December 4, 2011

Uncharted 3: The Review

As many of you already know I’m an avid PC gamer and there are very few games out­side of the PC sys­tem that I enjoy.  Uncharted is one of those fran­chises, one that I thor­oughly enjoy and when I heard that Uncharted 3 was com­ing to the PS3 I was very excited.  As with all sequels today I’m always wary of a sell­out, under­de­vel­oped or oth­er­wise incom­plete release.  I’m happy to say that the Uncharted fran­chise hasn’t and still does not suf­fer from any of these calamities. 

Out of all three I’d have to say this one is my favorite.  Gen­er­ally games don’t hold my inter­est for more then a few hours before I set them down and pick up some­thing but Uncharted 3 as with it’s pre­de­ces­sors held my inter­est from start to fin­ish and I even found myself want­ing to go through another play through.

Graph­i­cally Uncharted 3 is the best look­ing game on the PS3 if not the best look­ing game on both the PS3 and Xbox 360.  I know I will get flack from many Cry­sis 2 diehards but there sim­ply isn’t a pret­tier game on either con­sole sys­tem.  It’s also rivals many mod­ern PC titles which is say­ing a lot com­ing from me, some­one who gen­er­ally doesn’t think con­soles games hold a light to mod­ern PC titles.  Uncharted 3 takes you across the globe to many var­ied envi­ron­ments all of which have an incred­i­ble amount of detail put into them.  The only other game I can think of in recent his­tory that paid this much atten­tion to details is Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion.  One thing that I really noticed that really stood out to me is the char­ac­ter ani­ma­tions.  Drake has some incred­i­bly life like reac­tions not only in the way he moves but in the way he reacts to whats going on around him.  For exam­ple if you run by some­thing and you are very close he will react with his hands and body like he is avoid­ing the impact.  Or if things are explod­ing around him he duck and cover his head and slightly stum­ble as he is run­ning away.  Drake also has some swag­ger in his walk instead of the generic walk and run.  It’s lit­tle details like this that help add to an amaz­ing over­all experience.

The story, like it’s predaces­sors, is fan­tas­tic,  it’s grip­ping, excit­ing and cap­ti­vat­ing.  If you are a sucker for a good story like me Uncharted 3 will not dis­ap­point.   It picks up shortly after the events of the sec­ond but it also cov­ers and explains alot about Drakes child­hood and what made him what he was.  The chap­ters that cover Drakes child­hood are suprisignly inter­est­ing.  I didn’t think I would like them at first but I actu­ally enjoyed them.  I won’t spoil any­thing for you but it’s my favorite of the series thus far and it had my favorite ending. 

In addi­tion to being one of if not the best look­ing game out on any con­sole sys­tem it also sounds amaz­ing.  I have an Onkyo 7.1 1000 watt sur­round sys­tem and there are plenty of bass booms, explo­sions, chat­ter­ing of machine gun fire to anger even the most tol­er­ant of neigh­bors.  The voice act­ing is also top notch and that is actu­ally one of the things I most appre­ci­ate about the Uncharted fran­chise.  They don’t and haven’t skimped on get­ting qual­ity actors to do their voice overs.  There are plenty of cheesy and witty lines through­out and good vocal responses to what­ever is going on around you. 

Uncharted 3 does have some minor annoy­ances but noth­ing major.  There are some times here drake will get stuck in the ground, on a wall or in a rock… I had it hap­pen a cou­ple of times and I had to reload to a pre­vi­ous check point.  I also had times when I could not change weapons, reload or fire the weapon (no I wasn’t in a cutscene) and I would quickly get killed.   The other com­plaint I had, and this could be because I suck with con­trollers, is that the dif­fi­cultly seemed to vary a lot.  It would go from crazy easy to oh my god what does it take to kill this guy. 

One other thing that I really enjoyed about Uncharted 3 is it’s fist fights.  I’ve not seen a game with good hand to hand com­bat since the Matrix and I don’t think any game in recent his­tory has done fist fights well.   They took me down nos­tal­gia game to the old Clint East­wood and John Wayne movies.  I’d have to say they were one of my favorite aspecst of Uncharted 3.

