August 16, 2011

Gears of War 3, Go for the Gold!

Gears of War 3 News! Gold Weapon unlocks were offi­cially announced

Rod Fer­gus­son announced in a live web broad­cast over at Twitch.tv how to get the gold weapons unlocked in Gears of War 3 releas­ing on Sep­tem­ber 20^th. There are sev­eral ways to get all the weapons unlocked and I will try to list them all for you to get crackin on that sweet, sweet gold!

All gold weapons unlock if you are a Vet­eran Gear i.e. level 100 and win a match on each of the Snow Blind map pack maps in Gears of War 2 mul­ti­player

Gold Lancer is unlocked if you had it in Gears of War 2

Gold Ham­mer­burst is also unlocked if you had it in Gears of War 2

Gold Retro Lancer unlocked for any­one who played 90 matches and then scored 100 kills with it in the Gears of War 3 Beta so as long as you kept the beta on your hard drive until you start up Gears 3

Gold Sawed-off Shot­gun unlock is tied to get­ting the “Com­mando” achieve­ment in Gears of War 1 (Com­plete all acts on insane Dif­fi­culty in Gears of War)

Gold Nasher unlock can only be got­ten by Vet­eran Gears from Gears of War 2…BUT! If you plan on buy­ing Gears 3 the first week and play­ing online then you will auto­mat­i­cally unlock it! BUT only if you play online in the FIRST WEEK!

You will also unlock a spe­cial medal if you are a Vet­eran Gear from Gears 2 that you can “wear” in gears to let every­one know who you are!

It was also announced that start­ing this week­end August 20^th there will be an EXP week­end every week­end until launch. Rod didn’t say what the mul­ti­pli­ers would be for each week­end but hinted that they would increase from week to week. So if you haven’t hit level 100 yet, here’s your chance to work on that so you too can get the GOLD!

He men­tioned as well that if you buy the Gears of War 3 themed con­troller OR con­sole you will receive the Infected Weapon skin for all 5 weapons which from his descrip­tion is an ani­mated skin that “glows and pul­sates”! The Final announce­ment was that if you don’t have gears of War or Gears of War 2 that they will be on sale for Dig­i­tal Down­load on XBL start­ing august 23^rd in the US, UK and Canada only.

For your view­ing plea­sure check out the Video below if you want to lis­ten to Rod ram­ble about all thing Gears …

Watch live video from epicgamesinc on Justin.tv

July 28, 2011

3DS Price Drop!

Writ­ten by: CABXYZ…

Yes you heard that right, just less than a year after the porta­bles release it is get­ting a price drop and a mas­sive one at that. Early this morn­ing Nin­tendo released a press release stat­ing that the 3DS just 5 months after the system’s release will be taken from its $249.99 price tag to $169.99 on August 12^th. Yes, you are not see­ing things the 3DS will be $169.99 early next month. Nin­tendo of Amer­ica pres­i­dent Reg­gie Fils-Aime had this to say about the price drop,

“For any­one who was in the fence about buy­ing a Nin­tendo 3DS, this is a huge moti­va­tion to buy now,”

“We are giv­ing shop­pers every incen­tive to pick up a Nin­tendo 3DS from an amaz­ing new price to a rapid-fire suc­ces­sion of great games.”

If you were an early adopter then don’t worry Nin­tendo is not giv­ing you the cold shoul­der. If you have a 3DS and con­nect to the e-Shop before 11:59pm EST in August 11^th, you will be reg­is­tered for the Nin­tendo 3DS ambas­sador pro­gram. The pro­gram will con­tain two parts:

1. On Sep­tem­ber 1^st the e-Shop will receive NES Vir­tual Con­sole games and you will receive 10 absolutely FREE! These games are to include: Super Mario Bros., Don­key Kong Jr., Bal­loon Fight, Ice Climber, and The Leg­end of Zelda. There will be paid ver­sions of these games as well so that every 3DS owner will have the oppor­tu­nity for download.
2. By the end of 2011 the e-Shop will also include GBA Vir­tual Con­sole titles and you will receive 10 absolutely FREE! The titles to be included are: Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advanced 3, Mario Kart Super Cir­cuit, Metroid Fusion, War­i­oWare Inc. Mega Microgame$, and Mario vs. Don­key Kong. Nin­tendo stated that these titles will be for ambas­sadors only and won’t be released to the gen­eral pub­lic any time in the future.

