Archive - 2012

The Old Republic is Free this Weekend

2012/03/13
Jerry Paxton
News

Now, even more gamers can experience the massively multiplayer online game that is taking the world by storm! Starting this Thursday, players around the world will be able to jump in and experience Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ in the first Weekend Pass Free* Trial. This limited time opportunity will give individuals who don’t already have a previously-active Star Wars: The Old Republic account a chance to experience the groundbreaking, story-driven MMO from EA, BioWare and LucasArts for up to four days for free, with no payment method required.

Individuals who take part in the Weekend Pass will be able to experience the opening adventures of each of the eight character classes in the game, exploring both their Origin World and may even have the opportunity to visit their faction’s Capital World. Additionally, Weekend Pass players will have the chance to face off against other players in PvP Warzones, or join up with friends and play through a couple of early faction-specific Flashpoints in the game, The Esseles and The Black Talon.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is one of the most critically acclaimed MMOs of all time, having won MSNBC’s “Game of the Year” award, “Editor’s Choice” awards from IGN, PC Gamer and “Best MMO of 2011” awards from Game Informer, Gamespy.com, Massively, Ten Ton Hammer and more.  The game is set thousands of years before the classic Star Wars™ movies, with the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire locked in the middle of an epic, galactic war.  Players choose one of eight iconic Star Wars character classes, including the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Smuggler, Trooper, Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Bounty Hunter and Imperial Agent, becoming the hero or villain of their own personal Star Wars saga.

The Weekend Pass Free Trial opens Thursday, March 15, 12:01AM CDT and ends on Monday, March 19th at 2:00AM CDT. To learn more, visit www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com/weekendpass. Players can begin registering and creating their accounts on March 15.

Be sure to check back to www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com, as well as our Facebook and Twitter for all the latest updates.

Elder Scrolls Lawsuit Settled

2012/03/13
Jerry Paxton
News

ZeniMax® Media Inc. today announced that a settlement has been reached in the lawsuit it filed over Mojang’s applications for ownership of the ‘Scrolls’ trademark. The lawsuit was filed by ZeniMax when Mojang submitted applications covering a range of ‘Scrolls’ trademarks for use in video games and other media. In its complaint, ZeniMax cited a conflict with its longstanding trademark for ‘The Elder Scrolls’, the name of its highly-successful video game franchise published by ZeniMax Media’s publishing arm, Bethesda® Softworks.

Under the terms of the settlement, all ownership rights to the ‘Scrolls’ trademark will transfer to ZeniMax, and Mojang will assign to ZeniMax ownership of any pending “Scrolls’ trademark applications. ZeniMax has licensed the ‘Scrolls’ mark to Mojang to be used solely in conjunction with its existing Scrolls digital card game and any  add-on material it makes to that game.  The terms of the settlement bar Mojang from using the Scrolls mark for any sequel to the current card game, or any other video game.

“We are pleased to have settled this matter with Mojang amicably,” said Robert Altman, Chairman and CEO of ZeniMax. “The Elder Scrolls is an important brand to us, and with this settlement we were able to protect our valuable property rights while allowing Mojang to release their digital card game under the name they preferred.”

Armored Core V Off to Manufacture

2012/03/13
Jerry Paxton
News

SAN JOSE, Calif., (March 12, 2012) NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc. today announced ARMORED CORE® V has been approved for manufacturing to arrive heavily armed and armored in stores on March 20, 2012 in North America and on March 23, 2012 in Europe for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system.

ARMORED CORE V® revolutionizes the series with massive online multiplayer battles designed around huge team-based skirmishes on a grand scale, a robust offline mode, and a completely new atmosphere. Featuring ACs or “Armored Cores” that are customized for more strategic gameplay, ARMORED CORE V focuses on tactics and effectively utilizing the geography of a level to maximize the devastating effects of attacks. Players will be able to customize their Armored Core with countless unlockable parts creating their own personal weapons of mass destruction.

“We all know FromSoftware has a great track record of developing quality, highly immersive and addictive games, and ARMORED CORE V® will continue that tradition with new layers of strategy,” said Carlson Choi, Vice President of Marketing, NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc..

Developed by the acclaimed FromSoftware, Inc., the ARMORED CORE® franchise is renowned for its intense AC battles and customization, with ARMORED CORE V® offering 10-player multiplayer battles and over 500 parts to customize ACs into personalized war machines.

ARMORED CORE V® will be available throughout North America on March 20, 2012.  Fans pre-ordering the title from GameStop® stores across North America, as well as GameStop.com, will gain exclusive access to the ‘HEAVY ASSAULT PACK’ while supplies last, while fans who pre-order through Amazon.com will get access to the ‘RECON PACK’.  The packs will include additional weapons and parts that will help give players a competitive advantage on day one in the innovative and sophisticated online multiplayer battles of ARMORED CORE V.

