July 14, 2011

3DS Netflix goes live today.….

If you need a rea­son to dust off you 3DS and give it some love, Nin­tendo has your anti-static cloth in hand. The Net­flix app that was dis­cussed at last year’s E3 went live today on the3DS’s E-Shop. A bevy of con­tent will be avail­able as well as 3D movies that don’t require you to look like a hip­ster with those funky glasses. The parental con­trols on Net­flix will work on the 3DS appli­ca­tion as well as the 3DS parental con­trols will keep your rug rats from expe­ri­enc­ing any­thing not age appro­pri­ate or from them wit­ness­ing the bevy of crap movies and shows avail­able on the ser­vice and scar­ing them for life (Glee needs destroyed!). I am one excited to down­load this app. If I can have the 3D ver­sion of Tron Legacy avail­able to me on the portable I will be in heaven, plus it will make work more tol­er­a­ble (not this job, this is the fun job). The only prob­lem I can see would be the bat­tery life suck­ing hor­ri­bly due to the 3D being used while the WI-FI is stream­ing. The app is set up a lot like the PS3 app and my whole instant queue is there, I had to try the app out with my favorite Futu­rama episode (as seen below). The app is great and I can see using this a lot while I am typ­ing arti­cles or on the go at an air­port. Hope­fully this will entice more peo­ple to pick up the hand­held that have won me over (OoT FTW!). Any­one else excited that the 3DS fea­tures are finally com­ing to fruition?

July 14, 2011

Video Awesomeness!

I’m going to try and bring some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent to the site by show cas­ing some great trail­ers and videos of exist­ing and upcom­ing games across all plat­forms. Here’s my first…..

Deus Ex began as one of the first games to com­bine the gen­res of RPG and First-Person Shoot­ers into a sin­gle game back in 2000 being listed as one of the best games of all time here’s a trailer:

After the suc­cess of Deus Ex a sequel named: Deus EX: Invis­i­ble War was released and pretty much tanked com­pared to the suc­cess of the first, here’s the trailer:

Now we have Deus EX: Human Rev­o­lu­tion a PRE­quel to Deus Ex using (I hope) all the awe­some­ness that made the orig­i­nal so great! Let’s hope it can live up to the pedi­gree of the first and not crash and burns like the sequel! Here are some of the cin­e­matic and game­play trailers:

I’m hop­ing this will give the Mass Effect series some com­pe­ti­tion just because they’re two great sto­ry­lines using the same type of gam­ing style. We’ll see if Human rev­o­lu­tion can live up to the challenge!

Here’s one more just because!:

July 11, 2011

Digital Distribution… Competition Bad for Business?

A war is brew­ing on the inter­net for your money, sup­port, and loy­alty (no it’s not the PC vs Con­sole war that you see flames on a daily basis) and the out­come could have dire con­se­quences for the gam­ing indus­try.  That war is the supremacy over Dig­i­tal Dis­tri­b­u­tion.  Cur­rently there are sev­eral key play­ers in the indus­try, Steam (Valve Soft­ware), Impulse Dri­ven (GameStop), Direct2Drive and GoG.  Steam is by far the most pop­u­lar and largest of the group by sev­eral times how­ever sev­eral com­pa­nies are look­ing into pro­vid­ing their own ser­vices instead of sell­ing them through a ven­dor and com­peti­tor like Steam.

We often hear the phrase “com­pe­ti­tion is bet­ter for con­sumers” and in many cases this is true but in the case of Dig­i­tal Dis­tri­b­u­tion is this truly the case?  Con­sider this, the major­ity of major title games can be had through Steam and Impulse at this point in time.  And they can gen­er­ally be had below the stan­dard retail costs of $50 — $60.  This pro­vides the cus­tomer with a reli­able source with a large and estab­lished cus­tomer base, prices below mar­ket stan­dard, large selec­tion of mer­chan­dise to choose from and many friends to social­ize with.

