So, in case you have not already heard, Steve Jobs announced Apple’s long-talked about iPad today in San Francisco. The iPad features a 9.7” screen and full App Store compatibility. It will also be connected to what was announced as the iBooks store, Apple’s answer to the e-Reader marketplace. It does not, however, feature a camera or the ability to run multiple applications at once.
The 64GB model will retail for $699 without 3G capability and $829 with.
Playing through BioWare’s 2007 action-RPG, Mass Effect, I was amazed at how drawn into the story I was – an entire universe opening up before my eyes as I, along with the help of my very diverse crew, defeated a rogue Spectre named Saren along with an ancient and incredibly powerful sentient machine bent on destroying all life in the galaxy. Originally released on the Xbox 360, it was followed up a year later with a PC version featuring an overhauled UI. The PC version was equally incredible and when I heard that Mass Effect 2 would be released simultaneously on the Xbox 360 and PC platforms, geek fireworks went off as I polished up my mouse and keyboard for the coming adventure. Now it’s here – Mass Effect 2 for the PC, and it is amazing.
First thing to note is that BioWare allows you to import your character from the original Mass Effect into the sequel. This allows your decisions to carry over making for an experience that really feels seamless from your previous adventure. If you do not have a character to import, aside from telling you to pick up and play Mass Effect right now – it was great, you shouldn’t worry as BioWare has found some clever moments and ways in the sequel to flesh out the various decisions you needed to make in the original game.
The game opens a short while after the first game ‘ends’ and, without spoiling anything, something so horrific happens that the game flashes forward two years into the future. Shepard wakes up in an unknown location with strange faces and a splitting headache as he is thrust into combat right away.
Mass Effect 2 is a lot more third-person shooter than RPG where its combat is concerned. The game features a Gears of War-like cover system that is vital to utilize throughout the game in order to survive. By pressing the left shift key you can pause the action to bring up a command window allowing you to change your or your squad’s weapons as well as using any powers you or your squad may have. This integrated command window is seamless and the whole combat system is a work of art. It is a perfect blend between shooter and action-RPG.
Visually, Mass Effect 2 is truly a sight to behold on the PC platform – especially if you have a reasonably powerful rig. Like Dragon Age: Origins before it, BioWare has developed their visuals for the PC platform and then backed off where needed on the console variants. The only place where the visuals looked ‘off’ were the pre-rendered cutscenes showing the Normandy, your starship, making use of Mass Relays which are strewn about the galaxy. For those of your who do not know, Mass Relays harness great energies to allow passing starships to jump long distances around the cosmos. In Mass Effect 2’s PC version, these cutscenes have artifacting and pixelization – most likely due to their not being rendered in the high resolution I was running it at. However, even with this small issue the rest of the game looks beautiful.
The game’s score is excellent and features many of the themes from Mass Effect taken to a darker level. Many have said Mass Effect 2 is the ‘[The] Empire Strikes Back’ of the planned game trilogy (yes they are working on Mass Effect 3). Voice over work is top-notch, with many of the first game’s cast returning and reprising their roles along with a lot of new voices, including Martin Sheen (The Final Countdown) and Carrie-Ann Moss (The Matrix Trilogy). In-game audio effects are crisp and really ‘pop’, especially when the action gets heated – machine gun noises, biotic power hums, and people grunt and yell their battle calls. Equally-impressive are the more reserved audio effects such as the ambient noises of the Normandy when you walk about its many rooms in-between missions.
The overall gameplay is a lot like the first one in that, once you get the gist of the story, you are thrown into a large and open galaxy where you go from system to system. You can explore, recruit people for your crew, and various other types of missions. Mass Effect 2 features some new aspects to the gameplay, such as fuel management. In sectors and systems you will manually ‘pilot’ the Normandy from location to location by clicking and holding with your left mouse button. In-system travel does not cost you fuel but if you travel from system to system within a sector you will burn fuel. This fuel can be replenished at fuel depots, usually located by the sector’s Mass Relay. You will also mine planets by manually scanning them from orbit. Launching probes to a scanned area will grab minerals from which you can use to build technologies on your ship.