On top of all of that news Nin­tendo gave release win­dows for some of the 3DS’s biggest games this year. Star Fox 64 3D edi­tion will be out on Sep­tem­ber 9^th, Super Mario 3D will be in Novem­ber, Mario Kart will be out in Decem­ber and Kid Icarus: upris­ing will be out before the end of the year. This is a great announce­ment for a hand­held I am find­ing more and more things I love about it. With Net­flix now avail­able, a stead release of qual­ity titles, and with this announce­ment of a major price cut, the 3DS could be sit­ting on top when the hand­held wars ignite once more when the PlaySta­tion Vita arrives this fall.

July 22, 2011

Robert Rodriguez and AMD are Going to make Sweet, Sweet L.…. er Movies Together

Robert Rodriguez announced yes­ter­day at Comic con that his newly formed pro­duc­tion com­pany “Quick Draw Pro­duc­tions” will part­ner with AMD to help bring his future projects to light using the Vision Tech­nol­ogy that AMD has developed.

“Spy Kids 4” releas­ing next month is the first of his films to use AMD’s new tech… I’m not going to see Spy Kids BUT he did announce a Heavy Metal series of movies and video games, remak­ing the clas­sic ani­mated “Fire and Ice” and “Sin City 2” which will all use this new tech in post in some form or another. All I have to say is bring on the pop corn baby I’ll be campin at the the­ater for the next year or two!

Will this pro­pel AMD and Radeon graph­ics past their arch neme­sis Intel and Nvidia? God I hope so!  So what do you guys think?  Is AMD bet­ter? I’d love to hear some opinions!     

May 19, 2011

Dont miss out on your chance to save the galaxy with your FREE STEAM COPY OF MASS EFFECT.

Do you feel down about the state of the galaxy? Do you wish you had the com­mand­ing author­ity of a super badass bent on erad­i­cat­ing evil while at the same time being dash­ingly awe­some or ter­ri­fy­ingly douchy? Well wish no more!!! Now is your chance to win a FREE steam copy of MASS EFFECT. Its your turn to travel the galaxy kickin in doors and nut sacks, sav­ing the day and get­ting the freak­ishly hot alien chick.

Ill keep it sim­ple. All you have to do is share your thoughts with TGB. You MUST post 1 com­ment under this arti­cle and then post 5 com­ments under any arti­cle (all 5 com­ments do not have to be under the same arti­cle) and let us know whats on your mind. Post­ing 1 com­ment here and then 5 com­ments any­where else will enter you into this con­test, and you must be a reg­is­tered user to par­tic­i­pate. The pro­mo­tion will run for a week and end next Thurs­day 5/26/2011 at 12pm (noon). TGB staff are not eli­gi­ble for the promotion.

This is a Steam game and will require steam to down­load and play, if you dont have steam heres a link to get it, http://store.steampowered.com/about/, its free and quick and easy to set up. Who­ever wins the game will either have to add me as a friend in steam or give me their email address so that I can deliver the game to you. If there are any ques­tions feel free to post them here or con­tact me at pimpmasterf@thegamersblog.com.