Now enter EA and Activi­sion that see the suc­cess of Steam and want to piece of those prof­its.  How do they bring cus­tomers over to their side that are per­fectly happy with another, pos­si­bly supe­rior prod­uct.  Sim­ple, they cre­ate their own dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vice.  That alone, how­ever, is not enough for cus­tomers to come crawl­ing to them.  In the case of EA and Activi­sion the chances of them pulling cus­tomers away from already estab­lished enti­ties in the mar­ket is slim so what they do is with­draw all of their prod­ucts from their com­peti­tors ser­vices.  More com­pe­ti­tion is good right?  Maybe?  Per­haps not…

In some cases in a free mar­ket there is an argu­ment for a nat­ural monop­oly or per­haps a oli­gop­oly.  Util­i­ties are a prime exam­ple of this because it would be harm­ful to the cus­tomers to have more than one Util­i­ties Com­pany and it could even be dan­ger­ous.  This isn’t to say Steam, Ori­gin or any other Dig­i­tal Dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vice is as impor­tant as util­i­ties ser­vices, because they most def­i­nitely are not.  How­ever, it does cre­ate a inter­est­ing dilemma for cus­tomers who are now forced to choose between their favorite game and their plat­form of choice.  It’s in this way that large com­pa­nies force cus­tomers to their prod­uct even if they don’t want to.  Cry­sis II was recently removed from steam because EA was vio­lat­ing Steam poli­cies by dic­tat­ing user con­tent.  Shortly there after EA announced the rea­son for remov­ing their games and announced that Cry­sis II, Mass Effect III, Bat­tle­field 3 and The Old Repub­lic would all be Ori­gin exclu­sives and that they would not be avail­able on other platforms.

Cus­tomers will now be forced to have not one but two or more of Dig­i­tal Dis­tri­b­u­tion soft­ware plat­forms adding more over­head to their sys­tems.  They also have to split up their game col­lec­tions across mul­ti­ple plat­forms and this can be incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing to con­sumers.  In addi­tion to this these com­pa­nies will now have exclu­sive monop­o­lies of their prod­uct and now can dic­tate price as there is no longer and com­pe­ti­tion for their prod­uct.  This is almost NEVER good for consumers.

Cus­tomers should be wary as we star to see the mar­ket frag­ment as more devel­op­ers try to develop their own Dig­i­tal Dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vices.  What will con­sumers do as this hap­pens?  That remains to be seen?  While I don’t think it will get to the point where there is leg­is­la­tion involved (not to say that it couldn’t) , I do expect there to be some major chances in the PC gam­ing indus­try as the mar­ket con­tin­ues to move towards Dig­i­tal Dis­tri­b­u­tion.  What do you guys think?  Is more com­pe­ti­tion in the mar­ket when it comes to online games a good or bad thing? Do you think it will cause more harm than good?  Should com­pa­nies be able to hold a monop­oly over their games?  Let us know your thoughts!

July 10, 2011

Games for Windows + Xbox = ?

Games for Win­dows will merge with Xbox.com tomor­row July 11^th mak­ing Xbox.com a sin­gle stop for con­sole, PC and mobile gam­ing no specifics have been released other than the date of the merger con­firmed at Joystiq.com and Eurogamer.com. Here’s a link to the forums at xbox.com to check up on the “heated” debate on the merger. Check it out  here:

    I think this is a sen­si­ble move to have one site for all gam­ing plat­forms. So what you think? Will this make a dif­fer­ence? Will it affect Steam in anyway?

July 9, 2011

“Our Recon Drone Will Find Those Imperial Dwarfnuts”

Last Tues­day, a group called BlackMonkeys.de released a mod for Call of Duty 4 on PC enti­tled “Galac­tic War­fare”.  This mod turns the orig­i­nal Call of Duty 4 Mul­ti­player into a Star Wars shooter, pit­ting the Rebels against the Storm Troop­ers. There are sev­eral maps on Tatooine, one in the Cloud City of Bespin, and one map called “Not A Cave” (You can prob­a­bly guess where it takes place.) Any­way, let’s take a spin through this German-made prod­uct. You know the Ger­mans always make good stuff!

^This guy wouldn’t lie to you. I own mul­ti­ple ShamWow!s.