For more information on the game, as well as information on additional pre-order promotions, please visit: http://www.namco.com/console/armored-core-5 and http://www.facebook.com/armoredcore.

Mass Effect 3 Leaves Me Angry – A Review (PC)

2012/03/09
Jerry Paxton
News, Reviews
24 Comments

So I just finished playing through Mass Effect 3 and thought I would write up my thoughts on this last in the first Mass Effect trilogy (not counting the mobile games). I am still decompressing a bit from a very intense gameplay experience, so there will be a lot of stream-of-consciousness typing here. Pardon me in advance. I will start this review by summing up Mass Effect 3 like so:

Mass Effect 3 is 40 hours of incredible story, ending with 10 minutes that invalidates the entire experience and will anger you. A lot.

I will save the seriously-spoiling details for after a warning below, so sit-tight. After firing up the game on my three-monitor PC gaming rig, I discovered that Mass Effect 3 does not support my widescreen resolution of 5760×1080. The menu and UI elements were all stretched in a strange way and it was not playable because of this. I turned my resolution back to 1920×1080 and finally got to begin my gaming experience. I don’t recall having this problem in Mass Effect 2, but I digress.

Mass Effect 3’s gameplay has been infused with a cover system which, on the consoles, works very well. Using keyboard and mouse on the PC, however, it seems that the developers believed that computer gamers like to use their spacebars for doing everything. Spacebar controls using things, engaging cover, jumping over objects, and sprinting. Hit spacebar too close to an object and you will duck behind it. Double click the spacebar while holding a direction key and you will Kirk-roll in that direction – unless, you are standing too close to cover and you have a good chance of utilizing it. Problem is, that you don’t always want to move to cover. Sometimes you want to run to a position or dodge. Using the spacebar for so many controls makes accurately-predicting what your character is about to do problematic when the heat of battle and fog of war take hold.

Graphically, Mass Effect 3 is just as nice to look at as Mass Effect 2. Not much has changed in this area. Sound design is also more of the same. Additionally, all the voice actors do a nice job of reprising their characters.

What positive things can be said about the game? Well, you will have a great time playing through Mass Effect 3 – awesome story arcs, character interactions, dialog choices. Just phenomenal. Seriously, a great gaming experience. Until the end.

The disappointing part of Mass Effect 3 is that you spend so much time planning out your dialog options, squad choices, etc that all of it ends up being practically meaningless. After about 40 hours of intense and exciting gameplay, no matter what you do, you end up with 3 possible endings. Endings which re-use the same cut-scenes (minus a few details in each iteration) and leave you feeling used and abused in a not-so-nice way. BioWare and Electronic Arts touted this game series as being all about player choice and character interaction. The last ten minutes of Mass Effect 3 completely ruins not only all of your choices in this game, but also your choices in the previous two games. This is a huge bait-and-switch on the part of BioWare and left me wondering what happened in the dev cycle to cause this.

 

*********SERIOUSLY-ANGERING SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!*********

 

In Mass Effect 2, you had a really well-crafted, choose-your-own-adventure end campaign of selecting crew members to do specific tasks and getting a great resolution showing the outcomes for each of them (despite the melodramatic “human reaper” thingy). So, gearing up for the final assault on the Reaper transport beam I found my first squad selection. I thought for several minutes – who shall I choose? What are the possible outcomes of doing so – fully-expecting another riveting end campaign sequence where these characters that I had grown to care about could survive or not. I selected two squad-mates and began the assault towards the beam. I kept waiting for more decisions – tasking crew members with certain things, action involving them were, depending on who I had brought along, they would live or die or affect the mission on a serious level. It never happened. Instead, I just kept fighting. Fighting and defending areas in some very intense combat. Enjoyable, but straight-forward. I reached my final run towards the beam in the face of a huge Reaper firing its beam cannons and, surprise, everyone is dead – including my two squadmates. You live, barely, and in a Modern Warfare 3 style moment, hobble towards the beam and get sucked up into the Citadel. There you meet Andersen, who also got into the beam, and the Illusive Man. No matter what you choose to do in the next five or so minutes, you finally get to the end…

You finally get to meet the entity controlling the Citadel. This entity takes the form of a child who is killed in the first portion of the game and haunts Shepard’s dreams. The entity claims it is the Citadel and created the “cycle” system where young races get to flourish and older races are killed off and turned into Reapers who then go lie in wait for another 50,000 years to go by – only to start the process over again. The reason this entity crafted the cycle system is because, given enough time, synthetic life will wipe out all organic life in the galaxy… So it created synthetic Reapers to kill organic life every 50,000 years… Hmmm…

So in order to stop synthetics from killing organics, you create synthetics to kill organics?!?

This is the part where your head should explode like it just got read “the Chewbacca defense”.

