New MechWarrior Game

Well its been since November of 2002 when the last Mech Warrior Game came out on the PC. Not much is known about the new Mechwarrir game besides the fact that its coming out on both the PC and Xbox 360 and it will be utilizing the Unreal Engine.

So far though the game looks amazingly good almost like Graw 2 graphics. Expect much more to be released on this game in the coming months.

Battlefield 1943 Review

Battlefield 1943 has been out for just 2 days on Xbox Live Arcade and it has already become a smash hit. For only $15 or 1200MS points you can get on the best battlefield games to date.

Server Problems Right Now:
The only problem right now is well the game is so popular that the servers are having a lot of trouble keeping up with population. For most people you can expect to wait any where from 5 minutes to up to 2 hours. It seems to vary depending on the person - For me I do not have to wait any longer than 5 minutes. Also right now you cannot join a friends match what so ever. We tried all night to join each others matches and neither public or private matches seem to work. The battlefield team is working on updating and adding more servers so expect this to only be temporarily.

Besides the temporary server problems though this game is just great. It plays great and reminds me of a call of duty mixed with the Xbox 360 Battlefield Games. My friend who has played Battlefield 1942 says it plays very similar to it. The game lets you pick from 3 classes:
A sniper class that has demolition charges to kill vehicles
A rifle class that comes with semi-automatic rifle and a gernade launcher
A submachine gun class that comes with a rocket launch as your secondary to take care of tanks

The game features a territories type of game where your team of up to 24 players trys and capture and control the 5 territories. When your team controls 3 or more you slowly eat away at the other teams bar until its completely gone and which point you win.

The game comes with 4 maps that are all islands out in the pacific. The map size is just huge and it is packed with vehicles including boats, planes, tanks, and jeeps. The game is just amazingly fun and its only $15. My advice pick this up as soon as possible because this is sure to be a huge multiplayer game for a while.

Bungie Reveals ODST's Halo 3 Maps

When Halo 3 ODST ships on September 22nd not only will you get a beta key for the upcoming Halo Reach, but you will also be recieving these three amazing maps for Halo 3. I cannot wait to play midship again, its been so long. Heres a look at the 3 new maps:

Heretic

"Heretic returns players to familiar ground as the Halo 2 arena “Midship” makes its long-rumored debut in Halo 3. The stark interior of the Pious Inquisitor might appear austere on first glance, but Heretic’s symmetrical spaces require players to execute complex strategies in order to outplay their opponents."

Citadel

"Citadel may be a long abandoned Forerunner stronghold, but its small, symmetrical confines are far from secure. Two opposing bases offer little safety for players looking for solace. Instead, Citadel forces small squads to stay in constant communication, keep their heads on a swivel, and be prepared to adjust combat tactics in close quarters."

Longshore

"Longshore lacks the commercial ships that once made it a lucrative port for Old Mombasa, but it still bustles with activity. Designed for large scale combat and well suited for smaller affairs, Longshore’s multitude of industrial buildings, elevated walks, and open inlets conspire to create a complex battleground tailored for multiple combat scenarios."

Ben Heck makes New Xbox 360 Laptop

Ben Heck has once again modded and made another Xbox 360 Laptop. This times he has added some improvements to his older models by including the new Xbox 360 Jasper Motherboard. He has also included a flush CD Drive, an IR port for use with the Xbox 360 remote, and an overall sleeker look.

The new model sports a Gateway 17 inch monitor at the native resolution of exaactly 1280 x 720 that way you can play all your games in their native 720p resolution, no bars here!

Overall the Laptop looks amazing and I really wish you could buy something like this online. For more information see article on BenHeck.com

Xbox 360 Getting Online Radio Streaming with Last.fm

Announced at E3 this year was last.fm. Last.fm is nothing more than an online radio streaming service much like pandora except it will be on your xbox. The service will be completely free to all xbox live gold members, but ad-support. It looks like you can get an ad-free version of last.fm on your xbox if you subscribe and you will also get some other extra features included.

