Here are two of the highlights I’ve seen from the GDC event thus far.
Yet another Batman Arkham Asylum video:
There’s a reason I’ve posted three videos of this game, it’s because each of these videos I’m seeing make me more and more anxious about the game.
And then there is the mystery game I personally haven’t heard about before called Prototype.
It’s a sandbox type game where you play a man with some crazy special abilities, such as the ability to go into your opponent and actually use him to fool the others and even turn the others against another soldier.
From the gameplay elements I’ve seen it’s going to be kind of like playing Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, he has superhuman strength and can throw cars and beat up tanks…which is awesome fun.
I can’t write anymore I’m heading out to work in a few so I’ll just leave you with these drool worthy videos.
From out of nowhere a brand new interesting service called OnLive surfaced. It is currently in closed beta stages. Their website is launching in less then two hours though.
OnLive works by allowing you to play any game available on the service from any entrylevel PC/Mac and even your TV and all you need is an internet connection. It does this by sending your inputs from controller/Keyboard/Mouse to OnLive which sends back a video of what’s going on in the game. So basically the game is being run on their system and the video output is being streamed to you.
This will allow you to play high end games such as Crysis on a subpar PC and still get 60fps(supposedly) at HD resolutions.
You can use your TV by buying a separate box that will plug into your TV and presto you can play PC games on your TV. They even talked about porting over console games so essentially making it unnecessary to have consoles.
If the service works it would make investing in an expensive PC/Console less necessary, so this is a dream come true for many gamers who don’t have the money to spend to stay near/at cutting edge.
Now while this all sounds good. I have my doubts about it. This all relies on you having a very good connection(amount of bandwidth required for different resolutions is different) with little lag/packet loss otherwise the game will be all choppy. I’m also skeptical about internet providers being happy with the enormous amount of bandwidth this is probably going to require. Many of them have limits. I know mine wouldn’t be very fond of me playing games through this service unless they would happen to setup a data center right here.
But if it does work as they say it does, I must give them a thumbs up for coming up with this. They could very well get themselves established in the gaming industry soon enough and even start to trouble the big companies in the business like Sony and Microsoft.
Here is an interview on OnLive.
I don’t know if he’s all talk or not..but I hope he isn’t. Still, as for if I’ll ever use this thing..Well I doubt it. Call me old fashion but I want to own Consoles and up to date PCs. Plus I’m not too fond of everything becoming downloadable, I like owning original discs/cartridges for games, just feels more real to me and collectible.
Okay so there I was minding my own business checking through some links on Digg when this pops up.
Apparently during a Q&A Blizzard community manager Kevin Yu had with some Starcraft fans. He got asked about multiplayer LAN in StarCraft II and he said he could neither confirm or deny that it will be included. Considering that Diablo III is not shipping with LAN functionality it is considered likely that StarCraft II will go down the same road.
A likely reason for this is because of the lost ad revenue from Battle net.
Now I think this is a really stupid idea and even considering it is incredibly idiotic because a huge part of the popularity of StarCraft is it’s LAN functionality. It’s essential in tournament and LANs without internet. Forcing everything through Battle net will not make the job of people running the LAN any easier. I’m pretty sure that if you have a few hundred people connecting to Battle net through the same connection it can get a little lagged if it works at all.
Now, I know they haven’t confirmed or denied anything, but they shouldn’t even be considering this as an option at all, because it isn’t. A lot of gamers would be put off and take their money somewhere else and whatever ad revenue losses will be minuscule compared with lost sales from not having LAN functionality.
The link is down, I guess they pulled the story since it really doesn’t have any sound facts to it other then Blizzard neither denying or confirming LAN(Of course, if they were going to have it in, why deny it?)
So just the other day Resident evil 5 hit the shelves. I’m not sure if I’ll be picking it up since I’m rather broke and I’m trying my very best to keep expenditure down.
Not to say that I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on RE5 and I probably will at some point. But the thing is I lack a viable Co-op partner for the game and I haven’t even finished RE4. While I find RE4 a good game I’ve always been a bigger fan of the older puzzle solving games, RE2 is the best in my opinion. I’m a little nostalgic like that with some series, such as in the Legend of Zelda Franchise, my favorite is Link to the past. I could never really get into the 3D games such as Ocarina of Time despite it’s critical acclaim and success..
Apart from WoW, I’ve been doing moderate gaming this past week. I’ve spent a few hour swinging around in Spider-man: Web of Shadows. Which is a pretty good game. Defiantly the best Spider-man game I’ve played in recent times, although swinging around the city is incredibly fun my motion sickness tends to kick in if I do it for too long. It took me years to get up enough tolerance towards motion to play games such as Unreal Tournament and Half life.
I tried out the demo for the new Riddick game. It’s not bad. I never played the first one(although I had heard good things about it) so I can’t judge if it’s better or worse. Was kind of like when I was playing Thief back in the day. It has a lot to do with keeping hidden and staying in the shadows because as far as direct assault with a gun goes, Riddick gets his ass handed too him pretty easily.
