September 2013 Archives

Pixel Count: Most Anticipated October Release

Grand Theft Auto V landed last month and I imagine we are all still digging deeply into its controversial wickedness. However, time and video game releases wait for no one and with a new month comes more new releases.The odd thing about the month of October is that the really big releases come at the end of the month, such as Battlefield 4 and Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. Before that, it’s much more wide open than usual for a fall month. Check the poll below and vote for the game you want the most this month, then meet me after the break for my thoughts:

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Getting Addicted to Grand Theft Auto V

Guys, I have a confession.

You see, in the last couple of weeks I’ve developed a bit of an addiction. Every day at work, my mind is driven by thoughts of drugs, violence, theft, mayhem and destruction. At night my actions are guided by these impulses, and I disappear into the dark underbelly of my psyche to participate in grotesque fantasies, some of which leave people bloodied and battered.

Of course, I’m talking about Grand Theft Auto V here, Rockstar’s record-breaking new game that puts you in the shoes of the retired thief Michael, the up-and-coming gangster Franklin and the maniacal, homicidal addict Trevor. I can’t get enough of it. Continue reading Getting Addicted to Grand Theft Auto V

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 75: Millions of Beeches

We’re back after a week break, but can you blame us? We needed time to digest Rockstar’s latest magnum opus, GTA 5. As you can imagine, a large portion of the cast is taken up by this game, but we only talk up to the first heist, so there’s not a huge risk of spoilers.

Other than that we talk Valve’s Steam announcements (outside of the Steam controller that hadn’t been revealed yet), I heap some love on Nintendo for the Wii U and Windwaker HD and the fact that Apple payed EA to give them the exclusive launch of Plants vs Zombies 2, and apparently that’s a big deal?

Anyways, you know the drill by now, listen, rate and come back next week (hopefully) for another installment of the GamerSushi Show!

0:00 – 6:27 Intro
6:28 – 21:40 SteamOS, Steam Machines
21:42 – 26:58 Next Gen Transfers
26:59 – 31:09 Wii U and Wind Waker HD
31:10 – 37:25 EA and Apple “Non-troversy”
37:26 – 1:01:07 GTA 5
1:01:08 – 1:03:48 Outro

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GamerSushi Asks: How do You Feel About Companion Apps?

As the next gen looms, one thing I can’t help but notice is how many companion apps our games are getting. While smart phones and tablets are fairly ubiquitous these days, do games actually need a “second-screen” experience?

My first encounter with a companion app was last year when Mass Effect 3 hit. The Datapad app allowed you to send out fleets on missions to up your Galaxy at War completion percentage, something that was invaluable to bring all of your War Assets into the final battle. It was also a viable substitute for people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, participate in the excellent multiplayer mode.

Now, it seems like every game has an app. GTA 5 has iFruit (which is pretty bad), Battlefield 4 has Battlelog and UbiSoft’s next-gen samplings have their own apps. What do you guys think about companion apps? Do they add anything? Do you think they’re super neat and useful? Sound off!

Valve Unveils Steam OS, Steam Machine and One Other Thing

Oh Gabe Newell, I doff my proverbial cap to you. Not content to just have the largest digital distribution network for PC games, Valve is expanding the Steam Universe with an OS, machines and…something else.

Valve kicked off the announcements this week by showing off SteamOS, the Linux-based operating system that will guide your magical journey through living-room centered PC gaming wonderfulness. It sounds like you can dual-boot the SteamOS on an existing PC or stream games from your current gaming PC to a Steam Machine running SteamOS and play your games that way.

Continue reading Valve Unveils Steam OS, Steam Machine and One Other Thing

GTA V Myths Are Up All Night To Get Busted

The white whale has landed: Grand Theft Auto V has been in our hot little hands for over a week now and with the white whale comes the white lies: people making up all manner of tall tales, the kind that spread through message boards and social media like a digital Ebola virus. In the old days, outrageous claims were difficult to confirm. You had to try it yourself, usually several thousand times while wondering if you were following that jerk on the playground’s instructions exactly or if he was just a being a tool.

Thankfully, in this age of Youtube, we can test out some of these myths and legends for ourselves. And that’s just what DefendTheHouse has done on its Youtube channel: they’ve rounded up some of the biggest GTA myths out there and set about to prove them true or false. From towing a pursuing police car to stabbing a shark while underwater, these myths get put to the test. My personal favorite is the one about a car’s backfire igniting a gasoline trail. Little details like that really make the game stand out.

So take a look at the video below and tell us about your favorite video game myths, from GTA and from other games. Remember: busting makes you feel good. Go!

Source: DefendTheHouse

Pixel Count: Prequel Passions?

Prequels are all the rage these days. A word that used to hold little meaning before Star Wars made it commonplace in the 90s, prequels now span every medium of entertainment, from movies to video games and TV. For every Breaking Bad, there’s a Better Call Saul, for every Deus Ex, there’s a Human Revolution, and so on.

