Gaming Addict

Blizzard has announced the inclusion of a feature into the widely successful World Of Warcraft MMORPG that I can’t believe wasn’t included a long time ago.  Apparently very soon, you will be able to switch factions with any character that you have, for a fee no doubt.  Blizzard has said that they will be adding the feature to switch your character to an opposing faction character of equal stats/skills, meaning your race will change to the closest Horde or Alliance race.  Although no details as to whether you will have any control over which race you make the switch to, I kind of doubt that much power for decision making on your part.

Fairly cool news though.  If you find yourself feeling stale playing Horde, you can now switch to Alliance with your lvl 80 instead of having to start over from scratch.  Although I’m sure anybody on a role-playing realm is mighty angry about the news…but really who cares about the RP-ers?

Also in Blizzard news, the developer has a  brand new MMO in the works, and surprisingly it’s not Universe of Starcraft as so many people expected.  Rather this is a completely new MMO being designed from the ground up as a ‘next-gen’ MMO experience.  What that means, I don’t really know, but we’ll all have to wait some time to find out, as the game is in it’s very early stages, and no information has been released as to what we can expect. 

More Mass Effect 2 details released today.  Apparently, unlike the first Mass Effect, you won’t be able to do more than one play through of the story with your characters.  Sort of lame I guess, as it was pretty cool playing through the first Mass Effect a second or third time with beefed up characters and items.  But apparently that ability has been scrapped so that how you finish your game in Mass Effect 2 will be directly incorporated in Mass Effect 3.  BioWare has stated that you will be able to continue playing after you finish the main campaign, you just won’t have the ability to restart everything at your more advanced level.

I’m happy at least you can keep playing after the fact, that way I don’t need to make sure I’ve completed all secondary missions before finishing the game’s story.  Because it would be fairly annoying to not be able to continue Mass Effect’s storyline.

Also a BioWare developer announced that there will be a harder difficulty mode that you will not need to unlock for Mass Effect 2, unlike the first game.  I’m talking of course about the ‘Insanity’ difficulty mode, which you could only unlock in Mass Effect after playing through the game twice.  Because of the inability to play through the campaign multiple times with the same beefed up characters, in all likelihood you’ll have the ability to play with the game on ‘Insanity’ difficulty from the onset.

And I like where BioWare is headed with their harder difficulties.  As they are planning on making smarter enemies, not tougher ones.  You’ll die because they fight better than you, not because they’re overly strong and you’re weaker than ever before.  Did I mention I hate when that’s a game’s idea of making things more difficult.  Like Gears Of War…the harder it gets, the enemies don’t behave any more intelligently, they just take a crapload more ammo to take out, and you die faster.  That’s just making things more unfair to simulate difficulty, opposed to actually giving you a more difficult fighting experience.

The original Crackdown was moderately successful, and so I’ve been wondering why it’s take Microsoft so long to release a sequel, considering it’s relative popularity on Xbox Live.  Apparently Crackdown 2 has taken so long because Microsoft is actually doing the right thing, and trying not to be money hungry in favor of producing a better product for Crackdown fans like myself.  And I appreciate that, as it would have been easy for Microsoft to pump out a shoddy sequel that was basically a rehash of the first game, just with a few new options.

Scheduled for a release in 2010, the new studio in control of Crackdown, Ruffian Games is promising that this extra time has been put towards ensuring a quality product.  And that makes me highly anticipate the next Crackdown.

Considering the first was basically GTA with no story and the ability to play as a character with superhuman abilities, I’m down for a new campaign.  As long as Ruffian keeps the most fun parts of the first game, co-op online, wacky crazy physics, a ridiculous amount of carnage on screen, and the keys to the city mode, then 2 will be every bit as amazing as the first Crackdown.