One very daunting fact about Mass Effect 2 is that nearly every choice you make during the game will affect its ultimate outcome. It is possible to have every member of your crew, including Shepard, killed in the final confrontation. In this case, you will NOT be able to import the character into Mass Effect 3! It is also possible, albeit VERY difficult, to lose no one in the final assault. The re-playability based on all of these various choices is huge and between checking out all the ‘what-ifs’ as well as the upcoming DLC planned for the game, it is easy to think we will still be playing Mass Effect 2 in some form by time Mass Effect 3 is released.
One area where Mass Effect 2 is lacking is in its choice of weapons. New to the series is a special heavy weapons slot in which you can equip a ‘big gun’ – this can be anything from a grenade launcher to a particle beam cannon. These special weapons do not get reloaded very often so it is important to save them for the big fights. While BioWare has added the sub-machine gun weapon type, your overall choice of weapons per category is very limited. Thankfully, you will be able to upgrade the various weapon types by researching new technologies throughout the game.
The only other part of the game I took issue with was its ‘big reveal’ which, as I stated early, I will not spoil. While I am sure it was intended to come off as cool and ominous, the way the camera is angled and audio come off it just seemed like I was watching some bad B-movie. Even the line said by Shepard during the reveal is corny. Thankfully, the final battle is still fun despite the cornball reveal and I thoroughly enjoyed the finale. After you complete the game, you are given the option to start over with your character having all the items and experience that you ended with or just continuing to explore the cosmos – getting ready for the DLC and just seeing if the decisions you made throughout the game paid off.
Mass Effect 2 is an incredible experience. It is just enough shooter for the shooter fans and just enough RPG for the RPG fans. BioWare has really outdone themselves and I can’t wait to see what they have in store for the crew of the Normandy next time. Even though it is still only January, Mass Effect 2 is easily my game of the year thus far.
*Disclosure: BioWare/EA provided GamingShogun with a copy of the PC version of Mass Effect 2 to review over the course of several days.
Square Enix Europe and Avalanche Studios have released a ‘Pre-Order Trailer’ for their upcoming Just Cause 2. The trailer shows off all the goodies you will get for pre-ordering the game, which is due out March 26th, as well as features a lot of humor – just wait until the end of the trailer. For those of you not wanting to wait through the trailer, if you pre-order the game you will receive: An agency hovercraft, a signature pistol, special assault rifle, classic car, and a parchute featuring a skull logo.
Namco Bandai has released a new dev diary for their upcoming action-shooter, Dead to Rights: Retribution. Called ‘Abbey Road’, this dev diary showcases the recording of the game’s musical score while at the Abbey Road studios in the UK.
We first saw Bayonetta in action at a private demo in SEGA’s 2008 Electronic Entertainment Expo booth. The game looked stunning and centered mainly around watching a raven-haired witch’s rear-end, clad in black leather, glisten as she walked around shooting things with a super-model’s swagger. A year and change later and we now have our very own copy of the full version of Bayonetta and a review to boot!
(Notice they have turned down the ‘glisten’ in the game’s final release)
Bayonetta is the heroine of the tale, a witch who awoke twenty years past in a coffin at the bottom of a lake with no memory of who she was. At the start of the game she is an agent working for none other than Hell itself. The religious themes in the game are very palpable, even by disguising the name of Hell by calling it ‘Inferno’ and Heaven as ‘Paradiso’. The basic enemy Bayonetta will fight are called ‘affinities’, but you may know them better as ‘angels’. Only, in Bayonetta, angels are these winged creatures who resemble the crazed hybridization of a human being and a vulture. In fact, most of the creatures from Paradiso are grotesque in some way and the game’s most human-looking characters are from Inferno. Is the director, Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya trying to tell us something about his views on religion? Quite honestly, I don’t know, but I digress as it is worth mentioning if you are of the Christian faith and looking at this title.
As for the rest of us, while many of the characters in Bayonetta may be grotesque, all of them are very beautifully-designed and Bayonetta herself is one of the best-looking females I have ever seen brought to life in a video game. Not only do the game’s various characters look good, but they also sound amazing thanks to some truly excellent voice acting.
If you have ever played a game from the Devil May Cry series, you will feel mostly at home with Bayonetta. Gameplay is controlled by using just a few buttons on the controller and combat combos are pulled off even if you don’t know their sequences most of the time. This is mainly because SEGA has crammed so many possible combos into the game that it is damn-near impossible not to hit one, even accidentally. Combat is spread mostly between Bayonetta’s numerous martial arts moves combines with her four projectile weapons, each attached to one of her limbs. On top of these are her torture and climax attacks, which can do anything from summon an iron maiden to throw your opponent into to transforming Bayonetta’s very long and flowing hair into a gigantic demon to devour them!
