass Effect decided to rec­og­nize the female Shep­ard more in their third install­ment of the Mass Effect tril­ogy. I think that she makes a really pow­er­ful char­ac­ter. Bioware has put a lot of care and effort in to mak­ing Shep­ard a very well rep­re­sented char­ac­ter. I am very tempted to buy the collector’s edi­tion box set of art that includes her.

Foxx out.

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 24, 2012

Music for Gamer’s: Tuesday edition

Stan­dard Pod­cast [ 2:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup

Today we go from one of gam­ings great­est fran­chises to another. Street Fighter has been a fight­ing genre sta­ple since the early 90’s. Today’s track comes from the Super Street Fighter HD remake that was released for down­load a few years ago. Clam­ato Fever by AE & Prozax should open every EVO tour­na­ment, the song is epic. Get ready to rock the asphalt and go toe to toe with today’s great­est war­riors with this fan­tas­tic remix from the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Off­i­cal Sound­track. As before hit the link below to find where you can down­load this track, enjoy!

http://ocremix.org/album/12/oc-remix-super-street-fighter-ii-turbo-hd-remix-official-soundtrack

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