In this episode we all discuss XP whoring on Gears 2. We discuss many games that we have been playing, Lots of news and have a discussion about girlfriends and gaming.

We hope you enjoy and please don’t forget the 5 star Itunes reviews

New xbox logo and motto coming in 2011 with the motto ‘’Be what’s next’’

Personally I think it looks shit

You may all have guessed from my numerous postings of videos and previews of the upcoming shooter by Platinum Games, Vanquish, that I’m rather taken with the title. The game blends a Western style third person shooter with a Japanese style third person action game to come up with something that looks just fantastic.

By way of another hint as to how excited I am for this game, here’s a set of questions that were put to game designer Shinji Mikami during E3 and his answers to each of them:



What was the inspiration behind the style and setting of VANQUISH?

We based things on the Japanese animated series, Casshern. As far as the game goes, we really put an emphasis on speed during the gameplay.

How Important will the Melee combat be in the game? and how many melee moves are there?

We haven’t made melee the focal point of combat in the game, but it is an effective technique when you close in on an enemy. The focal point of combat in the game is shooting, so the melee attacks are really just to add to the combat repertoire.

Do you think VANQUISH will be able to successfully compete with other shooters on the market without Multiplayer?

Of course, the lack of multiplayer will probably make things difficult on the sales front, but what we have instead is the speedy exhilaration of Vanquish’s gameplay, along with the content you can really sink your teeth into. I think it will provide more than enough enjoyment for those who buy the game.

What was your inspiration to make this into a third person shooter and not first person?

I wanted people to really feel the action going on during the game, which means that we needed to show the player on the screen.

Will we’ll see any characters from your previous titles making an guest appearance?

Nope.

Do you think Vanquish represents a sort of attempt at making a very traditionally “western” genre and infusing it with a style that is centric to Japanese video games?

If that is how people take the game, I am totally fine with that.


Will it be different color swaps for the suit? I want a black one!!

At first, we thought it would be fun to have a black version of the main character included in special edition. During production though, this plan fell by the wayside, but you are right, a black version of Sam would be really cool.

Will the Achievements / Trophies be difficult to obtain?

We aren’t making them insanely difficult, but you are going to have to challenge yourself to earn them.

What is your favorite aspect of Vanquish?

I really love the boost system in the game, as well as the English voice for our main character, Sam. It is incredibly cool, and I’m hooked on it.

Is aiming of the guns smooth and precise despite the speed and hectic atmosphere of the game?

We have tuned things so that the guns in the game are easy to aim, and that aiming is smooth.

How serious is the story going to be?

Basically, it is a serious story, becoming a bit dark at the end.


Can Shinji Mikami shed some light on some hidden parts of the game that make it special and different?

The staff decided to screw with me a little bit by hiding some rhinoceros beetles in the game. They did this without me knowing, so definitely be on the lookout for them in the game.

Will be bosses be solely “Shoot and Dodge” or will there be pseudo puzzle challenges like environmental hazards?

The bosses are a bit old-school, in that there is a distinct process for defeating them, kind of like exposing their weak points and then firing upon them.

Did you go to a gaming art school or a regular university?

I went to a normal university, Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. I didn’t really study, but I was somehow able to graduate.

What was the inspiration for the visual style?

The backgrounds are influenced by a movie called Tristan + Isolde. In the end, the visuals are really the product of the individual tastes of the staff creating them, but I think the graphics in the game are something we can be proud to recommend to people.



Who will be composing the soundtrack for the game?

The soundtrack was mainly composed by our in-house composers; however, ex-Grasshopper Manufacture composer Masafumi Takada was also in on composing some tracks.

He never seems to stick with one game style for his projects, often doing something very different with each game genre he tackles. I’d like to ask why he chose the third-person shooter genre this time?

It isn’t really a question of why. There was a reason the game had to be a third-person shooter. To create a shooter with strong action elements, I felt the only way to pull things off was with the third person perspective.

What is the main difference between an Occidental shooter and a Oriental shooter?