First off, I will start by say­ing that this mod is not for the tech­no­log­i­cally impaired, nor is it for those of you who like to give up on things that frus­trate you. It is most DEFINITELY not for those of you who get sick of click­ing through Computer>C Drive>Program Files (x86)>Steam>SteamApps>Common>call of duty 4 a lot. Once you down­load and install or rein­stall the game (I’m guess­ing many of you prob­a­bly haven’t played this title in a while if you own it), you’ll need to man­u­ally update punk­buster. Allegedly there’s a .exe installer for this mod, but I couldn’t find it, so I just went with the .zip file. You put the con­tents of the “mods” folder into the Call of Duty 4 “mods” folder, and just drag the usermaps folder into the direc­tory. It is impor­tant to note that you can NOT launch the game through Steam and play this mod. You must nav­i­gate the above-mentioned treach­er­ous path and launch directly from the .exe, or else the mods will not work. You’ll be nav­i­gat­ing some long dis­tances. Short­cuts will not help you. Do not attempt to make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.

^What?

You’ll also need a man­ual update of Punk­Buster from www.evenbalance.com before you can play. No big­gie. Now, hear comes the thing that almost makes my head spin. Galac­tic War­fare servers don’t show up in the game list. You have to search for them (gamem­o­n­i­tor or else­where), then open the con­sole and type /connect, fol­lowed by tediously copy­ing the IP. (Side note– you should hit back­space a few times before you type /connect. Don’t ask why, just do it.) You could con­nect through Xfire or a sim­i­lar pro­gram if you don’t have a Steam copy of the game, but many peo­ple do because it is fre­quently on sale.

So, you’ve done all this work to appease this mod. You’ve man­u­ally screwed with every­thing, resisted the urge to just give up and play a dif­fer­ent shooter, and are finally (man­u­ally) con­nect­ing to a server. What do you get?

You get a face-full of AWESOME. This is one of the most bril­liant mods I’ve ever played for any game. Granted, it’s a tad com­plex and buggy at the moment, but that doesn’t take away from the solid win that this game is. It solves one of the great­est imbal­ancers of Call of Duty 4– the lev­el­ing sys­tem. A Stormtrooper is a Stormtrooper, and may choose from the basic standard-issue blasters. There are only 4 Blue Perks and 4 Yel­low Perks to choose from, which also solves another great imbal­anc­ing prob­lem. The game­play is nice and tac­ti­cal, and there’s always an answer to what the enemy team is doing.

The stan­dard fare of CoD game­types is here, along with one new “Very Impor­tant Droid” game­type, in which one player on a team is an R2 droid, which must be escorted to an area on the map. You play him in third per­son, so you can peek around cor­ners more eas­ily. He has a few meth­ods of defend­ing him­self, but for the most part needs an escort. Team Death­match, Search and Destroy, and all the other favorites play just like they used to, only with blasters instead of guns, Stormtroop­ers instead of Spet­snaz, and enter­tain­ing game­play instead of level grinding.

Apart from the afore­men­tioned com­pli­ca­tions, I only see two prob­lems with this game as it cur­rently is, both of which are eas­ily fixed. One, I’m hav­ing trou­ble load­ing maps on map change, and it locks up pretty hard. That might be just me, but it’s still an annoying/crippling bug which may be trou­bling many would-be play­ers. Two, the mod just doesn’t have a big com­mu­nity yet, so it’s miss­ing some of the things that will make it great. Play­ing this mod would be even more fun in a scrim-type set­ting, or at least with some hearty voice chat (nobody uses voice chat? What is this madness?).

So what’s my final judge­ment? This looks like a great mod to hop on. I can really see it tak­ing off, and the poten­tial for mas­sive hip­ster cred once the mod gets big a com­mu­nity that will grow with the mod can­not be denied. So, if you’ve got a pur­chased copy of Mod­ern War­fare lying around, go ahead and install it. This mod is a lot of fun.

