Going on vacation and will be back, not this Monday but the Monday after that. So I won't be posting anything new... from me anyway. But Rowan(Ian) is still around to put in his 2 cents now and then. So it shouldn't be completely baron while I am gone. So enjoy your gaming and all that jazz and give Ian a kick in his willy bum for new content.
You hear me out there in Internet land?!!?..whats that?....speak up?.......I said SPEAK UP!!!....that's much better. Now slow down and repeat that please!.......uh uh.....Uh UH?...I see....well now........ok okay!
The Internet told me that Ian was just eaten by a pixelated tiger. If he survives, then there may be new post to look forward too. GOOD LUCKS SIR IAN!!!
Wozza Wozza!! hotamalie...Your Genesis Machine. Today I heard a old man say to a little kid who was playing with a Nintendo DSi ," You always got your PlayBoy with you, don't you?". I thought this was funny for two reason. Little boys and their Play Boys, teehee.
This past Monday was the release of the next Marvel Pinball table with good ole Cap. Seeing as the movie is coming out soon, capitalizing on this hype is a smart move. But one doesn't have to see the upcoming movie to enjoy this table.
I had the opportunity to play this game a littler earlier than most with a generous gift from Zen Studios, much appreciated!
So please don't think that I am biased in anyway and that's why I looked favorably on the game, it really is enjoyable and well put together. As oppose to the table which they call Ironman and shits on you with every opportunity.
There's really not much I can elaborate on with this new table. If one thing seems to be consistent with Zen studios, is that..If you enjoyed one of their tables, then you more than likely you will enjoy there other ones as well.
Granted, they all play different with Iron Man being the weakest out of the bunch, but you get that table as part of the original bundle and if you buy the marvel pinball table now for $9.99 you get 8 or 9(can't remember) other zen pinball tables along with it. That's a fantastic deal..unfortunately, I already own the marvel pinball tables, so I will be missing out on this bundle.
But for $2.49, the new Captain America table does not disappoint. Its has its setting in the World War 1 and 2 genres with the Red Skull and Baron Zemo and seems to have less dead spots then the other tables. Which is great, I don't think gamers should be penalized with a misplaced shot shooting back at them and straight down the middle. Especially when its a more prominent area for hitting the ball.
As always score chasing with friends is a big part of this game. Find and add others that own this game and set up weekly challenges. Its great fun.....another great and priced appropriately add-on for the marvel pinball series. Even if you are not a fan of Capt America, you don't have to be, the table is fun in its own right.
I look forward to some score chasing with fellow Marvel Pinballers.
Just looked through the list of games being released this summer and I have to say, that I am not interested in anything coming out in the next couple of months. Which is kinda good, it gives me time to finish dragon age and finally get around to completing my growing list of DLC games that I have. So I'm not too heartbroken by the ordeal.
BUT - Looking forward into Sept and Oct, holy moly. Sept has Resistance 3 and possible Dead island that I will probable be getting. But then the mother load of games for October comes out, and then I'll be stuck with too much to do and no time to do.
We start off with Silent Hill - I haven't played a silent hill since the very first one, but I would like to get back into it with this one. Maybe the reviews, if bad will sway me away from it. But for now, I want to play this game.
Then Twisted Metal - This game is a must buy for me. I am a huge fan of the genre, I've owned every version of twisted metal ever since they started making them. This one won't be any different. Getting me some twisted metal.
Batman: Arkham City - They added Robin and Catwoman as playable characters?! Yeah!! sign me up for some of that. Playing those few levels with the joker was a great time, and I look forward to what Arkham City has to offer.
Battlefield 3 - The be all end all of FPS, Its like the icing on a cake. The last one to come out for the month of October and will probable stop all other games in their tracks and play nothing else but this for months and months.
So in the span of a month, that's 4 full price games. That's $320 taxes in for 4 games. I gotta start saving now I guess. Put aside a full game price savings every month up until October. That should help me out.
Silent Hill I could be swayed not too, the others? I don't think so.
I only recently watched the warriors on netflix and I never realized how much pop culture draws from this movie, its great!! Some of the most off the wall stuff that watching it today seems like a comedy, but with people really getting killed, and I know its not a comedy. It just reminds of one, being the year it was made. Its like my fascination with Gone with the Wind, I watch that movie for totally the wrong reasons.
Some dude outfitted his car in the theme of old school Nintendo. Now he's the coolest kid on the block, until the Sega Genesis Car bumps him down a notch.
I always miss these things when they happen. But not this weekend dammit. Me ,Beatfreaker and probable my cousin Mike will be tearing this shit up and unlocking some extra guns and abilities for sure. Would love to have a second weapon unlock with a handgun or something else equally cool.