I’ve already started planning for next years Digital Overload and I’ve already registered and payed for myself, I’m gonna see if I can’t pull together enough money before then. It should be possible, but due to my low paying job we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out.
I never delivered on that Street Fighter IV write up I was planning…Sometimes I just don’t feel like doing any writing, it happens and I’m sorry.
I’d like to add that I’m currently drooling over
I seriously can’t wait until this game comes. It looks AWESOME!
It seems that Konami are starting work on another Metal Gear related project, which I’m not surprised about. After what a success MGS4, stopping it then and there was never going to happen. I can’t wait to see what they plan on doing.
I cast serious doubt on Snake being involved, after all MGS4 was supposed to be his final and *SPOILER READ NO FURTHER UNLESS YOU KNOW*He didn’t have long to live at the end of MGS4*SPOILER ENDS*
But, with Hideo Kojima not doing any of the writing or involved in any way I wonder if the series will really be the same… Ah well, only time will tell.
Digital Overload was this weekend and due to financial reason I was unable to make it to the event, which sucked because what I’ve seen of it so far makes it seem like it was bigger and better then last years DO which I went on.
I always planned to write up a complete retelling of that Digital Overload but at that time I was swamped with work and I couldn’t find the time to do it.
I never finished it but I’m gonna drop in what I had finished in here now, just for the heck of it.
So where to begin..
My trip started on the Wednesday 5th of March. I woke up early and had to catch Herjólfur which is a ferry that sails between the Island I live on and Iceland. I hate Herjólfur, it’s like the most boring place to be and I also get sea sick pretty easily and the weather was really bad that morning so the boat was rocking all over the place and I got awfully sick and vomited quite a few times.
Not exactly a pleasant start to the trip heh.
When I finally reached shore I took the bus to Reykjavik and stayed at my best friend’s place for the night. Can’t recall what we did, I’m pretty sure we watched a movie and played some Warcraft III because that’s what we usually do. <_<
I woke up early the next morning because I had some errands to do before leaving. The flight out wasn’t until 5pm. I went to the bank to exchange some of my currency to Dollars and went on Subway to eat some. By the time I got back there was still far to much left and I was freaking out at that point. I took the 1pm fly bus and was at the airport not long after 2pm. I checked in and went to the duty free terminal. From there on out it was just the matter of waiting for the airplane. When I finally got on the plane, the ride it self was long and boring as expected. Nearly 6 hours flying isn’t exactly fun and the airplane was pretty cramped for a large guy like I am.
I had to sign a Visa waiver form prior to arriving and a customs declaration onboard the plane.
When we finally arrived, marveled over the skyscrapers in Boston as I was flying over them, it was the first time I had actually seen tall buildings like that.
There was a long line to the check out and I had to answer quite a few questions has I had thought. I had nothing to declare for customs so I got through without any troubles. The airport is really big and when I first arrived I didn’t have a clue where the hell I was supposed to go. Luckily the guy at information told me where I could get to the Hilton hotel which is connected to the airport. I walked a long walkway to get there but finally I arrived at the Logan International Hilton hotel. I checked in, threw my stuff into. Took a shower since I was sweaty after trip and then I headed down to a restaurant located with in the Hilton. I ordered a pizza, it was awesome but aftewards I was really really tired which understandable compared with the jetlag I had. 7pm in Boston is 12pm my time. I went to bed and slept until 4am-5am and couldn’t sleep any longer which again has to do with jetlag. I ended up watching TV for a few hours. Around 10am I checked out and headed back to Logan Int.
When I arrived back at the airport, I was just wandering around trying to figure out where to go or what to do. Took a little while but I figured out that I had to take the silver line to get the south station. When at south station I went and bought a ticket and had to wait for more then a hour for the next train to Providence. The station was really really busy and there were more people walking around there then in the biggest mall in Iceland. I almost missed the train because I have no experience with trains I got it just when it was leaving. The trip was fun and great, I got to see tons of cool things on the travel for example a Groundhog that was sitting in the grass right next to the train at one point while it was stop.
When I arrived at the train station, I got a little lost. I didn’t know which way the Convention center was, I did know that it was pretty close by. I took a big circle around the area and finally I got on track when I saw a sign with Atwells avenue on it which was the street the Hilton hotel is on. I walked to the hotel, checked in threw the really heavy stuff I had been carrying this entire time in and took a much needed shower. Then I headed for the convention center. I got in the line for DO. There was plenty of waiting ahead since it was only like 2pm and the event doesn’t open until 6pm. Luckily they opened up registration early around 4:30pm. Thanks to the much more streamlined system everyone was checked in only like 6:30pm. I went back to the hotel after I had set up my Laptop. There I ran into Austin(Clegg) which is one of the guys I was going to room with. He let me to the room Kitsune, Askee, Tears and more were and I finally met the gang which I’ve been chatting with through irc for the last two years.
