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 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

June 28, 2011

Crysis 2 DX11 Patch Released and Comparison

Today Cry­tec released it’s long awaited DX11 patch for Cry­sis II.  The DX11 con­tent, high res tex­tures, and updated visu­als have been a source of much debate within the PC and even con­sole com­mu­ni­ties.  PC gamers argue that the con­tent should of been released with the game instead of wait­ing sev­eral months after it’s release to be put out.  Many PC gamers claim that the DX11 patch is to lit­tle to late and that by “alien­at­ing” their core audi­ence, the PC com­mu­nity, that they have lost the fol­low­ing that they might of oth­er­wise had. 

Regard­less of where you stand on the mat­ter the DX11 patch is avail­able for you to down­load here and it is a free down­load to those who have pur­chased the game.  There are sev­eral dif­fer­ent con­tent packs that you can down­load depend­ing on what you want.  Each one has dif­fer­ent sys­tem require­ments so be sure to check them before you down­load them. 

What do you guys think to lit­tle to late?  Or just a great addi­tion to a good game?  Let us know! We want to know!

The patch fea­tures are listed below:

Cry­sis 2 Patch 1.9

• Added Con­tact Shad­ows
• Added DX11 sup­port for Cry­sis 2 (the fol­low­ing fea­tures only work when down­load­ing the optional DX11 pack­age here):
• — Tes­sel­la­tion + Dis­place­ment Map­ping
• — High Qual­ity HDR Motion Blur
• — Real­is­tic Shad­ows with Vari­able Penum­bra
• — Sprite Based Bokeh Depth of Field
• — Par­al­lax Occlu­sion Map­ping
• — Par­ti­cles Motion Blur, Shad­ows and Art Updates
• — Water Ren­der­ing improve­ments and using Tes­sel­la­tion + Dis­place­ment Map­ping
• Added Real­time Local Reflec­tions
• Added sup­port for Higher Res Tex­tures Pack­age
• Added var­i­ous new con­sole vari­ables to whitelist
• Fixed bul­let pen­e­tra­tion, which had been bro­ken by a bug intro­duced with the DLC 2 patch
• Fixed issue in MP where player stats weren’t always saved at the end of a game
• Fixed issue in MP where player stats would some­times ran­domly reset
• Fixed issue with MP time played sta­tis­tic, which would some­times be too low on leader­boards and in stats
• Fixed issue with JAW rocket not fir­ing through window’s con­tain­ing bro­ken glass
• Fixed rare issue where a user could not access MP with a valid CD key if they had pre­vi­ously used an invalid CD key
• Improved advanced graph­ics options menu
• Improved anti-cheat mea­sure­ments: fixed exploit which could pre­vent vote kick­ing work­ing against a user
• Improved multi-GPU sup­port
• Improved Tone Map­ping
• Re-added pos­si­bil­ity to enable r_StereoSupportAMD via con­fig file (unsupported)

I’ve also snagged some side by side com­par­isons of DX9 vs DX11:

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

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 26, 2011

Subscriptions VS Microtransactions

With advance­ments in gam­ing come new ways for the indus­try to get our money. How­ever with EA giv­ing way to the “online pass” codes trend we see gam­ing head­ing in a new direc­tion. Now we see free to play, pay to play, and all thats in between pop­ping up all over.

Sub­scrip­tions — Ahh the famil­iar feel­ings. Pay for a month? Three months? A year? Two years? Hope­fully this game lasts that long. Sub­scrip­tion based games rode the MMO wagon to become a stan­dard for a lot of games and gam­ing ser­vices. I am sure the first guy to see a pay to play game said, “Ha! That will never work.” Now that same guy does his best to scrape together enough money to get another month of WoW access like a crack­head get­ting his fix. Suc­cess in the MMO world led Micr­soft to charge a sub­scrip­tion for its Xbox Live con­tent. Even Playsta­tion Net­work finally  jumped on the bus when they saw how suc­cess­ful it was. More and more we are start­ing to see new games released with pass codes or codes for add-ons. Now whis­pers are being heard of pos­si­bly charg­ing a flat sub­scrip­tion fee and get­ting access to all the new con­tent as it comes. Will you want to pay for Xbox Live, a new game, and a sub­scrip­tion for play­ing that game? Seems a bit much to me.

