To celebrate Call of Duty: Ghosts shipping to retailers tomorrow, Activision and Infinity Ward have shared a little “It’s Call of Duty Time” infographic. Click on the thumbnail below to embiggen!
Author - Jerry Paxton
EL SEGUNDO, CA – November 4, 2013 – Konami Digital Entertainment Inc. has released details for METAL GEAR SOLID V, the two-game experience comprised of METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES and METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN.
METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES will launch Spring 2014 as a prologue to the events leading into METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN. This prologue brings all of the hallmarks of the renowned franchise in a concentrated story mode that guides players into the new gameplay mechanics against the backdrop of the expansive METAL GEAR SOLID universe.
METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES features new advances made possible by Kojima Productions’ FOX Engine, such as radical new game design, day and night cycles, and weather conditions that will all dynamically affect gameplay. The missions are designed to ease players into the new control and gameplay advances that will be an integral part of METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN.
The METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES storyline follows the series’ hero, Big Boss, as he infiltrates a remote Cuban prison camp on a rescue mission, all while trying to remain undetected. Explosive plot lines develop quickly as he finds himself on behind enemy lines with little options for help.
METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN will pick up where METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES leaves off and will plunge players into a new breed of open-world stealth action, featuring deep story arcs and dynamic gameplay as expected of a canon chapter in the METAL GEAR SOLID series. Both titles will be released for PlayStation®3, PlayStation®4, the Xbox 360 games and entertainment system and Xbox One, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft, highlighting the groundbreaking capabilities the FOX Engine brings to current and next generation consoles.
“The advanced capabilities of the FOX Engine are allowing me to express the story of METAL GEAR SOLID in a new way,” explained Hideo Kojima, Creator of the METAL GEAR SOLID series, and head of Kojima Productions. “There will be a significant difference in what METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN brings to the series, so we want to ease players into the new open world environment and its potential, allowing them to fully benefit from all that the new game offers. As such, METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES has been designed to introduce key elements, while setting up the events of METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN.”
METAL GEAR SOLID V: GROUND ZEROES will be released in Spring 2014 on PlayStation®3, PlayStation®4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One systems. The game will be available in retail stores nationwide on current generation systems for the MSRP of $29.99 or via download for $19.99. For PlayStation®4 and Xbox One, the game can be downloaded for $29.99 suggested retail price.
Each year, we at the site go into full-on Halloween mode for the entire month of October. Actually, our season began earlier this year with The Empty Grave’s early August launch. After each season, we like to take a look back and rank our favorite haunted attractions by various criteria. Here is the list of haunted attractions we got to visit this season as well as our awards!
Haunted Attraction Reviews 2013
- Los Angeles Haunted Hayride (Los Angeles, CA)
- Universal Studios Hollywood Halloween Horror Nights (Los Angeles, CA)
- Knott’s Berry Farm’s Halloween Haunt (Buena Park, CA)
- Haunted Hollywood Sports (Bellflower, CA)
- The Empty Grave (Anaheim, CA)
- Universal Studios Orlando Halloween Horror Nights (Orlando, FL)
- Rob Zombie’s Great American Nightmare (Pomona, CA)
- Six Flags Great Adventure Fright Fest (Jackson, NJ)
- Reign of Terror Haunted House (Thousand Oaks, CA)
- Big Worm’s Sherwood Scare (Northridge, CA)
- Crossroads Haunted Village (Corona, CA)
- Perdition Home (Yorba Linda, CA)
Best Value
Big Worm’s Sherwood Scare Home Haunt – This small home haunt located in Northridge, CA has some excellent narrative elements throughout its haunted house as well as a great deal of production value. Plus, you get to give $3 dollars to a good cause of fighting CF – just look out for the “man in the lake”!
Most Scary
Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights – Universal Studios might not have been quite the behemoth of scare that it was last year, but it still brought the terror in several of their well-produced mazes such as Evil Dead: Book of the Dead and Insidious: Into the Further. Their handling of these IPs was masterful and they made me jump several times during our visitations. For that, I am calling Halloween Horror Nights the “Most Scary” haunted attraction that I visited this season.
Best Monsters
Knott’s Berry Farm’s Halloween Haunt – The monsters of Knott’s Halloween Haunt have been in the scaring business since the park began its haunted event in 1973. A great deal of these monsters spend the other 11 months of the year continuing to perfect their talents at gatherings and impromptu rehearsal sessions. Many of them even create their own characters and personalities to bring to bear against the park guests and we salute their dedication and talent. Unlike some haunts where the talent feels robotic, Knott’s monsters are dynamic and truly scary.
