February 14, 2012

Mass Effect 3 demo is here!

One of this year’s most antic­i­pated, if not THE MOST antic­i­pated game, Mass Effect 3 released in demo form today and I must say if this is any indi­ca­tion of the full release then I think no other game will come close to touch­ing it the entire year!

In the demo you get two full sin­gle player lev­els com­plete with cut scenes. The demo also gives you an option to choose the game style you would like to play like straight shooter or clas­sic RPG action shooter. What lit­tle of the story you get it amaz­ing  in keep­ing with the Mass Effect fran­chise it hooks you in the first 5 min­utes and keeps you on the line until the demo is over. With­out rev­el­ing any­thing all as I can say if HOLY AWESOMES SAUCE! This game is going to be amazing!

There is a mul­ti­player com­po­nent that can only be accessed early (Feb 14^th to Feb 17^th) If you acti­vated your Bat­tle­field 3 online pass  and then after the 17^th will be open to every­one. Mul­ti­player is an objec­tive based “Horde” mode that is insanely intense and lots of fun.

The demo is avail­able now on PC via Ori­gin, Xbox live and The PSN for free down­load. If you haven’t done so down­load it now and check it out! For more info check out the offi­cial Bioware Mass Effect 3 site HERE.

Also on Sun­day Feb 19^th dur­ing the AMC show The Walk­ing Dead a new Mass Effect 3 trailer debuts to make you hunger even more to play this years’ best release! But for now check out this trailer with Fem Sheppard…..ENJOY!

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.

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

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 15, 2012

XCOM gets abducted into 2013

2K Marin’s fol­low up to Bioshock 2, the FPS reboot of the XCOM series, has been delayed from March of this year to 2013. IGN AU gave the scoop this morn­ing from the newest issue (226) of Game Informer. We will still see XCOM in 2012 as Firaxis is prepar­ing their game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a strat­egy game that is more in line with the clas­sic XCOM. If all goes to plan XCOM: Enemy Unknown will be out this fall on the PS3, 360, and PC respect­fully. Does the news get you down or was I the only one not sur­prised by this push? 2K will still see the release of Bioshock: Infi­nite some­time this year so they are still in good shape.

January 13, 2012

Get Diablo 3 Free! with some Stipulations…

I know this was announced late last year at Bliz­zcon but I’m think­ing that due to the release of Star Wars: The Old Repub­lic, Bliz­zard is finally get­ting their first real com­pe­ti­tion in the world of MMO’s. So they’re try­ing to pro­mote this offer to lock you into a World of War­craft sub­scrip­tion for a year. You will get Dia­blo 3 free when it’s finally released but there are some stipulations:

1. You have to have had an ACTIVE World of War­craft account in good stand­ing before Octo­ber 18^th, 2011
2. If you don’t have one already cre­ate a Battle.net account and merge it with your WoW account.
3. Agree to pur­chas­ing the WoW annual pass, lock­ing you into a full year sub­scrip­tion that can be paid in monthly install­ments ( you must com­plete the annual pass or you will lose access to Dia­blo 3)

What you get for your trouble:

Access to down­load Dia­blo 3 when Bliz­zard decides to release it, Tyrael’s Charger mount for use in WoW unlocked after patch 4.3 is released, and guar­an­teed beta access to the next WoW expansion

For more info on this offer, head over to the FAQ right here.

December 28, 2011

Thoughts from the Dota 2 Beta

Hello, every­one. It’s been a good while since my last post­ing. Again, same old excuses– social life, col­lege finals, manda­tory hol­i­day fam­ily time, and all of that good stuff. How­ever, I’ve def­i­nitely not let my gam­ing slip. Far from it– I got the invite I had been pray­ing for, and have spent the last week or so enthralled with Dota 2. While I’m def­i­nitely not expe­ri­enced enough to put out a full review yet (not even con­sid­er­ing the fact that the game is still tech­ni­cally in beta), I can surely pro­vide some per­spec­tive for those of you wait­ing who haven’t received invites yet.

Dota 2 is, unsur­pris­ingly, an incred­i­bly good and chal­leng­ing tac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence. It takes some drive and desire to play, how­ever; for new­com­ers, DotA has always been more of a learn­ing cliff than a learn­ing curve. Dota 2 eases much of the pain that was caused by the lim­i­ta­tions of the orig­i­nal DotA with­out chang­ing the game too ter­ri­bly much at all. The graph­ics are excel­lent, and it’s far eas­ier to dis­tin­guish between heroes and creeps (a com­mon novice com­plaint from the orig­i­nal) than it was pre­vi­ously. All of your abil­i­ties fol­low the new “indus­try stan­dard” setup of QWER, rather than the pre­vi­ous War­craft 3 sys­tem of “some ran­dom let­ter from the spell name”. The shops are amaz­ingly improved, stream­lined, and user-friendly (thank God, because DotA’s shop sys­tem left a LOT to be desired), and you can buy items into your stash from any­where on the map with just a few sim­ple clicks.

