Scene It? Box Office Smash Review

Scene It? Box Office Smash is the latest sequel in the scene it series. Scene It? Box Office Smash offers enhanced visual graphics. Scene It? Box Office Smash is a trivia or quiz game that has been designed to test your knowledge of blockbuster Hollywood movies. Now there is a huge selection of movies to choose ranging from 1950s to 2008. The online game play is awesome and the puzzles are more improvised. However the game is not without its flaws. The online and offline multiplayer supports only upto four players which could have been improved. But, overall it is a great game. I will give it 8 out of 10. Thumbs UP!

Left 4 Dead Preview

Horror games are my favorite and some of the best horror games that I have played are the Resident Evil Series (I have played all of them and am excited about Resident Evil 5), Dead Rising, Alone In the Dark and games like that. Some FPS horror games that are worth mentioning are FEAR, Bioshock, and Condemned: Criminal Origins etc. Write now the game that I want to tell you about is Left 4 Dead. Left 4 Dead is a first person shooter horror game that uses the Counter Strike Source engine. The game is owned by EA and it is said to be released in November 17. The game play depends on the teamwork and you will have to help your other 3 buddies to survive through all the levels of the game. The game will offer a huge arsenal of weapons to be used by the gamers ranging from pistols to machine guns etc. but, you will only be allowed to keep one secondary weapon with your pistol. Left 4 Dead offers a unique idea and judging by the previews it seems that this game is going to be a big hit. Left 4 Dead will be hitting the PC and Xbox 360 in November and I will soon give you more info on this game.

Burnout Paradise Review

Burnout is one of the most famous racing game franchises and it is famous for its car crashes and fast gameplay. Burnout offers a fast and intense action gameplay. The latest installment of Burnout series is Burnout Paradise released in January 2008 and it was a great hit. Burnout paradise is all about racing and wrecking cars. Burnout Paradise offers a free roaming world that gives you the free to go anywhere and destroy anything you want. Burnout paradise is superb in terms of graphics and all the car crashes and blasts look are very fun to look at. Burnout also offers a addictive online multiplayer gameplay where you can race with your friends in different modes. Burnout Paradise was released on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC and it is definitely worth playing because it offers a totally different experience and fun gameplay. Overall it is a great game and I will give it 9 out of 10.

Tomb Raider Underworld News

Tomb Raiders is one of my favorite video game franchises. Though playing this game needs a lot of times but still love playing it. I have played all the previous installments and I am now waiting for Tomb Raider: Underworld. By judging the trailers and game play videos that I have seen, I think it is going to be a great game.
Here is good news for Xbox 360 gamers. On November there will be a virtual fashion show where some designers will be presenting downloadable content for Lara Craft’s wardrobe. One of the creations that will be presented in the show will be chosen by the judges which will be available for download after the release of Tomb Raider. The winning designer will be awarded $3000.
From the game play footages that I have seen, Lara Craft will be fighting with Tigers, bad guys, wolfs and things like that.

Fable 2 Review

Fable was a huge success on Xbox. It was selected as the Xbox game of the year 2004. Fable offers a massive magical world that we can explore. We start as a child and as the game progresses we grow up, do jobs, get married, learn magic and fight against evil spirits. Fable 2 came out on the Xbox 360 on October 21 and was a huge success. Fable 2 features a massive world with an extraordinary amount of detail. In Fable 2 you also have a pet dog that helps you in your quests. There are a lot of different quests to choose from. You can either choose the good path or the evil path. The game is extraordinary in terms of graphics and the in-game music is also very good. However there are some problems in Fable 2 too. First of all earning money in the game is very easy. The story is not too deep either. The map is miserably poor and not very useful for navigation. But, overall it is a great game and you should definitely try it out. I will give it 8.7 out of 10.

Call of Duty: World at War beta

Last month we reported that Treyarch Studios latest entry to the Call of Duty franchise would be receiving the multiplayer treatment prior to its official release. Now Activision has sent us the word that it’s that time of the month… in a good way. That’s right CoD fans, the World at War multiplayer beta is up and running on Xbox Live. Unfortunately for PS3 owners there are no beta plans and PC users will have to wait a little while longer for the unspecified date of their slice of the CoD5 pie.

For those Xbox 360 owners looking to join in the World at War beta, you’ll want to be a bit of a gambler in order to be granted access. To be part of the multiplayer experience you have to sign up as a CallofDuty.com member which will put you in the run in for a beta token. So get in quick before the beta tokens are all dished out.