Is Uncharted 3 a per­fect game?  Almost, it had a cou­ple of issues that kept me from giv­ing a other per­fect game a per­fect score.  Uncharted is a MUST have title for PS3 own­ers and for any gamer for that mat­ter.  Uncharted 3 is my favorite game on the PS3 and one of my top 5 to ever come out on the PS3 and the Xbox 360.   The more expe­ri­enced con­sole, who doesn’t suck with the con­trols like I do should get around 8 — 10 hours  on the first play through.  I took about 12 hours on my first playthrough but I attribute that to my ter­ri­ble han­dling.   Over­all Uncharted 3 is the pre­miere expe­ri­ence on the PS3.  Do your­self, your friends and fam­ily a favor and get this game for your­self and for them. 

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHHcM6aHPnE

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVkL2l21faQ&feature=relmfu

October 24, 2011

Battlefield 3 Release Date Pushed Up

Accord­ing to the realase date checker on Ori­gin, Bat­tle­field 3 will now be unlocked at 10 PM Moun­tain stan­dard time.  This is fan­tas­tic news for those who were want­ing to play the game before they had to go to work the next morn­ing.  I’ve already pre­down­loaded BF3 and am wait­ing anx­iously for the unlock.  Stay tuned to TGB for the review!

Bat­tle­field 3 was orig­i­nally set to unlock at on Octo­ber 25^th at 1 AM on EA’s Ori­gin.  The game will now unlock at Octo­ber 24 at 10PM.  See you all on the Battlefield!

September 30, 2011

Video Awesomeness: Battlefield Edition

To kick off the open Beta for the highly antic­i­pated release (BY ME!) of Bat­tle­field 3, I thought it would be cool to visit the Lin­eage that the Bat­tle­field series has brought to the gam­ing com­mu­nity from PC to con­sole this is a strate­gic think­ing man’s shooter! So instead of me ram­bling on about the past here’s Adam Sessler (one of the only good things G4 TV has to offer). He basi­cally sums up the series through Bat­tle­field 1943 in three minutes:

When Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany came along I totally got into the series (sorry PC guys Dice mussed up not putting this one out for you!) The story was a mod­ern day ver­sion of Kelly’s Heroes, one of my favorite World War II movies from back in the day, which added com­edy and an enter­tain­ing cam­paign to this almost exclu­sive Mul­ti­player only series adding to its allure.
When Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany 2 released you could tell Dice was lis­ten­ing (as always) and released BC2 on ALL plat­forms with bet­ter con­trols lead­ing to an even more amaz­ing mul­ti­player experience!

Oh did I forget….FROSTBITE and DISTRUCTION 2.0 this is the engine that brought us destruc­tible envi­ron­ments!

I know there is so much in the Bat­tle­field series that I didn’t point out, but we’re here for some Bat­tle­field 3! Now I had early access to the beta on the Xbox (if you bought MOH Lim­ited Ed. you should have been there too) and for all its short com­ings (I’m in total belief that EA gave us the Alpha just to shut us up!) this is going to be a great addi­tion to the fran­chise. That being said looks like Dice has made up a cam­paign that might be as good as the mul­ti­player end…..
Here’s some of the story that you will experience:

Yes there are vehi­cles!.…

I can’t believe this is off the Xbox!…

Now that we’ve seen the cam­paign, how about some mul­ti­player being that we all will be los­ing sleep at the end of Octo­ber! There will be 24 play­ers on the con­soles and 64 for the PC! Ground as well as Air yes there will be jets!!!!!! The com­bat looks intense as ever so b e ready to drop so time into Bat­tle­field 3!

Pixel Enemy had some exclu­sive extended footage from the demo above, here it is!

You know if ya got 99 problems……play BF3! See you all on the Bat­tle­field I’ll be the one arm­ing the M-COM!

September 29, 2011

Battlefield 3 Beta Starts Today and Costs How Much?

By now every­one knows that the beta for the upcom­ing release Bat­tle­filed 3 is now avail­able for every­one to play on PC, Xbox and PS3.  I decided to first down­load it on my Xbox and went to the dash­board to down­load it when I run into the pic­ture above.  I was mildly shocked when I was told it was going to cost me 429,496,795 Xbox 360 points.  That comes to a grand total, at $19.99 for 1600 points of $5,360,025.58 dol­lars.  I don’t know, that seems a bit pricey, espe­cially for a beta.  But you know, we are in a reces­sion, gotta do what it takes to make ends meet.  We all know EA is hurt­ing for money these days.  

In all seri­ous­ness it will not cost any­thing to play the beta but you will have to pay for the full game.  The beta release will fea­ture fea­ture 2 maps on the PC and 1 map for the Xbox 360 and PS3 play­ers (sorry guys).  It also fea­tures a good num­ber of weapons which are all unlockable. 