Best Set Design
Reign of Terror Haunted House – We ended up doing a night of home haunts and other attractions we usually don’t get to reach in North LA County and I am so glad we did. The Reign of Terror haunted house in Thousand Oaks, CA features some truly amazing set design which makes guests feel like they are actually in the various sets found throughout the large attraction space. From the amazing textures on the walls to the creative use of animatronics built into the sets, the Reign of Terror is hauntingly-beautiful.
Best Overall Haunt Experience of 2013
The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride – This year, the LA Haunted Hayride once again gave Southern California something that it simply doesn’t have: A Midwestern Halloween carnival (with substantially higher production value). Aside from the frightfully fun hayride experience, guests can find delicious carnival eats as well as a talented cast of monsters and even ghost hunter presentations, fortune tellers, and a creepy walk-through maze, all set in the lonely and dark woods of Griffith Park’s “Old LA Zoo”.
VisionTek’s Radeon R9 280X is out on the market and we got the chance to take a look at one. Sharing the same card architecture as the Radeon 7970 family of GPUs, the Radeon R9 280X is basically a 7970 that has been optimized for performance.
The VisionTek Radeon R9 280X Video Card features 1 DVI, 1 HDMI and 2 Mini display port connections and supports AMD’s Eyefinity multi-display features.
Visually, the VisionTek R9 280X isn’t a huge monstrosity of a video card. It features an attractive design with a red outer shell that covers up its heat pipe cooling system. Responsible for cooling the video card are two cooling fans with special, curved fan blades to move more air at lower RPMs. The VisionTek Radeon R9 280x is powered by way of a 6-pin and 8-pin power ports and it is recommended to use at least a 750 Watt power supply.
Installing the video card is a straightforward process, and the size of the VisionTek R9 280X makes it easy to get into even cramped PC gaming chassis.
Up Next: Specifications
Namco Bandai was kind enough to send over a copy of their new PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures for the Xbox 360. PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures is platformer based on a children’s show of the same name. In it, PAC-MAN must take on the evil forces of Betrayus to save the city of Pacopolis!
Throughout the journey, PAC-MAN can be granted special, elemental powers to battle his foes – such as fire or ice-based abilities. These help break up the platforming and allow the titular character to actually be able to do some damage. The overall level design is colorful and decent – especially once you break free of the more tedious, early levels that the game puts your through. Weirdly, PAC-MAN takes on many different forms that I had not been aware he was able to do so (e.g. a giant boulder). The whole game feels a bit to me like a strange “trip”, if you get my meaning, but I think the kiddies will dig it a lot.
In a cool bit of Halloweeny goodness, the character of PAC-MAN is actually found to be somewhat disturbing in the game. I remember as a kid simply putting quarters into the arcade machine and happily-making the little yellow guy eat pellets and ghosts. Seeing him in 3D and hearing the dialog about him planning to eat his opponents borders on the macabre. But, I digress!
Overall, PAC-MAN and the Ghostly Adventures is a decent 3D platformer geared towards young kids who are fans of the TV show. It doesn’t tread any new ground in the genre but competently handles what it sets out to do. The game is available on both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms, and there is also a version out there for the Nintendo 3DS.
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Screenshots
November 1, 2013 — In 2011, Techland captivated the video game world when it released what is widely considered the greatest video game trailer of all-time for the relatively unknown at the time video game Dead Island. The trailer was viewed over 2.5 million times in the first five days and received universal praise from gaming and mainstream media outlets.
An All-new video game short, which comprises a shot–for-shot, live action adaptation of the beloved trailer, is now live on Machinima. Featuring the same iconic music, the production team matched the emotion and action of the original down to the smallest detail.
Live Action Trailer
The folks behind Reign of Terror are back at it again this year and we were lucky to be able to experience their haunted house last week. Located above the Gold’s Gym in Thousand Oaks, CA, the haunted house features a huge amount of real estate and some of the most awesome set design and build quality I have ever seen in a haunt. Tickets are reasonably priced at $15 dollars each and, after purchasing, we were ushered around the backside of the gym and up a rear staircase. Once on the second floor, we found ourselves in an Old West mining town with a variety of sets to see. There were water features, a saloon, a small mining cavern, and a great deal more. The catch to this is that all that was just the queue line!