July 9, 2011

Mass Effect 3 to be an Origin Exclusive

We now know that Mass Effect 3 will be an ori­gin exclu­sive on the PC along with The Old Repub­li­cand will not be avail­able on any of the other DD plat­forms such as Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse.  This will most likely be one in sev­eral upcom­ing exclu­sives to the Ori­gin plat­form.  Other title that are expected to be Ori­gin exclu­sives are Bat­tle­field 3, Cry­sis 3 and any future AAA title releases that will come from EA.  

Mass Effect 3 will of course be avail­able on PS3 and Xbox 360 for those of you who do not wish to play on the PC.  What do you PC  guys think about Mass Effect 3 being Ori­gin exclu­sive?  Will this be bad for busi­ness?  Good or bad?

July 8, 2011

Gamer Grub: The Review

*note: this site is not endorsed, nor is it endors­ing this prod­uct. This review is writ­ten by a pay­ing consumer.

My girl­friend and I work at a retailer that car­ries Gamer Grub™. She was the first to try it since the store I work at never received it. It is an inter­est­ing prod­uct, there is four fla­vors and come in 3.75 pack­ages. There is BBQ, PB&J, Pizza, and Smores (PB&J and BBQ were pur­chased for this review). At first glance the prod­uct looks just like Chex mix or any kind of trail mix but with much more fla­vor. The hook with this prod­uct is that it is sup­pose to be tasty gam­ing treats packed with vit­a­mins and neu­ro­trans­mit­ters for keep­ing focus. I have tasted both while play­ing the Uncharted 3 beta and never noticed a dif­fer­ence but I was also wash­ing them down with Code Red Moun­tain Dew, so I am guess­ing the effects were moot. But I will try eat­ing this with maybe water in hand and see if there are actu­ally any effects other than a great tast­ing snack.

BBQ – “A sweet & tangy blend of Smoked Almonds, BBQ Corn Nuts, Spicy Peanuts and Honey & BBQ Sesame sticks”. This one is great but I can do with­out the corn nuts. There is 150 calo­ries per serv­ing at about 3.5 serv­ings, bet­ter than pick­ing up a greasy bag of chips. It has a small kick to the spices and the Sesame sticks are just plain awe­some. I rec­om­mend the BBQ but the PB&J is what really blew me away.

PB&J – “A tasty blend of Peanut But­ter Chips, Peanuts, Straw­ber­ries, Straw­berry Jelly Chips and Sweet Bread”. I was cau­tious going into this one but I was pleas­antly sur­prised. It’s just as great as shov­ing a real PB&J sand­wich down the intake hole. Nei­ther the Peanut But­ter nor the Jelly is too over bear­ing and is a great com­bi­na­tion. It has 140 calo­ries per serv­ing at the same serv­ing size.

At the store I pur­chased them at, they retailed for $2.99 apiece; of course prices may vary by store. You can also pur­chase cases of this prod­uct here at the Gamer Grub store­front. They do spon­sor Mid­night Gam­ing Cham­pi­onship and endorse a few pro gamers and teams. I really hope this stuff sticks around; it is a great snack that I would pick up over some­thing nor­mal like chips or Chex Mix. Again it states it helps with focus with neu­ro­trans­mit­ters (sounds like some­thing out of Metal Gear) and I never saw a dif­fer­ence but I will down a whole bag while gam­ing and will update this post. So go pick up some Gamer Grub and get to gaming.

July 7, 2011

Thought of the Week: Despite reception we hold on.….