For those of you who got early access and have already formed some opin­ions please let us know your thoughts.  What did you think?  Did it hold up to expec­ta­tions?  Were you under­whelmed?  Let us know!

August 17, 2011

Upcoming Goodies

Just a heads up some good stuff being shown at Gamescon going on right now. A cou­ple of titles I know I am look­ing for­ward to.

August 12, 2011

Counter Strike : Global Offensive… It’s Finally Coming.

Valve has just announced the upcom­ing 2012 release of a new Counter-Strike title for PC and Next Gen con­soles, Counter-Strike: Global Offen­sive.   It’s bee n 12 long years since counter strike took the world gam­ing indus­try by storm.  Start­ing off as a sim­ple Half-Life mod, Counter-Strike became one of the most wid­ley rec­og­nized FPS titles in the indus­try and is still widely played 12 years after it’s release.  Here is the off­i­cal state­ment from Valve:

“Next Gen Con­sole, PC, and Mac Release Tar­geted for Early 2012

Valve, cre­ators of best-selling game fran­chises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Por­tal, and Team Fortress) and lead­ing tech­nolo­gies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Counter-Strike: Global Offen­sive (CS: GO).

Tar­geted for release via Playsta­tion Net­work, Xbox Live Arcade, and Steam (for PC and Mac) in early 2012, CS: GO will expand upon the team-based action game­play that it pio­neered when it was launched exactly 12 years ago (CS beta 1, August 1999).

CS: GO fea­tures new maps, char­ac­ters, and weapons and deliv­ers updated ver­sions of the clas­sic CS con­tent (de_dust, etc.). In addi­tion, CS: GO will intro­duce new game­play modes, match­mak­ing, leader boards, and more.

“Counter-Strike took the gam­ing indus­try by sur­prise when the unlikely MOD became the most played online PC action game in the world almost imme­di­ately after its release in August 1999,” said Doug Lom­bardi at Valve. “For the past 12 years, it has con­tin­ued to be one of the most-played games in the world, head­line com­pet­i­tive gam­ing tour­na­ments and sell­ing over 25 mil­lion units world­wide across the fran­chise. CS: GO promises to expand on CS’ award-winning game­play and deliver it to gamers on the PC as well as the next gen con­soles and the Mac.”

CS: GO is being devel­oped by Valve in coop­er­a­tion with Seattle-based Hid­den Path Enter­tain­ment. The title is tar­geted for release in early 2012 and will be playable at this year’s PAX Prime and Eurogamer Expo 2011.”

With the upcom­ing releases of Bat­tle­filed 3 and Call of Duty: Mod­ern War­fare 3 it will be inter­est­ing to see what Valve is going to bring to the table with it’s new shooter.  Valve is known for it’s qual­ity games and we should expect noth­ing less from their upcom­ing release. 

Counter-Strike: Global Offen­sive will NOT be PC exclu­sive and will be released on mul­ti­ple platforms.

August 11, 2011

Angry Gamers Appeal to Blizzard… Pure Rage

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDYjljdje-g&feature=player_embedded

Bliz­zards recent annouce­ment that Dia­blo III would be online only has gen­er­ated a lot of rage in the PC gam­ing com­mu­nity.   For exam­ple, the man above, has some choice words for Bliz­zard about their recent busi­ness deci­sion to make Dia­ble III online only.  While I and the videos author are on the same page for Bliz­zards deci­sion and  I might even con­sider send­ing them a let­ter to appeal their dec­sion.  How­ever, I don’t think the author of this video will accom­plish that.  It doesn’t really give the pro­fes­sional vibe that one might want in a busi­ness letter.

August 6, 2011

Blizzard Responds to Communities “Online Only” Complaints

Bliz­zards recent announce­ment that their newest release would be fol­low­ing the “Online Only” model has gen­earted a large num­ber of com­plaints.  Bliz­zard recently took the time to address those com­ments.  Here is what they had to say:

“We thought about this quite a bit,” said exec­u­tive pro­ducer Rob Pardo ear­lier this week. “One of the things that we felt was really import was that if you did play offline, if we allowed for that expe­ri­ence, you’d start a char­ac­ter, you’d get him all the way to level 20 or level 30 or level 40 or what have you, and then at that point you might decide to want to ven­ture onto Battle.net. But you’d have to start a char­ac­ter from scratch, because there’d be no way for us to guar­an­tee no cheats were involved, if we let you play on the client and then take that char­ac­ter online.”

