Gaming Addict

So, I was going to talk about how Playstation is forcing games now to fully integrate the PS3’s trophy system into every game, and the fact that it’s a huge rip-off of Xbox’s achievements, which was the greatest idea ever. But with the news I’ve just discovered, I’m completely content to forget about that entirely, and focus on the fact that The Witcher is coming to Xbox 360 and PS3. Yes that’s right, the PC’s best RPG experience in the last few years is coming to a console near you in the near future, and that’s the coolest thing ever.

Featuring a fully dynamic and revamped combat system to give you full control of Geralt like never before. The console release will also see The Witcher given a new engine, meaning the graphics and dynamic lighting systems are being given a complete overhaul, so that this new version of The Witcher will look better than ever, and will make you want to play through the games 80+ hours of questing even more.

With a game that has proven itself to be one of the coolest in recent memory, in terms of a truly fantastic computer action RPG. The news that the game is being revamped and reinvented for the console market is some of the best I’ve heard in some time. Hopefully this will be a successful port, and not a port to forget.

All I know is I’m especially excited, given the success of DLC recently in the console gaming market, who knows how many extra quests we could see for The Witcher, should the game prove to be successful.

Xbox owners win out over their PS3 counterparts once again, as Capcom has announced a Resident Evil 5 demo to be released via Xbox Live next week. And that sounds like the coolest thing ever to me, because ever since the first trailer I’ve wanted to play RE 5. Well actually ever since my completion of the fantastically incredible RE 4 I’ve been dying to play 5. The return to Chris Redfield’s plotline, and the exploration of the virus and it’s origins in Africa are also, well more than enough to make any past RE fan excited for the new instalment.

And if you’re an Xbox Live user, you’ll be checking out two full levels of that experience by next Wednesday. And what’s more, both levels will be fully functional for either solo offline play, or you can test out the very much hyped RE 5 co-op mode. Coolest thing ever.

So, if you’re completely excited about your current zombie excursions with the amazing Left 4 Dead. Don’t forget to take a break from the zombie apocalypse to revisit the game that really started the way we see the survival horror genre today.

Resident Evil is a classic, and remains one of the greatest horror experiences from the game, and I really can’t wait to give their first entry into the next-gen world a try.

Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning really looks as though it could become the best MMO on the market, even surpassing the giant that is World Of Warcraft, with their new announcement of a patch possibly coming soon. The concept Warhammer may be bringing to light is Realm v Realm combat. And that would be the coolest thing ever. If instead of just having PvP inside your Realm, how incredible would it be to band together, no matter what faction you’re a part of, to combat the players of a separate Realm, in what I would hope would be a giant battle.

Of course I would expect something along the lines of WoW’s battlegrounds, opposed to freeform RvR, because that would be impossible to set up. But even that sounds awesome. And Warhammer is planning on releasing exclusive items that can only be gained through RvR. Which means, if this comes off the way that’s been proposed, I may be making a switch from WoW to Warhammer.

And now, a bit of news that bothers me. The Legend of Ys: Books I & II is being released for Nintendo DS, but instead of it being a direct port with added content and graphical updates, which is the standard for a port like this, Ys is getting a translation overhaul for the plot of the game. That only bothers me because Nintendo might just take away some of the things that made people love Ys in the first place.

I’d hate the thought of Nintendo deciding what’s best for a game that was originally translated 18 years ago, because I just don’t trust Nintendo’s ability to manufacture content that’s true to the medium. They seem much more interesting in putting out any content with an E rating, instead of focusing on good content.

Once again with DLC ruling the world, The Last Remnant has been the next game to announce content being released very soon in the future. Now, remember Last Remnant has only been out for a very short while, like a little over a week, and already Square-Enix are planning DLC packs to be released all throughout December. Which fuels my theory that games are released incomplete nowadays, so that publishers can sell you the missing parts for extra after the game’s release.

And that’s crap.

But The Last Remnant’s DLC packs sound fairly cool, if not a little tacked on for being released so early after the games release.

The first pack is being called Challenge Pack 1, which will provide “ultra-challenging” guild tasks to help you level up even farther than ever before. Sounds fairly interesting to me, and will give those that have already conquered Last Remnant a reason to come back and give things another try.

The next will be The Key Of The Ancient Ruins, which is pretty self explanatory. The pack provides you with a key to unlock the Ancient Ruins, and will be offered up as a 100% free download from Xbox Live. I like free DLC.

The third set is March To War Set, which will offer up three different formations for battle like you’ve never seen before. The formations included are Scatterswarm, Goblet and Catapult, each of which will give you a significant tactical boost during battle.

And the final announced set, is Challenge Pack 2, which will be another free Xbox Live download bringing you the most difficult guild quests yet. Meaning you can take Last Remnant farther than ever before imagined, or at least that’s how these DLC packs are being sold.