The short answer is Realism. From the graphics, to the worlds, games created in the West tend to want to simulate reality at a very high level. On the other hand, there tends to be a great number of Japanese games going for distinctive styles of expression.

Thanks to Sega for gathering these questions and answers, they have certainly increased my excitement for the game. Hopefully they have done the same for you!

In this weeks show Glasgow pulls off some great impressions of the podcasts host and Peter Molyneaux.

We discuss Split Second, Prince of Persia, Alan Wake, Red Dead Redemption and much more. Lots of news and discussion about the new xbox.

Out-takes are hilarious and please don’t forget the Itunes reviews

It seems that in today’s gaming market everything successful has a 2, 3, 4 etc… after its name. Crackdown 2, Modern Warfare 2, GTA 4, Forza 3. New IP’s are great but there is another sequel.

Read the rest of this entry »

Extended episode this week. We discuss what we have been playing including Singularity, Crackdown 2 and Split Second. We have  lots of news and Natal Talk.

Make sure you listen to the hilarious out-takes

Please don’t forget the Itunes reviews

Future Soldier beta still a long way off, may not arrive until next year.

Ubisoft has told GamerZines that the Xbox 360-exclusive Ghost Recon: Future Soldier multiplayer beta will go live "a couple of months" before the game’s release next spring, suggesting that we may need to wait until 2011 for the chance to give the next Ghost Recon a whirl.

"It’s still coming," said Ghost Recon Future Soldier’s International Product Manager Aziz Khater when we asked what was happening with the beta.
"The game is coming in Q1 of next year and the beta is going to come out a couple of months before. We don’t have specific dates and we still can’t talk about the content of this beta, but all the guys who are waiting for the beta and have Splinter Cell will have the beta for sure."

However, when asked whether the beta might turn out to be a timed-exclusive for Splinter Cell: Conviction owners rather than an exclusive altogether, Khater said:

"It’s still under discussion. Maybe. These are things that we are discussing. Absolutely."
So, even if you haven’t picked yourself up a copy of Conviction, you may still be able to get in on the beta – if you’re prepared to wait even longer.

This is brought to you by Hogarth UK

The below is a reprint of an superb and brilliantly thought provoking article originally released on Kotaku. There’s a lot to get through here, but I thoroughly recommend reading it in it’s fullest and then joining the discussion of it over in the News section of the forums. I’m not going to put forward my personal view on the opinions raised here, but I would encourage each and every one of you to do so in the comments or in the forums.


The original version can be found here.

Are games our escapist fantasies, or our outlets for dealing with reality? Either way, why is our most common gameplay choice the pursuit of war?

I remember watching a long stretch of television footage of the United States dropping bombs on Iraq. It was late at night, so the broadcast was dark green and bright green, pulsating softly. There was a sound like a throbbing heartbeat from far away, or like the distant rumble of thunder; it was explosions, successive explosions. I remember the government called it “Shock and Awe.” I was both shocked and awed.

I hadn’t seen anything like Shock and Awe in my life. I never would again, unless you count the GDC 2009 teaser trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and the hushed admiration that overtook the onlookers at its debut. The green line of a heartbeat, the vague shapes of soldiers in an elevator, pulsing softly luminous. Gunshots. Distant voices. I remember thinking that it looked very real.

When I say “real”, I don’t mean it as a quality of the graphics, as a unit of technical proficiency, of resolution and of vivid game design. I mean it felt sharply au courant; from the marketing period until launch, it seemed to me transparently a reflection of our times, of anxiety and aggression, either a latent and wordless support of warmaking, or some kind of unspoken coping mechanism for the opposed.

I imagine others felt the same, but I never heard it. All I heard was “fucking awesome.”

All I saw was that damn thing fly off the shelves.

All I heard of was people spending hours in the guise of a soldier, blowing each other away with a little trash-talk and a well-placed shot or two or five, rapid-fire.