Let’s hope for some Crackdown 2 screens or video or something pretty soon…

New Tony Hawk skateboard peripheral makers Robomodo are considering their new piece of hardware almost a platform in itself.  Planned to go far beyond any motion peripheral ideas brought forth from Nintendo Wii’s balance board, Robomodo might be on to something.  Tony Hawk use will see the new peripheral basically function exactly as a skateboard would, essentially allowing you to realistically skateboard in right your living room.

At any rate, I’m interested to see the final results.

And also to see how Robomodo is planning on selling their new peripheral to development teams, going beyond the obvious skateboard/snowboarding uses.  I don’t exactly know, nor can I really see where they plan on taking their device beyond those realms, but I’m certainly intrigued.  I would like to see more games make use of unique features like this.

I like the evolution so far, kick started by Guitar Hero’s use of a unique peripheral, to the Wii which is all about unique realistic motion control, to now a realistic skateboarding peripheral for all major platforms.  Now we just need something much, much cooler for FPS games to really make you feel a part of the run and gun experience.  

Rockstar has released new information, and screenshots of the upcoming Max Payne 3.  I didn’t have any faith in this game before, and I have even less now, as it looks like Max Payne has just lost his way completely, in terms of recapturing the brilliance of the first game.  The first Max Payne gave us a fantastic story, combined with run and gun gameplay like you’d never seen before.  Told through graphic novel style pages, with brilliant dialogue and voice work, to form a true noir game experience that brought you to the depths of human darkness and back.  Freaking awesome.

Max Payne 3 doesn’t look to recapture any of that glory that’s been lost since the first game.  Max Payne 2 almost approached a reasonable level of original MP awesomeness, but still fell far short.  The character and environment appearance redesigns just completely lack the feel of that universe in any way whatsoever.  

The new game takes place in Brazil, opposed to New York, and features a sweaty, bald, bearded, ridiculously lame looking Max Payne.  12 years older supposedly, although he doesn’t look to have aged 12 years at all.  Maybe I’m weird for thinking this, but I hate being forced to play as ridiculously lame protagonists, and the way that they’ve redesigned Max to remove any trademarks from his past, just makes me essentially uninterested in 3.  And that’s sad, cause I was a huge fan of the series.

Rockstar keeps promising a true Max Payne experience, faithful to games and stories past…but their actions are speaking much louder than their words to tell me that isn’t true at all.

The wait for Mass Effect 2 has just been made a little easier, with the latest announcement from BioWare.  The developer announced that there is still more DLC planned for the first Mass Effect, to be officially announced and released soon.  Supposedly the DLC contains new systems and planets to explore, no doubt with a new side storyline for you to embark upon.  Hopefully offering a slew of new items and weapons/armor.  But at any rate, something to finally supplement my Mass Effect experience given the extreme anticipation I have for the ME2, is an extremely good thing.  

BioWare is also talking about the future of Mass Effect 1 star Shepard, which sort of bothers me as there have been way too many spoilers ahead of Mass Effect 2, but now we have spoilers for the plotline of Mass Effect 3 as well.  BioWare announced that the way the interactive storyline is set up, you can survive all the way to Mass Effect 3 playing as the original Shepard character you created for the first Mass Effect.  But as the first preview trailer for ME2 showed Shepard KIA, you’re not expected to survive Mass Effect 2 playing as Shepard.

This is intriguing in itself….but I’m a little mad that I’ve already been told to expect Shepard’s death in Mass Effect 2.  Because that would have been a fantastic shocker…the main character dies unexpectedly, and then stays dead.  But alas, because of EA and BioWare’s big mouths, that surprise will be forever ruined, and now Mass Effect 2’s death sequence is only a question of when, more than if…

Microsoft inadvertently announced the existence of a brand new revised version of the Xbox 360 set to release in 2010.  The ‘announcement’ was made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in which he referred to an upcoming version of 360 to be released with a built-in camera and what Ballmer called a ‘natural interface’.  Likely this means a version of 360 with built in Project Natal functionality.  And if you haven’t heard of Project Natal yet, it’s fairly easy to explain.

