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

January 14, 2012

D20 Girls Giveaway!

The Gamers Blog is giv­ing away a either a copy of Star Wars the Old Repub­lic or Skyrim (your choice!) in part­ner­ship with The D20 Girls.  So here is the deal. To win you have to go to the D20 Girls Face­book Page and the Gamers Blog Face­book Page and like both of them, as well as make an account on The Gamers Blog. From there, com­ment on this post answer­ing the two fol­low­ing ques­tions (in one post).

Who is your favorite female video game char­ac­ter and why? (make this appro­pri­ate please)

and What do you think is cool about the D20 girls?

You have between Jan­u­ary 14^th to Jan­u­ary 21^st to make a post (which is one week)