Dead Nation, Tashpool and Antoninus

Antoninus and Tashpool have taken a twenty-year hiatus from the blog, which comes out to about, oh, one year since the last post. Or something like that. In the mean time, we've been shooting up zombies in the lovely PSN game, "Dead Nation."

It's not a good day to be fat. A fat PS3 owner that is.

If you haven't heard, the PSN has gone down.  Let me rephrase that, the PSN has gone down for owners of the original fat model of the PS3.  The vast majority I would wager.  No one online knows for sure what is going on, but from personal experience, trying to log into the PSN comes up with a constant error.  Attempting to log into a game that uses trophies comes up with a different error that makes you quit the game.

In essence, my PS3 is worthless right now.  Sony has acknowledged the problem on their twitter account,

It's been over 5 hours since I first saw the problem and I'm desperately hoping this isn't a diabolic ploy by a greedy executive to get PS3 slim sales up.

Sega, you suck.

I saw a 2D Sonic. I saw a highly acclaimed Japanese game being ported to America.

I really thought Sega was trying to get back into the 90's kick ass track.

Of course I was getting way too confident too quick.  Sega announced they are cutting content from Yakuza 3.  Specifically, the Hostess Club and the Japanese history quiz.
Subsequently, I am announcing the cancelation of my Yakuza 3 pre order with Amazon today.

Thank you Sega. Moves like this keep me in check. Expecting you to do something more relevant than just cutting content than, I don't know, reworking the aspects of the game. Change the history challenge to American history? Change the hostess club to a night club? The game was out in March of last year in Japan. With this much time, you could have improved on it in a number of ways. Now, we get Like a Dragon (the original title resonates better with me) in the same month as the million seller series FF. Is ANYONE awake at Sega?!?


Yu Suzuki, Yuji Naka - where have you gone?!?

Fallout New Vegas

After seriously doubting that Fallout New Vegas would be released in Fall of this year, it seems my doubt may be unwarranted.



Coming to the PS3, XBox 360, and PC. And to celebrate this wondrous occasion, allow me to show you another teaser trailer of the game.



Okay, so maybe I lied about that.

Your Heavy Rain Shipdate

Hello from Amazon.com.

We have received new release date information related to the order you placed on August 25 2009 (Order# XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX). The item(s) listed below will actually ship sooner than we originally expected based on the new release date:

  "Heavy Rain"
   Previous estimated arrival date: January 04 2012
   New estimated arrival date: February 26 2010

For more details, please visit the "Your Account" section of our web site (http://www.amazon.com/your-account).  You can also reach "Your Account" by clicking on the link in the top right corner of any page on our web site.

----------------

Whew.  For a second there, I thought I was going to have to wait two more years to get my hands on the NA Heavy Rain release, thanks Amazon!

The Gaming Bra

So I really don't want to prejudge the KOR-FX sound immersion thingy, but wow, that looks like a gaming bra. 

A $180 gaming bra.  So the concept behind this is simple.  Strap a subwoofer to your chest and hope your pacemaker holds out.  We've seen chairs with this concept before, and having your body rattle with bass can be entertaining at first.  Just keep off the hip-hop and low rider tunes or you will be in a jiggling world of pain for the rest of the day.

Also, apparently the vibrations on your chest help induce, umm, sensual feelings.  The O-Face from the website is disturbing and hilarious all at once.

 

When the original just isn't good enough

Zelda fan? Sound track fan?

 Confirming to either of these questions should point you in this direction, http://www.zreomusic.com/2009/12/25/ocarina-of-time

The fine folks at Zreo Reorchastrated have been putting together music from the Zelda series for a few years now, and their latest addition of Ocarina of Time is a fantastic release worth checking out. 

What makes these sounds unique is the time and effort ZREO takes into recomputing all the original Zelda music into a synthetic orchestra for your listening pleasure.  The quality is great and it brings back tons of great memories.  Head over to help make it through the work day with a little Hyrule melody, you won't be disappointed!

Now you see it, now you see it only in Europe.

It's pretty isn't it?  That's the collector's edition of Heavy Rain that so far, has only been confirmed for a European release.  Bummer.  I'm a big soundtrack fan, and with this game concentrating so deeply on emotions and choices, the music is going to have a much deeper impact than most other mediums.

What's include is,

• The Taxidermist - a bit of stand alone DLC
• Official Game Soundtrack 
• Dynamic XMB Theme

The DLC is priced at $4.99 according to the PS Blog (America), Dynamic Themes go for $3 and with a soundtrack averaging around $15 we have a total of about $23 in goodies.  This is all stuff I would like to eventually purchase so I'm hopeful a good price is announced.