The CoD5 beta will provide gamers with the “opportunity to play as U.S. Marines, German Wehrmacht, Japanese Imperial Army and Russian Red Army factions in a variety of game types (Team Death Match, Free-For-All, Capture the Flag and War), across three different maps.” The maps are as follows:

Castle – The Imperial Japanese Army faces off against the Marine Raiders in a daytime battle, located on the grounds of an ancient, Japanese castle.

Makin – The U.S. Marine Raiders square off against the Imperial Japanese Army in a nighttime fight, set in an outpost on the Makin Atoll in the Pacific.

Roundhouse – The Wehrmacht will fight the Red Army to the bitter end in a daytime struggle that features tank and infantry combat, set in a desolate, war-torn European train depot.

The multiplayer betas will only run for a few weeks, but that should be time aplenty for Xbox 360 and PC gamers to hone their online skills for CoD5’s release on the 12th of November.

Fallout 3 for PC, PS3 and Xbox

For fans of Fallout, you should be happy to know that Fallout 3 will be out soon, in fact the november 7th, less than one month !!! Still in the apocalyptic world, you will have to try to survive by all means. I watched some video at the website of Game Trailers and the game play since very pretty cool and very impressive with a lot of effect.
The game will be available for PS3, Xbox and PC but for people who like to play with his keyboard and mouse, you will need a PC which have at least this kind of configuration if you want to experience the game in perfect condition :
System : Windows Vista
Proc : Intel Core 2 Duo minimum
Memory : 2GB minimum
Video card : compatible with Direct X 9.0c and at least 512MB RAM (like NVIDIA 8800 or ATI 3800)

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway

I am a huge fan of shooting games and specially FPS games. Hell’s Highway , the latest in the Brothers in Arms series, came out on September 23 and i was able to get my hands on this one on 24th. Hell’s Highway consists of all the qualities that were present in its previous Brothers in Arms titles with beautiful scenery and fast paced and exciting action. Hell’s Highway allows you to take the role of Sergeant Matt Baker and gives you the chance to become a leader of a squad. Though the squad will fight along with you, but you too have to deliver your performance and take care of your squad. There is a wide variety of weapons to choose from machine guns to bazookas. Overall i think its a great FPS game. I will give it 8 out of 10.

Fable 2 Preview

I am a great fan of RPG games and i think this one is a must have for me. After the great success if Fable Peter Molenyux will be releasing the 2nd part, Fable 2. I am very excited to tell you about this game. It is a fantasy RPG game. Let me tell you about some of the features of Fable 2. In this game you will be able to choose a good path or a bad path and decide on which way you want to lead your life. In this game you will be able to marry, have kids, have sex with or without animal skin condoms. You can even kill you husband or wife. And yes you can choose to play with a female or a male character. In short there is a virtual sim in this game. At any time you will be able to get your friend to play with you on the same console or on the xbox live network. This game will be coming out in october 2008 on Xbox 360 only. I am sorry to say that PS3 players won’t be able to play this game.

Pure, off road quad game

Pure, which is an off road game for the Xbox 360 developped by Black Rock Studio, is a game which proposes you to drive a quad. Black Rock Studio has experience in this domain so we can hope that the game will have a lot of fun. Not only the game will try to seduce the players with his arcade mode but also by the fact you can do spectacular actions with your quad.

I played the game during an exhibition and i was quite impressed. After i was able to play in the house of one of my friends and i can tell you that Pure impresses a lot. Not only for his good realisation, the driving is very impressive since it gives a very good sensation but unfortunately i will prefer a little more circuits to extend the playing.

Special edition Soul Calibur IV

If you like fighting game like Soul Calibur series, you should know that Soul Calibur IV is already at your favorite game shop but may be you dont know yet, it s that there will have a colector edition. You can find inside the kit : t-shirt XL, the game, a comic book, a tournament kit. Depending of your console, the t-shirt will have a different color. For Xbox, it s white and for PS3, it s black.

Microsoft builds Gears of War heat with cheap edition

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to state that Microsoft has perfected the art of marketing gigantic titles. Last year, Microsoft’s elaborate Halo 3 marketing campaign saw the game make a mockery of many video game sales records and now it is geared up to do the same with Epic’s Gears of Wars 2. The game is scheduled for a November 03, 2008 release but Microsoft, the game’s publisher, has already announced two new Gears of Wars editions - not Gears of War 2. There will soon be a two-disc collector’s edition and a generic game disc at a discounted price. The discounted copy will be priced $39.99 for the 360 and 29.99 for the PC, while the collector’s edition will lighten your pockets by $39.99.The collector’s edition will include previous GOW downloads and special GOW 2 content.