Sys­tem Requirements:

Sup­ported OS: Microsoft Win­dows® XP with SP2 or Win­dows Vista*
Proces­sor: Intel P4 2.4 Ghz or faster / AMD 2.0 Ghz
Mem­ory: 1.0 GB RAM or more (2.0 GB for Vista)
Graph­ics: DirectX 9.0c com­pat­i­ble, ATI X1300 XT or greater (ATI X1300, X1300 Pro, X1600 Pro, Radeon 2600 HD, and HD 2400 are below min­i­mum sys­tem require­ments); NVidia GeForce 6800 or greater (7300, 7600 GS, 8500 are below min­i­mum sys­tem require­ments)
Hard Drive: 12.0 GB or more free hard drive space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c com­pat­i­ble
DirectX®: 9.0c

* WINDOWS VISTA OR WINDOWS 7 USERS: Launch­ing “Mass Effect” from Steam requires the set­ting “Run as Admin­is­tra­tor”. If the User Account Con­trol fea­ture of Win­dows Vista is enabled, launch­ing “Mass Effect” from Steam will result in fail­ure. For users with User Account Con­trol enabled, launch Steam using the “Run as Admin­is­tra­tor” option or launch from the win­dows shortcut.

March 24, 2011

AND THE WINNER IIIIISSS!!!!

THE PROMOTION FOR THE METRO 2033 GAME ENDED LAST NIGHT AND THE DRAWING HAS BEEN DONE.

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED AND FOR CONTRIBUTING TO THE SITE, WE CONTINUE TO GROW AND ITS BECAUSE OF OUR MEMBERS AND CONTRIBUTORS THAT WE DO SO

THE WINNER IS IFINNERS

IFINNERS WHERE DID YOU HEAR ABOUT OR COME ACROSS THEGAMERSBLOG.COM?

THE NEXT STEP IS FOR IFINNERS TO SEND ME HIS/HER EMAIL SO I CAN DELIVER THE GAME, IF YOU DONT WANT TO MAKE YOUR EMAIL PUBLIC YOU CAN SEND IT TO gamersblg@gmail.com, IT IS A STEAM GAME SO IF YOU DONT HAVE STEAM YOU WILL NEED TO DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL IT TO RECEIVE AND PLAY THE GAME. YOU CAN DOWNLOAD STEAM HERE

http://store.steampowered.com/about/

AGAIN CONGRATULATIONS, IM HOPING WE CAN DO THIS AGAIN IN THE NEAR FUTURE

March 22, 2011

Things to know about the Nintendo 3DS

Today 3DS games will hit the shelves five days before the 3DS sys­tem itself. Such games will include The Sims, Mad­den, Ridge Racer, and Ghost Recon to name a few. So in light of the upcom­ing release here is a few things to note about the 3DS.

- The 3DS is back­ward com­pat­i­ble with all DS games (non-3DS games will not use the 3D effect)

- Nin­tendo added a left joy­stick for bet­ter move­ment and accuracy

- Added “Home” but­ton. This will pause the game allow­ing you to to access other items like the Nin­tendo shop with­out hav­ing to stop the game

- The light for bat­tery now shows oth­ers col­ors for other noti­fi­ca­tions. Red– low bat­tery, Green — nor­mal, Orange — Friend, Blue — Wi-Fi

- The 3D effect can be turned up, turned down, or com­pletely turned off

- The top screen is 10% larger than that of the DSI model

- Like the DSI model comes stan­dard with cam­eras. Three instead of two (one inside , two out­side) allow­ing the abil­ity to take 3D pictures

- The 3DS will come with a charg­ing cradle

- Built in motion sen­sors for side to side, up and down, as well as tilt­ing (games will use the dif­fer­ent effects)

- Will include a 2GB SD card

The Nintedo 3DS will be 249.99 and games around 39.99. Will it be the next big thing or will it pull a PSP Go?

March 20, 2011

FREE METRO 2033 GIVEAWAY

Just a reminder that the metro 2033 give­away ends this wednes­day and the draw­ing will be held on thurs­day morn­ing, so if you havent posted any com­ments yet head on over to the PROMOTION sec­tion and start com­ment­ing, every com­ment is worth 1 entry for the drawing.

