GameCop vs. LameCop is a feature where Anthony and I argue about video game issues, playing the role of either the GameCop or the LameCop as we do so. We switch roles each time. The GameCop has your best interests as gamers at heart, while the LameCop is just what he sounds like: a total loser.
This week, we tackle several issues including multiplayer in single player games, Nintendo’s lackluster GTA: Chinatown Wars sales and E3 predictions.
Not many people played Beyond Good and Evil, which is a shame because it was one of my favorite games of last generation. Much to the happiness of fans, a sequel is coming. Well, it seems that some dudes may have stumbled across a leaked video of Beyond Good and Evil 2, and posted it on the Web for our viewing.
While it’s not confirmed that this is Beyond Good and Evil 2, anyone that has seen the first one can recognize the style of the government soldiers, as well as Jade. And let me be the first to say that this video is incredible. I don’t think it’s actual gameplay, but seems to be more of a target render. If they get anywhere within 50 percent of what they show in this video, I’ll be a happy man.
Who played the first Beyond Good and Evil? Who else thinks this is awesome, if it is indeed the sequel?
Once again, a case of a game having multiplayer that doesn’t exactly need it in the first place. When Bioshock came out, there was a group of people that, as great as the game was, wanted multiplayer for some reason. I’m not sure what exactly they expected, but I for one love playing great single player games and thought that Bioshock was a perfect example of that golden age of gaming done right.
Well, it seems that the 2K Games dudes are going to deliver a multiplayer experience for the sequel, but luckily, it sounds like they’re going through a lot of work to do it, rather than just throwing everybody in Big Daddy suits. Apparently, each player is going to play a plasmid test subject during the Fall of Rapture. So, basically, the multiplayer helps add to the lore and mythos of the game series as a whole.
If Bioshock 2 has to have multiplayer, it’s probably better that they do something like this that builds more layers onto the story. Hopefully though, the mode doesn’t turn out to be stupid or take away from development of the single player. What do you guys think?
Source- Kotaku
I never played the original Red Dead Revolver for the PS2, but I heard it was at least decent enough. Created by Rockstar, the dudes that make Grand Theft Auto, this new Red Dead Redemption trailer is all kinds of awesome. I really love the atmosphere, and I’ve always wished for more great Western-themed games. Who else thinks this looks promising? Did anyone play the original?
We all know what some of the greatest games of all time are. We’ve seen the list, we’ve heard the arguments. Heck, we may have even seen friends playing them, so we’ve at least experienced the greatness. But there’s no way we’ve played all of them.
For one reason or another, I’ve missed out on a few of the “greatest games ever” throughout my life. I say that I always want to go back and play them some day, but as I get older and have less free time, this seems highly unlikely. I think for me, the greatest games I’ve never played are Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario World, and the original Half-Life (I know, I know).
I hope that someday I’ll finish all of these great games, but we’ll see what happens. What about you guys? What are the best games you’ve never played?
Levels are the staples of most video games, new and old. Throughout my life, there are video game levels that are so iconic that they have left a permanent imprint on who I am as a gamer. Whether it’s the challenge, the design, the music or the sheer fun factor, the best video game levels manage to be both memorable and entertaining, thrilling gamers for hours on end.
In this new regular feature, The Video Game Level Hall of Fame, we induct a few of our favorite video game levels of all time to an ongoing list. Since there are too many awesome levels from video games past to include, we thought that would be a good way to handle it.
So, here are the first five video game level inductees into our Hall of Fame, in no particular order.
Continue reading The Video Game Level Hall of Fame
Awesome video games based on movies are in rather short supply on the whole. You figure that these two great visual mediums wouldn’t be all that hard to combine, but for some reason the translations across both sides of the line have been rather awkward to say the least, and rather awful for the most part.
That’s why these new screenshots will make you drool and long for game movies that could have been. It seems that over at the Game Artist forums, a friendly competition is underway for users to create video game screenshots based on famous movies. Some of the submissions include Aliens, Hellboy, Harry Potter, Blade Runner, Indiana Jones, and then some. And they’re incredible.
The screenshots are mostly created in Unreal or the CryEngine, and are pretty face melting. Seriously, you’ll wish that these really existed. Hit the jump to see the screenshots.
Continue reading Today’s Do Want: Awesome Movie Games
While the first Red Steel game for the Nintendo Wii wasn’t a whole lot to write home about, the 2nd one is supposed to kick things up a notch. With the addition of Motion Plus controls and an updated art style, things are actually looking rather smooth, to say the least. I have to say that the new Red Steel 2 trailer shows some promise. I’m a big fan of the cel shaded style, though I wish these Wii trailers would actually show us more gameplay rather than dudes doing things no sane person in their right mind would do while playing a game.
