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.