Project Natal is now officially known as Kinect and will be out in November.

The 360 is probably getting a redesign which isn’t official yet, but since the Italian ad had Kinect right it’s likely the rest is as well. Finally with built in wifi so people can stop whining about that.

Killzone 3 is revealed and jumps on the jetpack revival train as well as adding snow. Looks a lot more interesting than Yet Another Brown Game at least.

Marvel vs. Capcom gets Dante and Deadpool, a rather matched pair if I may say so.

Lucasarts shows off The Force Unleashed 2: Now with twice as many lightsabers! I really liked the first one though, especially on easy where you could play unstoppable killing machine with force powers. Hopefully the sequel will be at least as entertaining.

New Gran Turismo 5 Trailer! Completely without release date and in standard GT fashion only shows the replay mode an not the actual gameplay mode. Let’s hope the Sony press conference can give us a new date that they won’t be able to keep for its release.

Super Scribblenauts to add adjectives, such as surfing werewolves.

Rock band 3 adds a real keyboard and a real-ish (102 button) guitar to try to actually learn the players to play the instruments in question.

More to come in the coming days.

Discuss.

SilentBobBC is mine.

All those years posting on IMG, I remember threads on this subject going into detail about Valve and Apple, Half-Life and Mac, this and that….

Boy, today sure just got a lot better.

Currently Playing:

Final Fantasy III (DS)
Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA)
Rayman: Ravung Rabbids (Wii)
Mario Kart Wii (duh! Wii)
Mario Super Strikers (Wii)
Super Paper Mario (Wii)
World of Warcraft (Mac)
Digital Chocolate Solitare (Mobile)
Lemmings Return (Mobile)

Also recently finished:

Fable (Mac)
New Super Mario Bros (DS)

You can tell I only have my Nintendo consoles with me, can’t you?

To make certain, I dug out my other piece of shit, the ATI X1900 XT which also failed in about the same amount of time after I bought the Mac Pro. Popped it in, and everything is OK. Granted I know the X1900 always worked fine until it really started to warm up and then artifacts start showing up. Attempting to run any game that pushes it harder instantly killed the video. But at least it works for simple tasks, whereas reinserting the 8800 GT even when cool, locks up the machine with flashes and flickers on the login screen.

The 8800 GT’s been a great card though, ran cooler, quieter and faster than the X1900. I can’t say I’ve had any trouble whatsoever running any game for Mac or Windows on the highest settings, save for Crysis: Warhead. Besides WoW last year, Age of Empires 3, and most recently Dragon Age, it’s shown great performance. Unfortunately Apple no longer sells them, so I acquired another from an online reseller. I wish I knew what killed it though. I can’t say for sure if Mass Effect 2 made its fan spin faster more than Dragon Age did. Perhaps dust and static? Anyways, this will probably be the last hoorah for the Mac Pro. It’s going on 4 years, been a great machine except the two video card failures. Hoping at least the replacement card when it arrives will last (praying) another 2 years as I do use the Mac Pro for more than just games. By then I may be ready buy a new machine.

Anyways, for the time being I’ll just install Mass Effect 2 on my laptop and copy the save over. Who knows, maybe Mass Effect 2 will take out my laptop. It’s covered by Apple’s extended warranty for the rest of this year. Go-go 8600M GT chipset debacle. If the video fails on it, they’ll have to replace the logic board for free.

Played about 5 hours tonight. Just a few quick thoughts before I head to bed. Story, as expected, is superb; never any doubt about that. 5 hours though, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Probably will take another 2 months playing off and on. 

Graphics are much, much nicer. I thought the first Mass Effect on the PC was a spectacle, despite some glitchy shading reminiscent of being an Xbox port. Everything, like Dragon Age was, is smooth and clean on the max settings. Characters more fluid in movements, talking, expressions, etc. Loading is snappy; no more elevator delays. Previous Mass Effect 1 save imported fine; only had to tell the Configuration Dialog where the previous game save folder was. Aside from the main story, I’ve encountered many quirky, little things on Omega related to the previous game. Humorous, interesting and shady characters, bits of audio overlaid in the station and ship, just playing around in the dialog trees and much more. All the things I enjoyed the most in Mass Effect 1 are abundant in Mass Effect 2.