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows - Review at Game Zone

For those who remember it, the original Gauntlet was an 80s arcade game, presenting the adventures a Warrior, an Elf, a Wizard and a Vakyrie, four champions of Good banding together against the forces of Evil–all in all, a classical storyline. The Xbox now welcomes its sequel, Gaunlet: Seven Sorrows, and the latest review about it is now up at Game Zone, which gives it a 7/10 mark.

Seven Sorrows is a tale told by the ghost of a fallen Emperor who, in his days, had the loyalty of the four immortal heroes that served him well. Yet even he admits that greed and other dark dealings had led him to commit unspeakable crimes, seven of them to be exact (hence the title), with one of them being the ultimate betrayal of his four champions. Tying them up and leaving them for dead in the Great Tree, he regrets his crimes and quickly frees them in hopes that they will put right all the evil he has unleashed on the Realm. Once again, the four heroes fight against monsters, spirits and other magical hordes that will put up quite a spectacular fight.

The game can either be played alone or up to four players. The gameplay itself seems to be close enough to the one of the original Gauntlet. Controls remain simplistic (we’re talking hack-and-slash here), and if the graphics aren’t anything breathtaking, the environments still stand out. If you like this “classic formula” of 80s games, this game may be (I quote) “a worthwhile experience”. In short: nice, but nothing new.

Burning Man vs. Xbox 360 Launch

Now I’ve heard everything. Corporate giants are out to copy an anti-corporate festival … The release of Xbox 360 is going to mimic Burning Man … I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s actually quite disturbing. But for you gamers, I suppose it’ll be a rockin’ event.

http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000697067435/

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Burning Man meets E3 for Xbox 360 launch
Posted Nov 10, 2005, 8:27 AM ET by Vladimir Cole
Related entries: Culture, Nintendo Revolution, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Chris Di Cesare, director of Xbox marketing, spent a few minutes rappin’ with us about Microsoft’s plans for the Xbox 360 launch event out in the middle of the Mojave desert. Since we’ve already covered the basics (all you need to know is that event tickets are being given away throughout the day today at participating websites), we’ll spend a little more time deconstructing the event itself.

Chris noted that the event has been likened to the Burning Man festival that takes place annually in Black Rock desert, Nevada. That Microsoft acknowledges and even embraces the idea that this is “Burning Man meets E3” indicates that they’re shooting for a completely different vibe than the Times Square/Toys-R-Us location they chose to host the original Xbox launch on November 16, 2001.

With the Zero Hour event, the company is shooting for “overtones of being something that’s more of a festival or celebration…. We wanted to do something that was different, and something that was true to the audience that the box was designed for, and that’s the gaming audience,” said Chris.

This isn’t the first time that Chris has adopted (some would say usurped) a fringe cultural movement. First, it was the wildly successful I Love Bees campaign that brilliantly adopted the ARG (alternate reality gaming) genre for marketing purposes, a success that subsequent imitators have failed to achieve. Now, by openly evoking Burning Man (and we assume designing the actual event so that it feels like Burning Man), Microsoft (and Sony for that matter) have been tirelessly campaigning to reform gaming’s image in a larger version of the reinvention personified by Xbox architect and Microsoft VP J Allard (pictured below).

No Oblivion For Christmas?

Much to my and many friends’ dismay, it seems that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, expected at first to be available for Christmas, won’t be out for this year in the end, but for a yet undefined date, somewhere between February and April 2006. This is bad news for those who were awaiting it with impatience, and a hard blow for MicroSoft, the game being one of the big titles planned for the launch of the Xbox 360.

Take-Two said that the game won’t be released until it’s fiscal Q2, which means some time between February and April of 2006. The company’s President and CEO, Paul Eibeler, says that the delay is to ensure quality of the product. According to Eibeler, the game’s developer, Bethesda Softworks, requires “additional development time to ensure the title meets gamers’ high expectations for this popular franchise”.