Micro­trans­ac­tions — The other side of the coin. Micro­trans­ac­tions are the newest fad in the gam­ing world but they actu­ally aren’t as new as you think. Xbox Live charges micro­trans­ac­tions every­time a user buys Microsoft points. What is newer is the way these trans­ac­tions are pre­sented. They are wrapped secretly in a “free to play” game. A per­fect exam­ple is League of Leg­ends, a top down action real time strat­egy tower defense game. It is absolutely free to down­load and play. Every­thing can be unlocked in game by sim­ply putting in time to the game. How­ever for a few dol­lars here and there you can speed up the process to get ahead. The suc­cess this in PC games like League of Leg­ends has got­ten Steams atten­tion. Steam announced a new direc­tion of free to play games using the micro­trans­ac­tion method. Even Xbox is rumored to be get­ting new games as well.

As with every­thing it all has to do with money. How much can they get from us and how much are we will­ing to pay? Some like the idea some don’t. Prices will be the biggest issue. If I have to pay for a game, pay for a ser­vice to play it, or pay for in game con­tent to be able to con­tend in game, what will that cost me?

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 — Sony

Well Day one of E3 is in the books and it ended with Sony. Now Sony had a ton of pres­sure to be great this year due to the PSN hack. Well lets just say I think they hit a home­run. They had to step it up and they did just that. After the apolo­gies and thanks for sup­port here’s what they gave us:

Uncharted 3 — Beta June 28 — Full game Nov 1 — We got a look at Uncharted 3 which looked amaz­ing. The game­play had Drake sneak­ing around a cruise ship dur­ing a ter­ri­ble storm. As you nav­i­gate the ship you and object around you con­tin­u­ously sway with the choppy seas out side. Even­tu­ally the ship gets a hole and starts flood­ing and then all of the sud­den the ship rolls onto its side adding a whole new level lay­out. It was a very impres­sive sneak peak.

Resis­tance 3 — Sept 6 - This install­ment takes place 4 years after the pre­vi­ous game and its all out war again. All new weapons and great graph­ics add to the lure. Also Resis­tance 3 will be capad­able with the PS Move. On Sept 6 there will be a spe­cial bun­dle that will include the game, the PS eye cam­era, Nav­i­ga­tion con­troller, PS move con­troller, and the sharp shooter con­troller all for $150.

God of War, Ico, and Shadow of Col­los­sus — All these games games are get­ting remas­terd col­lec­tions in 3D.

Playsta­tion will box a 24 inch 3D dis­play, 3D glasses, 6ft HDMI cord, and Resis­tance 3 for $499.

NBA2K12 — This title will include a new NBA on the Move fea­ture that uses the PS Move.

Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest — Fall 2011 — This will be a PS Move game set in a fan­tasy world. There will be no inven­tory or weapon select. The ges­tures you make with the Move con­troller will select the weapon auto­mat­i­cally. The game will fea­ture dif­fer­ent branch­ing paths all filled with puz­zles to get through them.

Infa­mous 2 — Gave us another trailer and later this year there will be an update to cus­tomize game­play and the addi­tion PS Move capability.

Lit­tle Big Planet 2 — Will get an update this year for the PS Move functionality

Star Hawk - this is the sequal to War Hawk and they gave us a trailer which looked fairly good.

Sly Cooper Theives in Time — 2012 - All we really got to see was a lit­tle trailer, hope­fully more to come

Dust 514 — closed beta late 2011 — full game spring 2012 — Dust will be a Playsta­tion exclu­sive. It’s a first per­son shooter that will be con­nected with the PC MMO Eve Online. It will also have a PS Move func­tion as well as PS Vita functionality.

Bioshock Infi­nite — Bioshocks new trailer looked fan­tas­tic and it will have uses for PS Move. The PS3 ver­sion of the game will come with Bioshock 1 on it.  Also as a side note there will be a game based in the Bioshock uni­verse for the PS Vita.

Saints Row — All we got was a release date of Nov 15

Star Trek — 2012 - This will be a co-op based game with PS Move func­tion­al­ity based on the J.J Abrams movie. It will also be in 3D. There will a pre­quel to the game as a dig­i­tal down­load. There will be a spe­cial phaser Move con­troller that you will be able to buy as well.