With Batman: Arkham Origins dropping next month, one of the more popular video game franchises in recent years is getting its own prequel treatment, putting us in the shoes of a younger, less experienced Dark Knight. While I’ve no reason to be suspicious of the game at all, I admittedly find it hard to get excited about not taking a step forward in the mythology, seeing as how I love where the story seemed to be heading with Arkham City. Likewise, Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, while looking mighty impressive, sort of kills my desire to see its story unfold since we’ve already seen how the whole thing ends — and let’s not even mention that there’s a new voice for the iconic Snake.

So today’s Pixel Count focuses on prequels. Do you love them or hate them? Are you indifferent? Go!

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Payday 2 and the Perils of Over-Patching

The original Payday had a solid idea at its core – co-op heists with bad-ass masks – but the execution was kind of lacking. It felt a lot like Left 4 Dead with its waves of cops, but instead of progressing through a level, you were left standing in one spot waiting for a drill to open a safe, or something.

Payday 2 actually took some steps to improve this, but unfortunately the developers shot themselves in the foot with Update 11. While the game has since been patched to fix some of the things that went wrong with Update 11, the game took a step back that will be difficult to recover from. Continue reading Payday 2 and the Perils of Over-Patching

GamerSushi Asks: Favorite NES Memories?

I’ve been gaming for as long as I can remember. I was lucky enough to be a kid during the beginning of the NES revolution, a revolution that we owe to Hiroshi Yamauchi, former President of Nintendo, who died yesterday. Yamauchi is largely responsible for turning Nintendo from a card-game company into the video game giant it is today, thanks to the NES, the brainchild of Yamauchi. He didn’t design games himself, but he was instrumental in crafting what would eventually become the NES.

As sad as it is that Yamauchi is no longer with us, his legacy lives on through the NES and all the great games and memories associated with it. I got my NES when I was 5 years old. I didn’t even know what it was, it just appeared one day, a gift from my mom to my brother and myself. Playing through Super Mario Bros, finding the warp zones, wondering how many damn levels there were in the game…it was a blast. I remember using the Power Pad to play Track & Field and losing to Cheetah over and over until finally resorting to pounding the pad with my fists instead of running on it like we are supposed to. Cheetah went down and my hands ached, but damn it, I won. Continue reading GamerSushi Asks: Favorite NES Memories?

Review: Animal Crossing: New Leaf

In my 26 years of existence, I didn’t think I’d ever feel bad for standing up a tiny animal made of pixels in a fake video game world, but I did. I said I would be at their house at 6:30 pm, but I missed it, leaving them looking crestfallen and disappointed in me. I felt more than a little ashamed.

This is what Animal Crossing: New Leaf for the Nintendo 3DS has done to me. Let’s review the damn thing. Continue reading Review: Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Superhot Mixes Bullets and Time

Even though I’m usually the last person to get excited about another shooter, Superhot looks like an awesome Steam Greenlight project that I could get behind. Not content to follow the Call of Duty formula, Superhot adds an element of time manipulation to all the shooty bits.

Much like some of the mechanics in games like Braid, the action in Superhot only moves forward when you move. Stopping freezes time instantly and allows you to plan your next action, like weaving in and out of frozen bullets.

While the game is clearly incomplete, it’s definitely got a cool look to it. Thoughts? Any other Steam Greenlight projects we should keep an eye out for?

Source – Superhot

Pixel Count: The Review Game?

Welp, it’s Grand Theft Auto V week here on the Internet, so you can guess what we’re talking about.

Despite our many, many grievances about Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V has managed to charm me over the last few weeks. I have to give credit to Rockstar for the way that they’ve managed the flow of information about this game, from the screenshots to the trailers to the details about GTA Online. It’s created a bit of a frenzy for a game I never wanted to play, to the point where all this week I’ve been salivating over reviews.

Which leads me to today’s Pixel Count. We’ve all got our methods about how we choose our games, or how we rate them before we’ve played them. I wanted to know how you guys get a sense of a game when it releases. Vote and tell us more in the comments!

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Plants vs. Zombies 2 Grinds To A Halt

I don’t really care for tower defense games anymore. The genre has become over-saturated and stale. But I do love Plants vs. Zombies, so when the sequel was released this last month, I was very excited. The cutesy art style and tough, but fair gameplay appealed to me on many levels. I had a ball with the first game and was eager for more. The fact that the game was now free-to-play with microtransactions didn’t give me a bit of pause. I’ve never once been tempted to buy my way through a game before, so why should PvZ 2 be any different?

Well, PopCap has managed to do the unthinkable because I am very close to dropping $5 just to get to the next area. But not because I am failing. On the contrary, I have beaten all the levels required to access the next area. But in order to progress, you need Stars, which are earned by replaying prior levels you have already beaten and completing certain challenges, which grant you Stars. In the first area, this was not an issue. You needed 15 Stars and I had 8, so I only needed 7 more to get things moving. But when I finished the second area, I had 9 Stars, but now you need 30. So I have to grind 21 levels in order to get the Stars required to play further. Continue reading Plants vs. Zombies 2 Grinds To A Halt

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 74: Fever Cast

We’re keeping the podcast rolling this week with a new episode, in which Eddy experiences a halucinatory fever dream and leads us all on a magical adventure in which we learn a bit more about ourselves. Nah not really, we mostly just talk video games and troll each other, like we do.