Rendez-vous next year, as we say in my country. And now, I need to find another Christmas gift for my boyfriend. Drats.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Everybody remembers Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind? Yes? No? You should! Not only have these games marked their time, but the fourth opus of the Elder Scrolls series is now to come soon… very soon… on our beloved machines. I’ve seen a pretty snazzy demo of the game recently, and both my boyfriend and I were in awe while watching it. Not only were the graphisms stunning, but they also leave room to much interaction with the background and the items pertaining to it (even animals, too; the demo showed one NPC ’shooting’ her dog with some kind of calming spell, and it was quite funny to watch).

In any case, for more information about this sure-to-be monster of gaming, here’s what IGN published about it yesterday:

We played through much of the same areas we saw at X05, which is basically the training area for Oblivion. At the start you’ll pick your race and customize your character’s appearance, eventually you’ll pick a birth sign, and a little while after that you’ll be charged with selecting your major skills and attributes. When you go to pick all your final attributes you’ll also be given the choice to change any of the conditions you’d previously selected, right down to your character’s name.

As you select what kind of character you want to be you can pick warrior or thief presets from a list, modify them, or create and name your own class, much like in Morrowind. Unlike Morrowind, Oblivion gives you the chance to try out some of the game’s skills before you finalize everything.

On our way through the training catacombs we were able to pick locks. These sequences switch to a different screen where you’re tasked with tapping tumblers into an unlocked position. As the tumblers move upward you need to press A at their apex to correctly fix them in place so you can open the container or door. Your security skill determines how difficult the tumblers are to manipulate and how many tumblers you’ll need to tap. You can also tell the game to automatically resolve the lockpick sequence instead of doing it manually, but this seemed to result more often than not in broken picks.

An article a tad bit technical, about the various character and skills possibilities, but doesn’t it make you wish that it was already available? For me, it sure does.

Worms 4 Mayhem Coming to America

Or at least on PC and Xbox, since a PS2 version isn’t in the works, according to GameSpot:

Worms 4: Mayhem expands on the oddball invertebrate warfare of its predecessors. Players will be able to create their own six-worm team to do battle in a variety of terrain created by a random level generator. Players will also be able to customize their worm teams’ look, sound, and fighting style. Furthermore, they will be able to equip said worms with new customized items from a weapons factory, including the tail nail, poison arrow, and sniper rifle.

Worms 4: Mayhem will also support several modes of play, including a 25-mission story mode for single players. Owners of Xbox and PC versions of the game can engage in online multiplayer bouts of up to four players. But if you own a PlayStation 2, you’ll miss out on more than Worms 4: Mayhem’s online play–the game isn’t being released in North America for the console.

The game will be available this upcoming fall, although no date has been announced yet. Let’s hope this will soon be done, as fall is almost upon us now, or so I’m told by my friend the calendar.

In any case, it’s worth a try. Worms is always fun to try with a bunch of friends, after all.

Halo 2 Update Takes Care of Cheaters

The announcement of the latest Halo 2 update was explicit enough regarding the policy about cheats, mods and various other hacks – and for those who use them as well:

Q: What will happen to a player if his or her Xbox contains modded content?

A: You will be banned if you are detected playing our game with modified Halo 2 content. Your ban will be from matchmaking, it will be permanent, and there will be no appeal process.
[…]
A: Playing with ANY modified content online is a bannable offense. Custom game types, created or loaded using Action Replay or similar devices, and then played on Live are considered modified content.

If one were to decide to not download this update, the consequences are also made clear enough – no access to the Live Servers anymore. Beware of softmods, too, because they’re included in what constitutes a bannable offense. As the saying goes: “this is at one’s ownrisks”.

“Fable: The Lost Chapters” Comes To Xbox

Remember the bit about “games and morality” published a few days ago about Fable? Well, good news for the Xbox RPG lovers: Fable: The Lost Chapter is definitively coming to Xbox - and IGN offers a nice article about it:

Microsoft Game Studios announced today that Fable: The Lost Chapters, currently in development for Windows and slated to release this September, will also be available in late Fall for Xbox®. Fable: The Lost Chapters builds upon the original best-selling Fable with loads of new content including new regions, quests and enhanced story elements that further enhance the mystical world of Albion. Fable: The Lost Chapters gives players the chance to fight new monsters, use epic spells to obliterate huge numbers of enemies, don new armor, wield additional weapons and interact with friends and foes using amazing new expressions.

You can read the full article here.

Games, Choices And Morality

The Toronto Star again, this time with an interesting article raising quite an amount of questions regarding moral choices in games – giving Fable as an example:

We begin with a scenario:

You’re a young boy who has just wandered behind a shed in your hometown and discovered a villager consorting with a pretty young blonde who is not his wife. A few minutes ago you met his better half. She asked you if you’d seen her husband anywhere.

