video games

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All kinds of good stuff coming out of New York Comic-Con tonight for Gears of War fans. Joshua Ortega, the writer of Gears of War 2, heavily suggested that a PREQUEL to the original game is in the works: one that would deal with the events of E-Day. That was the day, 14 years before the first game takes place, when the Locust Horde burst out of the underworld and began their genocidal war against the humans of Sera. So that’s potentially ten years worth of story that players might be able to experience and fight through. And if we’re able to play as Marcus Fenix then I guess that could mean his tale as a COG soldier right up to the day he chose to abandon his post and try to rescue his father: the action that ultimately sent Marcus to prison.

“You will not be disappointed

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It’s the old joke: “The inmates have take over the asylum”. But when the inmates are the rogues gallery of the Caped Crusader, turned loose inside the non-Euclidean former manse of Amadeus Arkham, and the only thing their sickened minds can fixate on is Batcave-ing in your Batskull, in a game being likened to BioShock well… that’s the kind of maniacal mayhem that Batman: Arkham Asylum promises to deliver. The game’s story is written by Paul Dini and will feature Kevin Conroy returning as the voice of Batman and Mark Hamill reprising that of the Joker…

Batman: Arkham Asylum is due out May 1st from Rocksteady Studios and Eidos Interactive, and is being built with the Unreal Engine 3.

And speaking of all things Batman…

A lot of people have still been wondering why I didn’t write a review of The Dark Knight.

Well folks, in the end… it ...

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Hot out of the gate and fresh into the blogosphere comes Matthew Federico, a fellow North Carolinian and I think that after just a few posts, his blog is promising some good things. Like this essay he just posted about video game piracy, and he covers all the bases rather eloquently…

Stealing is bad. Stealing is something you just don’t do. You don’t go into a candy store and just steal that Hersey’s Kiss. You don’t take what is yours, and you only get possession of something when you hand over your hard earned cash for it. You work hard, you spend hours after hours doing whatever it is that you do, you get your paycheck, you pay your taxes. You pay for insurance and food and gas and electricity and your cable. After all that, then you get to spend your hard earned money on anything you

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Eastern European video games have a very nasty reputation of being suicidally difficult. They are also gaining quite a lot of respect for being on the cutting edge of technical innovation. So it is that after reading about Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason that my curiosity has been piqued. Produced by Ukrainian studio Action Forms, it’s being described as “the Russian BioShock” (although Ukraine isn’t really part of Russia proper :-). Set on a Cold War-era Soviet icebreaker trapped by Arctic ice, Cryostasis is a first-person shooter where the player must not only fight blood-chilling monstrosities while conserving ammo, but must also stave off the elements or else freeze to death. Click here for the official website and GameCyte has just posted a trailer video of the game....

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Christoph Hartmann, worldwide president of 2K, has claimed in an interview with MCV that BioShock, which some have called the best video game ever created, might possibly lead to five sequels! In the interview Hartmann likens the BioShock brand to the Star Wars franchise… but also notes that 2K must be wary of milking BioShock with too much commercialism.

I finished BioShock for the third time the other night, and even knowing the story and the big plot twist, it has still lost none of its potency. I think that Rapture – the vast underwater city that is the setting of BioShock – is one of the greatest and most fully-realized environments created for a work of fiction. But I’m scratching my head at how Hartmann and 2K are already conceiving of five more games to offshoot from the original. Most fans of BioShock that I’ve spoken to have ...

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A little over two weeks ago we started a contest on this blog. The spoils? Three copies of the Gears of War 2: The Soundtrack CD… personally signed to the winners by composer Steve Jablonsky (the creative force behind the musical scores for Transformers, Desperate Housewives and a wazoo-load of other movies and television shows and other stuff). But in order to be eligible to win one of ’em, entrants were asked to send in a picture of themselves doing their best impersonation of any character from established Gears of War canon. Not a “costume contest” so much as that this was about conveying character and heart.

So we were giving away three Steve Jablonsky-signed copies of Gears of War 2: The Soundtrack… and this was an easy contest to judge ‘cuz three is exactly the amount of entries that came in! So the following three ...

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Just a friendly reminder that there are now five days remaining to enter the contest to win one of three copies of Gears of War 2: The Soundtrack, signed by composer Steve Jablonsky (who has also composed the scores for Transformers, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and ABC’s Desperate Housewives in addition to a ton of other good stuff).

By the way, these copies will be personally signed by Steve Jablonsky to the winners! So if you’re name is “Barney Spepple” and you win one of ’em, your copy will be signed something like “To Barney…” etc.

How do you enter again? Well, here are the rules once more…

1. E-mail your entry to theknightshift@gmail.com with GEARS OF WAR 2 SOUNDTRACK CONTEST in the subject line. GEARS OF WAR 2 SOUNDTRACK CONTEST has to be in the subject line.

2. Include the following information in your entry:

–

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…they tend to hide that fact from their contemporaries, according to the story at Financial Post.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong, at all, with anyone enjoying a good video game. The story cites Nicholas Muehlen, a fifty-year old dude – and a chef, by the way – who likes to indulge in the Gears of War, Halo and Call of Duty series of games. He and his wife get into the play as much as their grown children.

This can’t possibly be a bad thing. Or an activity to be embarrassed about.

Video games are a form of entertainment, just like television and movies. But they have the advantage of being an interactive experience that involves not just hand-eye coordination but more often than not some serious thinking, too. And consider immersive-style games like Gears of War 2 and BioShock: why just watch the story ...

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About a month ago I heard about GOG.com. The site – its URL is an acronym for “Good Old Games” – is dedicated to promoting classic computer games from years gone by. So with a lot of folks raving about how good Fallout 3 is since it came out last month and because I never played the original, I purchased Fallout (shown at left) from GOG.com for $5.99 earlier this week. For that amount came not only the game as a 500 megabyte download, but also the manual and a lot of other Fallout-related goodies (like the soundtrack).

And after the last few days of traipsing around the blasted wasteland of Fallout, I now forsee giving GOG.com plenty more of my coin in the future. In addition to Fallout and Fallout 2 (also for six bucks) the site’s catalogue features Descent and its ...

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Fifteen years ago this morning, on December 10th, 1993, id Software uploaded a zipped-up file to a bulletin board system and an FTP archive on the Internet. The file contained the setup, executable and WAD for the shareware version of the first official release of a new computer game called Doom.

And video games haven’t been the same since.

Yeah, Wolfenstein 3D (also an id Software product) is generally considered to have been the original first-person shooter. But Doom was the one that really made everybody stand up and take notice. Being thrown into the part of a Space Marine on a Martian moonbase who must fend off hordes of demons from Hell itself was wildly addictive fun. Some estimate that the original free shareware episode of Doom, “Knee Deep in the Dead”, is the most installed piece of entertainment software in history. That the game was so ...

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