Gearbox dun fucked up ... Someone better call the Game Police.

I've fallen a bit behind on this blog, but with spring break coming up my classes are dropping some tests and homework. I've been wanting to talk about this game, but I was hoping for some things to blow over to get some real information. However not much more besides the initial "Who Dun It" articles that people have been talking about.

So in case you haven't heard, Aliens: Colonial Marines is possible to worst game to have the Gearbox name on it. (I can't say as much for SEGA, play some newer Sonic games and then you'll understand.) Basically SEGA funded quite a bit of Borderlands and Borderlands 2 with the understanding that Gearbox would work on this game. Then SEGA also gave them money for this game.

Next thing SEGA knows is that Gearbox funneled ALL of the money into the Borderlands series and Duke Nukem Forever, while none of it went into Aliens. Gearbox apparently handed the game design off to a small studio and never really touched it again besides for some pre-rendered scenes and areas that were to show off for E3. Gearbox says they can't be at fault because they handed it off to another studio and because the contract ended when they released the game, because that is apparently all the contract really said they had to do.

While this may or may not be fair to SEGA or anywhere close to ethically okay, Gearbox may not face legal repercussions. That fact that they completed the contract means SEGA can't sue them for the game itself. Maybe sales or something similar. The most prevalent idea at Sega is that they will be getting a portion of the sales from Borderlands and Borderlands 2 to make up for the lack of sales in Colonial Marines. 

I'm not sure how they can quantify the implied sales. Either way Gearbox has just gotten a bad reputation and other major companies are going to be more resistant to working with them. This could very well be the end of Gearbox, which could either kill the Borderlands series or some other group will pick it up. On the off chance they get back on their feet, I hope they like working alone.

Pokemon X and Y Speculation

So not much going on with Pokemon. Except several rumors that   are from several different sources. Most of these sources are from 4Chan, others are just from other ezines or websites. Anyway, here are  the list of rumors about Pokemon X and Y:

(Highlight to see spoilers)

• Main characters are Jean and Jane; names are non-customizable
• Trainer now appears in the bottom screen during battle, with a speech bubble interface holding the trainer commands inside
• Trainers now have their own leveling system that affects how in-game NPCs react to you and grants various bonuses such as increasing capture rate and the rarity of Pokémon encountered
• A new key item called the Whistle can be used once per battle with differing effects, such as waking up a Pokémon or snapping it out of confusion.
• A bond level replaces the happiness meter from past games; higher bond levels grant bonuses such as experience or stat gain for Pokémon
• Bond level bonuses and the whistle feature can be turned off in PvP matches for the benefit of competitive play
• A new item called the Bond-EYE that resembles a pair of sunglasses allows players to view the nature of wild Pokémon and their capture rate
• The Bond-EYE also allows players to see visual avatars of other players and send them messages or trade and battle requests; this feature, akin to the Miiverse function in Nintendo Land, will be the first of its kind on the 3DS
• Wireless co-op is now possible, with one player being the leader and the other aiding in battle
• Players not able to play cooperatively will be allowed to request aid from NPC trainers in their adventures via a juice bar located in every town
• The PokéDex resembles a tablet with a 3D display that allows players to view Pokémon models, read full paragraph descriptions of them, hear their cries, view their locations, compare their sizes and weights with others, and read comments made by other trainers around the world about them
• Excess money can be stored in banks that grant interest and special gifts upon depositing certain amounts
• Using a special wristwatch device, players can travel 30 years into the past which features different characters, younger versions of current characters, different layouts, and different wild Pokémon
• The rival faction is Team Gear whose members wear purple bodysuits with black clock hands on them; they mess with events in the past that affect the present
• In one part of the game, you must catch a Munchlax in the past to clear the road of a Snorlax in the future, suggesting that past generations of Pokémon will be available from the start
• The professor is Professor Bristle and the rival is Ricki, a magazine writer who documents the strange events occurring in the past
• The new generation consists of 99 new Pokémon, many of them baby Pokémon and new evolutions of current Pokémon
• Sylveon is a Normal Pokémon that evolves based on the new bond level; it is the only new Eeveelution
• There will be a total of six legendary Pokémon that include Xerneas (Psychic/Rock) and Yveltal (Ghost/Flying) along with four black and white Pokémon based on card suits: a cobra with a heart-shaped hood and tail, a tiger with diamond patterns, a t-rex with spade-shaped eyes, and a peacock with a club-shaped tail
• Most of the brand new Pokémon will be new type combinations such as Fire/Ice and Dark/Electric

Most of this is probably either just made up (I.E. non customizable names) or speculation (I.E. all the baby pokemon or the watch). Remember to take this all with a grain, or several thousand grains, of salt. 