Some differences I’ve noticed from Mass Effect 1.
- UI is simpler. (At least for the PC I’ve noticed there are less unnecessary keyboard commands). More neatly accessible squad abilities. They grouped some control mechanics to make combat better. Combat has a little more emphasis here, which is alot nicer than it was in Mass Effect 1.
- Leveling upgrade system seems less complex at first glance. Might branch out further later on?
- I don’t see anymore grenades. No biggie, I never really used them all that much.
- Weapons have finite ammo and require reloading. It’s been awhile but I’m positive I remember Mass Effect 1 had infinite ammo weapons. However with increased heat generation proportional to varying rates of fire. I haven’t noticed any of my guns overheating, at least not yet anyway? Although I do prefer games with finite ammo over infinite.
- You physically drive your ship around each system near planets and mass relays, instead of just panning and zooming in and out. A nice touch I guess. Instead you pan and probe planets for resources that help you upgrade your stuff and fuel your ship.
- Hacking security is sort of cute. Find matching color-coded (programming) code segments.
- No more universal inventory. Still on the fence about this one. Probably a game design decision to make it less micro-managing. Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age have similar inventory management. You’re out someplace, you loot something, box pops up, you take some or all of it. Then I’d press another key to open my inventory and see my loot. Mass Effect 2 seems to have done away with that. You pick up items and anything you buy from vendors is kept with you, but from my time spent so far there doesn’t seem to be any way of using it or equipping it on-the-go. Can only do so on the Normandy or I suppose any other place they may have available for that purpose. You can equip your squad members when prompted to select them, which is fine I suppose. I spent about 5 minutes reading the manual and sifting through menus trying to find where my inventory key went, only to conclude that there simply isn’t one.
- More detailed pop-up alerts. Not just for achievements, but I seem to notice the big square pop-up on the right side of the screen informing me of everything I do, receive, or should care about, message after message after… sometimes I can’t read them quickly enough. Probably the one and only most annoying addition.
- No more level outline maps, at least none I’ve seen so far. Pressing M only briefly displays the mini-map that points to objectives. Can’t make it stay on the HUD permanently. Oh well.

Other than some interface tweaks and game mechanics I’m still adjusting to, it’s still insanely enjoyable and hard to put down. I maybe wrong or have overlooked some things in what I’ve mentioned above or just haven’t played far enough. Feel free to correct me on anything or share thoughts.

Road Rash was MY game back in the day.  Road Rash 2, 3D0’s version, 3D… all fantastic (except jailbreak and the ones that brought the series down), and if they really push the envelope with some incredible environments like traffic jammed interstates, crowded neighborhood streets, then throw in a great physics engine, some great bikes and deep characters and storylines, the game could be phenomenal.

So here’s me getting my hopes up insanely high.  Anyone else with me?!

Currently I’m a Level 7 elven mage getting ready to move out of Lothering. Took me awhile to master the party mechanics, and rethinking how I used to play the original Mass Effect for the PC by pausing the action briefly to position my party and tell them what abilities I want them to use.

Only in Dragon Age it’s pure micromanagement hell (changing party members for specific needs, equipping each of them with adequate gear and weapons, and making use of their trade skills), but honestly I’m really loving it. You can still switch quickly to any member and do anything live-action style while in combat. However mastering the pause mechanic to set-up targets, cast abilities, position characters, and change tactics ahead of time becomes essential to the survival of your party in much larger group fights and bosses.

It’s not for everyone, which makes me wonder how Bioware adjusted its complexity on a console. Dragon Age practically screams keyboard where the UI on the PC features the standard action bars and much of the control (aka sifting through dialogs or panels and clicking buttons) is simplified using a mouse.

In terms of story, I’m convinced Bioware does it better than no other. I probably would not be playing it still, had it not sucked me in already. Playing on and off, Mass Effect took me about 2 months for a mostly complete experience. On a first play-through I did most of the side stuff and read the quests as I tend to do with any game of this nature, like WoW, etc.

Graphically, it’s running fine on my now 3-year-old Mac Pro with all settings maxed. (2 x 2.66GHz dual-core Intel Xeon, 4GB RAM, 512MB nVidia 8800 GT, now running with Windows 7 on the Boot Camp hard disk) Some may argue it seems a tad dated when compared to other games today. I’d say it’s most definitely a step up from the original Mass Effect on the PC (which was partially due to it being a direct console port). Dragon Age looks much cleaner, runs smoother, has alot more effects. Makes me have high hopes for Mass Effect 2 to beat Dragon Age judging from the videos I’ve seen of it already.

So I’m curious if anyone is playing Dragon Age on Xbox or PS3. (Looking at Johan)

While a good idea in theory, the execution of the PSPGo is currently a disaster.

You pay a premium price for a console that has only two features the cheaper one doesn’t have, one that is good but not vital (Bluetooth) and one that should be able to implement on older PSPs with a software update (“quicksave” function for all games). But besides that you pay for a drive-less console to which games will cost more than the old one (few larger stores sell games at MSRP and almost no stores goes over it), and that’s not even talking about borrowing/buying used games.

The new form factor is amazing, but it forces you to go entirely wireless… over a 802.11b network card… and it won’t work with any current PSP peripherals besides 3.5mm headphones… which almost amazes me considering some of Sony’s other decisions regarding the console.

I really want to love the Go, and I really wanted one from it was first announced… but then they announced the price and my original reaction was “they must be kidding” followed by a long time thinking “it will be worth it anyways”. But when it finally arrived… it made wanna get a PSP 3000 more than ever before. I can get two PSP 3000s for the price of a PSP go here (albeit, going to a cheaper store for the 3000 and a store at MSRP for the go), and a trade-in option at Game would allow me to trade in a DS Lite with three games to let me by a PSP Go for the price of a PSP 3000. I didn’t take it

I though Sony messed up the PS3 at launch, but I guess that was just warming up for this.

Coming up next year will be the PS3 Go, which will have users pay $1000 to be allowed to watch video streams of chinese gold farmers play FFXIV on a console with no storage media, ports (besides video out) or controller. It will be the “next step in gaming” for sure.