As far as the service goes it will be available later this year and it will be accesible on the xbox 360 dashboard. Here are the main features via kotaku:

• browse artists & tracks and compile custom playlists
• share those playlists, and other recommendations, with friends via "Party Radio" (you'll also be able to listen in on the same songs/playlists together)
• create your own Last.fm station
• check out artist pages complete with photos, band info and other info like how to find similar artists.

No official release date is out yet and no word on whether last.fm will work when you are playing a game yet either.

Halo ODST will be Open World

Bungie’s latest installment in the Halo Series, Halo ODST will be the first in the series to focus completely on campaign play. That means no multiplayer what so ever. So to make the game more exciting Bungie has took some risks on the next Halo installment and made it an open world. Not too many details have been released on how this is going to work and play, but this is what we have so far from a recent interview with the Seattle Time.

"We're doing a lot of pretty neat things in terms of mixing it up, introducing some non-linearity, some free exploration," Staten told the Times. "This is also a mystery story so there's a lot more clue-finding and mystery-solving than you would normally find in a game of this kind - nothing that strays too far from the fun 'Halo' experience, but we definitely decided to take a little bit of risk and have some fun with this one."

It also was stated in the article that ODST will allow players to piece together clues to unravel the story of what happened to the other members of the ODST team. Also when a player wants to focus on the main story line they just have to head towards a specific place in the city to trigger a flashback.

Personally this kind of scares me thinking of my new halo game turning into an RPG similar to Fallout 3. Hopefully I am just being paranoid, I cannot imagine Bungie screwing up a halo game. Expect the game out on 9/22/09 and make sure to pick it up to secure yourself a beta key for Halo Reach!

Xbox Red Rings Finally Defeated?

Everybody who owns an Xbox 360 has the same fear; that one day you will turn on your system and get the dreaded "Red Rings of Death." If you don't know what I'm talking about, the red rings of death is a hardware failure that permanently kills your console. It is noticed by three of the four lights on the power button lighting up and flashing red. This lets you know your system has breathed it's last breath. There was a huge increase in the number own 360 owners who experienced this failure. So much so that Microsoft extended their warranty to 3 years to cover any broken systems.

Well now, it seems that Microsoft has finally fixed this problem that has plagued the Xbox community for awhile now. When your system gets the red rings, you can send it in to Microsoft and they will repair it for you. However, many consumers have reported sending in their console more than one time to be fixed, myself included. So what does Microsoft actually do when you send in your console? And when you get it back, are you just going to have to send it in again? Microsoft's Aaon Greenberg states that "We've improved that [repair] process," though he would not go into detail about it. "It's very quick and they may upgrade your system with the latest technology. So that works really well."

Trying to give more detail, Greenberg tells that "What we do in general, the way it works, is that they will fix it with the latest [hardware] improvements that we've applied to the current Xbox 360's. Obviously we're continuously improving the technology inside the box, not to get too technical. So they'll apply that when they make the increments to your system."

Electronics, especially ones like video game consoles, make continuous hardware improvements. Well the Xbox 360 is no different. The newest hardware installment, code named "Jasper", has reportedly already been released. How does this help with the red rings of death? Greenberg has an answer. "We're seeing great performance out of the current systems, so we're really happy with how they are performing. From friends that have had repairs done as of late, I can tell you from our own initial staff that we're seeing very strong performance from a quality standpoint."

In response to the red rings, Greenberg says, "what it comes down to is isolating and figuring out the issue, and the more that we can fix the issue, and know it's fixed, then we're good going forward. We've put the worst behind us on this, but we know there are a few lagging systems, and so we want to take those and make them right." Greenberg can't tell exactly what the new hardware updates are but, I think it's safe to say that the infamous "Red Rings of Death" are finally a thing of the past.
Article Written By: By Zack Duncan

Dead Rising 2 Teaser Trailer

Everybody out there can rejoice today because it is now official that dead rising 2 is coming out! It looks like we now have something to actually look forward to now. the teaser trailer reminds me of the old Halo 3 teaser trailer and what I could get out of it is there is zombies in vegas and a giant hamster ball. So far so good, cannot wait to hear more news on this game