Senior pro­ducer Alex May­berry told MTV that gamers can play by them­selves, but the char­ac­ters are stored on Blizzard’s Battle.net servers. “You have to authen­ti­cate through our servers to be able to play the game,” he said. “I think it’s not just ‘Dia­blo 3′ but with our games as a whole we’re tying every­thing into Battle.net these days…We can pro­vide a much a much more sta­ble, con­nected, safer expe­ri­ence than we could if we let peo­ple play off-line.”

In addi­tion to the player char­ac­ter aspect, the single-player mode will have Battle.net ele­ments includ­ing a per­sis­tent friends list, cross-game chat via the RealID sys­tem, player ver­sus player and more. These require a con­stant Inter­net con­nec­tion obviously.

But despite the rea­sons behind the always-connected require­ments, fans are not happy with the deci­sion. MTV uses this post­ing on Red­dit as an exam­ple which has more than 2,700 com­ments, most of which express their dis­taste for the always-connected requirement.

“I’m actu­ally kind of sur­prised in terms of there even being a ques­tion in today’s age around online play and the require­ment around that,” said Blizzard’s vice pres­i­dent of online tech­nolo­gies Robert Briden­becker. “We’ve been doing online game­play for 15 years now…and with ‘World of War­Craft’ and our roots in Battle.net and now with ‘Dia­blo 3,’ it really is just the nature of how things are going, the nature of the indus­try. When you look at every­thing you get by hav­ing that per­sis­tent con­nec­tion on the servers, you can­not ignore the power and the draw of that.”

“You’re guar­an­tee­ing that there are no hacks, no dupes,” he said. “All of these things were points of dis­cus­sion, but the whole copy pro­tec­tion, piracy thing, that’s not really enter­ing into why we want to do it. I’m a huge pur­veyor of online sites and from my stand­point, I don’t look at DRM solu­tions and go, ‘Wow, those are awe­some.’ I look at those and say, ‘Wow, those kind of suck.’ But if there’s a com­pelling rea­son for you to have that online con­nec­tiv­ity that enhances the game­play, that doesn’t suck. That’s awesome.

While it is appre­ci­ated that they are try­ing to pro­vide a “safer” expe­ri­ence many peo­ple pre­fer not to have their con­tent con­trolled.  Their state­ment that it wasn’t about piracy is a half truth.  Piracy is a big deal on the PC plat­form but not as big as it used to be.  This is another prime exam­ple of block­ing user made con­tent.  If users can’t cre­ate their own con­tent then they will be forced to pur­chase it from Bliz­zard.  This is 95% likely a move to drive more revenues. 

Source: Toms Hardware

August 3, 2011

Borderlands 2

Well the good peo­ple out of 2K Games and Gear­box have announced Bor­der­lands 2. The game is cur­rently in devel­op­ment and is set for an April 2012 release. Bor­der­lands 2 will fea­ture new char­ac­ters, weapons, equip­ment, envi­ron­ments, and enimies. The game will be avail­able for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. April 2012 too long to wait? Well then you need to head to Gamescon 2011 Aug. 17-21^st or PAX Prime Aug. 26-28^th where they will be demo­ing the game.

For more info on Bor­der­lands 2 or the first Borderlands visit

  www.borderlandsthegame.com

July 20, 2011

Dead Island — Left 4 Dead 2 on Steroids

Today while I brows­ing the Inter­net for new and upcom­ing games I ran across this game which appears like it is going to give Left 4 Dead a run for it’s money.  If going by the trailer, which was prob­a­bly one of the most heart break­ing trail­ers I have ever seen, is any indi­ca­tor on how the game is going to be… it will be amazing. 

Zom­bie Games appear to be com­ing out of the wood work lately ever since the ever pop­u­lar Left 4 Dead series hit the mar­ket.  The Left 4 Dead series is by far the most pop­u­lar zom­bie apoc­a­lypse fran­chise fol­lowed by Dead Ris­ing.  This is the first ‘zom­bie’ title I’ve seen in some time to actu­ally look   like it might be worth the money it costs.  I’ve gone ahead and col­lected some videos and pho­tos Dead Island.

Dead island is also sup­posed to include some RPG ele­ments along with a good story mode, machete throw­ing and I’m sure a plethora of weapons.  It will be inter­est­ing to see what kind of enhance­ments they give it to com­pete with Left 4 Dead.

Prob­a­bly the most sad trailer I have ever seen…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVzRo39P31I