P-L-A-Y S-T-A-T-I-O-N

So yesterday was the Sony press conference. And unfortunately, due to my poor internet connection I was unable to actually watch it. I could just read all the second hand accounts of what people had said.

So since you can just find the specifics of what was said just about anywhere. I'll be more focusing on what was said after the show.

First off the Playstation will not be backwards compatible which sucks. But it does save on the cost of producing the PS4. Some reports have thought that since consumers understand prices and are more cost conscience, the PS4 may be closer to the $200-300 range as apposed to the $400-600 range. This seems like an odd thing to say as the PS3 is still selling for about $350. However Sony is trying to cut costs where they can without diminishing the products usability.

Sony does have a plan for backwards compatibility however. They will be including an emulator on the PSN for the PS4. This will allow the PS4 to play digital copies of PS3 games. It may be possible that if you get the emulator that the system will be able to still be able to play the games. Unless they decide to change the way system reads or handled the Blu-ray or finds some new game breaking disk format. Another option that have come up with is Cloud Services or streaming your games. I'm not 100% sure on how that works. If you turn on your PS3 and it connects to the PS4 or if there will be some sort of software exchange from your PS3 to your PS4. I really have no idea. But to idea of still being able to play my PS3 games on my PS4 is nice to hear. Unless its some convoluted way, I'm interested.

Sony Announcement Predictions and Links.

If you haven't heard, Sony is holding a press conference today. It is expected that Sony will be releasing the specs or at least the vague concept of the system.

Personally, I think they are going to try to milk out all of their other nonsense that no one really cares about. Now don't think that I hate Sony. I have been a loyal Sony whore since I got my hands on my first Play station when I was eight.

What I mean by nonsense is Play Station Home, an enhanced Move system, something concerning trophies and players messaging each other on PSN. I hope to Kratos that they do not announce that they are planning to announce or even think its a good idea to implement a "no used games" idea.

Now things I, and probably everyone else,  might be interested is the new very brown and grey shooter (Killzone 4), Uncharted 4 (Is that what we are on?), Vita support, Cloud saving and maybe some of the hardware enhancements. What would be awesome, and I know they wont do it, is the ability to hook up your steam account to your PSN account so your cloud saves can be linked.

From what I understand the PS4 is going to be drastically cheaper than the initial price of the PS3 (which according to Sony was due to the back words compatibility). Also, from what I've seen Sony intends to have PS3 games have the ability to stream on the PS4. I'm not 100% on what that means. It could be "If you have the game data and trophies linked to your PS3 account prior to linking your PSN to your PS4 its considered own" or it could be that you need to buy the licensing to the game before you can play it. I have no idea how they plan on implementing this, but I am very very interested.

If you want to watch the stream Sony will have, here are a few links:
Game Informer
Official UStream

Ea and Ubisoft challenge Valve. (A.K.A. Actual News!)

So back to actual news. Surprisingly enough big game developers don't like Steam. Who would have thought that people who like money don't like their stuff being sold at face value so they don't make a huge profit?

Well apparently EA and Ubisoft have a huge problem with this. They have decided to partner up and sell each other games on their online stores.(Origin and UPlay respectively.)

So if you have a hankering to buy Mass Effect 3 and Assassins Creed III at the same place for retail value, and not on sale or cheaper like on steam. Then feel free to go over to one of these online stores and buy their games!

As a bit if extra incentive if you spend more than $14, and with everything almost retail value it wont be too hard to achieve this, you can redeem a code to get a game for free. From these choices: Driver San Francisco, From Dust, Might & Magic Heroes VI, Rayman Origins, The Settlers 7 or World in Conflict. However this only lasts until March 4th.