Best Buy New Year Xbox 360 Game Sale

Are you upset like for passing on a deal like target had earlier this year with Cod WAW for $40. Well the good news is best buy is bringing back those great deals with a full lineup of Xbox 360 games on sale for the beginning of 2009

Full List
Ninja Gaiden II - $9.99
Facebreaker - $9.99
Condemned 2: Bloodshot - $9.99
MLB 2K8 - $9.99
Turok - $9.99

Guitar Hero III - $19.99
Guitar Hero Aerosmith - $19.99
Battlefield: Bad Company - $19.99
Quake Wars (Xbox 360) - $19.99
Unreal Tournament 3 - $19.99

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows - $39.99
Rock Band 2 - $39.99
Mercenaries 2 - $39.99
Red Alert 3 - $39.99
Saints Row 2 - $39.99
Credit to Kotaku for list

The following games are available in store and online (link to online deals)

I think i am gonna stop by best buy tonight and pick up Ninja Gaiden 2, Guitar Hero 3, and Condemed.

Skate 2 Demo Review

Well I finally got to play the new skate 2 demo last night and I was left with a bad taste in my mouth because the demo left me disappointed. Do not get me wrong though the game looks better than ever, but they really did a piss poor job on the demo and this could be the shortest demo that I have ever played. First of all there is no free skate mode there is just career mode and party mode.

Career Mode starts off with you having to create a character mode which is cool and all, but why put this in the demo? Thankfully you can skip through this pretty quickly and actually get to the skating part. The demo begins with you having to do a tutorial area having you do all the stuff you already know like ride your board, kickflip and ollie. Once you complete this you get to the actual skate park. Once you enter the skate park you can actually skate around for a bit in a really nice and well designed area. The skate park is full of half pipes, grind rails, and all the things you would like to see in your skate park. The big flaw in this demo is it has a time limit starting out at 5 minutes. You gain time by completing objectives in the demo, but in the end you seriously only have about 6 minutes to just skate. Overall the demo lasts no longer than 10 minutes.

As far as the party mode goes you get to pick up to I think 5 players. You then get to pick to do one of two events. The first one is just jumping a gap and then doing about 5 seconds of tricks. The second mode is you jumping off of a ramp and trying to do as much damage to your body as possible. It works very similar to burnout revenges crash mode. Unfortunately this mode is not online in the demo.

Overall the demo was fun, but just way too short. I can understand why they would want to do this because the last demo you could play for about 30 minutes and some people including me felt that this was a long enough skate session that there would be no point in buying the game. Now after playing this demo I really feel like I want to buy this game just so I can skate around and do mad tricks with my friends.

I also found a video of the entire demo here on gamersyde.

Skate 2 Demo Coming To Xbox 360 Tommorow

Finally the Skate 2 is almost out and the demo will be here tomorrow. The demo will feature both story mode and multi-player mode. Personally I am very excited for the skate 2 demo. Usually I do not download too many demos, but the first skate demo was so great that I am obligated to download this one. I played the original Skate demo a lot. It was the perfect demo because you could just cruise around the park doing tricks to your hearts content and that is all I really ever want out of any Skate game. Sadly I did not even buy the game because I felt that the Skate’s demo was enough to satisfy my little Tony Hawk inside of me. Hopefully EA does not screw up this demo and makes it similar to the original. Stay tuned for a demo review and expect Skate 2 in stores on January 21, 2009. In the mean time why not watch the skate 2 trailer.

Update: The demo has officially been released. It is a 1.51GB download and it does not come with multi-player in the demo as promised. Bummer, cannot wait to download this demo after work!

Guitar Hero: World Tour Drum Kit Malfunction

Guitar hero is one of the best selling rhythm games ever and was at the top until rival game Rock Band stepped up to the plate. With Rock Band's introduction of a microphone, drum set and four player co-op, Guitar Hero faced, for the first time, serious competition. But, Guitar Hero fought to get beck on top with its newest installment Guitar Hero: World Tour by adding its own microphone, new upgraded guitar, four player co-op, the ability to create your own songs from the ground up, and an all new drum kit that resembles an actual drum set better than its Rock Band counterpart.