So for anyone else out there with Killzone 3 and want to unlock some extra weapons or abilities, give me a shout, join squads, me you, you me, whatever works. TRIPLE XP out the waZOOOOOO!!
I guess I didn't talk about playing Ghostbuster, the DLC game, I'll get right on that.In a nutshell, its a horrible game, even for Ghostbuster fans like myself. Which make me say to myself(DO THIS NOW BLAKE- GET THAT VIDEO CAPTURE UP ASAP YOU LAZY BUM!!!)
But Beatfreaker over at Portable Soldier was able to record what was happening on his side of the screen.
We found many annoying and at times entertaining bugs while playing the game, but this one takes the cake. On my side everything was normal, there was 2 boss enemies and that's it. Where as Jay's side was filled ghost. I couldn't see it, but he could. What was funny, is that it also made him invincible and continued on for the next two maps. Which was kinda good, cause he was constantly reviving us and not taking any damage.
So I wouldn't consider it a cheat since we didn't do anything, it just happened. But this video is a great example of the kind of mess that is Ghostbusters : Sanctum of Slime, boy is this game ever a mess.
Don't worry, Jay's not talking to himself. He's talking to me via mic...or am I in his head?!?Muahahahahahah....no no...I'm not that clever.
The latest table to come from Zen Studios and to be honest if they kept making marvel pinballs for the rest of my life, I be a happy man. It has to be one of the more surprising genres I've played, pinball? of all game genres, I'm enjoying the heck outta the marvel pinballs series.
With the inclusion of Fantastic Four to the series it just adds to an already fun library of tables. I first thought that each member was going to get its own table, one for Mr Fantastic, one of the Thing and so on. But its just one table that includes all of them, which just as good. Seeing as each character as its own challenge on the table itself.
What I am noticing about all the tables are its deadzones, areas that you hit the ball and no matter what , it will shoot back at you and straight down the middle. You have to learn where these are and try to keep the ball away from them, otherwise your gonna lose again and again.
Fantastic Four table is different than the other tables, its one of the few tables that you can get some series scores just by doing random things around the board. Unlike the other tables where you mainly only get the big scores by doing missions. Which I think is a great addition to the tables. A few of the missions are pretty challenging and require skill and alot of luck. But its great that you can take a side route to getting points with alternative score lanes. Ironman table I'm looking at your for being a points stickler!!
With my first few rounds of Fantastic Four I was able to score a 90 plus million, the closet one to that is my Spiderman score with 84 or 85. So I had a good run, but like I said, you can get points by doing more than just side missions, decent points aswell.only 3 other friends have this table yet, so I am hoping more will pick it up to do some score chasing. Always great fun! Have to hit the GamerDorks up again and see who's on board.
All in all, a great addition to the marvel pinball franchise, even for someone like me who is not the biggest Fantastic Four Fan. They took it and made something quite enjoyable.
With that, I am looking forward to their next table and the many more after that.
Got something in the works coming up that we need a twitter account for, so I figure I try and set it all up now. Never used twitter personally myself, but hey!! Lets give er a go and see what happens. I guess you could follow us if you like and we'll probable follow others aswell. Keeping the gaming network live and expansive. So join us or not, we aren't fussy, more the merrier...Be MERRY I SAID!!!
The art of exploitation??..sure...Terrorism - The art of suicide bombing!
I'm not a supporter of the hackers, I'm not sided with their cause against Sony, regardless of how shitty they handled the Hotz situation. At first I may have had a little sympathy when they released a statement that they were sorry for messing with the PSN (the first time), that they didn't mean to mess with gamers, just the company.
Then the shit hit the fan with hackers and all that went out the window. They are hacking everything and it didn't matter if you were a gamer, CEO of a big company. They are messing with every one's lives. But yet, when I mention this, people still are showing support for the hackers on some level. I'm boggled when it comes to this, these people are common criminals and especially with the latest hacks.
This week they(yet no one claims to speak for the group when it suits their actions) announce they are doing Titanic Takeover Tuesday.
This week on Tuesday the following things got hacked. Gamers and companies alike, it doesn't matter to these people. They DON"T CARE ABOUT gamers, they don't care that they are messing with people's personal information, they don't care that they are disrupting some one's time.
1)Minecraft 2)League of Legends 3)Eve Online 4)WOW support line 5) Escapist website 6)CIA.gov 7)FBI(branch of) 8)4chan.org 9)Senate of America
These are the same people who hacked Bethesda a week or two ago. They break in and shut the sites down, or mess with them so that the company have to shut down the site to rebuild the security. All of these got hacked in 1 day. 1 day!!!
To give you an idea of how severe this is. This month or last month, I should say. City Group bank got hacked and 210,000 people info, including credit card numbers were stolen. And the Bank didn't tell its costumers till a month later.