Rest assured, though, the chal­lenge is not gone. Last-hitting and deny­ing with most cast­ers requires impec­ca­ble tim­ing because they wind up their shots like a Looney Tunes char­ac­ter play­ing base­ball, and ani­ma­tion can­celling is an absolute must for chas­ing. Quarter-second reac­tions can decide entire team­fights, which in turn can decide entire games. If you don’t know what you’re doing (and unless you played DotA a LOT, you don’t), you will die at any given oppor­tu­nity until you get the basics down. Play­ing LoL does NOT trans­late into Dota 2 skill AT ALL.

I’ll speak to the LoL play­ers specif­i­cally for a moment. In Dota 2, you don’t get your con­ve­nient cast range cir­cles, skill­shot mark­ers, or any of that good stuff. With the excep­tion of AOE spells, every­thing is tar­geted with a sim­ple cur­sor, and you have to know how your spells work. Last hit­ting is WAY harder due to the afore­men­tioned ani­ma­tions, and deny­ing is a thing. A cou­ple of spells can kill you even at level one, and every­thing (except the lan­ing phase) moves a whole lot faster. Your health and mana are greatly reduced, so every shot counts. Tur­rets can’t save you. Flash can’t save you. God can’t save you, because he’s Zeus, he’s on the enemy team, and he’s going to kill you with his instant Karthus-like ult from across the map when you thought you got away. Play­ing Dota 2 will make you quite para­noid if you’re used to LoL. Learn the dif­fer­ence quickly.

How­ever, even with its stag­ger­ing chal­lenge level and excel­lent user inter­face, Dota 2 is still in beta and as such, there are a few faults. The lack of an obvi­ous “invite to game” or “join game” option makes find­ing games an inter­est­ing task. Match­mak­ing search times range from the fairly instan­ta­neous to the unbe­liev­ably slow. Yes­ter­day I waited a full fif­teen min­utes in game search before giv­ing up and play­ing with bots. On that note, the bot games are often­times more chal­leng­ing than play­ing against real peo­ple; the enemy team is a tac­ti­cal hive­mind, and yours some­times has trou­ble acknowl­edg­ing your exis­tence. To the bots on your own team, you’re the bab­bling, unpre­dictable for­eigner who’s off doing your own thing and ignor­ing com­mands. They gank seem­ingly arbi­trar­ily, and you have no real way of request­ing assis­tance other than div­ing head­long in and pray­ing that they fol­low you (which is typ­i­cally NOT a good strat­egy in Dota). Other than these incon­ve­niences, every­thing seems to work fine. The game hic­cups and lags dur­ing game start and char­ac­ter selec­tion (which makes the sounds hang up and repeat to form a slam­min’ three-second techno beat), but this really has no effect on the over­all game.

There ARE many things that Valve has got­ten very right with this game, though. The spec­ta­tor fea­ture is INCREDIBLY help­ful, as you can watch the pros (or your friends, or just ran­dom peo­ple) play and view their actions right down to each indi­vid­ual click of their mouse. This works pretty much flaw­lessly, and is easy to jump into. Watch­ing a num­ber of other peo­ple play a cer­tain hero is an amaz­ing way to learn, and you don’t have to worry about bias, track­ing down VODs, or patches mak­ing metas out­dated: you see every­thing in real time, and you get the kind of vari­ety you don’t find in online text guides. Doing just about any­thing I’ve not already men­tioned is pretty easy, because the menu con­struc­tion is incred­i­bly intu­itive. You’ll rarely hav­ing trou­ble look­ing for an imple­mented feature.

That’s about all I have to say right now, as I still tech­ni­cally qual­ify as a “noob”. I’ll be sure to post back more fre­quently with details on the beta and the com­pet­i­tive scene, and I look for­ward to doing an offi­cial review upon the game’s release. Until then, keep enjoy­ing your games, and remem­ber: ALWAYS have a Scroll of Town Por­tal handy.

December 19, 2011

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Beta Review

Ah yes, good old Counter-Strike.  No other shooter series has been as pop­u­lar and com­peta­tive for as long as Counter-Strike has.  Well, as many of you know by now, Valve announced a new, long over­due, addi­tion to the Counter-Strike series, Counter-Strike:Global Offen­sive.  Imme­di­ately so many rumors came out about the game and how true to Counter-Strike it would end up being and so on.  All any­one had were a few short videos show­ing some lim­ited game­play to stare at and for­mu­late opin­ions on.  There were some details given out such as the fact that the game is being made for XBox and PS3 as well as PC, and that they want to make it con­sole friendly to draw in a new crowd.  I think this def­i­nitely scared a lot of the old school CS play­ers as so often when a PC clas­sic goes to con­sole PC gamers feel it gets dumbed down.