But since its release in October the drum kit has gotten more hate mail than praise. A big difference that Activision Blizzard's drum kit has over Harmonix's Rock Band set is a sensitivity factor which tells the game how hard or how soft you are hitting the drum pad. This is incorporated in the game by different notes you may need to hit harder than others. But this innovative addition to game may be its biggest down fall.

Reports are coming from all over about sensitivity problems with this new drum kit, mainly with the red drum pad and the yellow cymbal which are located on the drum kits left side. Common reports are of both pads failing to register hits, only activate when struck in certain spots, or even being sensitive that striking one pad can even activate another one. And it appears that the problems occur on every system. I personally own the drum kit for the xbox 360 and have experienced slight issues when first playing mainly with trying to get the red pad to register my hard hits for extra points and with the foot pedal registering. But it all seems to work fine now.

A few tech-savvy people decided to tear open their drum kits to figure out the problem and on doing so noticed that manufacturers did not secure certain wires properly resulting in the sensitivity problems.

Activision is currently taking note of the recent onslaught of negative feedback from consumers and is working on several things to fix the problem. They offer a 90-day warranty to customers allowing them to return their drum kits free of charge but may not cover shipping rates and stated that they also will be offering a drum tuning kit that will allow users to fully enjoy the potential of their drum kit.
Article Written by: Zack Duncan

TGN Cincinnati Tournament After Thoughts

Well last Saturday I decided to still go to TGN Cincinnati. If you have looked at my previous post you can clearly see that I did not have high hopes before going to the tournament. Well I decided to still go. The only problem though was literally the entire week before our team kept hearing more and more bad news. The people we were going to have to could not go so we instead had to settle with local kids we knew at our school. So we were pretty much going to this tournament with a team we had never played with or practiced with before.

When we got there is was pleasantly surprised to see a conference room at the holiday in jam packed with kids playing Halo 3. I would assume there were well over 200 people there for the entire time I was at the tournament. We got there around 11 and for about the next 6 hours we watched Halo 3. The tournament was really well set-up and the worked there were really friendly. The teams there for Halo 3 were really good. There was even a handful of pro’s there including Strongside, Snipedown, and Ace. I am pretty sure there was more, but I do not follow MLG closely enough to know all of them by site. Strongside and Ace were both in the doubles tournament and they were a blast to watch play. I have never seen so many headshots before, you could definitely tell they were pro.

As far as the Gears Of War 2 tournament went it was pretty much a joke and I am pretty sure I am done playing Gears Of War 2 because it just is not that much fun to play compared to Halo 3. For GOW2, only 3 teams showed up. We had only about 30 minutes of practice and our team just got destroyed round after round by this other team who was clearly better than our hastily put together team. It might have been a different story if we had our original team there. The set-up though was awful for me atleast. We had 2 tv’s per team and were required to play split screen on these tiny 22 inch screen’s. (This was awful for me because I am used to playing on my 22 inch monitor that looks absolutely amazing and whenever I play on something else I complain like no other and that is without splitscreen!) Well we ended up getting 2nd out of 3 teams. So it was not a complete failure. We lost our $200 and our pride and we did not get anything for second because their was only 3 teams.

Another game they had going on later was Call Of Duty WAW. This was by far the saddest site I have ever seen. These kids complained so much and they all hid like 10 year old noobs the entire time. Anyone who has ever played COD knows how many annoying people play the game and these kids were twice as worse as the most annoying kid I have met on Call Of Duty.

All in all I had a good time going to the tournament because I got to watch a Halo 3 tournament and got to see some pros. It was fun, but next time I think I am just going to watch Halo 3 and not waste $200 on a tournament I knew I was not going to win.

Gears Of War 2 Tournament This Weekend

Tomorrow on Saturday December 13th I will be going to a Gears Of War 2 tournament in Cincinnati. At first I was very optomistic about the tournament. My friend signed us up. He said it was a $10,000 tournament and that was all i knew about it.