Once we entered the caverns signalling the start of the actual haunted house portion of the experience, we just kept getting blown away. Reign of Terror has done such a great job of making you feel like you are in the set environments. A haunted house, mortuary, science lab, prison, and a other locales will grace your journey towards the exit – each have a unique look and feel. Walls are an important aspect to any professional haunted house. You can often times judge the level of technical skills a haunt has by how they dress them. Are they simply painted plywood or have they gone the extra mile and textured them? Reign of Terror is all about the technical and their texturing is terrific.
Additionally, while there is a lot of monster talent roaming the maze, a great deal of the scares found within are animatronics-based. Usually, I have a big problem with this as it makes the attraction feel like one of those old-school carnival dark rides. Reign of Terror has done an excellent job at making them feel as organic as possible. There was even one animatronic jump scare that actually made one of our party scream a little (a large feat as we are all grizzled and jaded haunted house-goers from ‘wayback’).
Overall, the Reign of Terror Haunted House needs to be on your to-do list for next October. They are doing an outstanding job and should be commended for their efforts.
Address
197 N Moorpark Rd
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360
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Images
We had the opportunity to checkout some “home haunts” during our rounds this Halloween season, and were absolutely blown away by what the folks at “Big Worm’s Sherwood Scare” were able to create around their front and back yards. The basic theme of this haunted house is that all 64 kids attending Camp Sherwood went missing in 1975. After this event, the camp was closed – but, of course, recently re-opened. As guests of the camp, you get the chance to check it out and get more than you bargained for.
Approaching the home where Sherwood Scare is located, I was immediately impressed with the sheer length of the line to get into the attraction. This haunt has been highly-praised and we were so excited to get the chance to check it out. The attraction asks for a $3 dollar donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, so you can rest easy knowing that you are not only going to have fun but, also, give to a good cause. We were eventually ushered into the large cabin facade out front and sent towards what is usually the home’s back yard.
Around the side of the house was a really cool effect of a campsite with smoldering campfire. There was a tent where you could see a projection of two girls’ silhouettes moving about and even hear them speaking to each other. It’s fairly innocent banter, except for the cryptic stuff about the “man in the lake”. Once inside the first “room” of the haunted house, we met one of the camp counselors who showed us a really cool video to set the stage for what we were about to see. It starts as a promo video for the camp and is “taken over” by two girls who are pleading to leave (the recorded over the tape, basically). From there, you are sent into the darkness of the haunted house.
While Big Worm’s Sherwood Scare has a number of talented monsters working its winding pathways, and the duration of the experience is quite good, taking us about six minutes or so to get through, what stuck with me most was how the event kept the story of the camp going throughout. The narrative of the world they constructed was clearly present throughout and the final meeting with the “man in the lake” was a direct callback to the introductory video we watched as well as the two girls in the tent talking about it.
Big Worm’s Sherwood Scare is a very well-crafted home haunt and we can’t wait to see what they bring us next year!
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Address
8856 Encino Ave
Northridge, CA 91325
Promo Video
Montréal (November 1, 2013) – Square Enix® and Eidos-Montréal™, the award winning studio behind the critically acclaimed Deus Ex: Human Revolution® today released the first trailer in a new series of stylized videos that focus on the rich tapestry of THIEF™; its City and its characters.
Each trailer in this new series tells the story of The City from the perspective of a different character inTHIEF’s narrative describing what life is like in the broken, repressed City that is being ravaged by the evil Baron Northcrest and the mysterious sickness known as ‘The Gloom’.
The first trailer focuses on Basso, a former boxman (safe-cracker) turned fence, who uses his vast connections to The City’s underworld to organize thieving jobs for Garrett. He owns an intelligent, but bad tempered magpie called Jenivere who delivers messages for him. Garrett might consider himself a loner, but Basso is the nearest thing he has to a friend – and whether he readily admits it or not; he rather likes the fellow.
THIEF launches on February 25, 2014 in North America on Windows PC, PlayStation®3, PlayStation®4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
Trailer
October 31, 2013, Ridgewood, NJ – Kalypso Media Digital is pleased to announce a publishing agreement with Linked Dimensions GbR to publish Tank Operations: European Campaign, a classically inspired turn-based strategy game for Windows PC. In Tank Operations: European Campaign, players will take on the role of a WWII Field Marshal, blasting through 12 campaigns in turn-based warfare. More than 50 units will be available to the player, offering you control of land, sea and air as you battle the AI.
Tank Operations: European Campaign will be available via digital download this autumn.