On a cer­tainly pos­i­tive note there is the fact that Valve is test­ing with top com­pet­i­tive play­ers to try and make the game as true to CS and as com­pet­i­tively geared as they could.  Regard­less, most of my fel­low Counter-Strike play­ers expected it to be a fur­ther bas­tardiza­tion of the series; as we all know CS play­ers are gen­er­ally a pes­simistic bunch.  Well some time passed, rumors ran ram­pant, and a closed beta was finally announced for Octo­ber 2011 with keys being given out at spe­cial events like PAX.  I was unable to attend any such events but I did weasel my way into get­ting a key via good ole’ EBay.

Octo­ber came and at the very end of the month they announced that the beta was delayed to work in input from pro play­ers alpha test­ing the game stat­ing, “They gave us a lot of feed­back on things we should get in the game before we release it, oth­er­wise we’re going to be get­ting a lot of bug reports or a lot of feed­back and it would just be redun­dant.”  They also went on to say, “The closed beta will grad­u­ally expand to include more and more play­ers, until “by the end of it, every­one will be play­ing the game. It will be the released game that you’re play­ing and then at some point we’ll say, ‘OK we’re going to offi­cially release it.’ We have no man­date from any­body of when we have to ship this. So we’re more than happy to just keep work­ing on this until it’s ready to ship.”  This can be inter­preted as good and bad.  Good in the sense they are going to put a lot of time into pol­ish­ing it to make sure it is right … Bad because if you dont have a beta key you are stuck won­der­ing, “When will the beta open up so I can play damnit?!”

Well finally, Novem­ber 30, 2011 the beta was released and as a diehard CS fan I have been all over it.  The beta cur­rently is a lim­ited build miss­ing some func­tion­al­ity, maps, and weapons.  Cur­rently the only two maps that we have to play are the clas­sic bomb defusal maps de_dust and de_dust2.  As was pre­viewed de_dust has been mod­i­fied a bit to bal­ance out the game­play such as chang­ing up the under­pass, adding a stair­case to get ontop of it, and a few other things.  De_dust2 on the other hand is pretty much the same exact lay­out.  For those of you who are not ter­ri­bly famil­iar with the Counter-Strike series Counter-Strike is a First Per­son Shooter that began over 10 years ago on PC.  The game­play is sim­ple objec­tive based Counter Ter­ror­ist vs Ter­ror­ist sce­nar­ios.  The basic and most pop­u­lar map type is bomb defusal.  The ter­ror­ist objec­tive is to get to one of two points on the map and plant a bomb and then defend it until it blows up with the Counter Ter­ror­ist try­ing to either elim­i­nate all of the Ter­ror­ist or defuse the bomb.  The other main map type are hostage res­cue maps.  The ter­ror­ists have hostages they must defend as the Counter Ter­ror­ists objec­tives are to get in and escort the hostages to res­cue points in the map.  Counter-Strike has more sim­plis­tic mechan­ics over­all than Call of Duty of Bat­tle­field.  There are no iron sights, or any zoom for that mat­ter, out­side of scoped rifles.  There is no sprint.  Run­ning is the stan­dard move speed and walk­ing is used to con­ceal ones move­ment in con­trast to many newer shoot­ers that allow you to sprint.  The sim­pler mechan­ics speed up game­play and make the game much more reac­tion based requir­ing real twitchy reflex shots and accu­racy to be suc­cess­ful rather than posi­tion­ing and shot setup which is com­mon amongst most newer con­sole shoot­ers.  They did stay true to Counter Strike and keep the mechan­ics in Global Offen­sive the same as the pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions.  Had they changed these aspects the game truly wouldn’t be Counter-Strike.

Many other game modes also exist as the CS com­mu­nity has always been big into mak­ing mods for the game and some of the mod­ded game types that were extremely pop­u­lar are sup­posed to be off­i­cal game modes in the new Global Offen­sive.  One that has been con­firmed is GunGame.  It is a team elim­i­na­tion game where the object is to get one kill with each gun in the game before any­one else in the server does.  This has been an extremely pop­u­lar mod for Counter-Strike for years and is going to receive offi­cial sup­port in Global Offensive.

- Writ­ten by Aaron R

November 13, 2011

Skyrim PC Screenshots

I thought I’d post up some screens of the PC ver­sion of the game.  For those of you who haven’t had the chance to play yet or do not have a gam­ing PC cape­able of playin Skyrim take a look at the screens!  There may yet be a gam­ing com­puter in your future!