Time for this week’s thought that has been bounc­ing around my head for two weeks since the Mirror’s Edge and lack of cre­ativ­ity topic; are there games that were either met with mixed reviews or panned by crit­ics that you still hold dear or dili­gently hope for a sequel? Advent Ris­ing is mine. I love this game and will defend it till the day I die (not to be overly dra­matic). It had a story that sucked you in, a unique visual style and one of my favorite sound­tracks of all time; but it was plagued by bugs and a shoddy frame rate, and the “flick” sys­tem didn’t work as adver­tised but what game is per­fect? This is another game that sits in the cat­e­gories of “best game no one played” and “cre­ative game that gets buried amongst the tide of sequels”. There was also the blun­der of Majesco and its mil­lion dol­lar give away that went sour, but that is not the games fault. I had fol­lowed the game from pro­duc­tion to release get­ting my hands on any arti­cle and watch­ing every­thing I could on G4 (back when they actu­ally ran shows 24/7 about video games instead of run­ning 24 hours of pure crap). It also helped that one of the com­posers, Tommy Tal­larico, was on Judg­ment Day at the time. The game received mixed reviews, but I still bought it day one, and loved every minute of it. I still regard it as one of the best games of the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions despite what other crit­ics think. If they ever threw around the idea to make this game a movie I would lose weight, buff up, grow my hair, take act­ing lessons, and peti­tion to have the role of Gideon Wyeth. So know that I have con­fessed my undy­ing love for Advent Ris­ing, are there any games that despite their crit­i­cal recep­tion, you still love and adore?

Editor’s note: The two mas­ter minds that cre­ated the game Don­ald and Geremy Mus­tard are still in the indus­try at their dev stu­dio, Chair Enter­tain­ment. They are respon­si­ble for three hit down­load­able games; Under­tow, Shadow Com­plex, and Infin­ity Blade. There is still hope for a sequel to Advent Ris­ing, I would even set­tle for a XBLA sequel. No I am not des­per­ate, just passionate.  

Here is a two songs off it’s fan­tas­tic sound­track, the game is not back com­pat­i­ble on the 360 (out­rage!) but is avail­able on Steam for a steal of $9.99.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ_hgmGEhsw

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbTviFhHI4

July 6, 2011

Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force and Windows 7 64bit

This was the first time in a long time that I have had some time off to myself.  When decid­ing what to do with my spare time I decided to bring out my old cat­a­log and play a game that I hadn’t played in years and the first game that popped up was Star Trek Voy­ager: Elite Force. 

For those of you who don’t know Star Trek Voy­ager: Elite Force is an old game, by gam­ing stan­dards, released in 2000 and fol­lows the exploits of the “haz­ard team” abord the star­ship Voy­ager.  The “haz­ard team” is essen­tially a team of spe­cial forces oper­a­tives who are sent out to deal with “dan­ger­ous” sit­u­a­tions that stan­dard Starfleet per­son­ell aren’t equiped to  han­dle, much like your mod­ern day spe­cial forces. 

While play­ing this it got me to think­ing how much sim­pler the FPS genre was 11 years ago.  The way games were made were far dif­fer­ent then todays mod­ern shoot­ers.  The biggest dif­fer­ence was how there were no extra fea­tures such as unlocks, upgrades, perks or lev­el­ing up.  I also had to get used to the idea of using ammo sta­tions and health sta­tions.  It’s been a good long time since I have had to deal with man­ag­ing my health with my saves.  There were a cou­ple of times I actu­ally had to move back to pre­vi­ous save because I had saved at a “inop­er­tune” time.  

It was inter­st­ing how dif­fer­ent FPS genre has become over the past 10 years and I think they’ve actu­ally tried to over com­pli­cate what is actu­ally, what I think to be, a rather sim­ple genre and shouldn’t need to be overly com­plex.  Games like Call of Duty and the Bat­tle­field series have taken the FPS genre to new, com­plex, heights with weapon and armor unlocks, upgrades and perks.  It was actu­ally really refresh­ing not hav­ing to worry about any of those things while play­ing and the only thing I had to think about was just run­ning, shoot­ing and lis­ten­ing to the enter­tain­ing dialouge and story.  There was also no script­ing out­side of con­ver­sa­tion pieces.  There were sim­ple stealth mis­sions where you had to mostly “stay out of sight” but could still be in clear view. 

Elite Force was a great way to go back to a time when things were sim­ple, fun and excit­ing where ene­mies would come at you in hordes and level lay­outs were huge and all that was required to beat the final boss was to shoot it three hun­dred thou­sand times.  It was the most fun I’ve had in years and funny enough I didn’t put it down until I played it all the way through. 