For the love of Pete, somebody please just make this stop. After some recent rumors that Sony will be introducing motion control at E3 (didn’t they already try and fail at motion control?), it sounds like Microsoft is going to be joining the party and hoping for free money the likes of which Nintendo has enjoyed this generation. That’s right, the rumor is that Microsoft is developing full body motion control for future 360 games.
Supposedly, this will be superior to dongle-waggling in that it translates full body movement. For instance, in fighting games you kick, dodge, duck, and punch and watch it happen on the screen. It is also rumored to have video conference via a webcam, and will even have the ability for people to grab and manipulate things on their screen, a la Minority Report.
So what do you guys think? Are you sick of the motion control yet? Personally, I just want to push some buttons, but I don’t blame these guys for thinking they can make more money this way.
Source- Engadget
Man, you’ve got to hand it to Bethesda for all of the DLC they’ve been able to support their game with. Lots of games companies have said they’d do it, but Fallout 3 has really received some awesome additions to the excellent FPS RPG from last year. This Broken Steel trailer, the newest DLC for the game, is looking rather awesome. What do you guys think? Who has played any of the DLC packs so far?
There are rare moments in gaming life that make me stop and say “wow”. I pick up the controller, and I know that I’m playing gaming gold, that what I am experiencing is something new and fresh and fascinating, and I know it within a couple of minutes of gameplay. Then, there are times when the exact opposite happens. When I know that what I am playing is complete and utter crap. And it barely took me long to figure it out.
For me this weekend, that was Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. While I’ve been excited to play this game for months, I was pretty horrified early on when I discovered how shoddy the gameplay mechanics felt, how boring the whole thing was, and how glitchy it was to boot. I mean, hell, they literally use the same exact tutorial from the XBox game (Escape from Butcher Bay) as the intro to this one, shocking you with its outdated graphics. I was really disappointed at how boring the game is, because I really wanted to like it.
So what about you guys? What’s the last game that you played where you knew almost instantly that you didn’t want to play it anymore?
As newly elected mayor of SimCity (thanks to my Virtual Console) I pledged to finally do what I had never been able to when I originally played this as a kid: create a town with a population of 500,000 citizens. As I write this, I have 460,000 people and things have been running very smoothly…until now.
See, my citizens have developed a case of the dreaded, “We So Stupid” Syndrome. For those of you that don’t know, WSSS is a horrible disease that affects people all over the world, not just in video game simulations. I have used all the land in my city. I have been a decent leader, who built all industrial zones around the edge of town, minimizing pollution. Of course, that didn’t stop the little artificial bastards from bitching about it!
I built all their houses far away, so the only time they would ever enter an area with anything less than pristine air would be…IF THEY WORKED THERE! And if you work in a place that pollutes the air, but rather than get a job at the mall (I built lots of those, too!), you would prefer to blame the mayor for the desecration of the air, which you in fact cause by working there… kill yourself.
No, wait. I need you for the population count. Which brings me to next point: if I build a residential zone, I want houses built there, not schools or hospitals! All I want is to cram enough of these little morons into the limited space I have available to me (apparently, invading the neighboring towns is out of the questions) in order to get to the half million mark to get that damn Mario statue I have always longed for. And these fools decide to build 14 hospitals and 12 schools, including 2 hospitals right next to each other!
Well, I certainly hope there weren’t that many sick or enfeebled people in 13 of those hospitals because I got a little trigger happy with my bulldozer and kinda demolished them all. Course, my little resiliant Sim-tards decided to rebuild one of them right in the same spot. I felt like the Joker in The Dark Knight, walking out of Gotham County General, tapping that detonator. Eventually the mooks learned their lesson. And as for those schools, well…that was just fun. Don’t worry, I left one of them standing. Too bad it’s all the way on the other side of the river! Good luck with that commute everyday!
Speaking of commutes, when you to a certain point, the Sim-jerks start getting uppity and demanding things. “Residents Demand A Stadium” started flashing on the bottom of the screen. Well, sure they do. But that’s going to raise the tax rate and if it dares hover anywhere over 3%, they start tea bagging each other! I mean, throwing tea parties. Or something. Then they wanted an airport. Now, I am not a cruel leader. I like to think of myself as a benevolent dictator. So I granted them their airport. Hell, can’t be bad for growth and business right?
Wrong. Literally 2 minutes later, a plane crashed. So either I built my airport just before happy hour ended or I have terrorists running around my city, which is a giant problem since I didn’t build any fire departments. And we all know fire departments is how you fight terrorism. So I had to lock the city down for a bit, demolish the nuclear power plants in order to prevent any yellow cake from getting stolen and then I realized I had better destroy any bakeries as well, because I am pretty sure they have yellow cake, too.
Crisis averted, I think. I saw one of our planes take off and fly over the city, so I am going to assume that was my personal army on its way to Borat’s country to deliver giant cans of whip-ass to anyone who speaks a different language. With any luck, I will manage to sardine some more Sim-fools into my city and get that Mario statue and finally achieve a boyhood dream. Wow…games sure do make you feel like a loser sometimes, but God, is it worth it.