Its like the prisoner we see sitting in the cell, crying for what he did. But you've talked with him over the past months and he's really a nice guy, smart, funny and seems like a overall good individual. So you feel sympathy for his situation, perhaps he could be given some leeway? Oh right, he did murder and rape innocent children...but that was 30 years ago....I'm sure he's learned his lesson, he seems like such a stable fellow now! - OK, that's a little off track there..but the point is , there always seems to be someone who support these guys.
I'm honestly tired of all the hacking and if I got hacked tomorrow , I probable wouldn't even know it if they were being stealthy about it, heck most of us wouldn't. But then again, there's no press is hacking Joe blow from down the road.
This game is getting my inner madness riled up but the angry madness. I am madder at this game right now then I remember ever being mad at a game. Did you get this? I'm mad.
I am a fan of the original game and of Lewis Carroll's stories featuring the young heroine. Usually, I will not like games or stories that take innocent childhood themes and make them horrible. But the original game fit for me. It was a good representation of her madness from the event that transpired before the game opened.
So, I had been looking forward to this game ever since I heard they were making this sequel. I got it on release day and happily got home to drown myself in bloody craziness.
I'll talk about what I like first and don't like, and get to the maddening part later.
The game looks fine (apart from some visual glitches and occasional muggy textures). Not fantastic, but serviceable. It's a platformer true and true. The game levels barely make any structural sense. This brings to mind the horrible level design of the 2008 Prince of Persia game. But here, it doesn't completely bother me because it's basically a Super Mario Game, with a pretty facade. And it's being played in the fragmented mind of Alice, pieces of non-sense floating around. That's fine, it's what I was expecting even if it's a little bit disappointing.
One of the major problem is that each level (chapters) is extremely long. There are only five or six through the game, so while getting into a new chapter is fresh, it becomes repetitious very fast. And you stay in it for hours and hours. Each land has some specific enemies related to it, but there are also Ruins, creatures of goo and doll parts that keep popping repeatedly all the way through the game. And the level design feels lazy sometimes. The original played a lot with dimensions, shifting views and visual trickeries. This one is straight-forward platforms, levels and switches in crazy scenery.
I found myself actually becoming more interested in the short real-world London segments in-between the levels where you explore a dreary Victorian London, get more insight in Alice's world and story. The way the sets are lit and the character designs make it look like stop-motion bits, reminiscent of Tim Burton's work. But they are sparse, gradually shorter and I wish they could be played more. Actually, playing these make me almost wish the entire game was like this. But I have an obsession with Victorian London, so it's probably just me.
The story is great, even though it uses the common (and unforgivable) practice of combining the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen into one character which bugs me to no end. They are two separate characters from two different stories. One is a playing card, the other is a chess piece. Mixing the two motifs is NOT COOL! (I'm pointing at you again, but angrily, Tim Burton!!) But anyway, this is not the issue here. :P
What makes me incessantly mad is the boss fights. There are no real bosses. All they do is take some of the tough enemies and throw them at you in enclosed areas where you have to dispatch them all. But each different enemy has a different attacking and weakness pattern. So you gotta go through them methodically, which is hard when they are all coming you at the same time. But I've managed to go through most of the game.
Until now, where I will be stuck forever. For starters my game begins with very low health (two hits and I'm done for). There is no way to go back and find some energy, only forward to certain doom. You jump on a stupid hanging platfrom where the GD hard Colossal Ruin spawns.
Colossal Ruin
Now on it's own, that damn creature is tough as hell. You can only shoot the heads in it's body from a distance with the Pepper Grinder. Of course, they're all around it's body and retract and come out randomly. You can also imagine that the thing doesn't stand in one spot. It almost constantly tries to come at you, grad you and swallow you. Add the added pleasure of it's ranged exploding attacks that home in on you. Tough all on it's own.
But having just that would be way too nice. It's accompanied by the Slithering Ruin, a slug-like crawly that is slow, but relentlessly comes right for you.
Slithering Ruin
The are weak and easy to kill. But, they come in large numbers AND continually respawn new ones. Of course, giving a few second respite would be ridiculous and easy. So they respawn INSTANTLY when one is killed. So you gotta maneuver around a constant mass of them or slash at them constantly. BUT you need to use the ranged shots to get to the Colossal Ruin which also constantly comes at you. So what happens is the weapon automaticly focuses at the nearest enemy, which means it's one of these buggers. And switching targets is useless, since there's loads of those things. So you can never get a shot at the big creepy, it keeps bombarding you and you die. BANG BANG.
Its done, finished on Hard mode. Having finished it and thinking back on all the reviews that this game got, I have to wonder what all these guys were even thinking, or at least their thought process.