Her husband notices you watching his tryst. He begs you not to tell his wife, and offers you cash to keep his secret. So, what do you do? More than that, what is the right thing to do in this situation? The “good” thing to do? Do you tell the wife, destroy the marriage, and leave just as broke as you were before? Or do you take the money in exchange for your silence? Is that right?

Who knew that a video game could be this complicated, so questioning of my moral values? Who knew that I’d find myself, a man of 24, staring at a video screen, considering the best course of action and contemplating just what kind of man I want my young hero to grow up to become?

Anyone who has spent more than a couple of hours in the past few years getting intimate with a hunk of plastic and electronics will recognize the situation. Such choices and puzzles have become a feature of some of the most popular and complex video games of the past few years. […]

(Read full article here)

While we’re not yet at games when nothing at all is linear and players can really do whatever they please, it’s true that there’s often a demand for “something more”, and when this “something more” develops, we’re faced with this direct consequence: doing whatever we want necessarily implies that our choices can also be the wrong ones (not as in making us fail to solve game puzzles or quests - “wrong” as in “morally questionable”, sort of). It’s indeed interesting to think of all the premises without black-or-white answers that can stem from such kinds of games.

There’s another hypothesis I could raise out of this. Making immoral choices out of curiosity, to see where the game will take us next, is it wrong in itself? Would it make players, in the long run, less able to make “good” choices – and would we be faced with another wave of “video games makes people violent, and now they make them immoral too”? I may be extrapolating too far, of course. Let’s say that to me, the problem isn’t that improbable.

For the remaining time, I for sure won’t be one to complain about wide possibilities in games. I like being given the choice to play good, neutral, evil and other variations by taking actions and decisions, and not only by checking a box or moving sliders.

Say Hello To My Little Over-hyped Movie Port

This fall Scarface (no, not the autobiography of Tina Fey, but the mafia movie) is coming to the PS2 and Xbox. Rent it for the false hope that you’re as cool as every D-list celebrity tard on MTV’s “Cribs”, buy it for the racist Cuban-American stereotypes:

Al Pacino will be lending his likeness, but not his voice, for “Scarface: The World is Yours,” which is based on his 1983 hit film “Scarface.” Although Pacino will be the only original actor seen in the game, “Scarface” cast members Steven Bauer (Manny Ray) and Robert Loggia (Frank Lopez) are lending their voices to new characters. Other actors signed on for roles are James Woods, Jay Mohr, Cheech Marin, Michael Rapaport, Michael York, Miguel Sandoval and Robert Davi.

Call us crazy but with a line-up like that, we’d like to see some really original and innovative advertising to get the word out. Something like, oh I don’t know…posters? Posters that could hang on the walls of college dorm rooms and frat houses across the country!!! Nah, you’re right, it’d never work.

Al Pacino in ‘Scarface’ video game [Canoe Wham!]

GameFAQs 101, Lesson 2

Want to add that subtle hint of rage to an already angry GameFAQs review? Start it off in Yiddish:

Oy…what a game this turned out to be. I, thankfully, rented this game because I wanted to have something to pass the time for a few nights. Too bad that I will never see that 7.25 again. Seriously folks, this game is flawed beyond all belief. What makes me most upset is that it had potential.

Red Ninja: End of Honor [GameFAQs]

Odd Move — If Not Completely Idiotic, Which Of Course It Is

Oddworld’s president Lorne Lanning — who at some point OK’d farting and burping as the main means of communication within his company’s high-concept Xbox games and kept his job — announced that “the future direction of the company is not in the videogames industry.” Good thing they’re moving to Berkeley, CA, where a future direction in panhandling is extremely lucrative (God love Cal’s white-guilt-fueled leftist poly-sci majors, armed with nothing but parental allowances to plunk down in a bum’s tip cup on the way to the drum circle at Kip’s on half-priced beer night). [TotalVideoGames]

NARC: F’d Over Down Under

When a country founded by convicted rapists and murderers bans a game, you know it’s gotta be good. [GamesIndustry.biz]

Area 51 [CLASSIFIED] Goes Gold

Just when we thought the only alien on Earth was growing inside Britney’s uterus comes Midway’s Area 51 for the Xbox and PS2, due to hit the shelves on April 25. [GameSpot]

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