Yesterday EA Sports released the Mt. Eddie DLC for SSX (2012), and it’s what fans of the series have all wanted. No crevices to fall into. No need for wingsuits, ice picks, pulse goggles, armor, or any other reality-based equipment. Like in the beginning, it’s just you, your board and all the jumps, rail grinds, and fun you can handle.
Let me take a step back for a moment. The latest edition of SSX, released back in March, was heralded as the second coming for the SSX series. When the title was unveiled as “SSX: Deadly Descents”, the most vocal of fans decried it as an enormous step away from what made SSX great – odd characters, fun slopes, gravity-defying tricks. Though “Deadly Descents” was dropped from the title, it wasn’t dropped from the game. In fact, EA utilized creative-commons satellite imagery of the Earth to create 9 distinct peaks to race, trick, and survive. I’m not a big sports gamer, and the only new-gen racing game I own is Split/Second, but there is a harmony to the SSX series. Once they tried to make it based in reality a LOT of the fun went out the window. Read the rest of this entry »
Geeks such as myself have longed for the day to stand proudly, letting their dork flag fly. With a resurgence in dork culture over the last 4-5 years with programs like Robot Chicken, Firefly, and Chuck and video games like Halo: Combat Evolved – being a geek is the new cool.
But the best part, the hot girl geek. There is no greater joy. I give you: Team Unicorn!
How can you do that and not feel dirty? How do you decide which one you prefer over another when, truly, there is no choosing between children. Or, at least, I assume it’s how I’d feel if a) I had kids and/or b) the issue at hand was really about children.
Premiering to Xbox 360 Gold members late Monday night, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 demo brings the Sith(Jedi?) secret apprentice Starkiller back the dead. I played the original Force Unleashed on the 360 and loved it. Thought he camera was a little irritating and the force grip controls buggy, as an avid Star Wars fan, I could feel it flow through me with every button push – which was great because that meant I was either electrocuting someone with lightning, moving them out of the way with force push, or chucking them for distance with force grip. I didn’t care if my lightsaber was red, blue, green, purple, gold or black – it cut through AT-ATs, stormtroppers or rogue Jedi with precision. The demo for The Force Unleashed proved that the designers knew what worked and focused their energy on that.
Last week had a very up and down feel to it. Applied to quite a few positions and thankfully heard back from two of them. Though it didn’t go as I’d hoped, I’m attempting to be optimistic about it. What happened? Keep reading…
I’m a male. I’ve lived for 29+ years, mostly in either Virginia or North Carolina. I am an audiophile. I am a technophile. I love reading, going to the movies, and playing video games. I studied film at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, earning a B.A. in Communications. I worked for 5-6years for CBS Radio in which I worked in promotions and sales. Concurrently to the later portion of my tenure at CBS Radio, I went to school at Johns Hopkins University studying digital technology and the means by which people communicate, for which I will earn a M.A. in Communications this May.
All of the above equates to one thing – my favorite band doesn’t owe me a DAMN THING.
If you haven’t played Portal from The Orange Box stop reading this and go find a copy.
It is quite possibly the most ingenious puzzle game that I have played since Tetris. It’s a little too short, but the gameplay is amazing.
Here is the trailer that can explain it better than I:
So as you can see, you are given a device that will let you go from 1 point to another. That’s it. That’s all you get in order to survive moats of poison water, sentry bots, steel pistons and the ever-present A.I. If you are fortunate enough to make it to the end of the game, you are left with a song…..and cake. Below are the final credits and the amazing tribute that VGCats has done.
Enjoy. And if you can, go get a copy. It’ll take up 2-3hrs of your life that you will love to repeat over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…..
Tuesday, September 25th was a big day for Xbox gamers. I first played Halo: Combat Evolved my senior year of college when I moved into a dorm room with 2 freshmen, one of whom had literally every video game system made. He wanted to be a designer and would play games for hours. At the time I was still playing my N64, ruling house at Goldeneye and believing that Microsoft could not possibly create a video game system that would rival the systems I grew up with. I’d had a Nintendo, Super Nintendo and N64. I’d played Sega and TurboGrafx-16. I thought I knew what gaming was. This was September of ’02. Summer of ’03 I used the money given to me as gifts for graduating to purchase an Xbox so I could play Halo on my own. There have been a lot of days in my life that I’ve wanted to call in sick or play hooky, but never have. So engrossed was I in the gameplay and so locked in to what was happening(not to mention that I was on the last level of the game) that I called in sick to work so I could finish. Granted at the time I was only working a min-wage job until I found something in my field, but still – I’ll never forget the day I drove the warthog from one end of the Pillar of Autumn to the other, running over Covenant and Flood alike, just to get clear from the blast of the fusion core exploding. That’s the way you end a game.
It’s been nearly a year now since I pre-ordered my copy and Halo 3 has arrived. Between car issues, homework and work, up until yesterday morning I had only played the multi-player on Xbox live. The “Match-making” options are incredible. For one, while you are searching for a game to join into, a map of the world is displayed in the bottom left of the screen with areas lite up to show you who is playing Halo 3 in the world. Underneath that, the exact number of players logged into Halo 3 through Xbox live is listed. The first time I logged in and saw that over half a million people were played at 7:50a on Thursday morning – well let’s just say I was in awe.
One of the truly inspired additions to the game is the Theater function. For those that play and have moments of “wow” or “you have GOT to be kidding me” or my favorite – “that mother f***er!!!!” the ability to go back and rewatch the entire fight I just finished on Live is amazing. The best part is being able to freeze the recording, speed it up and slow it down or even to detached the camera from the player point of view and have it free float or jump from player to player in the game. The first night I played against my girlfriend I accidentally shot her in the back with a missile launcher while she held a flame thrower aimed over an abyss. I didn’t know I’d shot her in the back until we replayed the match, moved the camera around and slowed the shot to see the missile slam right into her unsuspecting backside. I felt really bad for having done that since I didn’t know, at the time, my weapon was a missile launcher, but the sight of the explosion frozen in time, the visage of her character being thrown forward, suspended in mid-air was….breathtaking.
Did I mention you can also record these kinds of moments?
I didn’t record that one, but I have recorded 3 vids so far of my own deaths and the vengeance I brought down on one player who choose to desecrate my body after he “killed” me. After respawning, I tracked him down and blew him up while he was in the act of doing it to someone else. Honor is important in battle among strangers, I think. Among Friends? All bets are off.
While I won’t get into the implications that this feature may or may not have on Machinima, I’ll say for now that has certainly changed the way I look at gaming.
Promotional Vids: Hunted
Museum
Believe – my favorite. If you watch, watch until the end
Yesterday EA Sports released the Mt. Eddie DLC for SSX (2012), and it’s what fans of the series have all wanted. No crevices to fall into. No need for wingsuits, ice picks, pulse goggles, armor, or any other reality-based equipment. Like in the beginning, it’s just you, your board and all the jumps, rail grinds, and fun you can handle.