What is interesting is the DLC that is included with the deluxe edition in Europe, and all pre-orders in America.  A similar offering to what EA did with Dragon Age by including something that needs to be separately purchased if you don't buy a new copy.  This is a pretty good idea that it helps drive new sales and plays down on used copies.

Here we can take two stances.  One, we can say that this content is already ready to go so it should be included in the purchase of the game.  Two, we can see it as an added bonus that compliments the main experience.  If the DLC included is something visual, or a small sub quest that does not alter the main storyline, I am inclined to go with the second choice and see it as a bonus.

What I really don't like is how gamestop sells used games for almost new prices and insults you by offering a pathetically small buy back price.  I think bonuses for new copies will become more popular in the future and help support the exploding budgets companies are putting into games. 

PS Blog Europe Release Info
PS Blog America Pre Order Info

UPDATE:
The dynamic theme was released on the American PSN recently for $3.00.  This helps to solidify the European deluxe version will not be heading to America.  I can only hope a different version will be made available locally.

Lastly, don't waste your money on the Heavy Rain Dynamic Theme.  It's pretty horrid in that it is only a single scene of an alley with rain coming down and some origami on the floor.  No lightning, no change of backdrops, no characters from the game making appearances, nothing.  For all the love I have for Quantic Dream, I really hope they didn't have anything to do with this.  And if they didn't, get in there and put something out better than this dreary thing!  You want to see a theme done right, look at the Bioshock challenge rooms DLC on the PS3.  It included a non dynamic theme, but you could tell a lot of effort and love went into it.

Will It Ever Die?

Probably not, but it appears that Arthas, the nemesis of Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, will.

After being older than five years and boasting millions of subscriptions, W.O.W. continues to thrive off the multitudes of addicted computer gamers stupidly hunched over their keyboards, flirting with pixelated, non-existent night elves from another world. Oh, and unfortunately those millions include me, too.

But there is a reason for this shameless stupidity. Last week marks the release of patch 3.3. Blizzard continues to add instances and content even a year after its release, including the unveiling of Tier 10 armor, three more dungeons, and a 25-man instance (also able to be down-scaled to a 10-man raid instance). The three instances involve a linear story where players take part in a small infiltration party attempting to exploit weaknesses in the Icecrown Citadel -- Arthas' home and fortress. The dungeons involve dramatic scenes that players take part in with Jaina Proudmoore and Arthas; the raid involves a joint Alliance-Horde siege on the Citadel go to hell in a hand basket with a gunship battle between the two factions, confrontations with the various denizens of his realm, and a confrontation with Arthas himself.

I have tried all the new content including the Icecrown Citadel raid, and I have this to say: the raid instance is quite challenging for those who aren't prepared. In typical modern World of Warcraft style, the battles are very dynamic, usually involving multiple phases, and require incredible management, skill and attention on the part of the players. No one is ever left out of the chaos. For some, this may be too much trouble. For others (including myself) this is the most exciting thing to come out of World of Warcraft in years. And as for the dungeons, they are by far the most difficult I can think of within the game. And this damned game has over five years of content.

But that's just the icing on the cake. The biggest advancement is the game's new cross-server looking-for-party tool. Before, players had to pray and go across the four-corners of the earth to find party members for certain dungeons. The new cross-server system allows for players across different servers to find each other rather than being limited to one server. What this means is that, instead of being limited to a pool of a few thousand players, a player now has a pool of tens of thousands of players to draw upon and party up with in dungeons. Instead of taking an hour to find players to party up with you, it now sometimes takes only a minute (five minutes at most). Never before have the game's player-versus-player battlegrounds been so empty -- they're all flocking to the new dungeon system. Blizzard says that the technology exists for raids and can be turned on like a switch, but they refuse to do it right now because of several problems they believe such a thing might introduce.

Five years ago I would have thought that the game would have died out by now, in favor of other competition. But that's really not the case -- instead, WOW continues to swallow the computer gaming industry up. And with a new movie coming out, it doesn't seem like its going to slow down. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? As much as I love World of Warcraft, I also love to hate it. I enjoy it, but I feel as though, these days, there just isn't enough competition for it to breed new, better games. In fact, the only real competition I can think of is Blizzard's other flagships -- StarCraft II and Diablo III -- neither even being massively multiplayer. When one company can afford to throw its own gaming convention, I think that says a lot. I hate Blizzard! But ... long live Blizzard?

Not quite a game, but ....

It only takes one image. One image to get me all excited, and yet, ready for memories of years before to be completely destroyed by commercialism.  We will all see in one year what is to come.

(it's in 3D! Finally a reason to hit up the local IMAX)