Anyhow, what’s the hardest you’ve ever worked for an in-game secret?
Man. I don’t know how many of you guys played the old school side-scrolling beat-em-up Ninja Turtle games back in the day, but they were pretty much my favorite things ever. The original TMNT for the NES (with rocket-powered skateboards), as well as Hyperstone Heist and Turtles in Time were so stinking fun to play back then, I remember repeatedly renting those games and beating them in one sitting with my brother.
That’s why I’m thrilled to hear that a 3D Turtles in Time remake is underway, and is rumored to be coming to XBox Live sometime in the near future. If this is true, I’m buying that game the day it comes out and playing the junk out of it.
Who else loves this game and wants to hit up some 4 player co-op when it drops?
Source- Destructoid
Summer is almost here and it’s time to bust out all the games that you haven’t finished yet. I figured that means it’s time for another Would You Rather.
In Would You Rather, I simply ask a series of questions, and you follow up with your answers. Give as much or as little explanation as you want for your choices, but we all know that we like to see the reasoning behind the madness.
However, if your answers suck, there will be zombies marching upon your abode. Zombies spitting swine flu. So yeah, you’d better make it good.
My favorite game seems to always be switching. I’m not talking about favorite of all time, but rather, my current favorite. A few months ago, it was Left 4 Dead, and right now, it’s Team Fortress 2. For a time it was Halo Wars, and for another time, it was even Valkyria Chronicles. I cycled through each of these relatively quickly, considering my normal habits.
Whenever I get into a game, I really sink into it for months at a time, unable to let go of its pixely goodness. I tend to become obsessed with it, playing it several nights a week with room for nothing else. And then suddenly, I get completely sick of it out of the blue and I don’t even want to play it anymore. However, the game that was able to shy away from this the longest had to have been Counter-Strike or Halo 3. To this day, I could still pick either of those games up.
What about you guys? Which favorite game of yours has lasted the longest as your favorite, and which games did you grow quickly sick of? Go!
It’s funny that in the newest edition of Sessler’s Soapbox, Adam Sessler should talk about the same thing I’ve been saying for a few months, most recently in last week’s feature about JRPG’s: Japanese developers have fallen off the rails. He lays out some of the issues and even mentions what part of the problem is, before offering a few solutions.
What do you guys think about this issue? Are Japanese devs playing catch-up to Western developers?
For those that are uninitiated, MAG, or Massive Action Game, is an FPS game coming for the PS3 that promises 256 player multiplayer matches. Massive, indeed, no? While I’ve been doubtful about pulling this off, Sony has come along to prove us all wrong with a new MAG trailer along with real-time footage of some of the big battles in question.
This is all very early, but what do you guys think? Can they pull this off?
I know that one day, an MMO will nab me and never let me go. I’m totally in love with the idea of them, but the gameplay has yet to really catch me on any particular one. And with everybody and their mom starting to turn IP’s into that now popular genre, it’s only a matter of time before one really inserts itself into my daily gaming.
That being said, MMORPG has put together a lost of the top 10 games that need to be MMO’s, and I have to say they have some really crazy but interesting ideas. While I don’t know if a Madden MMO would work, I can see it having that mass appeal that developers are looking for. The possibility of a Nintendo based world is nifty, as well. Also, the idea of zombie MMO where survivors try to find one another amidst a world overrun by the undead sounds cool as hell.
This list is definitely worth reading. What do you guys think of the ideas that are laid out? What is your favorite? Go!
Source- MMORPG
Well, the long wait is over for actual video footage from Dead Rising 2 with this brand new trailer. It features the new character as well as a variety of new weapons. I for one am particularly excited for the paddle with the chainsaws attached, or the motorcycle with the same previously mentioned chainsaws. Kind of awesome.
Kotaku also has a write-up of some demo footage that they saw, including the mention of up to 7,000 zombies at a time. Pretty crazy. Who else is pumped?
Finally, a voice of reason has spoken in the clusterfrak that is the video game release schedule, which places the majority of all games for an entire year in the holiday months. And who is this voice of reason, you ask? Well, it’s none other than Microsoft. I know, I was surprised, too.
Basically, after last year’s release hell that saw over 200 games release in a 3-4 week time span, Microsoft is wondering if this is a model that video game companies should continue to follow. Specifically, the questions are about whether new IPs can survive when all of the heavy hitters are released at the same time. As the main point of contention, they site Resident Evil 5 and GTA IV, both released in the first quarter of the year and seeing great sales numbers.
So what do you guys think? Good news? I for one would love to see gaming releases spread out through the year. I still haven’t caught up on my Christmas gaming, and I’m starting to lose interest.
Source- MCVUK