What really makes this all fit together is the extras after you beat the game. Its gives you a timeline of Duke Nukem Forever dating back to 1997, to the announcement trailer to the selling of companies, changing of hands, etc,etc. It gives a detailed timeline of what happened over the years.
It also has a art gallery that dates back just as far, showing you all the models, the the blocky models from 2001, the crappy textures from the olden days, its all very interesting to look at it.
But if anyone looked at all of this, like me they should have realized why the game is the way it is. Its no problem to see that this game is pre-2001 with a coat of paint. Looking at all the videos, behind the scenes, you can see that the stuff they had in 2001, 2004, 2006 are all in today's game. THAT is where the problem lies, sure that stuff would have be Ok years ago, but people have since then seen some pretty cool changes in the FPS genre. As a result, Duke falls into a dated style of gameplay that can come off has broken rather than nostalgic.
This is where my opinion differs from the Critics. I don't care that its dated, I don't feel gipped by all that Duke is or isn't, because I am going in with the mind set that I am playing a 2001 Duke game with semi-decent graphics.
You can really see that Gearbox just took what already existed and slapped in new models and textures and did the best they could with what time given to try and make it to today's standards, but it clearly needed at least another year or better yet, scrap what already was there and make their own version.
I could go on and talk about the controls and so on, but theirs no point. Everything that is Duke we've already seen and played, YEARS ago! We're not getting anything new here. The animation is downright laughable, the controls are decent enough, but holy cow did I ever get stuck on things when trying to run away. The graphics are sub-par, but other times they are decent enough, the levels are nothing to write home about, at times they feel really empty. The girls in the game are NOT sexy by any means, they come off more has a awkward dancing, as if Mom decides shes going to give a strip show for the next family dinner. Its just bad!
BUT!! and there is a big BUT! knowing and seeing all this. What really makes this game either a AWFUL failure of a game or a enjoyable playable one is the mindset that the gamer has while playing it.
Take this game for what it is, Its a 2001 Duke Nukem game with absolute dated controls/look/feel and set up for that time era. If you can't play anything that doesn't resemble COD, Battlefield or any other popular FPS. DON'T buy this game because it will not meet any expectations.
I guess it boils down to this, the same game looked at with two different perspectives, gives you two different views of the game. One is a playable -dated 2001 game with an attempt at today's graphics. The other is a game that doesn't even compare to what most FPS gamers play today and there fore is utter garbage and broken.
I had a good time with it, I played far worse games out there such as Damnation and Haze. For me, I can see what the critics are saying, but its almost like they are leaving out half the story. It be like going to court and only hearing the prosecution.
For me the game is like someone baking a cake with their only ingredients is flour and toothpaste. Then when you have something that resembles a cake, people then go,"Man, this is a shitty piece of cake, some of the worse I've ever eaten". Well no kidding dumbass, its made out of toothpaste and flour.
This game falls under, turn your brain off at the door or at least acknowledge what this game is. If you can't do that, then you won't enjoy it, simply as that. Currently, its not full price at $53, which is what I picked it up for. But for alot of gamers, I think to really make this game ring true, $30 is a more acceptable price to go back in time and playing something that is entertaining. I've had my chuckles and laughs here and there, and I've had my my COME ON!!?? moments as well.
This game is not a failure by far, its more of a "What the hell did I just play!?" Take that how ever you like...again..depends on the mindset of the gamer. You can choose either way. I choose to believe that I am eating chocolate poop.
Here is the 2001 E3 Duke Trailer, just as basically the same as today's game or least you get the idea.
Still playing Duke.....won't say too much right now. But I am playing it on Hard and I ran out of ammo. The last two enemies I had to kill were two big fat floating monsters with helicopter blades spinning around them and they shoot missiles and all I have are my fist.
I think this is the first time in a long time that I remember running out of ammo in a FPS with baddies left to kill.
The worse part is that you can't get close to these guys cause they are flying and when they do hover down to your level you can't get near them because the blades that spin around their torso hit you. So what the heck do you do?
You get lucky and find a shotgun lying around on the ground, that's what.
Yup, a shotgun with 27 bullets, you talk about making every shot count! It took about 15 min to kill these guys with peek-a-boo method and waiting for them to hover close to the ground, but holy cow! I can only imagine playing this game on insane mode.
These videos with the new old republic are amazing. What I find odd, is that I found this video on Break.com. But the title was called "RETARDED starwars" with the tag line," can this game get any worse?".
I'm at a loss for words with his statement....he doesn't like it because there's a cowboy type character? or..I don't know? I think you have to have your brain fried in bean sauce not to like these cinematic trailers, heck put them all together and their better than most things George Lucas himself makes. But besides all that, enjoy the trailer.