Throughout the course of each of the game’s many stages, you will collect numerous items, some power-ups and others just loot to sell at the store. One character, Rodin, will construct new weapons for Bayonetta to make use of as she collects more halos from the dead forces of Paradiso. The game features a number of weapons Bayonetta can use, most of them from the fallen forces of Heaven. Bayonetta’s main non-martial or magical arsenal are her guns.
There are two big issues with Bayonetta. First, there is very little instruction with the game. Due to how simple the controls are, this is not that big of a deal after a while. However, in the game’s opening battles you are not given the tutorial of how combat works and are thrown into the fight without a clue. Of course, you could read the instruction manual but, let’s be honest, who does that anymore? So, if you jump in be prepared for a bit of confusion for a couple levels until the combat tutorial is shown to you.
The second, even bigger issue is the game’s camera system. Bayonetta’s in-game camera gets stuck on objects, is often-times zoomed too far out and sometimes locked at a weird angle for you to get your bearings on what is taking place in the fights. Fights tend to be fast and furious and, coupled with this wonky camera, it’s easy to lose your Witch in the melee – especially with all the particle effects and hair flying about.
Bayonetta reeks of over-the-top style, from a ‘crazy’ Japanese remix of Bart Howard’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ to a heaping amount of the good old-fashioned ultra-violence. Even the voice work, with Bayonetta’s wry-delivery of lines in an English accent is perfect for this title. Throw in some really epic boss battles and the game is truly a sheer-action spectacular to behold.
Overall, SEGA’s Bayonetta is a fun third-person shooter game with easy controls, tons of style, and beautiful visuals that is sure to keep you entertained for a while if you can get past the wonky controls and over-the-top style (to some it may be a bit much – However, I dug it).
DISCLOSURE: SEGA provided GamingShogun.com with an evaluation copy of Bayonetta for this review.
Ubisoft has announced in their UPDATE ON THIRD FISCAL QUARTER PERFORMANCE AND ANNUAL TARGETS that Spinter Cell: Conviction has been pushed back to April of this year while R.U.S.E. will now released sometime in the fourth quarter of 2010-11.
From the Update:
‘- The postponed release dates for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction™ and R.U.S.E™, which were previously scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2009-10, and will now be released in 2010-11. Splinter Cell Conviction™ is now expected to hit the stores in April 2010.’
Activision Blizzard announced that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has passed a billion dollars in sales since its launch last November. The game is still getting some really solid purchasing numbers and all signs point to this figure growing even higher before petering out.
Official Release:
Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI) announced today that Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 continues to set sell-through records crossing the $1 billion mark… (cont.)
(cont.) …in retail sales worldwide since its launch in November, according to internal Activision estimates.
In its first five days alone, the game sold an estimated $550 million worldwide, outpacing five-day worldwide theatrical box office gross figures for such films as Avatar, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and The Dark Night, according to internal Activision estimates and boxofficemojo.com.
‘Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 has exceeded our expectations and shattered theatrical box office and video game records,’ said Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. ‘There are only a handful of entertainment properties that have ever reached the $1 billion mark, which illustrates the power of the Call of Duty franchise and mass appeal of this game.’
Modern Warfare 2 is rated ‘M’ (Mature) by the ESRB for Blood, Drug Reference, Intense Violence and Language. For additional information about the game, visit www.modernwarfare2.com.
Cryptic Studios has announced that the open beta test of their upcoming MMO, Star Trek Online, has begun. The test will run until January 26th and should give players plenty of time to get a feel for both the game’s space and ground combat. The game will be released on February 2nd, 2010 for Windows PCs.
While at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas we got some time to visit Capcom’s very fine suite, on the 30th-floor of the Planet Hollywood hotel, and play some Lost Planet 2. We would like to thank Capcom for giving us great access to their upcoming shooter, which is due out sometime this year.
In this latest installment of the Dante’s Inferno circle of Hell trailer, they focus on Fraud – the 8th circle. Fraud is full of all manner of evil creatures, many of which were sent there for being deceitful in their mortal lives. I can’t wait to see what EA has up its sleeve for the ninth circle of Hell, Trechery, which is due to be showcased on February 9th.