SSX — Playsta­tion 3 will have and exclu­sive Mt. Fugi course.

Need for Speed The Run — PS3 ver­sion will have seven extra cars to choose from.

Bat­tle­field 3 — PS3 ver­sion will include Bat­tle­field 1943.

NGP/ PS Vita — Hol­i­day 2011 — It has been offi­cially named the Playsta­tion Vita. Includes dual cam­eras, dual con­trol sticks, dual touch pads, axis con­trols, and a five inch touch screen. There will be two ver­sions. One with Wi-Fi and one with 3G capa­bil­ity. Playsta­tion will part­ner with AT&T for the 3G ver­sion. Wi-Fi ver­sion will cost $249.99 and the 3G will cost $299.99. There are 80 games in devel­op­ment and it will have cross play functionality.

Uncharted Golden Abyss — PS Vita game. Will use touch screen for more sim­ple con­trols. It had good visuals.

Ruin — Ruin is an action based rpg for the PS Vita. It will use a class sys­tem in a fan­tasy set­ting. It will use the cross play func­tion for the PS3 ver­sion. You can save on the Vita and then load from the same spot on the PS3.

Mod Nation Rac­ers — This will be a brand new Mod Nation Racer exclu­sively for the PS Vita. You will have a new track cus­tomiza­tion using its touch screen. Using the touch screen you can cre­ate banks for turns, jumps, moun­tains and lakes. There will 2 mil­lion cre­ated items already for use on day one.

Lit­tle Big Planet — There will be a PS Vita ver­sion with tons and tons of online/ com­mu­nity features.

Street Fighter X Tekken — We got to see a small trailer and found out Cole from Infa­mous will be a play­ble char­ac­ter. There will also be a PS Vita ver­sion with Cole as well.

We did not see Kevin But­ler which bummed me a lit­tle, but Sony did a great job in my opin­ion. Sony needed a good show­ing and I felt they did just that. We got dates and prices which is always good. I have a feel­ing they took a leap away from the PSN hack and now peo­ple will be get­ting back on board with Sony.

June 6, 2011

E3 2011 – Microsoft– All things Halo

What would E3 be wit out the fran­chise that cre­ated the Xbox? We know Bungie departed the series with Reach and the reins would be handed over to 343 Indus­tries, which is ran by for­mer Bungie mem­ber Frank O’Connor. Dur­ing Microsoft’s press brief­ing not one, but two Halo games were announced; mak­ing the scream­ing fan boy inside me cry tears of joy.

Halo: Com­bat Evolved Anniver­sary is just what we expected and has been wait­ing for. The game is the orig­i­nal Xbox hit with a shiny new coat of paint with online co-op and mul­ti­player. I was able to catch the inter­view Spike/Gametrailers had with Frank O’Connor. From what I gath­ered the game is essen­tially the Xbox game down to its core. There has been no tweak­ing of level design, or how the game plays; it was just a graph­i­cal over­haul to show the game some mod­ern love. In the inter­view they tried to get the pric­ing out of Frank but to no avail they could not. He did how ever say that it will not be $59.99. $39.99 for a beau­ti­ful remake and an online suite with re-mastered mul­ti­player, I’m in! The game will hit retail on Novem­ber 15^th 2011.

If that was not enough Halo for you, Microsoft and 343 had one more sur­prise; Halo 4. The Mas­ter Chief is back in all his green glory. No game play was shown but we did get one hell of a teaser trailer from the direc­to­r­ial mind of Joseph Kosin­ski (TRON: Legacy, “Starry Night” Halo 3 ad). The trailer, as beau­ti­ful as it was, is short and didn’t offer much in the way of story but the Chief and Cor­tana end up on that planet that was shown at the end of Halo 3s leg­endary end­ing (yes I spoiled it, it’s been 4 years if you haven’t beat it by now, tough), thought by the internet’s to be Marathon. There is not much info at this time besides the trailer but the game isn’t due out till fall of 2012. Until then keep an eye out as this Halo nut will bring you any fur­ther information.         

 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– 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.