Installing this “ancient” game was not as sim­ple as installing it from the CD.  I had to go to some lengths to get it installed on a Win­dows 7 64bit sys­tem run­ning on a AMD Phe­nom II X4 965, 8GB of ram, Radeon 5870 run­ning on the lat­est dri­vers.  Hav­ing said all that I thought it would be nice to give you the steps I took to get this installed and running.

1. Grab your CD and copy all files to a folder some­where on your computer

2. Go to the direc­tory you copied all of the files and go to the setup folder

3. Right click on the setup.exe file inside the setup folder and click the com­pata­bil­ity tab and set these settings .   

          a.  Check run com­pat­i­bil­ity mode and set it to Win­dows 2000

          b.  Check dis­able desk­top composition

          c.  Check Dis­able dis­play  scal­ing on high DPI settings

          d.  Check Run this pro­gram as an administrator

4.  Keep in mind this step can take as much as 20 min­utes before you see any results.  Run the setup.exe file as admin­is­tra­tor.  On my sys­tem it took 20 min­utes before I saw ANY signs that it was work­ing.  If you don’t see signs that some­thing is work­ing be patient it should start working. 

5. Now that the pro­gram is installed there are still a few other things that I had to do to get things func­tion­ing cor­rectly.  One thing to note about older games that were designed before the advent of 64 bit sys­tems and 1GB video cards.  Is that most of them can’t han­dle multi core proces­sors and sys­tem mem­ory over 4Gb includ­ing your video card.  What we have to do is make the game think it’s run­ning on an older sys­tem.  I should men­tion I would try get­ting the game to work with­out chang­ing these set­tings as it’s just eas­ier.  If the game func­tions at the set­tings you desire then you have no need to fol­low the fol­low­ing steps.

6.  Launch mscon­fig by click­ing on the Win­dows but­ton and typ­ing msconfig

        a.  Click the boot tab

        b.  Click advanced options

        c.  Set the max­i­mum mem­ory to what brings your total sys­tem mem­ory under 4Gb includ­ing your video cards mem­ory.  For exam­ple if you have a 1Gb video card mem­ory you would set the max­i­mum sys­tem mem­ory to 3000

       d.  This step can be done in two ways and it depends on what you pre­fer.  You need to set your sys­tem to use only 1 pro­cess­ing core instead of 2 or 4 or 6 or what­ever your sys­tem cur­rently has.  Most older games can’t uti­lize mul­ti­ple cores and in cases where they can it often ruins per­for­mance hav­ing mul­ti­ple cores instead of one.  Choose one of the two options that bests suits you:

                    1.  Go back to the boot options where you set your max­i­mum mem­ory and check the num­ber of proces­sors box and set it to 1.  This will set your sys­tem to use only 1 proces­sor and until you set it back it will only use one processor.

                    2.  Launch the game and press con­trol + alt + delete and click on task man­ager.  In task man­ager click processes and look for the stvoy.exe.  Right click on stvoy.exe and click select affin­ity and uncheck every box execpt  CPU 0.  This will set only stvoy.exe to use one core instead of all of them.  For some peo­ple this would be a bet­ter option.

These were the steps I took to get the game work­ing on Win­dows 7 64bit.   The steps may vary a lit­tle depend­ing on your cir­cum­stance and if you have prob­lems please feel free to post here and if you have another solu­tion that works as well please post it as well.  I hope this has helped some­one out there look­ing to take a stroll down nos­tal­gia lane. 

I should also men­tion that you fol­low these steps at your own risk and that I am NOT respon­si­ble for any dam­age caused to your system. 

 Do not right click on the setup.exe file in the main direc­tory as this one will not work.

July 5, 2011

Happy Independence Day!

I along with the staff at TGB would like to take this time to say Happy Inde­pen­dence Day to all of our read­ers and view­ers.  With­out you we would not be where we are today and for that we thank you.  We would also like to take this time to thank all the ser­vice men and women, past and present  for all that you have done for this coun­try.  With­out your ser­vice, your sac­ri­fice, your courage we very well may not have the free­doms we have today and we may have lived in a much darker place.  We thank you and will always be grate­ful for the ser­vice you do for this coun­try.  Happy Inde­pen­dence Day!