We gab a bit about the new iPhones, Kickstarter, Saint’s Row 4, now that I’ve gotten a chance to dig in to it, Grand Theft Auto 5 and how Rockstar is trying to kill Anthony, and a few more things besides. It’s an excellent cast as always, so listen, rate and be awesome. See you soon!

0:00 – 1:54 Intro
1:55 – 8:50 iPhone 5S and 5C
8:51 – 20:56 Kickstarter
20:57 – 30:09 Saint’s Row 4
30:10 – 38:25 GTA 5
38:26 – 46:53 Steam Family Sharing
46:54 – 57:37 Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Shorter Games
57:38 – 59:49 Outro

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GamerSushi Asks: What Are You Playing?

Sushians! The dreaded fall abyss approaches.

You know, the one that we’re all going to disappear into while we’re busy playing games. The first harbinger of doom comes in the form of one Grand Theft Auto V, which somehow is only a few days away. I’m not really sure how that happened, but I’m not complaining about it. After that, we’ll have games like Watch Dogs, Batman: Arkham Origins, AC IV, Battlefield 4 and then some.

But before all that, what are you guys playing right now? To prepare myself for battle at the moment, I’ve been diving into Saint’s Row IV, trying to finish it in a mad dash just in time for GTA V. I’m also trying to wrap up Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and hope to knock out Call of Juarez: Gunslinger sometime in the near future as well… but my eyes are often bigger than my stomach when it comes to gaming.

So what about you guys? What are you playing while you await the inevitable fall madness? Go!

Introducing 99 Gamers, the Game-Trading Community

Do you ever miss the old days, when it seemed like every kid had tons of unwanted games, ready for some no-strings-attached swapping? Growing up, I remember having tons of friends in our neighborhood who were always looking for something new to play, and would gladly trade their games for some of my old, unwanted ones. As I’ve gotten older, that community trading aspect gradually faded, except with close friends.

Enter 99 Gamers, a new trading community built around the idea of swapping games with other gamers for free. 99 Gamers was built with that old school neighborhood flavor in mind, and is built around letting its users send their games to each other for free. Continue reading Introducing 99 Gamers, the Game-Trading Community

Pixel Count: How Do You TV?

From Netflix to Apple to Amazon to your local cable provider, sometimes it seems like every company in the world is at war — and your TV is the battleground. While Microsoft is certainly unleashing its own bombardment with the TV capabilities of the Xbox One, Sony surprised the entertainment world today with their own announcement of PS Vita TV, a set-top box similar to the Apple TV.

When it hits Japan, the PS Vita TV will be able to stream services like Hulu, will be priced similarly to Apple TV, and will also allow gamers to play PS Vita games on their TV by way of a Vita slot in the back of the console. It’s an interesting idea, one with some intriguing possibilities — if there’s a similar content lineup when this thing hits North America, there’s no telling how big of a presence Sony could have in the TV streaming realm.

In light of this news, I’ve been wondering how you guys TV. There are so many options these days, and so many relate to gaming systems, I thought I’d throw it out there. Vote and hit us up in the comments!

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Emotional Simplicity in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

In the last few years, some of the most striking, emotional experiences I’ve had in games have come from stripped down, simple titles. Titles like Journey or Bastion, which give the player one simple goal, and execute the carrying out of that goal in a skillful, artful manner.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a new title from Starbreeze Studios which does just that. The best way to describe Brothers is that it’s a single player co-op game, one in which you control two brothers simultaneously, with each analog stick on a controller, along with its triggers. While it sounds simple enough, trying to solve puzzles with two characters at the same time can be a decent enough challenge of your dexterity and brainpower.

But the more striking thing is how much the game conveys with no dialogue whatsoever, just gameplay. Continue reading Emotional Simplicity in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

The GamerSushi Show, Ep 73: Rinkydink Curdlesnoot

Aaaand…we’re back. After our traditional Summer break we return to the mics to bring you the latest installment of the GamerSushi Show where we talked about how much we missed eachother. Not really, it’s mostly dick jokes, video games and the Benedict Cumberbatch name-generator, which is where I got the title for this episode.

When we recorded the cast last Wednesday, I had just come back from PAX, so I give an in-depth breakdown of what I saw and played. Well, more accurately I have to be gentle lead through the discussion, but we all know I’m bad at just talking about stuff.

Seeing as how we’re back, you should definitely listen to the cast, rate the cast, and enjoy the cast. We’re back on the regular schedule, more or less, so we’ll see you next week!

0:00 – 11:44 Intro
11:45 – 20:39 Dark Souls
20:40 – 42:59 PAX Prime
43:00 – 54:18 Microsoft and the Xbox One
54:19 – 1:13:24 Nintendo’s Missteps
1:13:25 – 1:30:06 Saint’s Row IV
1:30:07 – 1:31:46 Outro
1:31:47 SEKRIT PODCAST STUFF

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