But you can find out in December if they’re worth the trouble, DLC is always cool, but not when it feels like content that should have been in the game from the beginning.

I’ve just discovered the coolest game ever for PC.  Mount & Blade.

Horrible name, that in my scanning for a new PC experience, almost made me disinterested before I even bothered to find out more about the title, but I’m happy I did because Mount & Blade is fantastic.  I’ve never played a game before that offered the depth of horseback combat that Mount & Blade does, with an unparalleled level of realism and control as you spear enemies on massive battlefields.  The graphics won’t receive any real awards, but that hardly matters when a game controls this smoothly, or offers this much fun sword fighting.

Did I mention you can fire arrows from horseback as you’re moving across the battlefield, really hard to get good at, but awesome to have the opportunity.

M&B takes place in the fictional world of Calradia where you are thrust between five warring factions, and forced to make your own way throughout the world.  You can become a lone swordsman, or a commander of armies leading great battles over the games rolling hills.

Coolest thing ever.

M&B is fairly new, and an indie game, so you can pick it up cheap, if you haven’t already.  And I would definitely suggest you do, because M&B offers the sort of sword swinging action packed experience that I’ve really never played before.

Oh, btw, Halo 3: Recon got a name change today, to the much lamer Halo 3: ODST.  Because Bungie feels that the name Recon was misleading, and as you play a lone ODST soldier in the new campaign, Halo 3: ODST is much more accurate for the game’s content.

I think it’s lame, because if you say Halo 3: ODST it sort of rhymes, and that makes it sound lame.  Not like a badass fps where you fight alien invaders with vicious weapons and absolute malice.  Halo 3: ODST sounds more like something with bunnies, and the covenant comes to play with the bunnies, and as an ODST soldier you see them and join them in playing with the bunnies.  And you know, that’s what Halo is all about.

Bethesda has announced a whole bunch of updates coming up for Fallout 3. If you bought Fallout 3 for PC you’ll probably be getting the best of the deal, as Bethesda will be releasing an update called the Garden Of Eden, which will allow you to mod Fallout 3’s existing content, as well as create all new characters and areas, and anything else you can think of. That releases December. But I am perhaps more excited about the console side of things, mostly because I don’t have the time or patience to create content for a game, not to mention I lack the programming ability.

For the Xbox 360 starting in January, a series of updates will be starting, as an unnamed amount of DLC has been announced for monthly release. So 2009 will be the year of Fallout 3? The updates that have been announced are as follows:

• The first, Operation: Anchorage which will be a military simulation that reveals exactly what happened during Alaska’s liberation from Chinese invaders.
• Pitt is the next, which is a ruined version of Pittsburgh players will be able to traverse, in which you will be able to fight all manner of new raider factions and undoubtedly scavenge a ton of new items.
• And Broken Steel is the final installment that has been announced currently. Broken Steel sounds the coolest to me, as it marks the Brotherhood of Steel finally taking up arms against the Enclave. Broken Steel also sounds awesome because it takes place after the main story arch, which means that awful level 20 cap may be extended, so you can max out your players like never before.

Unfortunately for anyone that bought Fallout on PS3, you will be completely left out of the DLC loop, as no plans for DLC or really anything else have been announced for Playstation Network.

Well, as I wrote about last week, Lionhead studios had a major Fable II announcement to make, and it was canned because of the lurking presence of Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience. Well now the announcement has been made, and it’s amazing. Fable II will be getting it’s first DLC in December, and said DLC will be in the form of a new island zone that you will be able to traverse.

Given that the Fable II that shipped was a bit short on story, with the main arc consisting of an extremely short for an RPG journey of about 12 hours, the new DLC announcement couldn’t be better, as this will bring a slew of new quests, new enemies, new items and what I’m most excited about a weight loss potion. Because who hasn’t accidentally eaten something fatty in the game when you were about to die, and then having your only way of correcting the mistake being to search for produce traders so you could buy some slimming celery.

The new area will be called Knothole island, and will be covered with snow, of which you need to melt through a series of quests driven by the new area’s story. This will be the first in multiple DLC updates offered by Fable II in the future.

Which leads me to believe that game companies are seeing DLC as an exploitation for profit making, because Fable II as it shipped felt incomplete. And now with such a big DLC pack coming so soon I just wonder if Lionhead cut some of Fable’s features before the game shipped, so that they could charge you more for them when they were released later as DLC.

Which I really wouldn’t doubt as being a complete possibility.

Also announced today was that Dead Space will be getting a demo release on both Xbox Live and Playstation Network, so if you still haven’t played this most excellent survival horror adventure, now you’ll get your smack in the face as to what you’ve been missing.