March 12, 2011

Playstation Phone (Xperia Play)

Ever since its first release Ive been a fan of the PSP, all up until the PSP Go which was way smaller than it should have been, a slim­mer slider PSP is way cool, but they should have at least kept it the same size. Instead Sony made it smaller and some­thing that only a small child could prop­erly han­dle. Now I get that the Ipod touch has always had a smaller screen than PSP and it does just fine, how­ever the ipod didnt start with gam­ing as a soul pur­pose thus a smaller screen was jus­ti­fied. Hav­ing said this its not sur­prise that the PSP Go didnt do as well as was hoped, and now Sony is try­ing to pick up the slack with a Playsta­tion Phone. As a phone every­thing the smaller size will be jus­ti­fied. The smaller size is accept­able as we have more rea­son to carry a phone with us than a portable gam­ing sys­tem, and lets face it, we all want bet­ter gam­ing capa­bil­ity out of out phones to keep us enter­tained. The Playsta­tion Phone dubbed the Xpe­ria Play as its offi­cial phone name, as of right now will ship with the fol­low­ing specs:

4″ 854x480 Multi-touch LCD screen
5.1MP Cam­era
Mem­ory Card sup­port up to 32gb MicroSD
Included 8Gb MicroSD
1Ghz Scor­pion ARMv7 CPU
Qual­com Adreno 205 GPU
Will run on Android 2.3 OS (Gingerbread)

I would expect no more out of the Xpe­ria than I would any other droid as far as the phone/network capa­bil­i­ties go, gam­ing capa­bil­ity will far out­shine any­thing out there if for no other rea­son than it will be get­ting games devel­oped exclu­sively for it. It will work the same way as the PSP Go where you buy and down­load your games from their online store, the down­side is your avail­able gam­ing library depends on your stor­age capac­ity, mem­ory cards have got­ten cheaper but they arent that cheap yet. How­ever a 16Gb MicroSD card will prob­a­bly go a long way for the aver­age indi­vid­ual.
There is said that there will be around 50 or so games avail­able at launch and the phone will ship with crash bandi­coot installed, as far as game pric­ing ulti­mately the final price is up to the devel­oper but you can rea­son­ably expect games to release from $5-$8. The Xpe­ria will also come with Asphalt Adren­a­line 6, Bruce lee, Star Bat­tal­ion, The Sims 3 and Tetris.

All in all The Sony Xpe­ria Play is look­ing like it could be a big win, it will release on the Ver­i­zon Net­work and Im anx­ious to see if it will be 3G or 4G, per­son­ally my money is on 3G. Also I would expect the typ­i­cal $2–300 price point with a new con­tract but no offi­cial pric­ing has been released yet.

March 10, 2011

!!!!!FREE GAME GIVEAWAY!!!!!METRO 2033!!!!!

Dont have Metro 2033? Well now is your chance to score a copy of the PC version.

ENTER TO WIN A FREE STEAM COPY OF METRO 2033!!!

SIMPLY POST A COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE IN THE PROMOTION SECTION OR WRITE AN ARTICLE IN THE PROMOTION SECTION. EASY RIGHT!!! (ALL posts must be in pro­mo­tion sec­tion so I can keep track of entries, arti­cles will be moved to appro­pri­ate sec­tion by the admin once credit has been given)

Arti­cles are worth 2 entries and com­ments are worth 1 entry, there is no limit so start com­ment­ing or writing!!!!

This pro­mo­tion ends on Wednes­day 3/23 and the draw­ing will be held Thursday

The game will be deliv­ered through steam and to stream­line that process please include your email address asso­ci­ated with your steam acct with your first post/comment.

OH AND JUST FOR CLARITY, THE COMMENTS IN THIS POST ARE ELIGIBLE FOR ENTRIES, JUST CUZ ITS THE ANNOUNCMENT POST DOESNT MEAN ITS INVALID.

ANYONE WHO WANTS TO SUBMIT AN ARTICLE BUT DOESNT HAVE THE PERMISSIONS TO SUBMIT THEM ON THE SITE CAN WRITE THE ARTICLE THEN SEND IT TO gamersblg@gmail.com.

February 19, 2011

R.A.T 7 Review: Gods Gift to Gamers?