Unless they decided to pull their games from Steam, I'll just stick with Valve thank you.

League of Legends Restaurant

Presumably because tomorrow is the announcement from Sony, gaming news is a bit dead today. So I guess this counts as news now.

So in China a group decided to join in the "video game themed place" band wagon. With places like the World of Warcraft Cafe and the Blizzard Amusement park, this is just a new installment.


Because China is pretty much exempt from American copyright laws they can pretty much get away with anything. So if anyone wants to help pay for a ticket I'll  go to china to have some dinner while we get served by Sona. Along with the character themed waitresses looking like game characters they also have some of the food named about characters, like "Deep fried Skarner."

I really don't have much to say about this. Except they give you the ability to play League and if you win you get a discount. Lets go!

... The news really needs to pick up.

Bungie's Destiny (har har)

Title card for Destiny

First I must apologize for not posting anything over the weekend. Between School work, work around the house and Mass Effect my attention was at other places. Anyway, lets jump into this.

Since Bungie's departure from Microsoft and new attachment to Activision, they have announced a new game that will be released on the PS3 and Xbox360. There has been no announcement on the new generation that should be coming out later this year or next year. I also believe I have read somewhere that Bungie said that this game will not be releasing this game for the PC, which seems a bit odd but maybe they think that the current generation of basic consumer PC's wont be able to handle it. We won't find out until it's released however.

So when Bungie leaked this game, its working title was "Destiny" and now that it has been officially announced the game will be called "Destiny" (ground breaking stuff here). Bungie is calling this the "First Shared World Shooter", what they mean by this is that everyone in the game has a way to effect your game. You will do something to one world that will effect the experience another player will have there. This also means that the all of the games will be seamlessly shared. One person could be in the middle of a mission on another planet and if you see that they are in trouble, you can just hop in and help them, or go against them I guess. With that though, Bungie has said nothing about arenas or any kind of PvP, just seamless PvE.

The story is, as per Bungies usual, many years in the future a weapon was created that ended 90% of the world population and cities. Some point after that everyone that was left found the first city , and apparently only, they could inhabit and protect it with their lives. Now, sometime after that a strange Death Star looking thing appears to descend directly over the city slowly moving towards it Majora's Mask style. This orb is called "The Traveler" and no one knows why its there.

Your character is part of a group called "The Guardians" and it is your main purpose to protect the city. You can chose what style of Guardian you want to be The Old Republic style, what I mean by this is you can be strictly guns or use "magic" powers, I suppose there will be a class that is a mix with several different variations in the classes.

Art for the gameplay

Now after all that I have to say, what the hell is going on? If your characters main purpose is to prtect the city how is there as much to the game as they say there is going to be. Do you get kicked off the team and become a rogue protector of the galaxy? Where I'm coming from is that Bungie has mentioned that "you can see someone having trouble with a quest on mars and jump in and help them." Now if your purpose is to solely protect the only city where the only humans left, why are you on mars? Are you looking for minerals that have long been lost on Earth? If so then you are not protecting the city, you are still helping the city but you are not "protecting" it. I may be nit-picking but it still seems like a glaring issue with how its described.

Another thing that seemed to stick out for me. Think about this, the world is supposedly in a world where almost all life has been destroyed and you are living in a small city that is all that is left. Now put into perspective the number of players there will be. Lets say there are roughly 50% (that's correct statistics, I looked it up) of the worlds populations plays video games, currently that's almost 3.5 billion players. Now break it down into who owns what consoles, lets split that into thirds, for arguments sake, that's roughly 1 billion players on each world, saying every one of there gamers is playing. While that is much smaller than the current world population, that still isn't "almost all." Again, I'm nit-picking but it's something that would stick out to me while I was playing the game.

All in all this just kind of sounds like Bungie took a bunch of ideas and slapped them together and called them new (hopefully this will do better than Darksiders).