Then, you are given three choices: Kill all synthetic life, merge with the synthetic life so that organics and synthetics become as one, or try to control the Reapers and lead them away. All of these lead to the same basic cut-scenes, and there is no happy ending for Shepard (even in one where he seems to have possibly survived in a Crank-style moment). Worse yet, you get no real update on the outcomes of your squad-mates and NPC associations. Additionally, the Mass Relays are blown up in ALL of these choices. This means that, while FTL travel exists, there is no feasible way to jump across the galaxy and visit other planets. Additionally, there is this strange cut-scene of the Normandy getting chased by an energy field and breaking up, only to crash land on a jungle world. Why is this happening to the Normandy? Why are they not fighting Reapers in orbit like the rest of EVERY fleet in the galaxy (I rallied all of them). It just doesn’t make sense. I am so damned confused as to why I invested 40 hours into this experience – not to mention countless hours in the first two games.

Now, before you get all “the GEEK is taking this way to serious” on me, hear me out (and I appreciate your reading this): If Mass Effect 3 were billed as a shooter game or developed by the makers of “Extreme Rodeo”, I could overlook the whole mess of an ending. No problem. But, BioWare has gone to great lengths in touting that Mass Effect is all about player choice and character interaction. And, in large part, the game is! I was very happy with the game until the last twenty minutes or so. It actually feels like it becomes another game. I don’t know if this was an issue with development time or what. It just feels tacked-on and poorly thought out – worse yet, it invalidates all my choices I made over the 40 hours of playtime. I am very disappointed with this.

Here is the next rub…

After doing one of these three endings. Shepard is most-likely dead, Mass Relays destroyed, Normandy crashed and no word on the fate of your friends. You then find yourself back on the ship as if nothing happened. You get some cheesy “don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine” style message about continuing the adventure in multiplayer and DLC. But… Why would I want to do that?!? I know what happens. The character is dead, species cut-off from themselves, and no fricken updated on how my squad-mates turned out after taking so much time to help them through the adventure?!? There is absolutely no reason to spend money on a DLC knowing that there is no hope for the endgame.

Anyhow, thanks for reading my review/rant on this game which, if you shut the computer off right when Shepard makes it to the Beam, is pretty damned good. Just don’t play past that point and pretend that  what you are doing matters in the game’s storyline. Make up your own ending – it will be light-years better than what BioWare cooked up for the last ten minutes of the game.

KARA is Born

2012/03/08
boothby
News

Heavy Rain developer, Quantic Dream, has released another doozy of a demo with KARA. Demonstrating their new method of actor voice and motion capture, KARA tells the story of an android who is born self-aware. It is touching and emotional on a level that I haven’t seen since their highly-acclaimed Heavy Rain teaser.

Meet Kara

Sol: Exodus – A Review (PC)

2012/03/08
Judgeman
News, Reviews

I have missed the old space shooter games of my past.  Games like Tie Fighter and Wing Commander still bring a nostalgic tear to my eye when I remember how much I loved them.  So when Sol: Exodus came down the pipe, I was very excited to revisit this genre.  I had hoped that this game would help to reignite the space shooter genre.  What Sol: Exodus did do was make me rethink the games of my past and question whether those games were just as dull and boring as how this game turned out.  To me, Seamless Entertainment missed a huge opportunity to make Sol: Exodus a huge hit for people like me that wanted to play an engaging space shooter.

Story:

The story of Sol: Exodus is pretty much stripped straight from Battlestar Galactica.  You are a military pilot that is attached to a space expedition that is searching for a new planet to inhabit, since the Earth is doomed to be destroyed by our Sun.  Once you finally find a suitable planet, your expedition is attacked by a religious faction of humans that believe it is God’s will that the Earth is to be destroyed and that finding a new home is in direct opposition of what God wants.  The subsequent attack leaves only your battle cruiser intact to carry out the mission.

Sol: Exodus promises so much in the beginning, but fails to deliver on an engaging story through the six hours that it will take you to finish the game.  The story could have focused on the feelings of hopelessness of being the only ship left or focused on the religious crusade to prevent you from completing your mission, but in the end the story just fails to be interesting at all.  The  potential was here for Seamless Entertainment to deliver a fantastic story, but the actual delivery was much to short to make Sol: Exodus anything but another science fiction retread.

Game Play:

Game play for Sol: Exodus is bare bones space shooter.  You have your targeting reticule that can switch between targets by pressing a button.  Your ship is armed with blasters and missiles to shoot down your targets, and you have the ability to change your speed by using your thrusters.  The HUD helps you navigate to your checkpoint or points the way to your next target, but other then that doesn’t really do anything extra.  The game play of Sol: Exodus really falls into the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” realm.  Seamless Entertainment didn’t do anything here to push the genre into something new or exciting.