Holy crap play Left 4 Dead now. Best multiplayer experience you will ever experience on the Xbox 360 or otherwise. Left 4 Dead is an game that absolutely needs to be experienced by anyone that is tired of dumb videogame AI and wishes that every game presented an experience that offered true co-op with no boundaries.

L4D excels in practically everything, from it’s awesome gunplay, to the enemy variety with the zombie hordes, to the sheer number of different ways the zombies will react each time you play the game. Valve promised that each time you played the experience would be different, and they were correct, the engine they’ve built is ingenious, because the level changes each time with random zombie generation, so you never know where the next horde attack is going to come from.

A truly terrifying experience as you and your friends battle the thousands in an attempt to survive the apocalypse.

And one thing you should know if you don’t already, don’t stray far from the pack, because the only way teamwork can truly fail in the game is if you don’t stick with your partners. L4D will dominate you if you aren’t a team player because you are always dependant on your other players, whether it be for firepower, a med pack, or just saving your butt from the next oncoming horde.

If you haven’t purchase this, do so now, because L4D is a game that I can’t really convey in words, because it’s an experience, and it’s real people that you play with that make it so. I promise you’ll never get bored, and you’ll never need COD 4 or Halo 3’s online modes ever again.

Grand Theft Auto first DLC revealed today. Apparently the first DLC pack will be a whole new storyline for GTA IV featuring a new character named Johnny Klepitz who is a member of the biker gang The Lost. Those are about all the details however.

Although GTA IV’s first protagonist Niko Bellic will make cameo appearances in a few of the chapters in Johnny Klepitz’s storyline. Rockstar is promising that this new character will show you a different side of Liberty City, one that you haven’t seen before.

I for one just hope that the new pack includes some new territory. I know GTA IV is huge and everything, and I don’t ever get tired of playing within the areas available, but who doesn’t love new places to explore instead of the ones you’ve already been to a hundred times?

So I’m hoping the new side of Liberty City Rockstar is alluding to, is actually going to be some new areas included in the game with your purchase of Johnny Klepitz’s storyline.

Who knows how much this will retail for at the moment, but no doubt Rockstar can charge pretty much whatever they want and people will likely still pay it, because Grand Theft Auto is a videogame giant in every sense of the word.

Also announced was unspecified DLC for the upcoming Prince of Persia game. Ubisoft apparently understands how big the DLC market is, and will be providing plenty of content when PoP hits December 5^th. And that really is the way to go with videogames today, hit us with as much extra content as possible as soon as possible, because gamers love it.

I know I love having the option to introduce new things to a game you’ve already beaten, even if you have to pay a little extra.

Well, if you haven’t tried Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience, you will soon be forced to the next time you sign into Xbox Live. And immediately you’ll be struck with mixed emotions. For one thing the menus are remarkably easy to access, and the redesign is very welcome, as finding anything in the past on Xbox Live was a painstaking process of scrolling through all the content available. Then when you found something you had to hope you didn’t slightly tweak the joystick to the right by accident, or else you would change categories and then you’d have to start all over again. And normally the D-pad would solve this problem, but the Xbox D-pad has always been completely useless.

Well no more will those errors plague you. Instead you can be plagued by endless errors with your connection to Xbox Live when you try to access or download content. But I guess that doesn’t matter in lieu of Microsoft’s shiny new dashboard. Kind of like Window’s Vista, if the system is sparkly enough maybe everyone will ignore it’s shortcomings/flaws.

But the one thing that did seem relatively entertaining, Microsoft avatars, was also pretty disappointing. Before the launch of the New Xbox Experience, Microsoft promised a whole slew of customization options for your Mii, I mean Avatar, but really hasn’t delivered.

The options for clothing are surprisingly small, as well as facial features and hairstyles. Meaning no matter what you do to your avatar at the moment, it really won’t differ that much from anyone else’s, which sort of takes away the point of having a unique avatar for your enjoyment. Disappointing.

But one promising feature, that might be interesting someday after all the planned customization expansion packs for avatars have been released no doubt carrying a fee to purchase as Microsoft seems to charge for every small thing that enhances your Xbox experience, was announced if not fully realized yet. And that was the interaction of your avatar with other avatars through Xbox Live games. The most hyped was probably the introduction of game shows like 1 vs. 100, although that’s been pushed back to an unspecified release. But that, someday, will be awesome, the further integration of avatars I think is a good concept.

A blatant rip off of Nintendo’s Mii of course, but a great concept is still a great concept. And some games have already introduced the avatar integration well, like A Kingdom For Keflings, where the giant you choose to play as can be your own avatar. That’s promising, but so far I’d have to give Microsoft’s new experience a D, because nothing seems like it was planned out enough, the avatars just aren’t as promised. And, with the amount of errors and problems with Live so far just remind me too much of the rush job that was Vista.

(i still don’t miss the old blade system though)

 So stop with the broken operating systems Microsoft, please.