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!