It shocked and awed me that this fine-looking facsimile of modern warfare became a multi-million seller, made more money than God, and I felt alone in finding it a little bit of a strange thing to celebrate.

It’s strange, regardless of your political views. I and many of my colleagues near and far – our ranks are innumerable – have devoted countless words and column inches and printer ink and blog space to the miracle of “play” as visualized through the medium of interactive entertainment. We’ve talked you all blue in the faces about how interactivity lends added dimension to human imagination, to experimentation, to escapism. How the swift and sudden advent of multiplayer has allowed us to share, to create and connect to each other, made a formerly reclusive and ill-viewed activity “participatory,” “social.”

The cousin of someone dear to me got all but one of his limbs blown off in Iraq. This is our most popular way to play together? And we are all okay with this?

It is, of course, driven in part by economics. Modern Warfare 2, widely touted as the “top-grossing entertainment product of all time,” is a performance that many publishers are eager to repeat. Thus here we are in 2010, and the battle-royale to watch this holiday is among first-person shooters. Historical war. Modern war. Future-war. Reports of “Halo-killers.” We all sit back and anticipate the fall-holiday first-person-shooter shootout shit-show. Hallelujah.

At E3 this year, all that presenters could discuss at press conferences as they touted their FPS-of-the-year was “immersion” and realism. We have 3D now, so it’s even more in-your-face. I was in Sony’s press conference when everyone put on stereoscopic glasses and watched an elaborate demo of Killzone 3 in three dimensions. The blood that spattered my view with each concussive blast seemed as if it could be from my own head. To my left, an observer casually commented on the technical proficiency of the demonstration – further to my right, scattered cheers and applause greeted every explosion.

I knew I was looking at a fantasy scenario. A future that’ll never happen. Just a video game. But I still felt uncomfortable, I guess, with the net effect of E3 this year. Even the battle over new and innovative motion control technologies seemed time and time again to come down to one thing – “what good is Kinect when you can’t hold a gun, and how are you going to play an FPS with that?”

It’s not just money that drives the saturation of and heavy focus on these games. It’s simple game design logic; first-person gun mechanics are among the easiest and most sensible to design, my industry friend tells me. His team is hard at work on one of the big shooters launching this year, so he couldn’t let me use his name. “Projectiles have been part of gaming since forever,” he says, and it’s true – early arcades were all about shooting galleries. Think of old-school duels and kids playing cops and robbers; weapons have, in fact, been part of play for a long time. “When you get into the first-person view, shooting continues to be what feels most natural,” he says.

But as games get ever more immersive and lifelike, it starts to feel less like healthy play and more like unsettling aspirational fantasy to me. And as the economic competition around the genre heats up, the push for bigger-bloodier-more seems especially opportunistic and shameless. I don’t understand the continuing appeal; I don’t understand the unquestioning audience.

I research evolutionary theories on the hard-wired instincts of males in hunter-gatherer societies, and how technology’s eliminated the need for combat and aggression, but not the urge. When we play first-person shooters, we could be scratching an old, old itch that the comfort and complacency of modern living can no longer reach. That might explain why far more men are interested in war shooters than women, who under that same evolutionary paradigm, were supposedly geared toward keeping the homestead safe.

I try mining gamer culture for clues. Forum thread after forum thread makes it plain that most of these people don’t even know how to speak to one another, let alone engage in what marketing copy calls “healthy social play.” The Internet’s vocal ranks have something in common with soldiers from Halo to Helghast – they’re faceless. Behind the veil of anonymity one looks the same as the next, and the salvos they fire are brief and remorseless.

Has escapism desensitized core gamers to real-world consequences? The popularity of war simulators in and of itself isn’t what’s most alarming; it’s the absence of emotional connection, of conscience and of discussion. Just as hardcore gamers online often deliver casual slurs without conscience, maybe they’ve forgotten that bullets cause wounds and that war causes deaths. Or maybe there was something wrong with the core audience to begin with: maladapted people seeking maladaptive coping, and the industry that rose up to greet it.