1. The game have seamless multi-player. Like Journey.
2. Set far in the future. Like Halo (gee I wonder why).
3. Different yet very similar classes, that are either guns, powers or a mix. Like SWTOR.
4. The future isn't bleak. unlike, but based opposite of, Gears of War or Fallout.

If they can pull this off, which I don't see why this game would be horrible (but that's me having optimism). 

What I mean by that last one, about the future not being bleak is that the game is suppose to have a positive outlook. In Gears and Fallout the atmosphere is very bleak, the world is on the brink of ending and there isn't much chance for the world to go on a positive track, at least not for some time. This game is going to try to allow the story to progress in a way that will give the world more of a positive outlook.

Martin O'Donnell

What I can only describe as odd, is the two things I am most looking forward too. One is the Grognok World Building Tool and the in-house composer. The Grognok World Building Tool sounds interesting doesn't it? Well this is a tool that Bungie had put together that will allow them to change the world on the fly. This will allow the players to change the world with their actions and will give Bungie the ability to add in content as seamlessly as their alleged PvE. This will allow for a different experience almost every time you log into the game. This could lead towards different MMO's releasing new material even quicker and possibly for cheaper costs.

The other thing I mentioned was the in-house composer. Now this might now seem like much, but generally game developers hire freelance artists or composers for their sound track, which can lead to different music styles when a new add-on comes out. However Bungie has hired Martin O'Donnell as their main composer. Now in Bungies previous games the sounds track were beautiful. I can only imagine that this game will follow that pattern and as new parts of the game come out I can only hope that the sounds will match the sites in consistency and beauty. 

In the end, there is not much can be said (the past 10 paragraphs would beg to differ). The game hasn't come out yet and we are only left with speculation and what has been leaked. However whatever has been leaked can be changed just as easily as we heard about it. The concept sounds interesting and Bungie is a very competent game development company, now them being Independent with a small attachment to Activision, we can only hope that this next installment to their game library will be worth the hype and wait. If this game follows most of the game that have come out in the past, it wont, but we can hope.

Project Shield: Protecting us from bad handheld gaming

If you haven't heard about it yet, Nvidia is working on a handheld system that boasts it will change handheld gaming and blow the other handheld systems out of the water.

Things this system boasts are:

• Tegra 4. The best graphics card Nvidia has to offer as of right now



• A "full sized" controller. Which when you look at it you will see while I put full sized
•  A 5-inch 720p retinal multi-touch display. By this I think that mean its also a touch screen so I guess that's cool? Maybe it will be detachable and play simple games like Angry Birds? Imagine 720p Angry Birds, you can see the sadness in their eyes.
• Integrated speakers. Which should be a no brainier  I just hope it also has a headphones jack, because if they look over that fact, how will kids avoid paying attention to class AND hear what they're playing.
• 802.11n 2x2 MIMO game-speed Wi-Fi. Which they boast is the fastest on any handheld device and will change handheld gaming forever.
• Android Jellybean. This actually is very relieving, because Apple has a sort of social stigma and from my experience is a pain in the ass to work with, coding wise.

Now for some this is probably some old news, but they relased a youtube video yesterday showcasing exactly what the game can do. And if you notice it will have two graphics settings: Shield-enhanced and standard. The enhanced version has dynamic lighting and physics objects and standard is a basic mobile game. Now I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the standard version is for saving battery but I'm not really sure.

^{In case you don't want to click the link, here is the video.}

Positive correlation between games and Crime.

According to polygon.com there is a possible correlation between violent video games and crime in the Unite States. As their opening statement puts it "High sales of violent video games do not result in spikes in crime rates, instead correlating with a decrease in violent youth activity."

So as the story goes a group of economists were writing a paper on how violent video games effects crimes in youths. Within this study the economists looked at the continuing sales of Grand Theft Auto IV, a game about doing pretty much every crime under the sun. 

Now this study found that on the release day of Grand Theft Auto 4 crime hit the roof, but as the game had been out for a few days and a few weeks, the rate of crime started to slowly decrease and almost stagnating at a very tiny amount. 