Well i decided to do my own research. the website for the tournament is halo3pro.com/. Turns out the tournament is more than just gears, it also has Guitar Hero 3, Cod, and Halo 3. Also after reading the fine print this is what i found out about the prize pool.
"TGN's Cincinnati, has an estimated Prize Pool of $3,000-$8,000. Winners will receive between 60%-90% of the total payout as soon as the competition ends, any remaining funds will be paid in 20%-50% installments every 6-8 weeks as long as the team competes in the TGN Online Pro Arena against other TGN Pro Teams."

Also the website is a joke and is hardly ever updated. Their forums are a ghost town and you cannot even sign up for the forums because their sign up utility is broke! It gets even worse, they do not even have the Gears of War 2 tournament rules yet and their Halo tournament is not even mlg settings and the freaking website is called HALO3PRO!

Well since I wanted to make some strats with my team I decided to call them yesterday. Ofcourse they did not answer the phone. So I did the next best thing and I emailed them. I told them I would like to know the rules and how many teams have signed up because I am not driving all the way down their and spending $200 for our team to come to some joke tournament. Guess what, no response!

Well tommorow is the tournament and tonight we are practicing. I cannnot wait to follow up this post and tell you how it went. If you wish to play with us tonight in a private match add my GT: BATTLEGAURD123.

Also if anyone has any information about this very sad excuse of a tournament please comment this post or message me.

Modded Xbox 360 Laptop

BenHeck has done it again. He has made something that even Microsoft cannot do. This is a really nice modded 360. It looks like the entire thing is made out of aluminum and also looks like it might weigh twice as much as a normal 360. The screen is a very nice touch and everything looks almost professionally done or certainly a lot better than most other attempts. The features on this mod is what is truly impressive.

Not only did he fit a laptop into that cramped space, fit a screen on it, and make it all out of aluminum, but I think he has not lost a single feature with this build. If you watch the video which you should you can see that he has been able to fit in the hard drive, wireless adapter, 2 memory card slot, and 1 USB slot into the laptop design.

This machine is truly impressive and the only question left to ask is when can I get one!

Epic Addresses Gears Of War 2 Matchmaking Problems

As all of you may already know Gears Of War 2 online is very slow. With Gears Of War 2 being as popular as it is this has become a big problem and many people are wanting answers.

Well Epic Games has finally coughed up a response on their forums. Here is what they had to say about the problem.
“We're aware that some folks are experiencing longer-than-ideal wait times while using the skill-based Public matchmaking in Gears 2 multiplayer. We're working on some solutions but it's a complicated issue as there isn't any one problem; it's a combination of factors. Clearly, scale is one of them as we've had millions of successful matches played online so far, however a small percentage of players are having issues, which is unacceptable. We're working closely with Microsoft to address the matchmaking issues, I promise you that it is our #1 priority, and we hope to have an update soon.”
If you ask me I have yet to run into a person that has not had a problem with Gears Of War 2 Public Matchmaking, especially elimination.

Well hopefully the fix will be here soon, but to help us out Epic has given us a few tips to find matches quicker.
• If you are seeing long waiting times or your matchmaking search keeps restarting over, try restarting the search or try a different matchmaking playlist.
• The problems happen most frequently with parties of 1 and 4. So just try not to go into a match with 1 or 4 people and to get a match the fastest go into a party of 5.
• Also try and play private matches to avoid this problem all together
• Also NAT issues will always slow down your matchmaking so for heavens sake get you NAT on open already.

These tips really do not seem like much, but hey I am glad they are at least addressing the problem and are trying to work on it. Hopefully it is fixed soon because I really do like Gears of War, but I simply find matchmaking way to long for me to even consider playing public matches at this point in time.

Full Forum Post Here

Far Cry 2 Review

Far Cry 2 is a sequel to the much beloved game Far Cry 1. The fact is though these two games are completely different in almost everyway except the fact that you are in an open world in a jungle looking environment. I bought Far Cry 2 only a couple of days after it came out and I liked what I saw, but it really seems like they did not test this game well enough at all.
The game was good, but not great. Here is a quick list of what I liked and what I did not like.