If you are here you are prob­a­bly won­der­ing what the hell that weird look­ing $100 mouse is that you saw at your local micro­cen­ter, Best Buy or Newegg and if it is truly worth the rather steep price tag that is attached to it that my made your girl­friend ques­tion dat­ing you and you wife con­sider leav­ing you. 

I decided to pick this mouse up after all the hype I have heard around it and the fact that every time I went to ask about it some­where it was almost always sold out.  I have been going to my local Micro­cen­ter after work for 3 weeks now try­ing to pick one up.  I finally man­aged to get one today and have been play­ing with it. 

After open­ing the box and play­ing with it there sev­eral things that really stand out to me.  Have you ever heard the phrase “They don’t build things like they used to?”  Well, this is how they used to build things.  This mouse is sturdy and unlike the Razer Deathad­der mouse that I have that feels and looks like it is made of cheap plas­tic this thing is made of  solid alu­minum core and the plas­tic pieces are extremely sturdy.  I did not feel like I could break this mouse and to top it off the “click­ing” of the but­tons feels robust and respon­sive.  I actu­ally feel like I could drop this or even throw it at a wall and the wall would prob­a­bly take more dam­age then the mouse.  It also comes with some inter­change­able parts that can be swapped out to change the over­all feel of the mouse to suit your taste. 

One of the biggest sell­ing points of this mouse was its com­pletely adjustable to almost any hand con­fig­u­ra­tion.  These adver­tise­ments are not over­sold  and this mouse has more adjust­ments then a watch and it’s still styl­ish look­ing to boot.  I’ve got a oddly shaped hand so if I game for any extended amount of time or even just doing basic office work my hand will start to hurt.  The biggest thing I liked about this mouse is that I can elon­gate it to keep my wrist off of the desk.  This keeps it from putting pres­sure on the bot­tom of my hand and pre­vents me get­ting wrist pains after about an hour.  The mouse can be short­ened, widened, elon­gated, and even adjust the weight of the mouse by remov­ing the weights on the bot­tom of the mouse.  In total there are 15 dif­fer­ent adjust­ments  that can be made on the house and lit­er­ally hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent lay­outs you could con­fig­ure it to.  This mouse will fit nearly anyone’s hand and be com­fort­able.  This by itself is almost a deal maker for me. 

Well that’s all good that the mouse looks and feels good but does it per­form?  The R.A.T 7 is a 5600 DPI mouse and it’s the smoothest game­play and per­for­mance I have ever had.  In addi­tion to that it comes with con­fig­urable soft­ware that lets you adjust it to your spe­cific needs and sen­si­tiv­ity.  Some other fea­tures i feel that need to be men­tioned is the DPI on the fly.  You can by press­ing a but­ton on top of the mouse change the DPI to 4 dif­fer­ent lev­els.  This is great if your going from using a SMG to using a sniper rifle.  It will tone down the sen­si­tiv­ity greatly and give you far more con­trol over your weapons or army man­age­ment.  It also has a “Pre­ci­sion Aim” but­ton which allows you to cut the DPI by a set amount by just press­ing that but­ton.  This is great if you are cus­tomiz­ing it for a spe­cific game or appli­ca­tion such as Counter-Strike, Bad Com­pany 2, or Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Is this mouse worth the heavy price tag?  In my opin­ion, if you are seri­ous gamer, yes.  There are so many adjust­ments that can be made to that can improve your per­for­mance in your game big time.  In addi­tion that it actu­ally make it far more com­fort­able and safer to play games for extended peri­ods of time.  This mouse may not be for every­one and the $100 price tag may put it out of reach for some peo­ple.  The R.A.T 7 is by the best mouse I have ever owned.  Any­one who is look­ing for a solid gam­ing mouse should look no further. 

*  There is also a wire­less ver­sion of this mouse but I am not a big fan of wire­less and it also car­ries a higher price tag.   I choose not to get it. 

Here is a video of the adjustments: