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!

July 2, 2011

Space Battles!

The title says it all, it’s a nerds wet dream, watch­ing mas­sive star­ships slug­ging it out.  It doesn’t mat­ter if there is a rea­son for it or if they are just there because they can be.  It’s excit­ing and enter­tain­ing and today we are going to take a look at some of the best games and movies to play and watch space bat­tles in and we are going to link you to all of the best space bat­tles videos that we can find in one spot.  While this does stray from our usual arti­cle style I think every­one here loves space bat­tles so I don’t think we will have any complaints!

I am one of  ‘those’ indi­vid­u­als that could watch a 2 hour movie that con­sisted entirely of space­bat­tles and I would watch it over and over again.  I’ve actu­ally gone on youtube and spent hours search­ing for ran­dom videos of space bat­tles that I can find.  What is it about space bat­tles that enter­tain us so much?  Is it the flash­ing lights?  The majes­tic sight of mil­lion ton star­ships slug­ging it out for supremacy or per­haps it’s just the notion of an epic fire­fight in space.  What­ever it is it has lead to the cre­ation of user­made videos and web­sites such as SpaceBattles.com which has a very large user base and games ded­i­cated entirely to space bat­tles such as Gra­tu­itous Space Bat­tles and Star Wars: Empire at War.  The ways space bat­tles are por­trayed has changed dras­ti­cally over the past 40 years.  The orig­i­nal Star Wars films used indi­vid­ual mod­els for their space bat­tles and large sets and self made and timed explo­sions.  Cre­at­ing a space bat­tle such as one seen in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi would have been extremely labor inten­sive and if you messed up you would have to rebuild a model and that could be expen­sive and time con­sum­ing.  Now fast for­ward 25 years and we have CG gen­er­ated space bat­tles and they can be cre­ated from small to large scale with­out hav­ing to setup scale mod­els and film­ing them one by one.  This allows com­pa­nies and fans to gen­er­ate large scale space bat­tles at almost no cost.  Granted the ones you see in cin­ema cost a great deal of money to cre­ate but they also look a great deal bet­ter then ones you might see in a fan made movie. 

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi -   this was the first space bat­tle that I was ever exposed to as a child.  My father told me I should watch these movies and that he thought I would love them.  I believe that I was 8 at the time and he was cor­rect.  I loved the movies and still watch them to this day and even though it was made over 30 years ago it still looks amazing

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith — the intro this film is intense and prob­a­bly one of the best in the series

Seren­ity — this is one of those movies that you either love or you hate and it’s sadly a under­rated title and really good film based in the fire­fly uni­verse.  Fire­fly for those of you who don’t know was a very short run show that was can­celled very early dur­ing it’s run.  If you haven’t watched it you should do your­self a favor and pick it up at your local store.  Seren­ity coin­ci­dently con­tains one of the best space bat­tles in cur­rent live action cinema.

*I apol­o­gize for the bad music*

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine  — Prob­a­bly the best space bat­tles a Star Trek series has boasted if not the most grand.   Deep space nine actu­ally sported sev­eral large space bat­tles includ­ing two sieges on Deep Space Nine, one by the Klin­gons and one by the Domin­ion and sev­eral other large engagements

Mass Effect -  The bat­tle of the citidel is the best exam­ple of a space bat­tle ren­dered in game.  It’s also one of the best I’ve seen as well. 

Baby­lon 5 — One of the best Sci-Fi shows ever to see the light of day and it also has some of the best space bat­tles.  There were many space bat­tles through Baby­lon 5’s five sea­sons and sev­eral made for TV movies.  I’m going to pick the ones that I thought were the best. 

EvE Online — The cre­ators of EvE and fans have cre­ated sev­eral impres­sive space bat­tle movies.  Here are a cou­ple for you to enjoy. 

Bat­tlestar Galac­tica -  While the name sug­gests there would be alot of space bat­tles in this show there really isn’t.  That being said it has some truly gor­geous ones that shine when they come about.  I pulled a cou­ple of videos that I think really show­case this.

Fan made — I’ve gone around and col­lected a group of what I con­sider to be the best fan made space bat­tles.  I’m sure there are more out there and if there are more that I don’t have and you think that they should be on this epic list I would encour­age you to post them in the com­ments and I will try to add them. 

June 27, 2011

Sound The Alarm

Hey guys I have a friend who also has a nerd site. His name is Adam and he does up the geek­ness over at http://stashow.net/. Sound The Alarm brings you news in gam­ing and other fun things as well. They also do weekly pod­casts chat­ting about any­thing going on in gam­ing, sports, or ran­dom stuff around the house. They just hit the 25^th episode mark so gratz to them. So give them a check­ing out and tell them Ace­Of­Nades sent ya. Oh and be nice.

June 27, 2011

In Response to the Supreme Court Ruling: A Plea to Big Brother

Today, thsound­man brought us the news that the Supreme Court has ruled that video games are pro­tected by the First Amend­ment. While I per­son­ally feel that this is a land­mark achieve­ment for the cred­i­bil­ity of video games as an adult hobby, as well as a turn for the pos­i­tive in the deci­sions of the United States gov­ern­ment, it will put a bit of pres­sure on the par­ents to more closely mon­i­tor their children’s video game play­ing. This got me to think­ing about the usage of online mul­ti­player and other social media by those same chil­dren, and I came to a con­clu­sion: Social media and main­stream online gam­ing are such new things that few par­ents know enough about them to be able to accu­rately mon­i­tor their child’s usage of them. How­ever, in many house­holds across Amer­ica, there is one key mem­ber of the fam­ily that knows more about these two things than the rest of the fam­ily com­bined: The older brother.

My par­ents are fairly young, and in-the-know enough to real­ize the inher­ent dan­gers of unreg­u­lated inter­net usage. Still, with enough plead­ing and promis­ing to be respon­si­ble, at age 12 I was able to get my own email address, begin play­ing some pop­u­lar free MMO’s of the time, and have my first taste of online shoot­ers with Halo PC (a game which changed my life, def­i­nitely for the bet­ter). For­tu­nately for me, this was before Myspace existed, so I had plenty of time to be intro­duced to a method of com­mu­ni­ca­tion known as the online bul­letin board, or “forums” as most of you prob­a­bly know them. Over the years, I became an Inter­net ani­mal, but in a sur­pris­ingly good way; my “friends” (who I only knew by screen­names) taught me the value of not giv­ing out cru­cial pieces of infor­ma­tion, and I wit­nessed first­hand what hap­pened to those who gave out the wrong infor­ma­tion and angered the wrong peo­ple. Hid­ing behind a num­ber of dif­fer­ent “1337” monikers and a .gif avatar of a recol­ored Final Fan­tasy sprite, I had an absolute adven­ture across the Inter­net which still con­tin­ues to this day. I know there are thou­sands of you out there, about my age, who share a sim­i­lar story to mine. This is my plea to you.

Many of you have a lit­tle brother, lit­tle sis­ter, or lit­tle cousin. Chances are this child, how­ever young he or she is, has a cell phone, a Face­book page, a gam­ing con­sole which he or she uses online, or any com­bi­na­tion of the three. I charge you with mak­ing sure that this child grows up right with games and social media. That child’s par­ents prob­a­bly have no idea that your char­ac­ter is able to have sex in the Fable and Mass Effect series. That child’s par­ents have no idea that with a Face­book album of a pre­teen pool party and a lit­tle Pho­to­shop, peo­ple on the inter­net can and will do hor­ri­ble things. That child’s par­ents might not know what “eRP” means, what hap­pens when you delete System32, and that online mul­ti­player has a ten­dency to gen­er­ate curs­ing. But you do. I leave it to you.

On the other hand, there are some par­ents (pos­si­bly the ones behind the Vio­lent Video Games case in the first place) who believe that every video game is a blood, gore, and sex spree. These are the par­ents that are con­vinced that every­one on the inter­net other than their child is a pedophile. These are the peo­ple that actu­ally took Duke Nukem seri­ously. These par­ents might not have any idea that there are plenty of other kids that play games online all around the world, and how much cul­tural value there is in befriend­ing them. These par­ents might not have any idea how easy it is to learn a for­eign lan­guage while inter­act­ing and play­ing games with for­eign­ers online. These par­ents might not even stop to think that the skills their chil­dren are learn­ing online whilst play­ing video games, both soft (team­work, com­mu­ni­ca­tion) and hard (server man­age­ment, script­ing), can give them a tech­no­log­i­cal edge in a world where almost every career is increas­ingly reliant on the Inter­net. But you know. I leave it to you.

Broth­ers, Sis­ters, Cousins, Neigh­bor­hood Friends, all of you who are in your teens or early twen­ties and know one child who is in that awk­ward phase, hear me. Their par­ents might be com­pletely igno­rant to the dan­gers or ben­e­fits of gam­ing and the Inter­net. You are the one who knows. You’re still in your “cool phase.” That kid will drink up every­thing you say. Talk to them. You damn sure know what you’re talk­ing about.

June 27, 2011

Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Video Game Industry

In a mile­stone event today, the Supreme Court ruled today against the Vio­lent Video Game law pre­sented by Cal­i­for­nia law makers.

“Like pro­tected books, plays, and movies, [video games] com­mu­ni­cate ideas through famil­iar lit­er­ary devices and fea­tures dis­tinc­tive to the medium. And ‘the basic prin­ci­ples of free­dom of speech … do not vary’ with a new and dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium,” said the court.

“This coun­try has no tra­di­tion of spe­cially restrict­ing children’s access to depic­tions of vio­lence. And California’s claim that ‘inter­ac­tive’ video games present spe­cial prob­lems, in that the player par­tic­i­pates in the vio­lent action on screen and deter­mines its out– come, is unpersuasive.”

This is land­mark event in that it sets a prece­dent for any future enter­tain­ment indus­try laws.  This rul­ing pro­tects video games under first amend­ment rights thus extend­ing them the pro­tect­ing that the Lit­er­a­ture, Music and Video indus­try already have.

“Esthetic and moral judg­ments about art  and lit­er­a­ture… are for the indi­vid­ual to make, not for the gov­ern­ment to decree even with man­date or approval of majority”

While it may be true that chil­dren should not be play­ing Vio­lent or sex­u­ally explicit games it is most defi­nately not the respon­si­bil­ity of the courts to decide this.  The respon­si­bil­ity of pro­tect­ing chil­dren falls on the hands of their par­ents.  Par­ents and law­mak­ers that are angry with what chil­dren are view­ing should not be tar­get­ing the indus­try but per­haps tar­get­ing them­selves or par­ents of these chil­dren who are fail­ing to pro­tect the chil­dren from such content?

What does TGB think?  Do think the court made the cor­rect deci­sion?  Does any­one here think it should of gone the other way?  Should the gov­ern­ment reg­u­late the video game industry?

June 16, 2011

Crysis 2 Gone From Steam

Steam recently removed Cry­sis 2 from it’s online store.  This is rather supris­ing con­sid­er­ing that Cry­sis 2 is one of it’s top sell­ing titles.  The game was appar­ently removed a few days ago when some steam users who fre­quent the site real­ized that it was no longer avail­able for sale. 

EA released a state­ment saying ”

It’s unfor­tu­nate that Steam has removed Cry­sis II from their ser­vice. This was not an EA deci­sion or the result of any action by EA.

Steam has imposed a set of busi­ness terms for devel­op­ers hop­ing to sell con­tent on that ser­vice — many of which are not imposed by other online game ser­vices. Unfor­tu­nately, Cry­tek has an agree­ment with another down­load ser­vice which vio­lates the new rules from Steam and resulted in its expul­sion of Cry­sis II from Steam.

Cry­sis II con­tin­ues to be avail­able on sev­eral other down­load ser­vices includ­ing Ama­zon, GameStop and Origin.com.”

It’s inter­est­ing that Cry­sis 2 is also listed as an Ori­gin exclu­sive even though it is still avail­able on other DD ser­vices.  Recently EA has been push­ing their new Ori­gin ser­vice, Ori­gin, and for those of you who don’t know what that is it is a dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vice just like steam.  Whats most inter­est­ing is that not all EA titles were removed from Steams cat­a­log, only Cry­sis 2 was removed from the Steam catalog. 

Steam is by far the most pop­u­lar online dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion provider today.  With over 33 mil­lion accounts and ris­ing it has the largest user base and the largest num­ber of games cur­rently avail­able for down­load.  It’s the biggest rival to EA’s new ori­gin ser­vice which has very few titles avail­able to it.

Con­trary to EA’s state­ment this seems like a ploy to pull users from it’s biggest com­pe­ti­tior over to it’s Ori­gin ser­vice.  Using it’s top title such as Cry­sis 2 gives credit to that the­ory.  It will be inter­est­ing to see what they do with the next 2 biggest releases Bat­tle­field 3 and Mass Effect 3.  I sus­pect these will be Ori­gin exclu­sives as well because of a “undis­closed” Steam pol­icy.  What do you guys think? Do you think remov­ing their title from Steam was a good busi­ness deci­sion or a bad one?

June 6, 2011

E3 2011 – Microsoft– Tomb Raider

Crys­tal Dynam­ics came out on to Microsoft’s stage to present their new reimag­in­ing of Tomb Raider. This is vastly dif­fer­ent than we have seen her last in TR: Under­world. Lara is 21 and just begin­ning her adven­tures, the tone is much darker and gritty to the point dur­ing the demo Lara pulled out a piece out metal out of a wound like a pro; albeit much whin­ing and moan­ing. The game play they showed looked like a mix of clas­sic Tomb Raider and Uncharted. There were scripted playable sequences that looked very rem­i­nis­cent of Uncharted 2. Not to say that Lara’s new makeover is a bad thing and all they did was copy and pasted from Naughty Dogs opus, there were some orig­i­nal ideas amongst the demo. Using Lara’s “sur­vivor skills” you can locate things in the envi­ron­ments to use to cre­ate a path to progress. On exam­ple they had was using fire to burn cer­tain things to lower a plat­form. The game did suf­fer unfor­tu­nately from the plague that is infect­ing most mod­ern games ad that is the quick time event. There were sev­eral though out the demo, but they did not seem to slow the pace of the game down. The games aes­thet­ics were beau­ti­ful and I think I can get use to a darker and grit­tier Tomb Raider. If it is any­thing like Uncharted 2 I will enjoy the game immensely and can’t wait to get my hands on it. The game will be out fall of 2012.  

For more on all our E3 cov­er­age head over to E3 tab and check out the lat­est and great­est news.

June 6, 2011

E3 2011 – Microsoft– Kinect

Kinect was the biggest fea­ture at the Microsoft press event and with good rea­son. It was a huge hit over the Hol­i­day but with lit­tle fan­fare for the core gamer and with a very small library still no most have titles out­side of Dance Cen­tral. This issue they tried to address this E3. They brought out the big guns to try and declare that Kinect was for the “hard­core” and still appeal to the casual audi­ence they have already captivated.

After Don Mat­trick took the stage, Peter Moore for EA (funny to have the for­mer Microsoft exec on a MS presser again) took the stage to intro­duce that Kinect will be fea­tured in Tiger Woods, Mad­den, and Fifa fran­chises; to what extent it was not men­tioned. EA would con­tinue the Kinect dance with Mass Effect 3 reveal­ing its Kinect fea­tures in a live demo. Dur­ing the demo it was revealed that you will be able to choose dia­log choices by sim­ply speak­ing them mak­ing the con­ver­sa­tions more involved with the player.

Ubisoft would be the next to show off its Kinect tech with Ghost Recon: Future Sol­dier. They showed off a short trailer for the game then moved on a new fea­ture of the game called Gun­smith, and this is where the Kinect fea­tures come to life. Gun­smith is a new weapon cus­tomiza­tion suite that gives around 20 dif­fer­ent pieces of your weapon to cus­tomize, inside and out. There are over 20 mil­lion dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions and pick­ing out the weapon that is built for you and your sit­u­a­tion is just a ges­ture away. Using Kinect you will be able to scroll through parts and weapons in a breeze while being able to have cus­tom load outs acti­vated with just a few sim­ple words. At the end of the Gun­smith demo, it was announced that all future Tom Clancy games would have Kinect integration.

There were more Kinect “core” titles shown. A brief trailer for Crytek’s Ryse, which was code named King­doms last year, shows a bru­tal first per­son fighter set in, what looked like Rome. Forza 4 was shown and how Kinect will use head track­ing for cock­pit views. Forza 4 will be release on Octo­ber 11^th. Peter Molyneux, head of Lion­head Stu­dios, came on to announce a new Kinect Fable title, Fable: The Jour­ney. The title will be out in 2012 and looks like a rail shooter with other ele­ments, at least what I gath­ered from the demo. The PC hit, Minecraft, will be com­ing to Xbox 360 with Kinect sup­port more on a release date later.

The tone would change and the fam­ily fun side of Kinect was shown. Kudo Tsun­oda would take the stage to present Kinect Fun Labs; which seems like a cul­mi­na­tion of every­thing they left out at launch but in a hap­haz­ard fea­ture set.  The fun Labs will be avail­able on the dash­board to every XBL mem­ber, and as I am writ­ing this should be avail­able for you to use. (When I checked after the con­fer­ence it was nowhere to be seen) In the Fun Labs there are appli­ca­tions such as cre­at­ing avatars from a body scan, object scan­ning (they brought a stuffed ani­mal to life dur­ing the demo), and fin­ger track­ing that you can use in a Pho­to­shop like appli­ca­tion. I under­stand these are just tech demos of what the hardware/software combo are capa­ble of, but this is not what I had in mind for these fea­tures. I’ll let you know what I think of it when I get my hands on with Fun Labs at a later date. Dis­ney­land Kinect was shown, look­ing like an inter­ac­tive tour though the theme park, kids were involved with the demo. Then Time Schaf­fer took the stage to show off his stu­dios (Dou­ble fine) take on Sesame Street in Once Upon a Mon­ster, kids were involved in that demo as well. The Star Wars Kinect game was finally shown and demoed. It looks to take some of the great­est chap­ters in the saga and you’ll relive them in the eyes of a generic Jedi. It looked ok using ges­tures to hack and slash through bat­tle droids but the ges­tures and the ani­ma­tion just weren’t match­ing up and you have to say “light saber on” to acti­vate your weapon, really? I really am hop­ing for more from Lucas Arts.

Two of the Kinects hol­i­day hits are get­ting sequels, Dance Cen­tral and Kinect Sports. Dance Cen­tral 2 will have two play­ers danc­ing as well as the abil­ity to import the music and DLC tunes from the first game into the sequel. Kinect Sports Sea­son 2 will have more great motion con­trolled sports and will hope­fully make you look less like a tool than the two guys doing the onstage demo. The sports this year will be foot­ball, base­ball, golf, ski­ing, darts, and tennis.

For more on all our E3 cov­er­age head over to E3 tab and check out the lat­est and great­est news.

May 24, 2011

The Witcher 2: The Review

Back in Octo­ber 2007 rel­a­tively unknown devel­oper, CD Pro­jekt with Atari released The Witcher.   The orig­i­nal pro­vided one of the most authen­tic, orig­i­nal and cap­ti­vat­ing RPG expe­ri­ences ever to land on the PC or any plat­form for that mat­ter.  The game was not with­out its prob­lems how­ever as it con­tained many graph­i­cal glitches, extremely long load­ing times between sequences and a cen­sored ver­sion released in North Amer­ica.  The com­pany responded to these issues by not only releas­ing an updated ver­sion of the game but adding in new quests, graph­i­cal enhance­ments and reduced load­ing times but pro­vid­ing it free to cus­tomers who had already pur­chased the game.  In fact CD Pro­jekt spent over 1 mil­lion dol­lars resolv­ing the issues its cus­tomers pre­sented to them.   Ever since The Witcher was released fans have been anx­iously await­ing a con­tin­u­a­tion of the epic story which was The Witcher. 

The wait is finally over and The Witcher 2 has arrived and the ques­tion on every­ones mind is “is it worth the wait”.  The answer to that is most def­i­nitely yes.  The Witcher 2 picks up imme­di­ately where the first left off and we take up our role as Ger­alt of Rivia as he trav­els the lands attempt­ing to clear his name after he is wrongly accused for the assas­si­na­tion of King Foltest. 

Before we begin let’s get the bad, and yes there is some, out of the way.  The biggest issue this game suf­fers from is the abil­ity to break quests.   You can do things in such a way that you will actu­ally break key part of the quest to where you will have to reload the game and start over.  Remem­ber the gamers mon­tra “save often and love it”.  This can be incred­i­bly aggra­vat­ing when you have spent 45 min­utes doing things around the world only to find out that you have to repeat them.  I actu­ally found myself hav­ing to do this.   The dif­fi­culty in the game seems to be… off.  Even on nor­mal I found myself get­ting trashed early on in the game to the point where I had to switch the dif­fi­culty to easy just to pass a cer­tain stage.  We also have the prob­lem that ATI/AMD own­ers have run into where there are numer­ous graph­ics prob­lems abound.  Most of these issues, assum­ing the com­pany fol­lows its trend, should be fixed shortly in an upcom­ing patch this week. 

Sorry Cry­sis 2, step aside, you are not the graph­ics king on the PC.  With the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Metro 2033, The Witcher 2 is prob­a­bly the best look­ing game on the PC or any other plat­form for that mat­ter.  Some of the long dis­tance visu­als you encounter dur­ing your trav­els will leave you breath­less.  The sun fil­ter­ing through the for­est tree tops will make you stop and admire the visu­als.  The burn­ing fires you will see while you move through the game looks freak­ishly like the real thing.  The Witcher 2 steps up the graph­ics across the board.  PC enthu­si­asts will be in for a treat as The Witcher 2 offers a wide range of graph­i­cal set­tings that you can tweak and set to your heart’s content. 

The story as with the orig­i­nal is top notch and the deci­sions you make are just as impor­tant as they were in the first game if not more so.  The story is so cap­ti­vat­ing that you will find that you have been play­ing for 5 hours and not even real­ize it.  The game has mul­ti­ple begin­nings, ways to progress and over 16 dif­fer­ent end­ings depend­ing on how you play the game.  The Witcher 2 does not have good or bad choices like your stan­dard RPG and it can make some of the deci­sions that you make incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult and in some cases you may regret them *remem­ber the gamers mon­tra*.  The deci­sions you make not only affect the imme­di­ate sit­u­a­tion but changes the way the entire game plays out.  RPG fans will not be dis­ap­pointed with this. 

You are able to import your pre­vi­ous save game, how­ever if you are like me you prob­a­bly don’t have it any­more since you’ve prob­a­bly upgraded or changed com­put­ers since them. 

The biggest stand­out in this game for me was the voice act­ing.  It’s top notch all the way through the game.  From the passer by com­ments you hear while walk­ing down the street to the scream on the bat­tle­field the voice act­ing is superb and that com­bined with the supe­rior graph­ics and top notch story The Witcher 2 offers a really cap­ti­vat­ing and immer­sive world for you to get lost in and trust me you will get lost in it. 

The Witcher 2 improves upon every­thing that made The Witcher 2 and in my opin­ion is a bet­ter game than the orig­i­nal in many ways.  Any­one who is on the edge about buy­ing The Witcher or The Witcher 2 I would urge you to do your­self a favor and pick them both up as you will not be dis­ap­pointed.  The Witcher 2 is a fan­tas­tic game that should not be missed and it is one of the best games on the PC plat­form.  I should also note that this is a PC exclu­sive release and that is rare these days.  If you are look­ing for an excuse to build a new com­puter then The Witcher 2 is that excuse.  So tell your girl­friend good­bye, drop out of your classes and say good­bye to your social life as The Witcher 2 whisks you away to another world.

I should note that this is NOT a kid friendly game.  If you are a par­ent and con­sid­er­ing to get this for your child I would urge you to not  as this game is bru­tal and vio­lent and has sev­eral sex­u­ally explicit scenes through­out the game.