Pros
• Great Graphics for an open world game. Visuals
• Lots of weapons, ammo is the same on all weapons,
• Huge open world that is fun to jut go and explore
• Pretty much the game is really fun to play, like a GTA in Africa is the best I can explain it.
• A massive amount of missions to do

Cons
• Enemies take to many shots to kill with an assault rifle. You can literally shoot like 15 bullets into the chest of an enemy and they will not die, but if you shoot them once in the head bam their down. Just seems to not play right because of this
• The whole realism thing is absolutely awful. If your game to play real then you should not be playing video games and go play REAL LIFE. Why do game developers not understand realism does not equal fun. Weapons jamming and blowing up is terrible, do not even get me started on the whole malaria crap, fixing vehicles after every freaking checkpoint really pisses me off, and the checkpoint deserves a whole rant of its own.
• God Checkpoints are by far the worst thing EVER! This literally brought most reviews down an entire point of its own because of how stupid they are. The entire open world map has these areas usually around an intersection that you have to pass while driving. Each of these areas are filled with re spawning enemies. 90% of these checkpoints you cannot avoid and you have to go through them. In a good game you could just drive through the checkpoint and not have to worry about killing the enemies every single time, but in a bad game like Far Cry 2 you literally have to kill all the enemies in the checkpoint because if you try to just run right through it they will just chase you down in jeeps and start shooting at you which slows down your car so you are stuck having to kill them. This does not seem that bad, but I have not ran into a mission yet where I have not had to drive though about 3 of these checkpoints to get to the mission. Literally I probably spend 70% of the game driving from one mission to the next, am I the only one who sees the problem in this?
• Far Cry 2 has dumb A.I. This just pisses me off now, how can I game have bad A.I still? Seriously its 2008 come on Ubisoft get with the program. The bad A.I is pretty much self explanatory, dumb enemies doing dumb things and did I mention they are also over powered. Literally the only way to think about enjoying this game is to play it on easy.

Well I think I am done complaining. After doing this Far Cry 2 post I felt like I did more of just one giant rant. The fact is this game is a good game. It could be a great game, but with so many flaws you just have to wonder what were they thinking. My advice is not worth your money to buy right now, maybe just rent it or borrow it from a friend, but definitely not a go and buy right now game. I would give it a 7.5 out of 10.

So many to choose from, but so little cash...

In the past couple of week we have seen a total of 4 must have games come out on the Xbox 360. If you were to buy all of these games the day they came out you would be spending a whopping $240 plus tax. So the question now emerges what games you buy first. So now lets take a look at each game and I will be doing a follow up post on each game and what it has to offer.

Far Cry 2
Fallout 3
Dead Space
Fable 2

Each of these games are amazing, but stay tuned to see which ones stand out among each other.

Also mark your calendars for even more coming out in the coming weeks
Call Of Duty World At War
Gears Of War 2
Left 4 Dead

Not Excitied About Far Cry 2 Yet, Well Watch This And You Might Just Change Your Mind

This is Absolutely amazing how great this map editor looks. I was not even looking forward to Far Cry 2, but after watching this how could i not be excited!

Edge Gives Halos 3 Interactive Innovation Award and Bungie Responds With Teaser Video

Edge Awarded Bungie's Halo 3 the Edge Award for Interactive Innovation this year. Heres a quick blip of what edge had to say.

"Ultimately it is the integration and coherence of Halo 3’s online content that makes the game stand apart. From its Theater mode to Forge, and the way a party playing through Live can seamlessly manoeuvre between them, here is an experience that demonstrates an unparalleled understanding of the potential for console online play. Outside of the game, Bungie.net has been engineered to become a remarkable resource for Halo 3 stats and communities, providing life for the game even when your Xbox 360 is switched off. Halo 3, just as Halo 2 did before it, presents a roadmap for the way online will be integrated in videogames in the coming years."

Microsoft has responded to the award by making a teaser video explainging the fate of the Halo Franchise. The video seems to really hint towards another Halo game in the making, but it looks like it will not be made by Bungie.