But these games wouldn’t be the gold mines they are if they were limited to core gamers. Even the buyer who never goes online, who buys a game or two a year when the new-hot-thing comes out, is buying these up. The last time I was in GameStop, a pair of happy guys behind me struck up a conversation, and as it turns out, one was there to buy the other Call of Duty: World at War as a birthday present.

“I’m really into the history,” the guy explained.

He looked excited, and sort of like a normal person, and not like the kind of person who wanted to wire up and plug in and glaze out on a virtual battlefield all day long. I thought being “into the history” sounded like a much more comprehensible reason to be interested in these games. In the end, nationalist war, faction against faction, has been part of the human experience since the very beginning. Like it or not, it’s always been something deeply part of who we are; it makes sense that our simulated experiences, that our play, should seek to tap into understanding and experimenting with those concepts.

What continues to concern me is that we don’t think about it and we don’t discuss it. We’re able to witness grenade-flung bodies, we’re able to crush enemies under the treads of our vehicles, we’re ourselves able to die in trenches. And get up again, and keep doing it. How far can we push things before video games like these stop being a way to interact with and process the human experience, and instead cross a line to where they’re trivializing it?

[ Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

In Castlevania Harmony of Despair, fan favorite vampire hunters from throughout the series come together in order to return Dracula to his eternal slumber. Joining forces with friends on Xbox LIVE, up to six players can explore massive levels inspired by the worlds of Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia via online co-op play. As players employ their cooperative skills to unleash devastating attacks and fight the forces of darkness, they can discover hidden locations, special items and equipment to help in their quest. Fearless players can even choose to engage in competitive Survival Mode with friends to and determine the best slayer of evil.

Featuring detailed 2D art with the ability for players to zoom in and zoom out of the entire map of each level adding in a completely new dimension of gameplay, Castlevania Harmony of Despair will provide players with a thrilling, next generation experience coupled with the classic Castlevania aesthetic. To keep the momentum after initial launch, there are also plans for downloadable content featuring new characters along with new levels.

Castlevania Harmony of Despair will be available for Xbox LIVE Arcade as a part of the Summer of Arcade program on August 4 for 1200 Microsoft Points

Hydro Thunder Hurricane is the first official sequel to the classic Midway hit Hydro Thunder, which splashed into arcades and consoles over 10 years ago. Rather than simply recreate the original game with updated graphics, Vector Unit has delivered an all-new game engine for the sequel, with gorgeous HD visuals and amazing dynamic water physics.

The indie developer’s motto is “Big games in small packages,” and their first game as a studio delivers on that promise. The downloadable game features 8 all new interactive race tracks, new Single Player game modes, Xbox LIVE Leaderboard challenges, as well as robust multiplayer support for 8 players online, local split screen races with up to 4 players – and a combination of split screen and online play.

At the heart of all this new content, though, the game stays true to the spirit that made the original title an enduring fan favorite, attests Matt Small, Creative Director. “The feedback from Hydro Thunder fans has been overwhelmingly positive. When you put a controller into the hands of a hard core fan, and he nods and grins the first time he goes off some 800 foot jump or nails a shortcut and says something like ‘Oh yeah, this is how I remember it’ – that tells me we pulled it off.”

Fans will recognize favorite speedboats from the original Hydro Thunder: Razorback, Damn the Torpedoes, Tidal Blade, Rad Hazard and others return with beautifully redesigned models, multiple unlockable skins, and articulated boost animations with massive rockets folding out from hidden compartments. Race tracks are all original, but packed with the kinds of shortcuts and spectacular surprises the series is known for.

“On top of everything else, Hydro Thunder Hurricane is perfect for Summer of Arcade. What’s the first thing people think about when it’s summertime? Sun, fun, splashing around in the water, driving a speedboat at 200 mph, jumping off gigantic cliffs, and dodging dinosaurs. Right?”

Hydro Thunder Hurricane will be released on July 28, 2010, exclusively on Xbox LIVE Arcade. The game will sell for 1200 Microsoft Points.