Now I guess technically this is a negative correlation, but you know where I was going. The only problem I see with this idea is that this idea could probably move over to other statistics, like as Grand Theft Auto IV sales went up so did the sales of deli meat or as crime goes down the GPA of students in a college in Ontario goes up. Now those are ideas that don't necessarily correlate in the same way as games and crime/violence. However, the point is made, this may be an interesting correlation, but it doesn't really mean anything.

Unless this can be turned into a causation, instead of a correlation, it's just a nifty idea. But if this can, it will change the way we view video games and might make censorship lessened.

Ghost in the Nexon: MMOFPS

Nexon; the game developers behind Maplestory, Mabinogi, Elsword, Dungeon Fighter Online, Vindictus, Dragon Nest and Eve Online, are bringing us gamers another MMO to add to their library of 20 (Thats only counting American games).

This game is going to be an MMOFPS (Massively Multi-player Online First Person Shooter for the layperson) and based in the Ghost in the Shell series. The major selling point seems to be that you will be able to control a Tachikoma and a member of Section 9.

Before you get worried about not being able to make your own character and have "full", whatever that means, customer characterization. 

Not much has really been released about this game and unless you know your way around Kanji your going to have to wait. Nexon does plan on making an American counterpart  but it won't be for awhile. If you can read kanji then you'll still have to wait till 2014.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter ... more like sales fighter ... oh god I need better jokes.

After about four months of miserable sales EA has finally admitted that Warfighter was a complete flop. The Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore had publicly announced that EA will be taking the "Medal of Honor franchise off the shelves" for their development team. So basically what that means is one less modern shooter that does the same boring thing all modern shooters have been doing for the passed few years.

Now instead of admitting that trying to milk along another modern shooter franchise was simply a bad idea, EA's Chief Creative Director John Hillman told gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun this.

"We don’t think it’s a genre problem. It's an execution problem," Hilleman said. "We don’t think Medal of Honor’s performance speaks to any particular bias in that space against modern settings or World War II or any of that. It's much more that we had some things we should've done better. I think a key part of this is having the right amount of high-quality production talent,” he added. “And we didn’t have the quality of leadership we needed to make Medal of Honor great. We just have to get the leadership aligned.”

Now here's where I call bullshit. For one, the only modern shooter that I have recently played was Spec Ops: The Line. It took what people like about shooters and gave it an amazing narrative not usual "America is great kill the people who aren't white." But besides that lets look at some other titles that the EA dev teams have/where working on: Plants Versus Zombies for the Windows Phones, Mirrors Edge for the Windows Phone, Sims 3 expansions, Scrabble for the iPhone, Battlefield 3: Close Quarters, Battlefield 3: Armored Kill, Battlefield 3: Aftermath, Battlefield 3: End game, Need for Speed for every tablet and phone along with some more phone and ipad games.

Now EA can blame this game doing horrible on whatever they want. But when they have a modern shooter series that is already doing well, sort of, and they are going to try to compete with it AND have the same people work on the DLC for the other game too, things may get a bit hectic and bad. 

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go practice for when EA releases Bejeweled 3 ... or are they working on 4 now? I don't know, but I know they aren't working on Medal of Honor.

Space Simulator: Not AFK the game

So Apparently Buzz Aldrin, one of the men that had a major hand in the moon landing as one of the astronauts, is putting his hand in the ring for video game creation now. His first video game will be aptly titled "Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager."

The Purpose of this game is actually not to man the shuttle or anything like that, you literally play the manager of the the space station of a fledgling space program in the fifties. You have to deal with NASA guidelines and make sure you do everything by the book.

The game should have two different modes, a free play mode and a campaign mode. The free play mode will allow you to free do what you want and spend your money. The Campaign mode will give you specific money on a turn to turn basis and goals you need to accomplish. Both modes are suppose to put you through the historic events that happened through NASA's career. 

All this said, the concept seems very interesting, but as with all other simulators (I.E. Train Simulator and Farm Simulator) it will more than likely be a very select niche of people that will buy/play this game and has a very high chance of just being a very over complicated space simulator.

I can see this game maybe being used for people who want to work for NASA and maybe even being used in some select college courses that would touch on this subject in some way. All in all this game probably won't sell en masse but will still have its uses and select market.