The game itself is broken up into eight missions, all pretty much the same thing.  You shoot things, defend things, and fly to certain points that the game tells you.  The repetition factor here really shows through during your time with the game.  The game also does not have an auto save feature with no way to save mid-mission, so if you fail a mission you will have to restart from the very beginning of that mission.  I had a hard time wanting to finish some of this missions once, let alone twice because I failed at the end.

Then there are the bugs.  Sol: Exodus feels like it was rushed to be released and is filled with game ending bugs.  I had a couple of missions that were failed due to my ship clipping into an object and not being able to free myself.  With the lack of a save feature mid-mission, this would send me into a frustrated string of well aimed curses, just prior to me walking away from the game.  Sol: Exodus just feels unfinished and not ready for release with these bugs.  I know that Seamless Entertainment is working on these items, since they are very active on the Steam forums, but this game is just not fun to play.

Aesthetics:

Sol: Exodus is not a very pretty game, but for some reason runs absolutely terrible on my machine.  For a game that is set with lower graphics requirements, I was surprised at how bad it would chug and look during certain game play elements.  Other then that, the art direction of the game is very generic.  The ships look like other space ships that I’ve seen in other science fictions movies and games, the planets are pretty much look the same, and the graphics of the individuals talking to you are not animated.

The voice acting is decent, but with a generic science fiction story, just does nothing to help bring the player into the world of Sol: Exodus and just doesn’t save the game from being a forgettable game.

Final Thoughts:

Seamless Entertainment really could have hit a home run with Sol: Exodus.  The space shooter genre hasn’t had a good game in years and there is a market of people, like me, that remember the good ole days of Tie Fighter.  The problems with Sol: Exodus are numerous, from a generic storyline to buggy game play and a complete lack of mid-mission saves.  But what Sol: Exodus truly fails to be is fun.  I just did not have any fun playing this game due to the many issues with the story and game play that I ran into.  When it all comes down to it, if the game isn’t fun to play, then the developers really failed in their purpose.

EA Unveils New Battlefield 3 Content

2012/03/08
Jerry Paxton
News

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – March 7, 2012 – The Battlefield™ army is over 12 Million strong and growing every day as Battlefield 3™ and its first expansion, Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand continues to recruit gamers around the world with its dynamic sandbox gameplay and state-of-the-art technology. Today, DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) studio, demonstrates its ongoing commitment to fans by unveiling three new themed digital expansion packs* that will enhance the superior Battlefield experience with fresh and innovative gameplay, new modes, unique environments and more ways to wage all-out-war on the battlefield. Powered by the Frostbite™ 2 engine, the next expansion packs are: Battlefield 3: Close Quarters in June, Battlefield 3: Armored Kill in the fall, and Battlefield 3: End Game in the winter.

  • Battlefield 3: Close Quarters – In Battlefield 3: Close Quarters, players are dropped into a frantic, infantry-only theatre of war. Frostbite 2 high definition destruction makes the environment come alive as everything from furniture to plaster gets shot to pieces. Players will feel the intensity of the world exploding around them as rubble and broken pieces pile up on the floor, while tight level design and vertical gameplay create a highly competitive environment. Battlefield 3: Close Quarters also introduces new weapons, assignments and unique dog tags to bring back to the base game.
  • Battlefield 3: Armored Kill – Following the tight infantry gameplay of Battlefield 3: Close Quarters, DICE will release Battlefield 3: Armored Kill that ups the ante for vehicular mayhem as only Battlefield can do. Featuring new driveable tanks, ATVs, mobile artillery and more, Battlefield 3: Armored Kill also delivers huge battlefields for an all-out vehicle assault, including the biggest map in Battlefield history.
  • Battlefield 3: End Game – The fourth expansion pack will ship in the winter but details remain tightly guarded.
  • Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand – Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand is available now for download for $14.99 or 1200 Microsoft points and features four of the most beloved Battlefield 2™ maps (Strike at Karkand, Gulf of Oman, Wake Island and Sharqi Peninsula), all fully re-imagined utilizing the power of the Frostbite 2 engine.

Patrick Bach, Executive Producer, Battlefield 3 said, “Instead of delivering piecemeal map packs, we’re giving players a completely new experience with every themed expansion pack to keep the action fresh. Our expansions are designed to excite our large and active fan base while attracting new recruits with gameplay that is dynamic and unpredictable every time.”

Battlefield 3 is supported by a robust, and completely free social platform called Battlelog that invites players to compete, communicate and play with friends. Gamers track personal stats, compare against other players and join a platoon in an effort to dominate the battlefield. To add to the competitive fervor, a fully integrated rent-a-server program for console players will be available for gamers to play online with friends the way they want to play in either private, public, ranked or unranked matches. For more information about these enhancements and future plans for Battlelog, please visit www.battlefield.com.