Project Natal is essentially Microsoft’s answer to the Wii’s motion control.  Project Natal features a camera that will allow motion control without the use of a controller, the ability to sign into your Xbox automatically through physical recognition, and will feature artificial intelligence that you can fully interact with.  So basically Natal could be pretty cool, although I need to see exactly what’s going to happen with the final hardware, as so far it just sounds like an upgraded version of Sony’s Eyetoy.  

At any rate, Microsoft has confirmed that there is in fact a new Xbox 360 that will release in 2010, but they have not confirmed or denied whether the new 360 will feature Project Natal technology.  So something is on the horizon, but who knows what exactly that is at the moment. 

Turbine has released the first screenshots of the newly implemented store for Dungeons & Dragons Online’s new free to play format soon to be released in North America.  And so far, I’m far less than impressed, as Turbine’s new concept of micro transactions to supplement income, instead of monthly subscription fees, looks like it’s going to be annoying as all hell.  Seriously, practically every page has something that you would have to pay to receive.  Like the character creation, where some classes require payment from you in order for you to create a character of that type….where’s the logic in that.  

You have to pay to be a monk?  What for like no apparent reason, that class was just randomly chosen as one you’d have to pay to play as?

And paying to play as a different race like Drow…that just seems annoying too.  Or paying to get health potions from the store, does that mean health potions will be scarce to anyone that is unwilling to pay for them?

This is starting to bother me, as Turbine made DDO sound like an MMORPG that would be free to play in all it’s glory, with the option of paying for certain things to supplement your experience if you so choose.  But clearly DDO is going to be a frustrating and boring MMO experience unless you’re willing to shell out the money for items, dungeons, and character classes and races.  Lame I say…

I’m disappointed, and I think here DDO has officially made sure that they won’t be around in the MMO community for very long, because I can’t imagine anyone enjoying the experience of paying for health potions, and having to make a choice on whether to buy something or not on practically every menu screen.  

EA has announced that they are in fact planning on releasing a sequel to the freaking awesome Mirror’s Edge.  Reportedly there is a small development team hard at work right now on Mirror’s Edge 2, though it’s unclear right now as to the direction the game itself will take.  EA has admitted taking criticism of the first game to heart, such as the short single-player campaign, lackluster multiplayer, and the lack of a fully realized fluid storyline.

Now with a smaller team on hand to handle the game, the franchise is going to get the closely monitored care it needs to make Mirror’s Edge 2 something spectacular, and something that will live up to the hype of what an adventure FPS can become. 

I just hope they iron out the horrid storyline issues, and awful cut scenes from the first game, and instead inject a more creative original plot, and pre-rendered sequences that are as gorgeous as the rest of the game.  And please make the trip longer this time around, with more chances for awesome combat scenarios, and ridiculous chase sequences.  I can’t get enough of those, but Mirror’s Edge just seems to leave you wanting more by the end, and unfortunately there’s no more to be had once you hit the finish line.

Dungeons & Dragons Online announced a bit of a shock last week about the future of the game.  And that is that D&D is to become a free to play MMORPG, and will instead concentrate on garnering cash through micro transactions opposed to monthly subscription fees.  The game will be receiving a complete reboot this summer to accommodate the changes, undergoing a name change to Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited, and will be given the addition of premium dungeons and items that will cost real world money to purchase.  

The transactions are planned to be set up so that you can play and pay on the fly, like clicking a few onscreen links at a pay dungeon to open up instant access, and to automatically withdraw the funds from your account.  Of course you will be able to play through the game and achieve the highest level possible by playing completely for free, the road will just be faster and easier should you choose to spend a little money.

I don’t know how this will pay off, and I don’t know that I’m for this sort of thing in the future for other MMOs.  I don’t like the idea of paying real money for digital money or digital items, when the whole point of the game should be to earn them, or work for them.  Otherwise the value is completely taken away.  

Like what World of Warcraft has become, where most people just buy gold instead of making the money through a well trained profession.